Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/370

356 half-an-hour we stood alongside her; and the man who answered my call was Mike Leveston. When he saw me hailing him from the poop of a steamer, he turned green as the sea about him; and he yelled to me to stand off if I didn't want a bullet in me. The sight of him maddened me; I turned the machine-gun on his decks, and swept them clear as a grass field, but he lay flat on his face by the taffrail, and he bellowed for mercy like a woman. And he got it. I ran the steamer alongside him, smashing in his quarter, and when we had gripped, I got aboard. Then he grovelled at my feet, and, as I held my pistol at his head, he gabbled out the news that my son was dead—told me that he died at Panama, and he screamed for mercy like a hog at the block. But I cut his throat from ear to ear with my own knife, and I threw his body to the sharks limb by limb as you would throw a dead sheep to the dogs. God knows, I was mad then, as I have been often since, and am now. My poor son!"

"The man told you the truth, then?"

"Yes. When I had made chips of his ship I went back to Panama, and there got news of the boy. They had buried him at Porto Bello, and I stopped there long enough to make his grave decent, and then returned up the coast to New York. Coming back, the vermin with me took a fancy on the third day out, when