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Chapter 3. THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR
The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low,
rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western
avenue and a little townward of the British consulate. Within was
a grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant
occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court: the doors, that
had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the
grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars
upon the windows.
The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the
last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of
water by the door, a half cocoanut shell beside it for a drinking cup;
and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open,
his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of
sunbright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window;
and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused
and laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket. His long
arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the insults of the morning, and
the harrowing business of the letter, had strung him to that point when
pain is almost pleasure, time shrinks to a mere point, and death and
life appear indifferent. To and fro he paced like a caged brute; his
mind whirling through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes, as
he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crumbling whitewash was
all full of them: Tahitian names, and French, and English, and rude
sketches of ships under sail and men at fisticuffs.
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