It seemed as if one of those terrible, but brilliant, duels, with which that room was so familiar, was about to be enacted.... But he laid the rapier down. After all, the rapier is scarcely a thing of this century. Cleggett, for the first time, felt a little impatient with the rapier. It is all very well to DREAM with a rapier. But now, he was free; reality was before him; the world of actual adventure called. He had but to choose! He considered. He tried to look into that bright, adventurous future. Presently he went to the window, and gazed out. Tides of night and mystery, flooding in from the farther, dark, mysterious ocean, all but submerged lower Manhattan; high and beautiful above these waves of shadow, triumphing over them and accentuating them, shone a star from the top of the Woolworth building; flecks of light indicated the noble curve of that great bridge which soars like a song in stone and steel above the shifting waters; the river itself was dotted here and there with moving lights; it was a nocturne waiting for its Whistler; here sea and city met in glamour and beauty and illusion. But it was not the city which called to Cleggett. It was the sea. A breeze blew in from the bay and stirred his window curtains; it was salt in his nostrils.... And, staring out into the breathing night, he saw a succession of pictures.... Stripped to a pair of cotton trousers, with a dripping cutlass in one hand and a Colt's revolver in the other, an adventurer at the head of a bunch of dogs as desperate as himself fought his way across the reeking decks of a Chinese junk, to close in single combat with a gigantic one-eyed pirate who stood by the helm with a ring of dead men about him and a great two-handed sword upheaved.... This adventurer was--Clement J. Cleggett! ... Through the phosphorescent waters of a summer sea, reckless of cruising sharks, a sailor's clasp knife in his teeth, glided noiselessly a strong swimmer; he reached the side of a schooner yacht from which rose the wild cries of beauty in distress, swarmed aboard with a muttered prayer that was half a curse, swept the water from his eyes, and with pale, stern face went about the bloody business of a hero.... Again, this adventurer was Clement J. Cleggett! Cleggett turned from the window. "I'll do it," he cried. "I'll do it!" He grasped a cutlass. "Pirates!" he cried, swinging it about his head. "That's the thing--pirates and the China Seas!" And with one frightful sweep of his blade he disemboweled a sofa cushion; the second blow clove his typewriting machine clean to the tattoo marks upon its breast; the third decapitated a sectional bookcase. But what is a sectional bookcase to a man with $500,000 in his pocket and the Seven Seas before him? CHAPTER III A SCHOONER, A SKIPPER, AND A SKULL