Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/253

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CAPTAIN CHRISTY
239

turned on him her heavy, sallow face and malevolent eyes. To her hooked nose she held a camphor bottle, which she fitfully lowered and clapped into position again.

"I've made up my mind," she declared, between whiffs. "Now hark! You've wasted enough time among those good-for-nothings. You must sell that old hulk of a schooner."

II

"Well, just keep on as you do, then," shrilled his wife, at the close of a week's debate. By main force of nagging she had beaten down the captain's good-humored defense and reduced him to a state of unnatural brooding. "Keep on." She raised pious glances to the ceiling: "You 'll only bring my white hairs to the grave."

They were really of a yellowish gray, screwed tightly up in unreverend knobs and horns; nor did their descent to the tomb appear more imminent than ever before in thirty years of hypochondria; but they served her rhetoric.