The Most Dangerous Game
Connell, Richard
晴天日记搞笑的新年祝福语Published:1924
Categorie(s):Fiction, Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, Short Stories, Thrillers
Source:Feedbooks
About Connell:
Richard Edward Connell,Jr.(October28,1893–November23,1949) was an American author and journalist,best known for his short story "The Most Dangerous Game."Connell was one of the best-known Amer-ican short story writers of his time and his stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly.Connell had equal success as a journalist and screenwriter.He was nominated for an Academy Award for best original story for1941's Meet John Doe.He died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills,California on November22,1949at the age of fifty-six.
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"Off there to the right—somewhere—is a large island,"said Whitney." It's rather a mystery—"
"What island is it?" Rainsford asked.
"The old charts call it`Ship-Trap Island,"'Whitney replied."A suggest-ive name,isn't it?Sailors have a curious dread of the place.I don't know why. Some superstition—"
"Can't e it,"remarked Rainsford,trying to peer through the dank tropical night that was palpable as it presd its thick warm blackness in upon the yacht.
"You've good eyes,"said Whitney,with a laugh,"and I've en you pick off a moo moving in the bro
wn fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can't e four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night."
"Nor four yards,"admitted Rainsford."Ugh!It's like moist black velvet."
"It will be light enough in Rio,"promid Whitney."We should make it in a few days.I hope the jaguar guns have come from Purdey's.We should have some good hunting up the Amazon. Great sport, hunting." "The best sport in the world," agreed Rainsford.
"For the hunter," amended Whitney. "Not for the jaguar."
"Don't talk rot,Whitney,"said Rainsford."You're a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?"
"Perhaps the jaguar does," obrved Whitney.
"Bah! They've no understanding."
"Even so,I rather think they understand one thing—fear.The fear of pain and the fear of death."
"Nonn,"laughed Rainsford."This hot weather is making you soft, Whitney.Be a realist.The world is made up of two class—the hunters and the huntees.Luckily,you and I are hunters.Do you think we've pasd that island yet?"
"I can't tell in the dark. I hope so."
"Why? " asked Rainsford.
"The place has a reputation—a bad one."
"Cannibals?" suggested Rainsford.
"Hardly.Even cannibals wouldn't live in such a God-forsaken place. But it's gotten into sailor lore,somehow.Didn't you notice that the crew's nerves emed a bit jumpy today?"
地暖优点"They were a bit strange,now you mention it.Even Captain Nieln—"
"Yes,even that tough-minded old Swede,who'd go up to the devil himlf and ask him for a light.Tho fishy blue eyes held a look I never saw there before.All I could get out of him was`This place has an evil name among afaring men,sir.'Then he said to me,very gravely,`Don't you feel an
ything?'—as if the air about us was actually poisonous.Now, you mustn't laugh when I tell you this—I did feel something like a sud-den chill.
"There was no breeze.The a was as flat as a plate-glass window.We were drawing near the island then.What I felt was a—a mental chill;a sort of sudden dread."
"Pure imagination," said Rainsford.
"One superstitious sailor can taint the whole ship's company with his fear."
"Maybe.But sometimes I think sailors have an extra n that tells them when they are in danger.Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing—with wave lengths,just as sound and light have.An evil place can,so to speak,broadcast vibrations of evil.Anyhow,I'm glad we're getting out of this zone. Well, I think I'll turn in now, Rainsford."
"I'm not sleepy,"said Rainsford."I'm going to smoke another pipe up on the afterdeck."
"Good night, then, Rainsford. See you at breakfast."
"Right. Good night, Whitney."
挺身而出的近义词
There was no sound in the night as Rainsford sat there but the muffled throb of the engine that drove the yacht swiftly through the darkness, and the swish and ripple of the wash of the propeller.
具文
Rainsford,reclining in a steamer chair,indolently puffed on his favor-ite brier.The nsuous drowsiness of the night was on him."It's so dark," he thought,"that I could sleep without closing my eyes;the night would be my eyelids—"
An abrupt sound startled him.Off to the right he heard it,and his ears, expert in such matters,could not be mistaken.Again he heard the sound, and again.Somewhere,off in the blackness,someone had fired a gun three times.
Rainsford sprang up and moved quickly to the rail,mystified.He strained his eyes in the direction from which the reports had come,but it was like trying to e through a blanket.He leaped upon the rail and bal-anced himlf there,to get greater elevation;his pipe,striking a rope, was knocked from his mouth.He lunged for it;a short,hoar cry came from his lips as he realized he had reached too far and had lost his
balance.The cry was pinched off short as the blood-warm waters of the Caribbean Sea dod over his head.
He struggled up to the surface and tried to cry out,but the wash from the speeding yacht slapped him in the face and the salt water in his open mouth made him gag and strangle.Desperately he struck out with strong strokes after the receding lights of the yacht,but he stopped be-fore he had swum fifty feet.A certain coolheadedness had come to him; it was not the first time he had been in a tight place.There was a chance that his cries could be heard by someone aboard the yacht,but that chance was slender and grew more slender as the yacht raced on.He wrestled himlf out of his clothes and shouted with all his power.The lights of the yacht became faint and ever-vanishing fireflies;then they were blotted out entirely by the night.
Rainsford remembered the shots.They had come from the right,and doggedly he swam in that direction,swimming with slow,deliberate strokes,conrving his strength.For a emingly endless time he fought the a.He began to count his strokes;he could do possibly a hundred more and then—
Rainsford heard a sound.It came out of the darkness,a high scream-ing sound, the sound of an animal in an extremity of anguish and terror. He did not recognize the animal that made the sound;he did not try to;with fresh vitality he swam toward the sound.He heard it again;then it was cut short by another noi, crisp, staccato.
"Pistol shot," muttered Rainsford, swimming on.
Ten minutes of determined effort brought another sound to his ears—the most welcome he had ever heard—the muttering and growling of the a breaking on a rocky shore.He was almost on the rocks before he saw them;on a night less calm he would have been shattered against them.With his remaining strength he dragged himlf from the swirling waters.Jagged crags appeared to jut up into the opaqueness;he forced himlf upward,hand over hand.Gasping,his hands raw,he reached a flat place at the top.Den jungle came down to the very edge of the cliffs.What perils that tangle of trees and underbrush might hold for him did not concern Rainsford just then.All he knew was that he was safe from his enemy,the a,and that utter weariness was on him.He flung himlf down at the jungle edge and tumbled headlong into the deepest sleep of his life.
When he opened his eyes he knew from the position of the sun that it was late in the afternoon.Sleep had given him new vigor;a sharp hun-ger was picking at him. He looked about him, almost cheerfully.
"Where there are pistol shots,there are men.Where there are men, there is food,"he thought.But what kind of men,he wondered,in so for-bidding a place?An unbroken front of snarled and ragged jungle fringed the shore.
He saw no sign of a trail through the cloly knit web of weeds and trees;it was easier to go along the shore,and Rainsford floundered along by the water. Not far from where he landed, he stopped.
Some wounded thing—by the evidence,a large animal—had thrashed about in the underbrush;the jungle weeds were crushed down and the moss was lacerated;one patch of weeds was stained crimson.A small, glittering object not far away caught Rainsford's eye and he picked it up. It was an empty cartridge.
"A twenty-two,"he remarked."That's odd.It must have been a fairly large animal too.The hunter had his nerve with him to tackle it with a light gun.It's clear that the brute put up a fight.I suppo the first three shots I heard was when the hunter flushed his quarry and wounded it. The last shot was when he trailed it here and finished it."
He examined the ground cloly and found what he had hoped to find—the print of hunting boots.They pointed along the cliff in the dir-ection he had been going.Eagerly he hurried along,now slipping on a rotten log or a loo stone,but making headway;night was beginning to ttle down on the island.
Bleak darkness was blacking out the a and jungle when Rainsford sighted the lights.He came upo
法律基本知识n them as he turned a crook in the coast line;and his first thought was that be had come upon a village,for there were many lights.But as he forged along he saw to his great astonish-ment that all the lights were in one enormous building—a lofty structure with pointed towers plunging upward into the gloom.His eyes made out the shadowy outlines of a palatial chateau;it was t on a high bluff, and on three sides of it cliffs dived down to where the a licked greedy lips in the shadows.
"Mirage,"thought Rainsford.But it was no mirage,he found,when he opened the tall spiked iron gate.The stone steps were real enough;the massive door with a leering gargoyle for a knocker was real enough;yet above it all hung an air of unreality.
乌云飞
He lifted the knocker,and it creaked up stiffly,as if it had never before been ud.He let it fall,and it startled him with its booming loudness. He thought he heard steps within;the door remained clod.Again Rainsford lifted the heavy knocker,and let it fall.The door opened then—opened as suddenly as if it were on a spring—and Rainsford
