Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 3 — page 191: what you’re looking at

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

TEACH: PIRATE DE LUXE. I suppose. His idea of humor, if I remem- ber my history, was firing off his pistols un- derneath the table during breakfast, and somebody’s knee-cap. ‘“T hate,a man who’s funny before lunch. What are ‘the front members of those two strings of ships moored to?” - “A sunk timber-boat apiece, with a bridle from head to stern. They make ‘capital breakwaters. They haven’t moved a quarter of a degree since I stuck them there. “Rum, you’ve had no callers.” ‘‘ Not a bit rum. The steam-lanes across the seas take up precious little more room than the railroads do on a land continent. A steamboat always keeps narrowly te her steam-lane, unless the master’s drunk. | “ Anyway, she does not get off it a second time, because that skipper gets fired by the office when he lands ashore for the unforgivable crime of being too long be- tween ports. The ‘delayed on voyage’ tale is quite out of date, these days.” ‘“‘ But you’ve forgotten the sailing-ships. They've come into their own again, poor old dears, since tonnage got so short.” ‘““ No, I haven’t, Mr. Newspaper Reader. But there are mighty few of them at sea because there are mighty few available offi- cers with enough seamanship to sail them. Dash my wig! I’ve done a spell on a full- rigger myself as a kid, but I’ve been so long in steam that I wouldn’t care to tackle ‘putting one about to-day. ‘It’s like billiards: one' always remem- bers a bit about the game, but one soon gets out of practise. However, your winc- . jammers are much like the power craft. They don’t make a board here and a board there just promiscuously over the face of the oceans. Winds are mapped out these days, and you can generally prick off a. windjammer’s course on a chart before she leaves port, with reasonable accuracy. “ She’ll make her southing here, and get away to the east’ard there. But she ex- plores no unknown seas. Not she. Old barky sticks to her lanes just like her bet- ters. Now this patch here is outside all the lanes.” ‘ Sort of oasis, eh?” . “Tt’s a backwater, that’s crossed by the 965 road to nowhere. Even sea-rivers miss it, and you find them most everywhere. You can tell that by the weed. shouting with laughter when he bagged “Look at those tangles of bubbly yel- lew stuff floating on Reckitt’s blue water. By Jove, Raisghyll, isn’t that Portuguese man-o’-war a beauty? I don’t know what the fancy name for them is, but that’s what we sailormen always call them. I always. say they’re the prettiest thing that sails on all the seas.” ‘“ Prefer Loch Fyne kerrings myself,” said his lordship, who was above all things a practical man. He took a last puff at his cigarette, chucked the stump on to a gar- den of the amber weed, and added the ru- kric, ‘‘ Fried. Sell for you, Teddy, my lad, your young woman hooking it. Marriage would have steadied you.” “Yes,” the pirate agreed. ‘‘ It doesn’t look as if I shall rharry at present. I thought I had her on that old nitrate bark. Who’d have guessed that 2 Brazilian cruiser would lose her reckoning and blunder in exactly there. “Good Lord, that tub’s beat was two” hundred miles to the s’uthward of: where we were! A darky called Smith’s her captain, and he always was a rotten navi- gator. But. two hundred miles off her course! Did you ever hear of such stinking luck ? ‘I'd half a mind to stop and fight her. She’s armored, of course, but one could bet on her people not being able to shoot for nuts, and my beauties can lay a gun Straight, by gad, with any one on the seas. But I couldn’t go and loose hell into a ship with Mary on board.” ‘Observe the sentimental pirate,’”’ said Lerd Raisghyll. “Love before dooty.” ‘You ass, you’d have done the same yourself. This isn’t the navy. Well, let’s get on with the washing. What about it?” “Tm unofficially commissioned by high authority, as I've told you before, to pomt out that you’re a°damned nuisance to crea- tion, politically, and every other way.” | “ve gathered that from the papers. My sacred Irish flag has set all you scum of politicians by the ears the world over.” “It has. It’s also saved your bacon. But for that piece of infernal mpudence EO DOO UCC YN S Colin