Adventure Magazine Cover — page 116: what you’re looking at

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

114 ‘‘T am poor because for thirty years I have been a teacher who gave freely his services to chiidren whose parents could pay noth- ing.” The pseudo wise man, who had spoken so foolishly, was at once put to death, for ‘T’eeay Layeen answered: “What a wretched tutor, that in thirty years no pupil of yours has risen to a post where he could gratefully relieve the poverty of you who helped him to his place of honor!”’ When a poor fisherman had been given the choice of joining the pirates or being put to death, he answered: “IT choose death, that my dutiful son may never feel the disgrace of worshipping at the grave of a thief!” So bold and noble a sentiment caused T’eeay Layeen to bestow a gift upon the fisherman and set him free. T’eeay Layeen had been known at least once to show appreciation of a foreign devil’s courage; this was at a time when his junk, having easily overhauled a small ship on which a mere child of a midship- man, who chanced to be a passenger, fought so stubbornly with sword and revolver after the crew bad been captured or killed that T’eeay Layeen gave orders for him to be taken unharmed. “T have spared your life,” said T’eeay Layeen. “How will you repay me?” “You have killed my friends, and if I could I would hang you!” said the mere boy who, young as he was, had learned that life is of no such value as to make a worthy man tremble at the thought of losing it. This bold answer from one so young, so young in fact as to have still a glint of child- hood tears in his angry eyes, chanced to please the yellow pirate; and in-the course of time, through the same agents by which plundered goods went into the hands of un- scrupulous merchants for sale in the Sing- apore markets, the boy was safely returned to Englishmen. There came the time when T’eeay Layeen, having been badly beaten by an English gunboat that pretended to be an awkward merchantman, determined at any cost to get better cannon than he had; and as it seemed almost impossible to get them safely past the vigilance of British spies and customs officers in Eastern ports, arrange- ments were made for their delivery at Sydney, and he himself went after them. When his junk was wrecked, T’eeay Gordon Young Layeen had gone adrift in the dark on a plank; he was in the water a night and al- most a day before he succeeded in getting ashore on what was as barren a waste of reefs as any that ever broke the bones and heart of a castaway. T’eeay Layeen believed in gods; not in their mercy but in their cruelty; that they tried the hearts of men; and as he was not a man to lie down and turn up his toes, he went on, blindly pushing on because his was the courage that drivesa man. It was more than flesh and bleod that kept him alive; he had the nature that simply does not, will not, give in to pain, to torture; his brain seemed to shut out pain as an Indian fakir-does when studding his flesh with nails to make himself appear pious. His bare feet were cut, they bled, grew wretchedly sore as he pressed along the miles of desolate reef, sleeping on rocks when he had to sleep, drinking deep from tiny rock basins when squalls swept across the reef, being nearly roasted on cloudless days, eating shell fish when he felt the need of food; but pressing on, he knew not where. British gunboats knew him by report for the one and only. Chinese captain who more often than not led his men when they swarmed on an attacked vessel; he was the one pirate in those pirate-infested waters that washed the southern shores of China, and the islands even afar off, who seemed less after plunder than the joy of plunder- ing. The British gunboats respected his more than the other pirate craft they were surprizing and blowing out of the water; but, such is the British nature, that they would have conscientiously blown him the higher because of their respect—praising him for a fighting blighter even as his junks splintered. It was the qualities that made him feared at sea, dreaded by other pirates, and, at times, regarded as something more than human by his own men, that kept him alive on the reef. At last he was sighted by béche de mer fishermen, who then as now are a sort of yellow slaves sent out by Chinese merchants to gather sea slugs on the most desolate spots of the earth. T’eeay Layeen was then so much the wreck of a man, and being there where they knew no man could live, they were at first afraid to come near him; but finally noticing COMmMiCcoooks Cc (©