Max Pemberton
The Iron Pirate & Captain Black
Sea Adventure Novels
e-artnow, 2021
Contact: [email protected]
EAN: 4064066387082
Table of Contents
THE IRON PIRATE
Table of Contents
Chapter I. The Perfect Fool Asks a Favour.
Chapter II. I Meet Captain Black.
Chapter III. "Four-eyes" Delivers a Message.
Chapter IV. A Strange Sight on the Sea.
Chapter V. The Writing of Martin Hall.
Chapter VI. I Engage a Second Mate.
Chapter VII. The Beginning of the Great Pursuit.
Chapter VIII. I Dream of Paolo.
Chapter IX. I Fall in with the Nameless Ship.
Chapter X. The Spread of the Terror.
Chapter XI. The Ship in the Black Cloak.
Chapter XII. The Drinking Hole in the Bowery.
Chapter XIII. Astern of the "Labrador."
Chapter XIV. A Cabin in Scarlet.
Chapter XV. The Prison of Steel.
Chapter XVIII. The Den of Death.
Chapter XIX. The Murders in the Cove.
Chapter XXI. To the Land of Man.
Chapter XXII. The Robbery of the "Bellonic."
Chapter XXIII. I Go to London.
Chapter XXIV. The Shadow on the Sea.
Chapter XXV. The Dumb Man Speaks.
Chapter XXVI. A Page in Black's Life.
Chapter XXVII. I Fall to Wondering.
CHAPTER I.
THE PERFECT FOOL ASKS A FAVOUR.
"En voiture! en voiture!"
If it has not been your privilege to hear a French guard utter these words, you have lost a lesson in the dignity of elocution which nothing can replace. "En voiture, en voiture; five minutes for Paris." At the well-delivered warning, the Englishman in the adjoining buffet raises on high the frothing tankard, and vaunts before the world his capacity for deep draughts and long; the fair American spills her coffee and looks an exclamation; the Bishop pays for his daughter's tea, drops the change in the one chink which the buffet boards disclose, and thinks one; the travelled person, disdaining haste, smiles on all with a pitying leer; the foolish man, who has forgotten something, makes public his conviction that he will lose his train. The adamantine official alone is at his ease, and, as the minutes go, the knell of the train-loser sounds the deeper, the horrid jargon is yet more irritating.
I thought all these things, and more, as I waited for the Perfect Fool at the door of my carriage in the harbour station at Calais. He was truly an impossible man, that small-eyed, short-haired, stooping mystery I had met at Cowes a month before, and formed so strange a friendship with. To-day he would do this, to-morrow he would not; to-day he had a theory that the world was egg-shaped, to-morrow he believed it to be round; in one moment he was hot upon a journey to St. Petersburg, in the next he felt that the Pacific Islands offered a better opportunity. If he had a second coat, no man had ever seen it; if he had a purpose in life, no man, I hold, had ever known it. And yet there was a fascination about him you could not resist; in his visible, palpitating, stultifying folly there was something so amazing that you drew to the man as to that unknown something which the world had not yet given to you, as a treasure to be worn daily in the privacy of your own enjoyment. I had, as I have said, picked the Perfect Fool up at Cowes, whither I had taken my yacht, Celsis, for the Regatta Week; and he had clung to me ever since with a dogged obstinacy that was a triumph. He had taken of my bread and eaten of my salt unasked; he was not a man such as the men I knew—he was interested in nothing, not even in himself—and yet I tolerated him. And in return for this toleration he was about to make me lose a train for Paris.
"Will you come on?" I roared for the tenth time, as the cracked bell jangled and the guards hoisted the last stout person into the only carriage where there was not a seat for her. "Don't you see we shall be left behind? Hurry up! Hang your parcels! Now then—for the last time, Hall, Hill, Hull, whatever your confounded name is, are you coming?"
Many guards gave a hand to the hoist, and the Perfect Fool fell upon his hat-box, which was all the personal property he seemed to possess. He apologised to Mary, who sat in the far corner, with more grace than I had looked for