The Gentle Buccaneers E-Book

Fred M. White

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Gentle Buccaneers – a gang of four pirates. They were a good company, physically, if not intellectually, although Endellion himself, the leader of the expedition and the owner of the yacht, was a classic scholar and passionate admirer of Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy he loved to translate. They liked to pose as people who were disfigured in a battle for peace. However, it soon became harder to show up in public. Everyone is starting to pay attention to them.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. BEAUTY IN DISTRESS

II. THE GREY RAIDER

III. THE SHIFTING SANDS

I. BEAUTY IN DISTRESS

THE Gentle Buccaneers were lounging on the deck of the Gehenna in the moonlight after dinner. They might have been just four very proper and gallant gentlemen, taking their ease after the pleasures of the day, and, indeed, they were something like that; but thereby hangs a tale.

There were four of them altogether–the Honorable Roger Endellion, commonly called Jolly Roger as a delicate compliment to him, as the leading spirit of the great adventure; Jimmy Graydon, alias Truthful James, one time a mighty “Rugger” international three-quarter, and St. John Wallace, commonly called the Brigadier, seeing that for a brief space he had been a soldier; all some time at Eton, and now citizens of the world. The fourth man, Peter Shacklock, generally hailed as the Prodigal Son, was pure American, and, as his nickname might imply, a backslider from a commercial point of view, and a veritable thorn in the flesh of a businesslike father with perhaps more millions (dollars) than he knew how to count.

They were a fine company, physically, if not intellectually, though Endellion himself, the leader of the expedition and owner of the yacht, was by way of being a classical scholar and a passionate admirer of Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy he was fond of translating with a wide margin.

Now it pleased the Gentle Buccaneers to regard themselves as something between Drake and Kidd. In other words, pirates in the South Pacific Seas, though, nathless, their piracy, like Ariel’s spiriting, was done gently. They liked to pose as men who have been badly mauled in the battle of the world, and as regards two of them, at least, this was substantially true. The others had gone into the business in the pure spirit of adventure. But Endellion, at least, had a real enough grievance. As he was fond of putting it, what use was that large fortune of his, inherited from a kindly godmother, seeing that it was impossible for him to show his face either in the park or on “the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.” There had been a time, not so long ago when he had been quite persona grata in Society, but that was before he had fallen in love with a woman of considerable personal attractions and slim morality who had somehow got entangled in a card scandal of some magnitude. In his fine quixotic way Endellion had taken all the blame upon himself and confessed of a social crime of the blackest type–the one unforgivable sin, in fact.

He had not been blind. No one had known better than he that the object of his misplaced affections had no business to be playing for such a high stakes, despite the fact that she was a fine exponent, and depended upon her skill to pay most of her obligations. But Endellion had not stopped to count the cost. He was most absurdly in love, and it had seemed to him that with his ample means he and the lady in question might live happily ever afterwards, in spite of the social ostracism which would inevitably be handed out to him. And therefore he stood confessed for her sake, and then, when she was enjoying the sympathy of everybody, she turned her back upon Endellion and married someone else.

Endellion immediately disappeared from his familiar haunts, and from time to time rumors reached his old friends to the effect that he was leading a riotous sort of life in the South Pacific Seas on board a luxurious yacht in company with a few other black sheep he had scraped together from various parts of the globe. He had gone headlong to the devil. Sooner or later he would be picked up by some patrolling gunboat, and then there would be an end to his career.

And so it came about that Endellion was sitting there with his companions, on the deck of his own yacht in the glorious moonlight, off a little spit of an island inhabited, for the most part by other black sheep and a trader or two in copra and mother o’ pearl. They did not know even the name of the island and had drifted there in the mere spirit of adventure. They had been on shore for an hour or two taking in water and one or two odd things, and now seated on the deck round a little table on which stood an electric light, smoking their cigars and talking idly over coffee and liquers.

They might have been no more than four idle gentlemen, prospecting around for sheer amusement. From where they sat they could see the foam creaming on the white sand and a waving fringe of palms swaying gently in the evening breeze. It was a peaceful picture of sea and sky and brilliant moon and far enough remote apparently in the way of crime or violence.

“What manner of place is this?” Endellion asked. He had not been ashore. “What do you make of it, Jimmy?”

“Oh, just the usual,” Graydon replied. “Two or three huts, a general store, and a poisonous little saloon, of course. Same old game. A handful of white traders steadily drinking themselves to death in the intervals of business, and the inevitable remittance man propped up against the bar. It’s a lovely spot, of course, but a God-forsaken hole, all the same. Not much sign of adventure here.”

The Prodigal Son, otherwise Peter U. Shacklock, chuckled quietly to himself.

“I don’t know about that, sonny,” he said. “There’s a girl on the island. A real peach, too.”

“Oh, come off it,” Wallace said. “Do you mean there’s a lady tied up on this gob of sand?”

“I do that,” Shacklock replied. “I saw her when the hands were filling up the water casks. Tall, dark, with violet eyes and a walk like a goddess. Quite young too. Now I wonder who the deuce she is.”

“That will do,” Endellion put in. “None of that, my boy. No woman here. Now, what does Marcus Aurelius say about woman and her man friends?”

“Oh, come off with your Marcus Aurelius,” Shacklock went on. “I tell you there is a mystery here. Now, what on earth is a woman–and a lady, mind–doing here, where there isn’t a clean white man within a thousand miles? When I say a lady I mean it. The real thing.”