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

field; yet the truth is, I began all that late in life, and deliberately. To me, used to exact habit of thought in all things, and accustomed to be governed by trained reason alone, it was never enough to say that a thing was partly done, or well enough done to pass: only the best possible way had any appeal to me. I brought my reason to bear on every situation in life. Thus, I studied an investment carefully, and before going into it, I knew what the result would be. My investments, therefore, always have prospered, because they were not based on guess or chance, as nine-tenths of all the public’s business ventures are. In the same way, I had gone deliberately about the matter of winning the regard of the only woman I ever saw who seemed to me much worth while. I argued and reasoned with Helena Emory that she should marry me, proving to her by every rule of logic that, not only was she the most lovable woman in all the records of the world, but, also, that love such as mine never had before been known in the world. Sometimes, as I logically proved the fitness of our union, and grew warm at my own accuracy, she wavered, relented, warmed: and then again, forgetting my argument, she would relapse into womanlike frivolity once more.... I did not like to think of this, as I sat in the shade with Partial. It cost me much in self-respect, irritated me.

But, having studied sport and outdoor living deliberately as I had studied the law and business and Helena, I had rather a thorough grounding, on life in the open, for I had read every authority obtainable; whereas my young associates had read none. So cautiously, now and then, I suggested little things to them, as that the fire need not be so large, and would do better if confined between two green side logs. I taught them how to boil the kettle quickly, how to make tea, and also, more difficult, how to make coffee; how to cook bacon just enough, and how to cook fish—for I had taken a few trout earlier in the day—and how to make toast without charring it to cinders. Again, I delighted them by telling them of little camping devices, and quite won their hearts when I found among Hiroshimi’s packages, a small camp griddle with folding legs, of my own devising. It was quite clean and new, but it performed as I felt quite sure it would. In fact, reason will govern all things—except a woman.

We ate al fresco, as true buccaneers of the main, and grew better and better acquainted. It occurred to me that mayhap the nautical education of my associates was, after all, somewhat superficial, so I set about mending it by explaining something of the rigging of the ship; and I gave them, by means of the Sea Rover’s bowline, some lessons in sailorman splices and knots. The bow-line-in-a-bight, the sheet-bend, the clinch-knot, the jam-knot, the fisherman’s water-knot, the stevedore’s slip-knot, the dock-hand’s round-turns and half-hitches for cable makefast, the magnus-hitch, the fool’s-knot, the cat’s-cradle, the sheep-shank, the dog-shank, and many others—all of which I had learned in books and in practise—I did for them over and over again; just as I could have done for them a half-dozen different ways of throwing the diamond-hitch in a pack-train, or the stirrup-hitch in a cow camp, or many other of the devices of men who live in the open; for beginning late in life in these things, I had studied them hard and faithfully.

I could see—and I noted it with much gratification—that I was rising in the estimation of my pirates. It pleased me not at all to show that I knew more than they of these things, for I was older and my mind was long my trained servant; but I had monstrous delight in seeing myself accepted as one fit to associate with them. Once or twice, I saw the two draw apart in some debate which I knew had to do with me. “Well, now,” Lafitte would begin; and L’Olonnois would demur. “No, I don’t just like that one,” he would say. By nightfall—and I presume I do not need to recall all the incidents of our afternoon, or of our pitching camp by the riverside an hour before sundown—I learned what was the subject of their argument. I had been admitted to the pirates’ band, but the question was over my name.

We sat by our fireside, before our little tent, after a pleasant meal which I know was well cooked because I cooked it myself—trout, a young squirrel, and toast, and real coffee—and Partial was close at my knee, having obviously adopted me. We were fifteen or twenty miles from my house, nearly twice that from their homes, but the world, itself, seemed very remote from us. We reveled in a new luxurious world of rare deeds, rare dreams all our own. I was conjuring up some new argument to put before Helena should I ever see her again—as of course I never should—when Lafitte rolled over on the grass and looked up at us.

“We was just saying,” he remarked, “that you didn’t have no name.”

“That is true. I have not told you my name, nor have you asked it. Had you been impolite, you might have learned it by prying about my place.” I spoke gravely and with approval.

“No, we didn’t know who you was.”

“Let it be so. Let me be a man of no name. A name is of no consequence, and neither am I.”

“Sho, now, that ain’t so. I never seen a better—now, I never seen—” Jean Lafitte’s reticence in friendship, again, was getting the better of him.

“So we said we’d call you Black Bart,” added L’Olonnois.

“That is a most excellent name,” said I after some thought. “At present, I can find no objection to it, except that I wear no beard at all and would have a red or brown one if I did; and that Black Bart was rather a pirate of the land than of the sea.”

“Was he?” queried L’Olonnois. “Wasn’t he a pirate, too, never?”

“There was a famous pirate chief known as Bluebeard or Blackbeard, and it may be, sometimes, they called him Black Bart.”

“Wasn’t he a awful desper’t sort of pirate?”

“He is said to have been.”

“It sounds like a awful desper’t name,” said Jimmy: “like as though he’d fill up his ship with captured maidens, an’ put all rivals to the sword.”

“Such, indeed, shipmate,” said I, “was his reputation.”

“Well,” concluded L’Olonnois, “we couldn’t think o’ any better name’n that, because we know that is just what you would do.”

(So, then, my reputation was advancing!)

“Wasn’t you never a pirate before, honest?” queried Lafitte at this juncture. “Because, you seem like a real pirate to us. We been, lots of times, over on the lake.”

“It may be because my father was always called a pirate,” I replied. “You see, in these days, there are not so many pirates who really scuttle ships and cut throats.”

“But you would?”

“Certainly. ’Tis in my blood, my bold shipmate.”

“We knew it,” concluded L’Olonnois calmly. “So, after now, we’ll call you Black Bart. You can let your whiskers grow, you know.”

“True,” said I. “Well, we will at least take the whiskers under advisement, as the court would say.”

“We must be an awful long ways from home,” ventured L’Olonnois, after a time.

“Hundreds of miles our good ship has ploughed the deep, and as yet has raised no sail above the horizon,” I admitted.

“Do you—now—do you—well, anyhow, do you have any idea of where we are going?” demanded Lafitte, shamefacedly.

“Not in the slightest.”

“But now—well—now then——”

In answer I drew from my pocket a map and a compass; the latter mostly for effect, since I knew very well the bed of our river must shape our course for many a mile. On the map I pointed out how, presently, our river would run into a lake, into which, also, ran another river; and would emerge on the other side much larger. I showed them that down that other river, as, indeed, down mine, logs used to float from the pine forests—many of my father’s logs, of ownership said to have been piratical—and I showed how, presently, this stream would carry us into one of the ancient waterways down which millions of wealth in timber have come; and explained about the wild crews of river runners who once ran the rafts down that great highway, and into the greater highway of the Mississippi; whence men might in due time arrive upon the Spanish Main.

“Is there any way a fellow can get across from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi River?” demanded Lafitte, who was of a practical turn of mind: and on the map I showed him all the old trails of the fur traders, explorers and adventurers, French and English, who had discovered our America long ago; whereat their eyes kindled and their tongues went dumb.

At last, I told them we must to our hammocks; and soon our bloody band was deep in sleep. At least, so much might have been said for Lafitte and L’Olonnois. Alone of the band of sea rovers myself, Black Bart, sat musing by the fire, the head of my friend, Partial, in my lap.

CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH WE HAVE AN ADVENTURE

OUR band of hardy adventurers arose with the sun on the morning following our first night in bivouac, and by noon of that day, thanks, perhaps, in some measure to my own work at the oars, and a sail which we rigged from a corner of the tent, we had passed into and through the lake which our map had showed us. Now we were below the edge of the pine woods, and our stream ran more sluggishly, between banks of cattails or of waving marsh grasses. We put out a trolling line, and took a bass or so; and once Lafitte, firing chance-medley into a passing flock of plover, knocked down a half-dozen, so that we bade fair to have enough for dinner that night. It was all a new world for us. No one might tell what lay around the next bend of our widening waterway. We were explorers. A virgin world lay before us. The nature of the country along the stream kept the settlements back a distance; so that to us, now, in reality, retracing one of the ancient fur-trading routes, we might almost have been the first to break these silences.

Toward nightfall we came into a more rolling and more park-like region; our prow was now heading to the westward, for the general course of the great river beyond. I had no notion to visit the city of Chicago, and our route lay far above that which must be taken by any large craft bound for the Mississippi route to the Gulf.

Farms now came down to the water’s edge in places, villages offered mill-pond dams—around which, in scowling reticence, we portaged the Sea Rover, unmindful alike of queries and of jeers. I found time to post additional letters now. Indeed, I was preparing for a long and determined enterprise. It was the Sea Rover against the Belle Helène; and, did the skipper of the latter loll along in flanneled ease and luxury, not so with the hardy band of cutthroats who manned our smaller and more mobile craft, men used to hardships, content to drink spring water instead of sparkling wines, and to eat the product of their own weapons.

We were I do not know how far from our first encampment, perhaps thirty miles or more, when toward five o’clock