THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA
Things had grown too hot for Shard, captain of pirates, on all the
seas that he knew. The ports of Spain were closed to him; they knew
him in San Domingo; men winked in Syracuse when he went by; the two
Kings of the Sicilies never smiled within an hour of speaking of him;
there were huge rewards for his head in every capital city, with
pictures of it for identification--_and all the pictures were
unflattering_. Therefore Captain Shard decided that the time had come
to tell his men the secret.
Riding off Teneriffe one night, he called them all together. He
generously admitted that there were things in the past that might
require explanation: the crowns that the Princes of Aragon had sent to
their nephews the Kings of the two Americas had certainly never
reached their Most Sacred Majesties. Where, men might ask, were the
eyes of Captain Stobbud? Who had been burning towns on the Patagonian
seaboard? Why should such a ship as theirs choose pearls for cargo?
Why so much blood on the decks and so many guns? And where was the
_Nancy_, the _Lark_, or the _Margaret Belle_? Such questions as these,
he urged, might be asked by the inquisitive, and if counsel for the
defence should happen to be a fool, and unacquainted with the ways of
the sea, they might become involved in troublesome legal formulae.
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