Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 92: what you’re looking at

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

74 blew off a hatch cover. And then he slept by the wheel, wrapped in a dirty blanket, arousing almost every minute, it seemed, to strengthen the Blackfish out and set her on her course again. She had indeed been a gallant vessel, that bark Blackfish, although the trade for which she had been built was as black as her name and the paint on her sides. Rusted leg irons stapled to the floor in both holds testified to that. Made to run slaves into the States, she had been, at a time—the fifties—when slave importing was long since illegal. Afterward she was one of the fleet of daring packets which bore the much needed drugs, food and mail from Havana to the beleaguered city of Mobile, until she was pocketed and cap- tured by a squadron of Farragut’s gun- boats. Then Johnstone bought her for a song at public auction—as government owned ships have always been sold—and made her an island trader. Even at that time she had the lines of a racing yacht. Her tall masts—cut down by a third afterward when they became rotten—raked like those of a corsair of Barbary. Her main royal yard was near twenty feel long as it lay on deck; aloft, it seemed a man could span it with his two arms. Even her belaying pins were mahogany, and her catheads were carved with the leaping figure of the little whale whose name she bore. Again she yawed and turned her port rail to the waves, and Dugan awoke. By the sun it was noon and time he was up and doing. No rich prize for salvagers, that Blackfish, but yet one worth a few thous- ands, and one very easy to take, with the waves dying down to quiet swells and the port of Tampa only a few hours away. Must be up and doing! Very thoroughly he rummaged the cap- tain’s cabin and his own for weapons. Three forty-five revolvers he found and thrust inta his waist band. A very picture of a pirate was Dugan O’Day, with his week-old beard of golden-red, his huge, gaunt appearing frame, his bare feet, and a blood-soaked bandage around his forehead in lieu of a hat, for a falling block had scratched him there. And he swore like any pirate at the food he must eat. Salt beef, biscuits, and cold water! Again he stood at the great wheel. Then he lashed it and sat on a cleat, resting Adventure and watching the brilliant sun playing on the canvas of some small sailing craft hull down to the eastward. And then he was asleep. Perhaps two hours later he awoke, with the reek of fish in his nostrils, and in his ears the murmur of uncouth Spanish and the creaking of some craft whose side rubbed that of the Blackfish. Bare feet pattered below him and cau- tiously he raised his head to peer down from the elevation of the poop deck. It was a Cuban smack, and four of her men were already aboard the bark. Voices of two sounded in the saloon below; two more lounged by the rail. And another Cuban on the smack was laying down a heavy cable. Dugan arose and stood at the top of the companionway, saying nothing, while a squat, grossly fat man and a thin one emerged from the saloon. Apparently the fat one was the smack’s captain. Very silent, for a moment, and Dugan could hear the splashing of freshly caught fish in the well amidships of the smack. The man aboard that boat disappeared, and still the Cuban captain and the thin man with him conversed in low tones. And Dugan O’Day: was enjoying himself im- mensely. ‘The honor of this visit, kidalgo—to what is it entitled?” he asked in the sweetly flow- ing, limpid Spanish his: mother had taught him. A rank insult, that Azdalgo, for a man so called is a nobleman of Spain. The Cuban was anything but that! From infancy Dugan had thought in three languages. Born, he was, of a pale lity of a woman who had danced her way to fame on the stages of two continents before sickness and the love of Michael O’Day weaned her from her art. Bred, was Dugan, in the old French Quarter of New Orleans, almost within the shadow of the cathedral and with the smell of the market always in his snubby nose. And he had been named Juan Alvarez y Mario Patrick Dugan O’Day. His mother called him Jua- nito and taught him to play the casti- nets and dance; his father called him Pat and taught him to fight with his hands; he called himself Dugan, because he liked the sound of the name, Dugan O’Day, and taught himself many other things. Quite naturally, then, he came to speak GOMIGIOO (C©