"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

center of it-plumb in the center. We was racing along like a prairie fire,
but it never made any difference, we couldn't seem to git past that center
no way. I couldn't see that we ever gained an inch on that ring. It made a
body feel creepy, it was so curious and unaccountable.
Well, everything was so awful still that we got to talking in a very
low voice, and kept on getting creepier and lonesomer and less and less
talky, till at last the talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there and
"thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the longest time.
The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead, then he stood up
and put a kind of triangle to his eye, and Tom said it was a sextant and
he was taking the sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he ciphered
a little and looked in a book, and then he begun to carry on again. He
said lots of wild things, and, among others, he said he would keep up this
hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow afternoon, and then he'd
land in London.
We said we would be humbly thankful.
He was turning away, but he whirled around when we said that, and give
us a long look of his blackest kind-one of the maliciousest and
suspiciousest looks I ever see. Then he says:
"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."
We didn't know what to say, so we held in and didn't say nothing at all.
He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to git that thing out of
his mind. Every now and then he would rip out something about it, and try
to make us answer him, but we dasn't.
It got lonesomer and lonesomer right along, and it did seem to me I
couldn't stand it. It was still worse when night begun to come on. By and
by Tom pinched me and whispers:
"Look!"
I took a glance aft, and see the professor taking a whet out of a
bottle. I didn't like the looks of that. By and by he took another drink,
and pretty soon he begun to sing. It was dark now, and getting black and
stormy. He went on singing, wilder and wilder, and the thunder begun to
mutter, and the wind to wheeze and moan among the ropes, and altogether it
was awful. It got so black we couldn't see him any more, and wished we
couldn't hear him, but we could. Then he got still; but he warn't still
ten minutes till we got suspicious, and wished he would start up his noise
again, so we could tell where he was. By and by there was a flash of
lightning, and we see him start to get up, but he staggered and fell down.
We heard him scream out in the dark:
"They don't want to go to England. All right, I'll change the course.
They want to leave me. I know they do. Well, they shall-and NOW!"
I 'most died when he said that. Then he was still again-still so long I
couldn't bear it, and it did seem to me the lightning wouldn't EVER come
again. But at last there was a blessed flash, and there he was, on his
hands and knees crawling, and not four feet from us. My, but his eyes was
terrible! He made a lunge for Tom, and says, "Overboard YOU go!" but it
was already pitch-dark again, and I couldn't see whether he got him or
not, and Tom didn't make a sound.
There was another long, horrible wait; then there was a flash, and I
see Tom's head sink down outside the boat and disappear. He was on the