Surprise and startlement were the stranger’s portion, as he opened his
mouth to speak, then changed his mind and murmured to himself, “Same
stock—no wonder we look alike.”
Still in the throes of disgust, Francis regained the shore of the Bull,
sat down on the edge of the dugout, filled and lighted his pipe, and
gloomily meditated. Crazy, everybody, was the run of his thought. Nobody
acts with reason. “I’d like to see old Regan try to do business with
these people. They’d get his ears.”
Could he have seen, at that moment, the young man of the canvas pants
and of familiar appearance, he would have been certain that naught but
lunacy resided in Latin America; for the young man in question, inside a
grass-thatched hut in the heart of his island, grinning to himself as he
uttered aloud, “I guess I put the fear of God into that particular
member of the Morgan family,” had just begun to stare at a photographic
reproduction of an oil painting on the wall of the original Sir Henry
Morgan.
“Well, Old Pirate,” he continued grinning, “two of your latest
descendants came pretty close to getting each other with automatics that
would make your antediluvian horse-pistols look like thirty cents.”
He bent to a battered and worm-eaten sea-chest, lifted the lid that was
monogramed with an “M,” and again addressed the portrait:
“Well, old pirate Welshman of an ancestor, all you’ve left me is the old
duds and a face that looks like yours. And I guess, if I was really
fired up, I could play your Port-au-Prince stunt about as well as you
played it yourself.”
A moment later, beginning to dress himself in the age-worn and
moth-eaten garments of the chest, he added: “Well, here’s the old duds
on my back. Come, Mister Ancestor, down out of your frame, and dare to
tell me a point of looks in which we differ.”
Clad in Sir Henry Morgan’s ancient habiliments, a cutlass strapped on
around the middle and two flintlock pistols of huge and ponderous design
thrust into his waist-scarf, the resemblance between the living man and
the pictured semblance of the old buccaneer who had been long since
resolved to dust, was striking.
“Back to back against the mainmast,
Held at bay the entire crew....”
As the young man, picking the strings of a guitar, began to sing the old
buccaneer rouse, it seemed to him that the picture of his forebear faded
into another picture and that he saw:
The old forebear himself, back to a mainmast, cutlass out and flashing,
facing a semi-circle of fantastically clad sailor cutthroats, while
behind him, on the opposite side of the mast, another similarly garbed
and accoutred man, with cutlass flashing, faced the other semi-circle of
cutthroats that completed the ring about the mast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account