First published, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Perfect Fool asks a Favour 1
II. I Meet Captain Black 13
III. \"Four-Eyes\" delivers a Message 31
IV. A Strange Sight on the Sea 43
V. The Writing of Martin Hall 59
VI. I Engage a Second Mate 92
VII. The Beginning of the Great Pursuit 101
VIII. I Dream of Paolo 114
IX. I Fall in with the Nameless Ship 123
X. The Spread of the Terror 140
XI. The Ship in the Black Cloak 153
XII. The Drinking Hole in the Bowery 166
XIII. Astern of the \"Labrador\" 180
XIV. A Cabin in Scarlet 193
XV. The Prison of Steel 198
XVI. Northward Ho! 205
XVII. One Shall Live 218
XVIII. The Den of Death 228
XIX. The Murders in the Cove 239
XX. I Quit Ice-Haven 262
XXI. To the Land of Man 274
XXII. The Robbery of the \"Bellonic\" 285
XXIII. I Go to London 298
XXIV. The Shadow on the Sea 308
XXV. The Dumb Man Speaks 329
XXVI. A Page in Black\'s Life 345
XXVII. I Fall to Wondering 371
THE IRON PIRATE.
_A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea._
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....
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