“Never heard of him.”

“Never heard of him?” This in a tone of great surprise.  “You never heard of him either?” said Mr. Daddles, turning to each of us boys, one after the other.  “What have your parents been doing to let you grow up in ignorance?  I’ll have to tell you about him,—­ he’s the very last of the pirates.”

“Where does he hang out?” asked the Captain.

“On Rum Island or Alligator Key,—­I’m not sure which.  The accounts vary.”

The Captain looked at Mr. Daddles in a quizzical fashion.  “I guess you’ve got a yarn,” said he,—­“why don’t yer let us have it?”

Mr. Daddles was perched on the cabin, swinging his bare legs over the cock-pit.  The Captain was at the wheel, as usual, with his eyes fixed on the water ahead of us, part of the time, but now and then raised to look at Mr. Daddles.  The latter had a serious, almost mournful expression on his face, as he told the story of the last of the pirates.

CHAPTER III

THE LAST OF THE PIRATES

“You know that a great many of the most famous pirates were really rather small potatoes.  Take Captain Kidd, for instance.  Why, they are still disputing whether he was a pirate or not.  If he was one, he didn’t take to it until late in life, and he’d been a perfectly respectable sailor up to that time.  They sent him out to catch pirates, and according to one story he turned pirate himself.”

“Well, they hung him for something,” said Captain Bannister.

“Yes, sir.  They did that because they said he was a pirate, and that he murdered his mate.  He said his mate mutinied, and that he was justified in killing him.  There were a lot of others who went out to catch pirates, but ended by turning pirates themselves.  Then there were some who just carried on pirating as a kind of branch business, when other things were dull.  What respect can you have for that kind of a pirate?  Some of ’em were wreckers part of the time, and pirates the other part.”

“What are wreckers?” I asked.

“Why, they,” explained Mr. Daddles, “made a living by what they could steal from wrecks.  Either they stayed on dangerous shores and waited for a wreck, or they would deceive sailors by building false beacons at night so as to toll the ships upon the rocks.  That was a pretty mean sort of thing!  They couldn’t pick out a rich galleon, all full of gold ingots, and then fight for the treasure, like pirates and gentlemen!  No; they had to take whatever came along, and, like as not, all they would get would be a miserable fishing-shack, loaded with hake and halibut!  A real, simon-pure pirate would have refused to shake hands with a low-down wrecker, and it would have served him right, too.