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, stul