Tom Pagdin, Pirate

The Broadstream punt was grating gently on the pebbles at the South Side. Morning, gowned in silver grey, with trimmings of gold, still slept voluptuously on her divan in the Or...

It was very dark in the scrub, and the new moon had set. The flying foxes squealed in the wild fig trees, and Tom Pagdin, sitting under the tamarind heard a night owl complainin...

“Pirates don’t play larks on one another,” replied Tom. “If one pirate plays any larks on the other, the other pirates what the lark is played on challenge him to a duel.”

“Sometimes,” returned the other boy, “when they wuz ketched; but they mostly got killed after they’d had an all right rippin’ round an’ plunderin’ an’ buryin’ great piles of sov...

It was lonesome and dark. An impressive, significant stillness hung over all Nature. The night animals and birds, which ordinarily filled the bush with noises, seemed to have re...

At times either lad would start up and murmur in his sleep; but they were young and healthy, and it was not till the sun rose high overhead that they awoke.

“I didn’t,” replied Dave; “I thought about ’em this mornin’, an’ I been thinkin’ about ’em all day, but we took a oath not to talk about it, didn’t we?”

Across the Clarence, on the south side, winches rattled bales of wool and bags of potatoes and maize into the coastal steamer, which traded weekly between Sydney and the fertile...

“Knew you had something?” ejaculated the Sergeant. “You knew you had something! Why, hang it, man, do you think I am going to be dragged out of my bed after a thirty miles ride...

It is a long harkening from an island in the Clarence to the Faubourg St. Antoine of Paris. But the threads in the wool of Life run far and wide.

By the winds and currents, and mayhap, in nautical phrase, by the “act of God” also, the boat in which Jean Petit and his three convict companions had escaped from New Caledonia...

This figure held in one hand a jug. As the hand moved in response to the man’s words, a dark liquid, looking like blood, splashed from the jug. It was the blood of Holterman’s v...

Tom hurriedly led the way into a thick patch of jungle, and they crawled under a low clump of young stinging trees, where it would be almost impossible for a full-grown man to r...

George Chard had been transferred from the red desert of Gilgargery to the Rivers. The bank for which he laboured was one of the institutions of the country. Its clients lay chi...

George Chard slept on the bank premises. The keys of the bank safes were kept by the manager during the day, but when he left the office for his private residence they remained...

George Chard felt it bitterly hard that after his years of service he should earn not only the reproof of the head office, but that suspicion should in some way indefinitely be...

The look in Petit’s eyes when he perceived the boat was not calculated to reassure Tom and Dave. Dave’s face showed gruesomely pale in contrast with his red hair, and no one wou...

The first mate had armed himself with a paddle, and was standing behind his chief waving his clubbed oar above his head in a state of great excitement. He shouted defiance at Pe...

It was. If any disinterested chronicler of piratical life could have beheld Tom—that ragged buccaneer in miniature—holding the muzzle of Dan Creyton’s Winchester to the prisoner...

George Chard was somewhat taken back when a small boy, acting as emissary for the pirates, handed him an unclean scrawl next morning. It was written with blue pencil, on a sheet...