CHAPTER XVI
THE VERNAL INVASION
Ganley, togged out in a loose-fitting and many-wrinkled suit of white duck, was pacing the Laminian's bridge-deck, like a polar bear pacing its cage.
He watched the morning sun come up, bright and brazen, like a newly minted penny. He watched the aerials bridging the mastheads and waiting like a seine to net any wandering school of æolian notes. He watched the barefooted sailors sluice the steaming deck-boards. But most of all he watched the sky-line ahead, with many ruminative uplifts of his heavy iron-grey eyebrows.
It startled him a little to see McKinnon emerge from the deck below, fresh from his early bath in a rusty iron tub that had long since parted with its porcelain, whistling like a sand-boy as he climbed the brass-plated stairs.
He emerged from the stair-head in a suit of fresh linen, clean and cool-looking, as chirpy as
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