Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 160: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

158 Not a word OU Another drink and off you go. ashore that you have visited me. drink, when I offer it.” The little man swallowed perforce the tumbler that was poured out for him and stumbled up the companionway where rough hands set him into his dingey and saw him sculling drunkenly shorewards. “A thousand pirates! A thousand lick- spittles! A thousand mice-hearted cravens! exclaimed Bane. ‘‘Blood and bones! What say you, men? Are you for kissing the king’s foot and going softly with sixpence in your pockets and calved in cotton, or are you for silk hose and gold guineas?” “I was with Kidd.” , The man who spoke had a face the color of a ripe mulberry, seamed like a walnut- shell. One eye was sightless, like a bruised grape, the other gleamed between lids scar- let-hawed as those of a dog. On one cheek powder had tattooed the badge of his calling. The end of his bulbous nose had been sliced and indifferently patched. “Hanged he was,” he went on. ‘Strung up at Execution Dock seventeen years ago come last month. He swings in chains down the river yet with Churchill, How, Mullins, Parrot and the rest of the brave lads. Yet would I rather hang than go halting all my days at sight of a constable. A murrain on the Governor, say I.” “Kidd was a canting coward,” said Bane. ‘‘What said he on the gallows? ‘For my part I am the most innocent of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.’ We want no Kidds nor his kind of cattle aboard, prating of chains. Silence, you dog!” , The old buccaneer was on his feet, his drink-palsied hand fumbling at his belt. ‘Blood and wounds!’ he cried. ‘“‘Noman calls me coward!”’ But Bane had caught the uneasy shifting of his followers’ eyes at the talk of gallows and chains. He flung the black bottle and it smashed upon the other’s skull. He collapsed, blood streaming from a strip of scalp, mingling with the reek of the liquor. ‘‘Put him in the peak!” ordered Bane, and watched while his words were obeyed, his fierce eyes challenging his men. ‘‘Hurley! Long! Take your watches and guard the boats. No man leaves this ship save on my orders.” “If they cannot cross the bar neither can we,” muttered a pirate and his opinion Adventure found echoing ‘“‘ayes”’ from many of the rest. ‘“‘Then we go in the sloop,” said Bane. ‘‘What, my bullies, because Rogers has come a month too soon, are we to stay like rats in a trap and give up our freedom with our booty? Are you men or mice? Will you be governed like sneaking puppies by those who tamely submit to laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get with their knavery, —— them for a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls! “They vilify us, the scoundrels, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Jama free prince and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred ships at sea and an army of a hundred thousand men in the field. ‘Shall I submit to be kicked about a deck at the pleasure of one who fancies himself my superior? Shall I, and you, free men all, give up our delights, the chink of guineas and the clink of glasses, the kisses of women and our fellowhip, because, forsooth, Rogers says so? ‘‘What if we leave the Swift Return be- hind us? Iwasa lad when first I ran away from the cursed merchantman to which they had bound me ’prentice. With six brave hearts we borrowed a canoe and stole away to the Grand Camanas, to go on the account. We took a turtling sloop and joined on other bullies until we gained an Irish brigantine. From that we took a Spanish trading sloop of six guns. From that, on the coast of Virginia, a New England brigantine bound for Barbados that yielded us a vessel of ten guns. “Now there were eighty of us aboard. From the Bahamas to Guinea Coast and back we sailed, to Madagascar and the Arabian Gulf. We traded the brigantine for a galley of twenty-four guns and at the last we took a three-decker of Portugal, outbound from Brazil. Thirty-six guns she mounted but we took her, a hundred and eighty of us hearties, ripping off her upper deck, deep-waisting her by cutting down the gunwale and so made her the Swift Return. Shall we not start again in a sloop? “T tell you, my bullies, that my star rises. Shall I scteen it with the king’s parchment? Set me adrift with three logs, a palmetto sail COmicloo C©