Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/286

. Then, day by day, numerous horseshoe nails worked at the heavy iron padlock that kept her a prisoner beside the piles of the old bridge. Here she was examined, and talked over, and even belabored as to her chain-bound stern and pried at as to her ponderous bow. But still she clung tenaciously to her old mooring, while Chamboro's newly awakened dreams of piracy went unrealized.

But in what land, since boy drew breath, can piracy be kept down! It comes as implacably and mysteriously as the mumps or the measles. It 's an atavistic taint in the blood, a vagabondic diathesis—a regurgitation of savagery, innocently relieving our colic of civilization, and the sooner it breaks out and is over and done with the better!

And all of this brings me round to the pirates themselves. Yet who, indeed, would ever have suspected them! Who could ever have foretold that weak little Willie Steiner, who daily took a spoonful of emulsion for the jam that came in its wake, was to dig three good feet of the pirate cave in the creek bank, hidden away in the scrub willows, just above the Cemetery! And who would ever have dreamed