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

those two old hands, and the Devil going out into the
lightning, and the thunderstorm raging on, and Bill Snyth
sitting chuckling to himself between the bursts of the
thunder.
But I had more questions to ask and interrupted this
reminiscence. Why did they all three always play together?
And a look of something like fear came over Jim Bunion's
face; and at first he would not speak. And then he said to
me that it was like this; they had not paid for that
crystal, but got it as their share of Bill Snyth's kit. If
they had paid for it or given something in exchange to Bill
Snyth that would have been all right, but they couldn't do
that now because Bill was dead, and they were not sure if
the old bargain might not hold good. And Hell must be a
large and lonely place, and to go there alone must be bad,
and so the three agreed that they would all stick together,
and use the crystal all three or not at all, unless one
died, and then the two would use it and the one that was
gone would wait for them. And the last of the three to go
would take the crystal with him, or maybe the crystal would
bring him. They didn't think, they said, they were the kind
of men for Heaven, and he hoped they knew their place better
than that, but they didn't fancy the notion of Hell alone,
if Hell it had to be. It was all right for Bill Snyth, he
was afraid of nothing. He had known perhaps five men that
were not afraid of death, but Bill Snyth was not afraid of
Hell. He died with a smile on his face like a child in its
sleep; it was drink killed poor Bill Snyth.
This was why I had beaten Bill Sloggs; Sloggs had the
crystal on him while we played, but would not use it; these
sailors seemed to fear loneliness as some people fear being
hurt; he was the only one of the three who could play chess
at all, he had learnt it in order to be able to answer
questions and keep up their pretence, but he had learnt it
badly, as I found. I never saw the crystal, they never
showed it to anyone; but Jim Bunion told me that night that
it was about the size that the thick end of a hen's egg
would be if it were round. And then he fell asleep.
There were many more questions that I would have asked
him but I could not wake him up. I even pulled the table
away so that he fell to the floor, but he slept on, and all
the tavern was dark but for one candle burning; and it was
then that I noticed for the first time that the other two
sailors had gone, no one remained at all but Jim Bunion and
I and the sinister barman of that curious inn, and he too
was asleep.
When I saw that it was impossible to wake the sailor I
went out into the night. Next day Jim Bunion would talk of
it no more; and when I went back to Stavlokratz I found him
already putting on paper his theory about the sailors, which