The Voyage of the Hoppergrass | Page 9

the same place."

"How did they like having their heads cut off?" asked Mr. Daddles.
"Well, yer can't tell 'bout a Chinaman. They didn't seem to mind it
much. They get used to it, yer see."
"Somehow," said Mr. Daddles, "a Chinese pirate doesn't seem like the
real thing to me."
"That's so," I agreed. I came and sat down with the Captain and Ed
Mason in the cock-pit. "I always think of a pirate as a man with a black
beard, and--"
"A red sash around his waist," put in Ed Mason.
"All stuck full of pistols and things," added Jimmy.
"Guess that kind has all died off," said the Captain.
"All except Black Pedro," remarked Mr. Daddles.
"Never heard of HIM."
"Never HEARD of him?" This in a tone of great surprise. "You never
heard of him either?" said Mr. Daddles, turning to each of us boys, one
after the other. "What have your parents been doing to let you grow up
in ignorance? I'll have to tell you about him,-- he's the very last of the
pirates."
"Where does he hang out?" asked the Captain.
"On Rum Island or Alligator Key,--I'm not sure which. The accounts
vary."
The Captain looked at Mr. Daddles in a quizzical fashion. "I guess
you've got a yarn," said he,--"why don't yer let us have it?"
Mr. Daddles was perched on the cabin, swinging his bare legs over the
cock-pit. The Captain was at the wheel, as usual, with his eyes fixed on
the water ahead of us, part of the time, but now and then raised to look

at Mr. Daddles. The latter had a serious, almost mournful expression on
his face, as he told the story of the last of the pirates.

CHAPTER III
THE LAST OF THE PIRATES
"You know that a great many of the most famous pirates were really
rather small potatoes. Take Captain Kidd, for instance. Why, they are
still disputing whether he was a pirate or not. If he was one, he didn't
take to it until late in life, and he'd been a perfectly respectable sailor
up to that time. They sent him out to catch pirates, and according to one
story he turned pirate himself."
"Well, they hung him for something," said Captain Bannister.
"Yes, sir. They did that because they said he was a pirate, and that he
murdered his mate. He said his mate mutinied, and that he was justified
in killing him. There were a lot of others who went out to catch pirates,
but ended by turning pirates themselves. Then there were some who
just carried on pirating as a kind of branch business, when other things
were dull. What respect can you have for that kind of a pirate? Some of
'em were wreckers part of the time, and pirates the other part."
"What are wreckers?" I asked.
"Why, they," explained Mr. Daddles, "made a living by what they
could steal from wrecks. Either they stayed on dangerous shores and
waited for a wreck, or they would deceive sailors by building false
beacons at night so as to toll the ships upon the rocks. That was a pretty
mean sort of thing! They couldn't pick out a rich galleon, all full of
gold ingots, and then fight for the treasure, like pirates and gentlemen!
No; they had to take whatever came along, and, like as not, all they
would get would be a miserable fishing-shack, loaded with hake and
halibut! A real, simon-pure pirate would have refused to shake hands
with a low- down wrecker, and it would have served him right, too.

"But Black Pedro was the very top-notcher of them all, the finest
flower of piracy. He didn't go pirating just during the summer months,
when his other business was slack. And he would have died before he'd
have been a wrecker. It was a profession, with him. And an inherited
one, too. He was the third of the name. He started in as cabin boy on
the ship of his grand-father,--old Black Pedro the First. The old man,
the grand-father, was captured once by an Admiral of the English Navy,
and taken to Tyburn to be hanged. You see he was such a prominent
pirate that they wouldn't just string him up to the yard arm, like a
common buccaneer. He was tried with the greatest ceremony, and
sentenced to death by the Lord Chief Justice himself. That was a great
feather in his cap. But when they tried to hang him the crowd around
the gallows liked him so well that they started a riot, and in the
excitement he got away, and a year later he was back on the Spanish
Main, pirating again, with all of his old crew who were still alive,--
about