Title:  The Courage of Captain Plum

Author:  James Oliver Curwood

Release Date:  May 20, 2004 [EBook #12388]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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[Illustration:  “I am going to take you from the island!”]

The COURAGE of CAPTAIN PLUM

By
James Oliver Curwood
1912

With illustrations by
Frank E. Schoonover

THE COURAGE OF CAPTAIN PLUM

CHAPTER I

THE TWO OATHS

On an afternoon in the early summer of 1856 Captain Nathaniel Plum, master and owner of the sloop Typhoon was engaged in nothing more important than the smoking of an enormous pipe.  Clouds of strongly odored smoke, tinted with the lights of the setting sun, had risen above his head in unremitting volumes for the last half hour.  There was infinite contentment in his face, notwithstanding the fact that he had been meditating on a subject that was not altogether pleasant.  But Captain Plum was, in a way, a philosopher, though one would not have guessed this fact from his appearance.  He was, in the first place, a young man, not more than eight or nine and twenty, and his strong, rather thin face, tanned by exposure to the sea, was just now lighted up by eyes that shone with an unbounded good humor which any instant might take the form of laughter.

At the present time Captain Plum’s vision was confined to one direction, which carried his gaze out over Lake Michigan.  Earlier in the day he had been able to discern the hazy outline of the Michigan wilderness twenty miles to the eastward.  Straight ahead, shooting up rugged and sharp in the red light of the day’s end, were two islands.  Between these, three miles away, the sloop Typhoon was strongly silhouetted in the fading glow.  Beyond the islands and the sloop there were no other objects for Captain Plum’s eyes to rest upon.  So far as he could see there was no other sail.  At his back he was shut in by a dense growth of trees and creeping vines, and unless a small boat edged close in around the end of Beaver Island his place of concealment must remain undiscovered.  At least this seemed an assured fact to Captain Plum.