Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 123, No. 4 — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Th ( rF - aboard take on the job? TEACH: PIRATE DE LUXE. themselves to be of a very different metal to ‘Blackbeard’s ruffians of two centuries earlier. ever for amputations performed by the car- penter, and shuddered at the idea of boil- ing pitch as a styptic. They had all heard (it appeared) of anti- septic surgery, and anesthetics, and con- ceived a mad admiration for them; and when five men after the action off the Azores (I think it must have been then) died unpleasantly, Teach discovered a movement in the forecastle that smelt re- markably hike mutiny. Now he was a dark-faced man, and he had a hard, black mind, but he was no pig- headed fool with a taste for butting against an immoveable bulkhead. A doctor. was it, they wanted? Couldn’t some handy man The cabin stew- ard, now, Llewelyn Jones? WHe’d been a "dentist. \ running on her present charter. Captain Teach, if it came to his turn— and he exposed himself far more than any other member of the ship’s company—was quite open to entrust himself to the deli- cate operating of Llewelyn. But the crew‘ had voted emphatically against the squint-eyed steward. Three of them, it seemed, had entrusted their teeth to his machinery, with lamentable results to both teeth and purse. “Very well,’”’ said Teach. “If you are set on a pukka doctor with, as you stipu- late, letters after his name, I will catch one for you. I can’t do it at once, because we are in mid-ocean, and doctors (at least the best of them) are not amphibious animals. But I guarantee to pinch one for you with- in ten days, together. with the tools of his craft, and what drugs he may have in stock. *“ Got all that? Now let’s hear no more of this squeamishness. A young ladies’ school atmosphere seems to me distinctly out of place on the Littondale while she’s Damn your collective eyes, don’t you realize yet that youre pirates, with a hanging in front of you if you show just one soft spot to any living being on the face of the globe outside your own club? But you shall have your doctor, because I have said you should.” This new lot had no use what- - 087 Just north of abominable Hatteras on the eastern seaboard of the United States, as you will remember, is that fine patch of difficult water called Albemarle Sound. Up the various small creeks running into it are situated the wooden buildings of sun- dry hunting clubs, and into the head-waters pours the muddy stream of the Roanoke River. The houseboats of the professional shooters of the canvas-back duck lie off the beaches. . There is a bit of a harbor in at the back of the island that carries Cape Hat- teras, and shelters the mouth of the Sound, and in this harbor Teach installed a 38- knot M. L. which was camouflaged as an old-fashioned steam. yacht with a large fat yellow funnel. It looked as if she could do a meager six knots at a pinch. Thanks to oak-varnished three-ply, she was the exact image of one of those comfortable family boats that the elderly city man, with a taste for cruising, keeps in summer commission for the benefit of an expanding family. The chubby yacht called herself Petro- nella, and dispensed forbidden firewater lavishly to all who called. Visitors were not asked on board, because the three-ply additions were only for external view. The steward, a Welshman, who called himself Owen Trevor, and wore a noticeable outward squint, said he had ‘the strictest instructions from the owner, Mr. Fursten- burg, first, to show nobody over the ship, and, second, to send nobody away without a drink. As his measure of “a drink ” was a bottle of unexceptionable Scotch whisky from an apparently inexhaustible cellar, this effort at popularity produced instant success in a land that had wakened up one dismal morning and found, to its annoy- ance, that it had “ gone dry.” A less ostentatious hospitality would, to my mind, have been safer. But there you ‘have a sample of Teach’s vanity. Even on this ticklish kidnaping expedition, while the Littondale was drawing off the scent else- where—it was somewhere in the Florida Channel from what I can gather—he could not endure the thought that his trumpery Petronella should remain unnoticed. His instinct for advertisement showed DOO Original froma 3 ee 2 : S CO