The Pirate Story Megapack. R.M. Ballantyne

had taken postgraduate work in the greatest of all universities—the world at large. Long ago, in the little village of Maine, he had seen and known such things as surrounded Katherine—the diminutive of that would be Kitty, he supposed, if a chap ever got familiar enough with her to use it—and her cousin. There had been antiques and old silver and fine linen with all the niceties that go with them in his mother’s house. But of late years those things had gone by the board. He had roughened and toughened. He had lost his finer manners, perhaps his sensibilities.

      He looked at his suit of serge. It had been cheap, because he could not afford any more than he paid. Cheap clothes in this day and time are shoddy and it had worn quickly and badly. It looked like a suit from the slop chest. The same way with his shoes, his tie, his hat, everything. A chap like he was would constantly offend the girl’s ideas of life, he imagined. Then took himself to task for a fool for thinking about such things.

      The chance to go away in a ship of his own—she had hinted he would be master—down to the South Seas, with her! She crept in again to the foreground of his dreams, tugged at him with a hundred warps of interest. To find a missing man and a missing treasure, here was romance, or folly, and Jim was not old or world-worn enough to entertain the suggestion that the two are twins.

      It was Lynda Warner who reappeared and escorted him up a white, thin-spindled, mahogany-railed stairway, curving to the next floor. He found himself in a guest room with furnishings of white, and hangings of gay chintz, rag rugs on the floor, a door half open to a tiled bathroom. It was as different from the room he had at the National House, uptown, as the forecastle of a ship is to the cabins aft. Jim was used to the latter, but this increased his ill ease till he caught sight of himself in the glass and laughed at his reflection for that of an egregious ass.

      “It isn’t the clothes, you chump,” he told himself; “it’s the man. You’re straight enough and decent enough under your artificial hide. You can always buy duds. You can always mend your manners. As for the girl, you’ve got to do your best to persuade her, or her cousin, that she’ll be throwing her money away. Without butting in too personally, of course. If you can’t, or if you get in too deep, it’s up to you to drift off and fade away. She’s a yacht built for speed in summer waters and summer winds; you’re a trading schooner and out of her class. You belong moored to a copra wharf, not off a yacht club float.”

      The heart-to-heart talk did him good, and after he had washed up and brushed his hair and clothes, be went downstairs cheerfully with recovered poise. He appreciated the courtesy that left all talk of the vital question out of the meal, covering it so successfully that it appeared dismissed. And he appreciated the meal: crisp waffles with honey, fresh asparagus with poached eggs and a sublime sauce over all, a huckleberry pie that melted, crust and all, in one’s mouth, and coffee such as he had not tasted for ten years. Lynda Warner exhibited a rare fund of anecdote and a sense of humor that the girl reflected and Jim enjoyed. The supper was savored with the best of condiments—laughter.

      Only the porches and the two front rooms of the house had been given over to business, it seemed, though there were some goods stored in the barn back of the little garden. The rest of the house was private and the property of the girl’s father—or the girl herself, Jim feared. The dining room held portraits of Avery Churchill Whiting, the missing skipper, a ruddy-faced mariner with gray hair and a blend of kindliness and determination in his strong features; and of James Avery Whiting, father of the aforesaid, also a captain, but in naval uniform. His sword hung below the frame.

      There was a serving maid, angular almost as Lynda Warner, privileged by custom and her own indomitable determination to know all about everything that was going on. The elimination of all reference to the Golden Dolphin might partly have been staged for her benefit, Jim surmised. She was patently devoured with anxiety to know who he was, and how he came to be invited. She surveyed him between service with a puzzled face, her head cocked to one side like an undetermined hen.

      They remained in the dining room, which appeared to be also used as a general living room, and the maid dawdled over clearing away. But she was gone at last and both women insisted upon Lyman smoking, producing cigars that were both good and properly moist. Gratefully enjoying it, he listened in his turn.

      Avery Churchill Whiting had, it seemed, retired from the sea, inland to Foxfield where relatives had settled for land commerce. He had married late and was forty when Katherine Whiting was born—the only child. Her mother died soon after and the two became chums, the girl going on voyages until Captain Avery decided he was fairly well fixed, that the merchant marine was rapidly going to the dogs, and that he hated steam worse than ever. Therefore he settled to enjoy his three delights; his daughter, trotting horses, and flowers.

      His wife’s brother, Stephen Foster, native of Foxfield, was the uncle who was coming at eight o’clock, with his son, Newton. He was a manufacturer of blankets and woolen goods and Jim gathered that he had made almost a million during the war. Gathered also from a hint of Lynda Warner that he was not averse at anytime to making more; that, born on a farm, gaining footing in the office of a mill after factory experience, he had finally made good as producer in a small way until the war gave him his great opportunity. Now, having tasted power, he was obsessed with the desire of great wealth and what it might do to make him a ruler of men.

      The son, it seemed, was a more negligible quantity, confining most of his activities to various amusements, a Yale graduate. Lynda Warner, with an inimitable trick of suggestion, drew these sketches, which Jim felt were excellent portraits, in a few words. It appeared that she was not over friendly to the Fosters, father and son, and Jim noticed that the girl entered no especial protest, save to disregard her caustic interjections.

      The important factor was that the Fosters owned a third share in the Golden Dolphin and its hidden treasure. Lyman was glad that a man—and a successful business one—with a real interest in the affair, was to take part in the council. The talk of hidden treasure was attractive enough, but if it was of bulk small enough to be concealed on the ship it did not seem likely that it would have been left there. There was that skeleton! He wondered whether Lynda Warner had already told the girl about it. It would have to be mentioned at the conference.

      “My father,” said the girl, “once got to be very friendly with a chief named Mafulu, ruler of an island somewhere near the Bismarck Archipelago. That is, he had been ruler until the Germans took his island away from him and made plantation slaves out of all his people. After that he hated all white men. He even mistrusted father for a long while after dad had saved his life. But they got to be blood brothers and called each other by the other’s name. Mafulu was Vaitini—the nearest his tongue could come to Whiting—and father was Mafulu. They had not seen each other for years and father had quitted the sea.

      “Mafulu, and some of his islanders, were employed as pilot and crew by a man, an eccentric millionaire who had taken up anthropology, with the tracing of the drift of the Malayo-Polynesian races as his especial hobby. As father understood it, Mafulu had graduated from pilot and come to be his right hand man. At all events, he accompanied this millionaire through the archipelagoes, to Tahiti, to Hawaii and at last to San Francisco. He was still on the ship, or yacht, when the owner dropped dead of heart disease. There was some squabble among the heirs, and Mafulu was dismissed. He had been too proud to accept actual wages, so he was practically penniless, unable to speak much of the language, bewildered by the bustle of a city, robbed, and cheated. Finally the fogs of San Francisco proved too much for him. He was a magnificent specimen of manhood, father said, and probably would have lived to be almost a hundred in his native haunts. As it was, he was found in a dying condition in a miserable sailors’ lodging house where he had been the drudge—that fearless chief and warrior—for enough to eat and a hole to crawl to at night. It was consumption of the most rapid sort. Some reporter got part of his yarn and pieced together more, enough to make a feature story. It was copied by the Associated Press, more briefly.

      “Father left for San Francisco within six hours after he had read the item in the local paper. That was like dad. Mafulu was a man, he said, and there were few men nowadays. He respected the obligations of his blood brotherhood. And Mafulu literally died in father’s arms, died still hating all white men—was it any wonder?—save one, the one he called by his own name and who called