King Kong

Chapter One Even in the obscuring twilight, and behind the lightly floating veil of snow, the Wanderer was clearly no more than a humble old tramp freighter. The most imaginative, the most romantic eye could have detected nowhere about her that lean grace, those sharply cleaving contours which the landsman looks for in a craft all set to embark upon a desperate adventure. For the likes of her, the down-at-heels support of the Hoboken pier was plenty good enough. There, with others of her kind, she blended into the nondescript background of the unpretentious old town: she was camouflaged into a comfortable nonentity. There she was secure from any embarrassing comparison with the great lady-liners which lifted regal and immaculate prows into the shadows of skyscrapers on the distant, Manhattan side of the river. Her crew knew that deep in her heart beat engines fit and able to push her blunt old nose ahead at a sweet fourteen knots, come Hell or high water. They knew too that surrounding her engines, and surrounding also that deep steel chamber which puzzled all of them and frightened not a few, was a staunch and solid hull. Landsmen, however, drawn to the waterfront by that nostalgia which ever so often stirs those whose lives are bound by little desks and brief commuter train rides, looked over her rusted, scaling flanks and sputtered ignorantly: "Lord! They don't call that a sea-going craft, I hope!" Weston, though he had taxied to the waterfront bent upon a business in which nostalgia had no part, said exactly that and drew back the hand which had been about to pass over the fare from Forty-second Street and Broadway. After all, if he had mistaken the pier, it would be a foolish extravagance to let this pirate on wheels knock down his flag and so gain the right to add an extra fifteen cents to the return charge. Hanging tightly to his money, he lumbered out of the taxi with that short-winded dignity which marks the fat man of fifty-odd. In the same moment, an old watchman poked a cold red nose around the corner of a warehouse. Weston hailed him: "Hi, Cap! Is that the moving picture ship?" Only after the cold red nose had bobbed assent did Weston pass over the cab fare, and even then there was a glint of suspicious doubt in his eye. Still hardly more than half satisfied that he had not mistaken the rendezvous, he scuffed through the light fall of snow to the Wanderer's gangway. " 're you another one agoin' on this crazy voyage?" the old watchman demanded suddenly from the gloomy shadow of the warehouse. "Crazy?" Weston swung around the more quickly because the adjective bolstered a conviction that had been growing in his own mind. "What's crazy about it?" "Well, for one thing, the feller that's bossin' it." "Denham?" "That's him! A feller that if he wants a picture of a lion'll walk right up and tell it to look pleasant. If that ain't crazy, I want to know?" Weston chuckled. That wasn't so far from his own estimate of the doughty director of the Wanderer's destinies. "He's a tough egg, all right," he agreed. "But why the talk about this voyage being crazy?" "Because it is, that's why." The watchman emerged from his snug, protected niche the better to pursue the conversation. "Everybody around the dockand lemme tell you there're some smart men around here even if they ain't got such high and mighty jobseverybody arouWallace, Edgar is the author of 'King Kong', published 2005 under ISBN 9780812974935 and ISBN 081297493X.