"Dunsany, Lord - The Three Sailors' Gambit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

night with their crooked moves.
I thought then that, drunk though he was, he was not
telling the truth, and I promised to show him to people who
played chess all their lives so that he and his mates could
get a pound whenever they liked, and I promised not to
reveal his secret even to Stavlokratz, if only he would tell
me all the truth; and this promise I have kept till long
after the three sailors have lost their secret. I told him
straight out that I did not believe in the crystal. Well,
Jim Bunion leaned forward then, even further across the
table, and swore he had seen the man from whom Bill had
bought the crystal and that he was one to whom anything was
possible. To begin with his hair was villainously dark, and
his features were unmistakable even down there in the South,
and he could play chess with his eyes shut, and even then he
could beat anyone in Cuba. But there was more than this,
there was the bargain he made with Bill that told one who he
was. He sold that crystal for Bill Snyth's soul.
Jim Bunion leaning over the table with his breath in my
face nodded his head several times and was silent.
I began to question him then. Did they play chess as far
away as Cuba? He said they all did. Was it conceivable
that any man would make such a bargain as Snyth made?
Wasn't the trick well known? Wasn't it in hundreds of
books? And if he couldn't read books mustn't he have heard
from sailors that it is the Devil's commonest dodge to get
souls from silly people?
Jim Bunion had leant back in his own chair quietly
smiling at my questions but when I mentioned silly people he
leaned forward again, and thrust his face close to mine and
asked me several times if I called Bill Snyth silly. It
seemed that these three sailors thought a great deal of Bill
Snyth and it made Jim Bunion angry to hear anything said
against him. I hastened to say that the bargain seemed
silly though not of course the man who made it; for the
sailor was almost threatening, and no wonder for the whiskey
in that dim tavern would madden a nun.
When I said that the bargain seemed silly he smiled
again, and then he thundered his fist down on the table and
said that no one had ever yet got the best of Bill Snyth and
that that was the worst bargain for himself that the Devil
ever made, and that from all he had read or heard of the
Devil he had never been so badly had before as the night
when he met Bill Snyth at the inn in the thunderstorm in
Cuba, for Bill Snyth already had the damndest soul at sea;
Bill was a good fellow, but his soul was damned right
enough, so he got the crystal for nothing.
Yes, he was there and saw it all himself, Bill Snyth in
the Spanish inn and the candles flaring, and the Devil
walking in and out of the rain, and then the bargain between