Produced by Roger Frank, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
THE GOLD TRAIL $1.30 net THE PEARL FISHERS $1.30 net POPPYLAND $2.00 net THE NEW OPTIMISM $1.00 net THE POEMS OF FRANÇOIS VILLON TRANSLATED BY H. DE VERE STACPOOLE BOARDS, $3.00 NET. HALF MOROCCO, $7.50 NET
AUTHOR OF “THE GOLD TRAIL,” “THE PEARL FISHERS,” “THE PRESENTATION,” ETC.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY: MCMXVII
Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co. New York, U. S. A.
Captain Blood used to come down to McGinnis’ wharf every afternoon to have a look round. The Captain was an Irishman of the black-haired, grey-eyed type from the west coast--a relic of the wreck of the Spanish Armada.
The Spanish strain in the Celtic nature makes for volcanic developments; and the Captain, from what we knew of him, formed no exception to this rule. He was known as “The Captain” _tout court_ all along the front at San Francisco, from the China docks to Meiggs’ Wharf. He was a character. Scarcely forty years of age, he had done most things that a man could possibly do in the way of sea-and-land adventure. He had run guns in the Spanish-American War, dug for gold at Klondike with the first batch of diggers, lost two fingers of his left hand in a dust-up on the Chile coast, and two ships in a manner considered dubious by the Board of Trade. But he never had lost a friend, nor an enemy. Unlike most of his class, he had nothing of the amphibian about him. Straight and well set up, he always managed to keep a clean, well-groomed appearance even in the teeth of adversity.
The Captain was seated to-day on a mooring bitt, watching the freighters loading with grain and the tugs and Italian whitehalls passing on the blue water of the bay. He was down on his luck, had been for the last month, and was in a condition of humour with the world that would have lent him to any job from piracy to the captaining of a hay barge.
Owners had fought shy of him ever since his last deep-sea adventure. Capable and sober enough, he had earned a reputation for recklessness that was a bar to employment as fatal as a reputation for drink. There were no more Klondikes to be exploited, perfect peace reigned on the west American seaboard from Vancouver to Wellington Island, piracy was out of date, and every hay barge had its captain.