Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 25, 1924 — page 105: what you’re looking at

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

BUCCANEER BLOOD. Because of the low mist—and likewise the fact that he was not on the lookout for such a thing—Wing had failed to see the craft sailing past him. Furthermore his own dinghy being so low in the water—a matter of six inches of freeboard—it was more than likely that they had failed to sight him. He dropped his burden—the hysterical man who had flung himself into his arms. Dorset found himself sprawled on the sand while his companion ducked off into the protection of the cane-brake. “Belay there, you gibberin’ idiot!” Wing was whispering frantically. ‘“ Them pirates you seen is runnin’ up there athwart the chateau. There they go into the court- yard around aft of the first tower. You ain’t seen visions, you ain’t seen devils. Crawl alongside of me on yer belly. They’s real men!” It was thus, under cover of the cane- brake and the thick marsh tussocks, that Wing reached the door of the chateau. In his eyes, the terrified and crab-like thing crawling along behind him could no longer be considered as non compos mentis. Dor- set, in other words, had justified himself. CHAPTER XVIII. WHEN JACQUELINE AWOKE. romantic dream—of magnificently dressed buccaneer captains stepping down from massive gold frames, of a golden haired brave swinging a flashing cutlass in the air so that it sang as it cleaved through the skulls of his victims; of a diminutive gargoyle with piquant face and mouse eyes; of a banquet at which the six Raiglon pirates sang, “ I'ifteen men on a dead man’s chest! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” She dreamed of a whole crew of filibusters dancing on the decks of a Spanish galleon after an orgy of murder. One with a scar like the scar on one of the Raiglon por- traits, was hopping about and pounding the deck with his peg leg. The very vocifer- ousness of his jig, and the sound of that peg knocking, banging, awoke her. She started up, clutching wildly at the J esnanic a awoke from a violent but 95 mosquito netting which draped her huge four-poster. Had she actually heard that knock? It seemed as if the room still vibrated with the sound. It filled her ears. She felt it in her very bones. She trembled to it, as a taut wire responds to a chord. For a long time she waited, terrified, lis- tening, clutching the netting, afraid to part the velvet curtains. And yet, surely, she pursuaded herself—it must have been a dream. There was a grumble of voices, like thunder rolling at an infinite distance across the salt marshes. No wind, no whining of mosquitoes, no hoot of owl: all customary sounds were held in abeyance. It was like the unnatur- al silence which she knew came before those Gulf hurricanes. Only now the hurricane— so she imagined—was going to break, not out in the bayous, but within the house. The Raiglons were awakening. They were unsheathing their cutlasses, which for cen- turies had remained in web-covered scab- bards. She could not get the dreadful thrill of her dream out of her soul: her ancestors, whom she had been taught to worship as her gods, were to reénact their murderous brawls in that house before dawn! Even now there was the low mutter of voices in the great dining hall downstairs. It could not be the cracked piping voice of old Quintilian—nor of her grandam. - They never bickered; they never so much as raised their voices above a quiet modula- tion proper in the talk of servant and dowager. When the grandam was angry, she vented her wrath in a voiceless whisper. A guttural laugh floated upward; the laugh of men drinking. Never in her seven- teen years on this earth had Jacqueline heard such a hideous sound crashing into the air. She parted the velvet draperies, leaped from her bed and, barefooted, tiptoed to the door. She put her trembling hand to the key to ascertain that it was turned, and the door locked. Then she thought of her grandam. It was the custom of the aged chatelaine, as Jacqueline knew, to remain down there—in that very hall—taking her “nightcap ” before retiring. Gomichbooks (©)