“But Black Pedro was the very top-notcher of them all, the finest flower of piracy.  He didn’t go pirating just during the summer months, when his other business was slack.  And he would have died before he’d have been a wrecker.  It was a profession, with him.  And an inherited one, too.  He was the third of the name.  He started in as cabin boy on the ship of his grand-father,—­old Black Pedro the First.  The old man, the grand-father, was captured once by an Admiral of the English Navy, and taken to Tyburn to be hanged.  You see he was such a prominent pirate that they wouldn’t just string him up to the yard arm, like a common buccaneer.  He was tried with the greatest ceremony, and sentenced to death by the Lord Chief Justice himself.  That was a great feather in his cap.  But when they tried to hang him the crowd around the gallows liked him so well that they started a riot, and in the excitement he got away, and a year later he was back on the Spanish Main, pirating again, with all of his old crew who were still alive,—­ about eight of ’em.

“He had to get a new ship, for his old one—­the ’Panther,’—­had been sunk in the fight with the English Admiral.  So he had one built for him by a firm in San Domingo, who made a specialty of pirate ships.  It was the very latest thing in that kind of vessel, strong, swift, heavily armed, and luxuriously furnished.  The crew had a social hall for holding their revels and the cabins were fit for a king.  Even The Plank was solid mahogany.”

“What plank?” This from Ed Mason.

“What plank?  Did you ever hear such a question?  I shouldn’t think you’d ever been to school.  Why, the plank,—­the one that the pirates’ victims have to walk.  Didn’t you ever hear of walking the plank?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, old Black Pedro the First named his new ship ’The Angel of Death’ and he had a picture of the Angel embroidered in black velvet on his foresail.  He was a proud man, I tell you, when he sailed out of San Domingo on his first voyage.  He had a black velvet suit—­made out of some that was left over from the picture of the Angel—­and a red sash around his waist, in the proper style.  This was stuck full of cutlasses and flint-lock pistols,—­ four cutlasses and eight pistols.  And he had two or three more pistols in each boot.  He had a fierce, black beard, and the most ferocious face you can imagine.  He scared some people to death by just glaring at them.  And his own son was first mate,—­he was almost as ferocious as old Pedro the First.  And his son—­the grandson, that is, of Pedro the First—­was cabin boy.  It was the boy’s first voyage.  Before they had been out a week they fell in with ‘El Espiritu Santo,’ a private galleon belonging to the King of Spain.  It was loaded with bars of solid gold, and fifteen chests of gold doubloons.  Black Pedro ordered the Jolly Roger hoisted at all three mast-heads, and went down to his cabin and stuck six more pistols in his boots.  Then the two ships opened fire on each other with their big guns, and fought for about half an hour.  At the end of that time, the first mate came to the captain and said: