The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales

by Robert E. Howard

  And in the brief space before the rope hurtled out, down from the heavens plunged a high-flung piece of granite fair upon Dolores. She seemed to sense its shadow, and in the moment it struck her she half sank, breaking its force. But it followed her down. The mass struck between her gleaming shoulders, and she flung up her arms in despair, turning over and over with the impact, then floating unconscious close by the side of the white schooner that had been her goal.

  “God! Get her aboard!” gasped Pearse. “She’s done for. Yet we cannot leave her there for the sharks, like a beast!”

  Venner and Peters were already trying with boat-hooks to catch Dolores’s tunic. Pearse threw a line over the girl and drew her nearer and the hooks took hold. They drew her up the side with a care that amounted to reverence, for in her unconsciousness she was more beautiful than ever, her fine features molded in dead white, traced with fine blue veins; the grace of her form was that of a lovely sculpture now, lacking vitality, but possessing every line of perfection. The blow that had overtaken her had failed in its terrible threat to crush her.

  “Lay her in the companionway on the lounge,” said Venner. He ran to the saloon and brought up wine. He bathed her temples and wrists with the liquor, and forced some between her blue lips. And Pearse chafed her hands and patted them, gazing down at her in silent awe.

  “Venner,” he whispered, when her eyes refused to open, “we must let this settle the score against her. It’s a terrible end for such a creature.”

  “For my part, Pearse, I would give all I have just to see those great violet eyes laugh at me again; to hear that mocking laugh from her maddening lips. God, will she never awake?”

  Astern of the schooner the sun was slowly descending to the western sea-rim, and as the course was resumed after picking up Dolores, the Point and the cliff gradually drew out across the path of the sun, until the outlines of the rock and trees stood out black and sharp. On the cliff-top a heavy pall of greasy smoke hung low about the shattered pirates’ camp; from fissures high up the frowning side spirals of smoke testified to the wide-spread destruction that followed the blast.

  They looked at the terrific devastation, and again at its nearer victim. And as they gazed down at her, Dolores’s lips trembled in a faint smile, her great eyes opened wide, looking directly and fearlessly back at them.

  “I thank ye, my friends; I knew you would take me,” she whispered, and the two men turned away with a shudder. As she had lived, Dolores was now meeting her inevitable end, bold and indomitable.

  “Where are you hurt?” inquired Venner lamely. “Let me do something to ease you.”

  “Ease?” she laughed as of old, but her teeth clenched upon her lower lip immediately, with the pain it caused. “I shall ask ye to ease me presently, good friends. Grim Death has me by the throat already. But carry me outside. I am stifling in here. Let me see the ocean and the sky at least in my passage. And I have something to tell ye also.”

  On the gratings around the stern, abaft the wheel, they laid her on soft cushions. She drank greedily of the wine and water they offered her; she quivered with eagerness to unburden her mind before her thirst was quenched forever. She motioned them, to bend over her, and began to speak in, husky whispers.

  “That chest, thou cast it overboard. Dost know what was in it?”

  Both shook their heads. None had seen inside the chests after they came from the great chamber.

  “I’ll tell ye, then, for the peace of your souls and the tranquillity of your voyage. Lest thy men be seized with a desire for treasure that shall work ye mischief, have them open the other two chests. Quickly, for I am faint.”

  Venner went to the chests himself and flung back the lids, which were bolted on the outside and not locked. He stared for a moment, unbelievingly, then nodded to Pearse. Pearse stared, too, in amazement, and one after the other the sailors were called to see. They saw two great strong-boxes filled to the brim with iron chains, broken cutlases, rusty bilboes, and rock; a fool’s treasure in truth.

  “’Twas a trick to set my rascals at odds,” Dolores told them when they returned to her. “To thee, Pearse, I showed my treasure, and I fear that blast has buried it beneath a mountain. Milo was to take it out. I cannot believe it can have been taken away ere that powder blew it to fragments. It was still in the powder store.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Pearse quietly. “It was that which precipitated the fight between us three that killed poor Tomlin.”

  “Well, if thou still art hungry for treasure, my friends, there is my store buried where thou knowest, and I shrewdly fear but few of my people are left. But I am slipping. Stand aside, that I may close my eyes on the place I called home.”

  Dolores ceased speaking and lay, scarcely stirred by her faint respiration, gazing over the schooner’s stern at the sinking sun. The golden disk was turning to red and across its darkened face the cliff and Point stood out in sharp silhouette, which grew larger as the great glowing sun was distorted and enlarged by the refraction near the horizon. The breeze had changed, and now blew with gentle strength out of the west, a fair wind for their homeward course, and the strands of Dolores’s glorious hair blew about her face like tendrils about an orchid of unearthly beauty.

  Presently she stirred again, and now she summoned all her remaining vitality to raise herself on an elbow. Pearse and Venner leaned closer, sensing the end in the tremendous brilliancy of her wide, dry eyes.

  She spoke softly, yet with a thrilling note of yearning that choked her hearers with harsh sobs.

  “Father, I come,” she whispered. “If I have failed in obeying thy commands, I ask forgiveness, for I am but a woman. A woman with instincts and yearnings, born of the mother I never knew. Thy very treasures that were to appease me put the yearning more strongly in my brain. Thy teachings showed me a world of beasts and savagery; thy treasures gave me dreams of a world peopled by such as I would be. My mother’s blood forced me to seek this other, better world; thy blood forced me to seek it wrongfully.”

  She paused, and gathered her fleeting breath.

  Then, sitting suddenly upright, she flung both arms out to the setting sun now lipping the sea, and cried:

  “Gods I know not. Yet must there be such, else had I never known the devotion of a Milo! Wherever ye be, brave Milo, living or dead, commend me to thy own gods and forgive me for my ingratitude.” She seized Venner and Pearse by the arms as she fell back, and whispered: “In pity, friends, set my feet toward the west, and launch my poor body down the sun path as it sinks into the blue Caribbean that was my only home.”

  She relaxed with a little shivering sigh, the glorious eyes closed with a tired tremor, and the spirit of Dolores the beautiful, the wicked, the tempestuous, winged its way down the mysterious paths of the dark unknown.

  “Come,” said Venner, suddenly shaking off his abstraction, “time is all too short if we are to render her this last small service.”

  “How shall we do it?” asked Pearse doubtfully.

  “We shall send her down her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we may. Bring me that grating, Pearse. We will speed her in the dress she loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for the sun is half gone!”

  Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating, across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn secured. Then, all prepared, Peters sprang into the boat, bored a score of auger-holes in the bottom, and as the great red sun set fierce and blazing behind the black profile of the cliff, the filling boat was set adrift, straight down the path of the luminary, bound ever westward, until the sea gods claimed it and its passenger for their own.

  “Farewell, place of ill-luck!” cried Pearce, as the schooner bore away before the rising evening breeze. “May I never set my eyes on such evil shores again.”

  “Then you wi
ll not come back to seek the treasure?” asked Venner, with a shadowy flicker of a smile.

  “Not for a thousand times the treasure that lies there!” cried Pearse vehemently. “And I have seen it! The horror of this will haunt me until my dying day. I only hope God will look kindly upon that poor woman, that’s all.”

  “I hope so, too,” rejoined Venner thoughtfully. “With a white woman’s opportunities, what a woman she could have been.”

  But the gods are inscrutable. Only the warm mantle of the setting sun gave a hint that Dolores might be even now entering into a place of eternal rest, where her sins of ignorance and untutored instincts would not count too heavily against her. The sea is very benign to its elect; a calm sea in the setting sun received Dolores in arms of infinite benignity.

  THE MAROONER, by J. Allan Dunn

  I

  El Cay de los Quatros Hombres

  Like herrings cured in sun and wind

  The four lie side by side.

  Dry as a husk of coco-rind

  Above the creaming tide.

  —Buccaneer Ballades.

  “Turtler Tom” was the man who discovered them and gave name to the islet. He had beached his sloop in the leeward lagoon the better to calk a leaking seam and found them lying on the sand just above tide reach, the desiccated rinds of what had once been human beings, mummified, distorted husks of shriveled skin and flesh and bone, their bleaching skulls wisped with hair, a few discolored rags flapping about the pitiful remnants.

  What tortures had forerun the giving up of their ghosts on this arid shoal that thrust itself above the blue Bermudan waters, Tom could well imagine. There was no water on the cay, no shade, no growth but scanty herbage and brown palmetto scrub that survived between the rains by some miracle. He looked for identification traces in the shreds of personal belongings and found none.

  “Dead of hunger and of thirst,” Tom said to his Carib sailor. “What brought them here? There is no wreckage.”

  Then his foot kicked up an object buried in the sand and wind-drift. He stooped and picked it up.

  It was a boarding-pistol of unusual design.

  Forged of the same strip to which the trigger-guard was attached and deep-set in the wooden frame of the barrel was a heavy blade, machete-shaped, sickle-curving, a formidable weapon for close quarters after the discharge of the pan-primed powder and bullet, a thing designed by the genius of deviltry.

  Turtler Tom had seen this pattern before though it was rare those days, the recent invention of a buccaneer scourge of the Caribbean. His moody eyes gleamed as he hefted the cunningly balanced weapon by its carved grip.

  “Marooned, poor devils! Marooned by ‘Long Tom’ Pugh!” he exclaimed. “One of his bullies dropped it from his belt, likely, and it got shuffled under the sand. Come, Tampi, we’ll bury what’s left of ’em.”

  Turtler Tom bore the news of his grisly find with him back to Providence and to Port Royal and all along his devious water wanderings but the score of Long Tom Pugh was a long one and los quatros hombres lay beneath the weather-fluted sands on the cay that bore their name as only epitaph, unrecognized though doubtless not unmourned.

  II

  The Mercy of Long Tom Pugh

  The chase had been a long one and Long Tom Pugh raged like a thwarted devil. From dawn until a scant half-hour of sunset Pugh’s schooner had trailed the other, both vessels tacking on long reaches with canvas set until their tall masts bent like whips and their lee rails were gutters of foam.

  Foot by foot Pugh’s Scourge had overhauled the fugitive until the weapon from which Pugh got his name, the “Long Tom” couched in the bows, had found first its range and then its target, so that now the trader lay wallowing in the choppy seas off the tiny cay, hull riddled, foremast gone, its decks a clutter of rope and canvas that served as shrouds to five of its crew that the last charge of partridge had dismembered and disemboweled. Three men stood near the stern, weary, bloodstained, helpless, yet defiant, watching Pugh’s longboat crowded with his bullies dance over the water to take them off.

  “A murrain on the luck!” said Pugh. “A stinking shell-peddler! And I thought it a gold-carrier from the Plate! And we short of powder. But they’ll pay for it, the dogs!”

  He cupped his hands and bellowed across the crisp waves.

  “Bring ’em away and let her sink, blast her. The wind’s ashift.”

  The hair upon Pugh’s broad and naked chest was black save where a streak of white marked where a cutlass slash had sliced his brisket, but the hair of his head and of his long beard was dyed a rusty purple as if it were stained with dried blood. His fierce face, deep-tanned, deep-scored, was split by a great, bony nose like the beak of a macaw with nostrils that were narrow slitted and twitched as he watched the progress of his boat. One black eye had Pugh and one of hazel and from both of them the devil looked out as it leaned on elbows across the sill of his brain, never free from the fume of liquor and never seemingly affected by it.

  He was bare to his belt that was studded with pistols tucked into a gaudy over-sash and to which swung a hanger in a leather scabbard. Wide pantaloons were thrust into wider sea-boots of leather and he stood with his legs wide apart and his furry hands upon his hips. Almost alone of all his crew of forty ruffians who overcrowded the capacity of the Scourge, Pugh wore no earrings. The lobe of one brown ear lopped in twain where some desperate foe had torn away the ornament. His teeth were naturally divided and Pugh had filed them in the manner of the Madagascar savages, the better to characterize his evil countenance.

  The sun dropped rapidly and the sinking schooner swashed about in water that was incarnadined with the sunset. Nine of Pugh’s bullies were in the longboat, now returning with the three prisoners, forty-odd watched at the rail or made ready for the tack to come, for the fickle day’s-end wind was setting them down to the shoals that outribbed from the cay.

  The three men were set aboard, their arms pinioned behind their backs and shoved aft to where Pugh stood agrin. They were of varying age and stature and one was bald save for a fringe of hair. But there seemed some link of related features common to all of them and they looked Pugh fairly in the face though the blood was running into the eyes of one of them from a scalp wound.

  “So,” said Pugh. “Ye thought to outsail the Scourge in that coffin-box of yours?”

  The bald man answered.

  “We could not fight. We had no weapons to match yours.”

  “Then ye would have fought, priest-face? Eh? Ye would have fought with Pugh?”

  “I’ll fight with ye now, an ye let one arm free,” answered the other composedly.

  Pugh’s face grew purple with a rush of choleric blood. He whipped a pistol from his belt and leveled it, the hammer slowly cocking to the pull of his finger. Then he lowered the weapon.

  “Sink ye for a bragging fool,” he said. “But I will not kill in cold blood. I must remember my vow. I am a merciful man. Yet ye crow well. What is your name?”

  “We be three Graemes.”

  Pugh glanced to where the yellow lettering on the pitching stern of the wallowing vessel showed the name Three Brothers and nodded.

  “Of Nassau? Turtlers?”

  “Aye. Our port is Nassau but we are Carolinans.”

  “So? What know ye of the schooner Belle Isle bound from the River Plate. She should be hereabouts. Speak up.”

  “Naught. Nor would I tell ye an’ I did.”

  “Say ye so? Look ye, Graeme, I am a merciful man. And ye are a fool to be stubborn standing on the edge of trouble. It is in my mind that ye are lying. So, I give ye another chance. Tell me what ye know of the Belle Isle and join my crew. We can find room for all of ye and a full share apiece if ye come willingly?”

  Silence hung for a few seconds.

  “No? Still stubborn? Then we but waste time, brethren three. Into the boat with them!” Pugh ordered as a stronger gust set the Scourge to shivering where she swung in the eye of the wind, uneasy and restive, her keen
bows pawing the waves, “Give them the usual provender and set them on the cay.”

  For the first time something like anxiety showed in the faces of the trio.

  “Ye would not maroon us on yon cay?” said the eldest Graeme, “’Tis waterless. Man, ’twill be worse than murder. It means—”

  “A fig for what it means,” said Pugh. “Ye will shortly find that out. And I am a merciful man, Graeme. I am sending meat and drink.”

  The brothers exchanged glances. It was as if they nodded acquiescence with their eyes. The bald-headed one spoke.

  “Then may God curse ye for a murderer and a coward, Long Tom Pugh!” he said. “May ye come at your end to linger till your tongue grows to the roof of your mouth and your belly shrivels. May your soul shred out into the darkness and whine in the winds for mercy.”

  He suddenly shot out neck and head and spat full in the buccaneer’s face.

  Pugh turned livid and his eyes became points of fire. He snatched the scarlet bandanna from the head of one of his crew and wiped his face and beard, then flung the gaudy silk overboard where the wind snatched at it and whirled it far astern.

  “Ye are a cunning knave, Graeme,” he said and his voice held hate and breathed it as an iron holds heat. “I would that I had time to handle ye aright. Yet, before ye die, ye will wish a hundred times that I had shot ye as ye would have me do. Over with them! Ye will find company ashore, Graeme. Ask the four I left there a while ago to play hosts to ye.”

  “And speed back,” he called to the quartermaster in the stern of the longboat. “These are tricky waters. Ah, look at that!”

  The foundering schooner had taken her last sudden plunge and disappeared, but her maintop spar protruded from the water, warning of a shoal toward which wind and sea were slowly backing the Scourge.

  “We’ll pick ye up outside!” roared Pugh. “Let her come up! Pay off there! Starboard tack!”

  He leaped to the wheel, active as a tiger for all his bulk, and laid a guiding-hand to the spokes to aid the helmsman. The lithe schooner gathered way and hurled herself ahead as she caught the wind in the shallow hollows of her sails, close-hauled, fighting free from the threatening reefs and bars. The longboat sped to the shore, tumbling out the three Graemes, hurling after them two kegs, one of which fell short and swashed about in the tide fringe till two of them retrieved it.