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

foul a place for human habitation. The one large tent served as shelter, and a rude awning sheltered the ruder table in the open air. But directly about the tent, and all around it in every direction, lay heaps of clam shells, most of them opened, some not yet ready for opening. I had smelled the same odor—and had not learned to like it—in far-off Ceylon, at the great pearl fisheries of the Orient. The “clammer” seemed immune.

Presently, he introduced to us a woman, very old, extraordinarily forbidding of visage, and unspeakably profane of speech, who emerged from the tent; his mother, he said. It seemed that they made their living in this way, clamming, as they called it, all the way from Arkansas to the upper waters of the Mississippi. They had made this side expedition up a tributary, in search of country not so thoroughly exploited; without much success in their venture, it seemed. The old lady, her head wrapped in a dirty shawl, sat down on an empty box, and stroked a large and dirty Angora cat, another member of the family, the while she bitterly and profanely complained. It was now dusk, and she did not notice anything out of the way in her son’s rather swollen nose and lips.

I explained to Lafitte and L’Olonnois that we were now come into the neighborhood of possible treasure, and the sight of a few pearls, none of very great worth, which the old crone produced from a cracker box, was enough to set off Jimmy L’Olonnois, who was all for raiding the place.

“What!” he hissed to me in an aside. “Did we not spare his life? Then the treasure should be ours!”

“Wait, brother,” said I. “We shall see what we shall see.” And I quieted Lafitte also, who was war-like at the very sound of the word pearl. “Them’s what they take from the Spanish ships,” said he. “Pearls is fitten for ladies fair. An’ here is pearls.”

“Wait, brother,” I demanded of him. For I was revolving something in my mind. I presently accosted the clammers.

“Listen,” said I, “you say business is bad.”

“It certainly and shorely is,” assented the old dame, fishing a black pipe out of her pocket, and proceeding to feed it from another pocket, to the discomfort of the soiled Angora cat.

“Well, now, let me make you a proposition,” said I, taking a glance at the heap of fresh shell which lay beyond the racks of trolling lines and their twisted wire hooks, by means of which dragging apparatus the mussels are taken—shutting hard on the wire when it touches them as they lie feeding with open mouths—“you’ve quite a lot of shell there, now.”

“Yes, but what’s in it? Button factories all shut down with a strike, and no market: and as for pearls, they ain’t none. Blame me for carryin’ a grouch?”

“Not in the least. But what will you take for your shells, and agree to open them for us, at wages of five dollars a day?”

“Both of us?” he demanded shrewdly. I smiled and nodded. “It’s more than you average, twice over,” said I, “and you say the stream is no good. Now I, too, am a student of the great law of averages, because I am or was a director in a great life insurance company. You say the luck is bad. Like other adventurers, I say that under the law of averages, it is time for the luck to change.”

“The luck’s with you,” growled the clammer, “it’s ag’in me.” Unconsciously, he put a finger to his swollen nose. “What’ll you gimme?” he demanded.

“One hundred dollars bonus and ten dollars a day,” said I promptly; and he seemed to know I would not better that.

“Who are ye?” he queried: “a buyer?”

“No, a pirate.”

“I believe ye. I never saw such a outfit.”

“Will you trade?” I asked; “and how long will it take to open the lot?”

“Nigh all day, even if we set up all night and roasted.” He nodded to a wide grating; and the ashes underneath showed that in this way the poor clams, like the Incas of old, were sometimes forced to give up their treasures by the persuasion of a fire under them.

“Very well,” I said. “We’ll call it a day. That’s a hundred and ten dollars for you by this time to-morrow. I invoke the aid of capital and of chance, both, against you. You will very likely lose: but if so, it would not be the first time the producer of wealth has lost it. But I make the wager fair, as my reason tells me I should.”

“Ye’re a crazy bunch, and I think ye’re out of the state asylum over yonder,” broke in the old woman, “but what the hell do we care whether ye’re crazy or not? Ye look like ye had the money. Jake, we’ll take him up.”

“All right,” said Jake. “We’ll go ye.”

“To-morrow morning, then,” said I; and our party rose to return to our camp, where Partial greeted us with warmth; he having assigned to himself the duty of guard. And so, as Pepys would say, to bed; although Lafitte and L’Olonnois scarce could sleep.

“Let him attempt to make a run for it, after we have hove him to, and we will board him and give no quarter!” This was almost the last of the direful speech I heard from L’Olonnois, as at last I turned myself to a night of deep and peaceful slumber.

CHAPTER IX IN WHICH WE TAKE MUCH TREASURE

“YOU must be awful rich, Black Bart,” said L’Olonnois to me as we sat on the grass, at breakfast, the following morning.

“No, Jimmy,” I replied, putting down my coffee cup, “on the contrary, I am very poor.”

“But you have all sorts of things, back there where you live; and last night you said you would pay that man a hundred dollars, just to open a lot of clam shells. Now, a hundred dollars is a awful sight of money.”

“That depends, Jimmy,” I said.

“’N’ we’d ought to take them pearls,” broke in Lafitte. “Didn’t we lick him?”

“We did, yes; twice.” And in my assent I felt, again, a fierce satisfaction in the first conquest of our invader, that of body to body, eye to eye; rather than in the one where I brought intellect to aid in war. “But there are two ways of being a pirate. Let us see if we can not win treasure by taking a chance in logic, and so be modern pirates.”

They did not understand me, and went mute, but at last Jimmy resumed his catechism. “Who owns the place where you live, Black Bart?”

“I do.”

“But how much?”

“Some five or six miles.”

“Gee! That must be over a hundred acres. I didn’t know anybody owned that much land. Where’d you get it?”

“In part from my father.”

“What business was he in?”

“He was a pirate, Jimmy, or at least, they said he was. But my mother was not.—I will tell you,” I added suddenly: “my father owned a great deal of timber land long ago, and iron, and oil, and copper, when nobody cared much for them. They say, now, he stole some of them, I don’t know. In those days people weren’t so particular. The more he got, the more he wanted. He never was a boy like you and me. He educated me as a lawyer, so that I could take care of his business and his property, and he trained me in the pirate business the best he could, and I made money too, all I wanted. You see, my father could never get enough, but I did; perhaps, because my mother wasn’t a pirate, you see. So, when I got enough, my father and mother both died, and when I began to see that, maybe, my father had taken a little more than our share, I began trying to do something for people ... but I can’t talk about that, of course.”

“Well, why not?” demanded Lafitte. “Go on.”

“A fellow doesn’t like to.”

“But what did you do?”

“Very little. I found I could not do very much. I gave some buildings to schools, that sort of thing. No one thanked me much. A good many called me a Socialist.”

“What’s that—a Socialist?”

“I can’t tell you. Nobody knows. But really, I suppose, a Socialist is a man born before the world got used to steam and electricity. Those things made a lot of changes, you see, and in the confusion some people didn’t get quite as square a deal as they deserved; or at least, they didn’t think they had. It takes time, really, as I suppose, to settle down after any great change. It’s like moving a house.”

“I see,” said Jimmy sagely. “But, Black Bart, you always seemed to me like as if, now, well, like you was studyin’ or something, somehow. Ain’t you never had no good times before?”

“No. This is about the first really good time I ever had in all my life. You see, you can’t really understand things that you look at from a long way off—you’ve got to get right in with folks to know what folks are. Don’t you think so?”

“I know it!” answered Jimmy, with conviction. And I recalled, though he did not, the fact that he bathed daily, Lafitte weekly, yet no gulf was fixed between their portions of the general humanity.

“It must be nice to be rich,” ventured Lafitte presently. “I’m going to be, some day.”

“Is that why you go a-pirating?” I smiled.

“Maybe. But mostly, because I like it.”

“It’s a sort of game,” said L’Olonnois.

“All life is a sort of game, my hearties,” said I. “What you two just have said covers most of the noble trade of piracy and nearly all of the pretty game of life. You are wise as I am, wise as any man, indeed.”

“What I like about you, Black Bart,” resumed L’Olonnois, naively, “is, you seem always fair.”

I flushed at this, suddenly, and pushed back my plate. “Jimmy,” said I at last, “I would rather have heard that, from you, than to hear I had made a million dollars from pearls or anything else. For that has always been my great hope and wish—that some day I could teach myself always to be fair—not to deceive anybody, most of all not myself; in short, to be fair. Brother, I thank you, if you really believe I have succeeded to some extent.”

“Why ain’t you always jolly, like you was havin’ a good time, then?” demanded my blue-eyed inquisitor. “Honor bright!”

“Must it be honor bright?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will tell you. It is because of the first chapter of Genesis, Jimmy.”

“What’s that?”

“Fie! Fie! Jimmy, haven’t you read that?” He shook his head.

“I’ve read a little about the fights,” he said, “when Saul ’n’ David ’n’ a lot of ’em slew them tens of thousands. But Genesis was dry.”

“Do you remember any place where it says ‘Male and female created He them’?”

“Oh, yes; but what of it? That’s dry.”

“Is it, though?” I exclaimed. “And you with an Auntie Helena, and a brother Black Bart. Jimmy L’Olonnois, little do you know what you say!”

“Well, now,” interrupted the ruthless soul of Jean Lafitte, “how about them pearls?”

“That’s so,” assented Jimmy. “Pearls is booty.”

“Very well, then, shipmates,” I assented, “as soon as we have washed the dishes, we will see what can be done with the enemy yonder.”

We found our two clammers, the young man and his crone of a mother, up betimes and hard at work, as evil-looking a pair as ever I saw. The man’s face was still puffed and discolored, where my fists had punished him, and his disposition had not improved overnight. His hag-like dam also regarded us