in smuggling, piracy, and "blackbirding"
(which is kidnapping Gilbert Islanders and selling them to the
coffee-planters of Central America), but that she maintained special
relations with Satan, founded on the power of mysterious charms which
her skipper was supposed to have procured from some mysterious source
and was known to employ on occasion. Beyond the information which his
manifests and clearance papers divulged, nothing of his supposed shady
operations could be learned either from him or his crew; for his
sailors, like him, were a strangely silent lot--all sharp, keen-eyed
young fellows who never drank and who kept to themselves when in port.
An uncommon circumstance was that there were never any vacancies in the
crew, except one that happened as the result of Freeman's last visit to
Rabaya, and it came about in the following remarkable manner:

Freeman, like most other men who follow the sea, was superstitious, and
he ascribed his fair luck to the charms which he secretly procured from
Rabaya. It is now known that he visited the mystic whenever he came to
the port of San Francisco, and there are some to-day who believe that
Rabaya had an interest in the supposed buccaneering enterprises of the
"Blue Crane."

Among the most intelligent and active of the "Blue Crane's" crew was a
Malay known to his mates as the Flying Devil. This had come to him by
reason of his extraordinary agility. No monkey could have been more
active than he in the rigging; he could make flying leaps with
astonishing ease. He could not have been more than twenty-five years
old, but he had the shrivelled appearance of an old man, and was small
and lean. His face was smooth-shaved and wrinkled, his eyes deep-set
and intensely black and brilliant. His mouth was his most forbidding
feature. It was large, and the thin lips were drawn tightly over large
and protruding teeth, its aspect being prognathous and menacing.
Although quiet and not given to laughter, at times he would smile, and
then the expression of his face was such as to give even Freeman a
sensation of impending danger.

It was never clearly known what was the real mission of the "Blue
Crane" when she sailed the last time from San Francisco. Some supposed
that she intended to loot a sunken vessel of her treasure; others that
the enterprise was one of simple piracy, involving the killing of the
crew and the scuttling of the ship in mid-ocean; others that a certain
large consignment