The Lady and the Pirate by Emerson Hough (best new books to read txt) 📕

world, the pearls of price, the casks of the Wine of Life, are his only who takes them. They can not be bought, can not be given. “Oh, haste! Jean Lafitte, for my new knowledge indeed eats at my soul. Hasten, for the Bird of Life is on the wing, L’Olonnois.” So I spoke to them; and they, feeling it all a part of the play, gravely answered in kind, to what end that any who sought to stay Black Bart and his crew did so at peril of their blood.

We came, I knew not after how many days forgotten in detail—after passing, each avoided as a pestilence, many cities prosperous in commerce—alongside the river port of the city of St. Louis, crowded with motley and misfit shipping of one sort or other, where our craft might moor without fear of exciting any suspicion, in spite of our ominous name; for I had the precaution to lower our flag of the skull and cross-bones.

I sought out the man most apt to know of any considerable vessels docking there, and made inquiry for any power yacht one hundred and twenty-five feet long, white and black ventilators, white hull with blue line, flying the burgee Belle Helène, or some such name. None could advise me for a time, and I looked in vain, as I had in every dock in six hundred miles, for the trim hull of my yacht. At last one old mariner, in rubber boots, himself skipper of a house-boat south-bound for a winter’s trapping, admitted that he had seen such a craft three days before!

“Did she dock?” I demanded.

“Sure she did, and lay over night. I remember it well enough, for I saw her tie up; and that evening her owner went ashore and up-town, and with him his bride, I reckon—handsomest girl in all the town. They must have been married, for he was lookin’ like he owned her. That was lemme see, two days ago or maybe four. They came aboard her next morning, all three—there was a old party along, girl’s mother likely—around eleven o’clock, and in a little while cast off and went on down-river. As fine a boat as ever made the river run—still as a mouse she was, but quick as a cat, and around Ste. Genevieve, I reckon, before I got back to my own scow after helping them off here. No wonder her owner was proud. He stood on the quarter-deck like a lord. Why shouldn’t he, ownin’ a boat an’ a girl like that?”

“He doesn’t own either!” I retorted hotly.

“Why, how do you know he don’t?” demanded my sea-going man.

“Who should know, if not myself?”

“Sho! You talk like you owned her!”

“I do own her!”

“It looks like it. Which do you mean—her the yacht, or her the girl?”

“Both—no! That is, well at least I own the boat.”

“That may all be, or it all mayn’t,” he replied, openly scoffing; “at least so far’s the boat goes. Anybody kin buy anything that has the price. But as to the girl, you’d have to prove it, if I was him. And if he didn’t look like he owned her, or was goin’ to, I’ll eat your own gas tank there, an’ them two kids in it fer good measure.”

Of course I could not argue or explain, and therefore turned away. But all the answer of my soul came from the lips of L’Olonnois, who, propped up against the cockpit combing, was reading aloud to Lafitte from The Pirate’s Own Book as I approached. “Hah! my good man!” exclaimed the pirate chieftain as he looked at his blade, “unhand the maid, or by Heaven! your life’s blood shall dye the deck where you stand!”

“Ah, ha! Cal Davidson,” said I to myself through my set teeth; “little do you think that you are discovered in your sins, and little do you know that the avenger is on your track. But have a care, for Black Bart and his band pursues you!”

And, seeing that we had now laid in abundance of ship’s stores, including four drums of gasoline; and since the trail of Cal Davidson was, at least, no wider than the banks of the river down which he had fled, it looked ill enough for the chances of that robber when the stanch Sea Rover, her flag again aloft and promising no quarter, chugged out into midstream and took up a pursuit which was to know no faltering until at last I had learned the truth about the fair captive of the Belle Helène. For indeed, indeed, Omar, and you, too, stout Lafitte and hardy L’Olonnois, the Bird of Life was on the wing.

CHAPTER XII IN WHICH WE CLOSE WITH THE ENEMY

CAL Davidson took on five drums of petrol at Cairo, and a like amount of champagne at Memphis, and no man may tell what other supplies at this or that other point along the river. He evidently suspected no pursuit, or, if he did, was a swaggering varlet enough, for, according to all accounts which we could get, he loitered and lingered along, altogether at his leisure, with due attention to social matters at every port; for if he had not a wife at every port, at least, he had an acquaintance of business or social sort, so that, one might be sure, there were few dull moments for him and his party, whether afloat or ashore. He must have attended a dinner-party and two theaters at Memphis, and have sailed only after making three thousand dollars out of a combination in champagne present and cotton future, whose disgusting details I did not seek to learn. Trust Davidson to make money, and to make the most of life also as he went along. He always had the best of everything; and surely now he had, for the leisurely, ease-seeking Belle Helène, not actuated by any vast motive beyond that of the bee and the honey flower, slipped on down and ahead with perfect ease, while we, grimy, slow, determined, plowed on in her wake losing miles each hour the graceful Belle Helène chose to show us her light disdainful heels, serenely indifferent because wholly ignorant of our existence.

But we held to the chase as true pirates, not loitering at any port, and—since now I, also, had learned something of the intricacies of our engine, and could take a trick while the others slept—running twice the hours daily the haughty yacht would deign to log. I knew that Cal Davidson would stop to shoot and to visit, and knew that he could, by no human means, be induced to pass any telegraph point where the daily standing of the baseball clubs could be learned—he counted that day lost in which he did not learn the scores. As for myself, I have never been able to understand how any grown man or any one ungrown can take any interest whatever in the deeds of hired ball-playing Hessians, who have back of them neither patriotism nor even a municipal pride. But, for once, I was joyed that the organized business sense of a few men had put an otherwise able citizen under tribute, because now, though the Belle Helène must pause at least daily, the Sea Rover need do no such thing.

Nor did we. We were hot on the trail of the enemy as he flew south along the Chickasha Bluffs, hot as he left Memphis behind, and taking the widening waters which now wandered through low forest lands, reached out for the next city of size, historic Vicksburg on her seventy hills. And hot and eager, more than ever, were we when, chugging around the head of that vast arm of the river, where it curves like a boy of some southern sea, with its heights rising beyond and afar, we saw what caused me to exclaim aloud, “At last! There she lies, my hearties!”

I pointed on ahead. To my eyes, who had designed her, every line of that long, graceful, white hull was familiar. The jaunty rake of her air-shafts, like stacks of a liner, the sweep of her clean freeboard up to her shining rail, the ease of her bows, the graceful boldness of her overhang—all were familiar enough to me. She was my boat, and once I was wont to enjoy her. And on board her now was the woman who had taken away from me all desire to keep a yacht in commission, to keep open a house in town, or an office, or to frequent my clubs, or to meet my friends. Was she there, this woman; and was she still?—but I dared not ask that question.

“Full speed ahead, Jean!” I called. “That’s the Belle Helène! Yonder lies the enemy!”

And then the inevitable happened. Perhaps it was too much gas, perhaps too much lubricant, perhaps a spark plug was carrying too much carbon. At any rate, the engine of the Sea Rover chose that time to chug and cease to revolve!

It was more than a mile to the foot of that vast curve; and even as I leaped at the grimy oily motor, I saw a white dingey with blue trim make out from the wharf and leisurely pull alongside the landing stair of the yacht. It held two figures only, that of the deck-hand who rowed, and that of the large white-flanneled man who now disembarked from the dingey and went aboard the yacht. He was waving a paper over his head, so that I inferred the Giants must have won that day. And then, as we tugged and hurried with our arbitrary motor, I saw the Belle Helène, with a slight smiling salute to friends ashore, swing daintily about and head out and down the river! The faint and infallible rhythm of her perfect enginery came throbbing to us across the water ... I stood up. I hailed, I waved, I shouted, and I fear even cursed. Perhaps they thought some drunken fisherman was disporting himself; but certainly, a few moments later, we were rocking on the roll of the river, and the yacht was out of sight and sound around the next great bend.

“It shall go hard but we overhaul yon varlet yet,” said L’Olonnois grimly.

“Aye,” assented Lafitte; “we’ve busted a plug, an’ he has showed us a clean pair of heels, but it’s a long chase if the Sea Rover does not overhaul him. We’ll have to overhaul our engine first, though,” he added thoughtfully.

But the overhauling of our engine meant a voyage under sweeps to a precarious landing among divers packets, house-boats and launches, on Vicksburg waterside, and a later visit to a specialist in diseases of the carburetor; so that, when at last the Sea Rover was ready for the sea again, her chase might have been a hundred miles ahead an she liked.

“Gee!” exclaimed Jean Lafitte, as we were about to cast off. “Looky here, de Cubs licked de G’ints five to one to-day.” He pointed to figures in a newspaper which he had obtained. So then it might have been excitement of rage, and not of joy, which had animated Cal Davidson when he went aboard.

“Never mind then,” said I, “for that gives us a day’s start.”

“How do you mean?” demanded Jean.

“It means that yonder varlet will not leave Natchez to-morrow until late evening, after the wires are in from the northern ball games,” I replied. “Of course he’ll stop there next.” I felt now that the Lord had, by implanting this insane lust of petty baseball news in his soul, delivered my enemy into my hand.

Now I wist not how or at what dignified speed the Belle Helène swept on down that mighty river through