The Pirate Woman Part 25

PRECEDING CHAPTERS BRIEFLY RETOLD

On the death of Red Jabez, Dolores, "a glowing creature of beauty and pa.s.sion," took over her father's rule of the pirates of the Maroon coast of Jamaica.

With the help of her faithful slave, Milo, the Abyssinian giant, she crushed a rising insurrection among her riffraff subjects, whose cupidity had been played upon by Rufe, the Spaniard.

But Dolores was herself the victim of discontent. Loathing her outlaw subjects and the island, she determined to seize the first boat that pa.s.sed her way, and escape with her jewels and her gold.

When the pleasure yacht, Feu Follette, came that way, she sent Milo and her maid, Pascherette, to decoy Rupert Venner and his guests, Craik Tomlin and John Pea.r.s.e, to the island.

In the midst of her reception to her captive-guests, she beheld Rufe and a band of insurgent blacks and mulattoes attacking the crew of the schooner, while Sancho, whom she had despatched to care for the vessel while in the harbor, was joining in the attack.

Then she rushed over the cliff and into the water, and boarded the boat, followed by her loyal Milo.

After a long and b.l.o.o.d.y struggle, the woman's ruse of firing the ship with a keg of powder won the day, and Rufe and Sancho fled into the wilderness, while from the schooner's topmast flew the Sultana's own flag.

Demanding that the traitors, Rufe and Sancho, be rounded up, Dolores threw her three guests into chains, while she accused Pascherette of abetting the treason of Sancho.

Then Dolores turned to Venner with the offer of her love if he would sail away with her, having first despatched his friends. When the man, whose soul was racked with pa.s.sion for the beautiful black panther, recoiled from her condition, she left him in his chains.

Next she dealt with Sancho, whom Pascherette had lured back to the woman's mercy; and Sancho emerged from Dolores's presence a driveling imbecile.

When Milo beheld at this moment the fleeing form of Yellow Rufe, made distinguishable by vivid lightning, Dolores determined to complete her punishments.

The Spaniard was making good his escape when Milo took up the pursuit in the little sailboat. Dolores and her crew would follow, by the light of his flares, in the schooner.

With the untamed soul of a woman who had never known defeat, Dolores drove her crew and defied the wind and the waves, and the Feu Follette was liberated from the mud and swung to the gale as the cry rang out: "There's the flare--and she's burnin' steady!"