The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

on earth——”

      “It came out of one of those bags. You see, Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, in the middle of their performance in the tea-room of the hotel at Palm Beach, suddenly changed their instruments for automatics and held up the crowd. I took this bracelet from a pretty, overrouged woman with red hair.”

      Ardita frowned and then smiled.

      “So that’s what you did! You have got nerve!”

      He bowed.

      “A well-known bourgeois quality,” he said.

      And then dawn slanted dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray corners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading. For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life—then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat and the swish of oars.

      Suddenly against the golden furnace low in the east their two graceful figures melted into one, and he was kissing her spoiled young mouth.

      “It’s a sort of glory,” he murmured after a second.

      She smiled up at him.

      “Happy, are you?”

      Her sigh was a benediction—an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal—then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside.

      Up the ladder scrambled the two gray-haired men, the officer and two of the sailors with their hands on their revolvers. Mr. Farnam folded his arms and stood looking at his niece.

      “So,” he said nodding his head slowly.

      With a sigh her arms unwound from Carlyle’s neck, and her eyes, transfigured and far away, fell upon the boarding party. Her uncle saw her upper lip slowly swell into that arrogant pout he knew so well.

      “So,” he repeated savagely. “So this is your idea of—of romance. A runaway affair, with a high-seas pirate.”

      Ardita glanced at him carelessly.

      “What an old fool you are!” she said quietly.

      “Is that the best you can say for yourself?”

      “No,” she said as if considering. “No, there’s something else. There’s that well-known phrase with which I have ended most of our conversations for the past few years—’Shut up!’”

      And with that she turned, included the two old men, the officer, and the two sailors in a curt glance of contempt, and walked proudly down the companionway.

      But had she waited an instant longer she would have heard a sound from her uncle quite unfamiliar in most of their interviews. He gave vent to a whole-hearted amused chuckle, in which the second old man joined.

      The latter turned briskly to Carlyle, who had been regarding this scene with an air of cryptic amusement.

      “Well Toby,” he said genially, “you incurable, hare-brained romantic chaser of rainbows, did you find that she was the person you wanted?”

      Carlyle smiled confidently.

      “Why—naturally,” he said “I’ve been perfectly sure ever since I first heard tell of her wild career. That’d why I had Babe send up the rocket last night.”

      “I’m glad you did,” said Colonel Moreland gravely. “We’ve been keeping pretty close to you in case you should have trouble with those six strange blacks. And we hoped we’d find you two in some such compromising position,” he sighed. “Well, set a crank to catch a crank!”

      “Your father and I sat up all night hoping for the best—or perhaps it’s the worst. Lord knows you’re welcome to her, my boy. She’s run me crazy. Did you give her the Russian bracelet my detective got from that Mimi woman?”

      Carlyle nodded.

      “Sh!” he said. “She’s coming on deck.”

      Ardita appeared at the head of the companionway and gave a quick involuntary glance at Carlyle’s wrists. A puzzled look passed across her face. Back aft the negroes had begun to sing, and the cool lake, fresh with dawn, echoed serenely to their low voices.

      “Ardita,” said Carlyle unsteadily.

      She swayed a step toward him.

      “Ardita,” he repeated breathlessly, “I’ve got to tell you the—the truth. It was all a plant, Ardita. My name isn’t Carlyle. It’s Moreland, Toby Moreland. The story was invented, Ardita, invented out of thin Florida air.”

      She stared at him, bewildered, amazement, disbelief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam’s mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, for the expected crash.

      But it did not come. Ardita’s face became suddenly radiant, and with a little laugh she went swiftly to young Moreland and looked up at him without a trace of wrath in her gray eyes.

      “Will you swear,” she said quietly “That it was entirely a product of your own brain?”

      “I swear,” said young Moreland eagerly.

      She drew his head down and kissed him gently.

      “What an imagination!” she said softly and almost enviously. “I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.”

      The negroes’ voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them singing before.

      “Time is a thief;

      Gladness and grief

      Cling to the leaf

      As it yellows—”

      “What was in the bags?” she asked softly.

      “Florida mud,” he answered. “That was one of the two true things I told you.”

      “Perhaps I can guess the other one,” she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.

      A BRUSH WITH THE CHINESE, by G.A. Henty

      It was early in December that H.M.S. Perseus was cruising off the mouth of the Canton River. War had been declared with China in consequence of her continued evasions of the treaty she had made with us, and it was expected that a strong naval force would soon gather to bring her to reason. In the meantime the ships on the station had a busy time of it, chasing the enemy’s junks when they ventured to show themselves beyond the reach of the guns of their forts, and occasionally having a brush with the piratical boats which took advantage of the general confusion to plunder friend as well as foe.

      The Perseus had that afternoon chased two Government junks up a creek. The sun had already set when they took refuge there, and the captain did not care to send his boats after them in the dark, as many of the creeks ran up for miles into the flat country; and as they not unfrequently had many arms or branches, the boats might, in the dark, miss the junks altogether. Orders were issued that four boats should be ready for starting at daybreak the next morning. The Perseus anchored off the mouth of the creek, and two boats were ordered to row backwards and forwards off its mouth all night to insure that the enemy did not slip out in the darkness.

      Jack Fothergill, the senior midshipman, was commanding the gig, and two of the other midshipmen were going in the pinnace and launch, commanded respectively by the first lieutenant and the master. The three other midshipmen of the Perseus were loud in their lamentations that they were not to take share in the fun.

      “You can’t all go, you know,” Fothergill said, “and it’s no use making a row about it; the captain has been very good to let three of us go.”

      “It’s