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Mermaids and spouting whales, compass roses and anchorscrowded the flesh, most of them sun-faded and ancient. But on the back of his right hand, where it must have hurt like blazes as it was being done, was a laughing skull above two crossed cutlasses, picked out in red. It looked more recent than the others.
    And the image was the same as the one that Jack Steele flew on his bloodred pirate flag.
    As I drew a measure of rum, I told Mrs. Cochran that this might be the very man who could answer at least some of our questions, and I begged her to let me hover in his corner as much as I could. She agreed, but warned, “He’s a rough-looking customer, Davy. Be ye careful, hear?”
    The old fellow drank the rum greedily and called for another. I brought him another measure, a double one, and when he had finished that, yet another. By then he was staring and snorting, and I felt bold enough to ask, “New in these waters, Captain?”
    He glared at me with a bleared brown eye. “Shut your gob, cabin boy!” And he snatched the latest round of rum from me as if he feared I would take it away from him.
    By and by he began to talk, in a muttering, grumbling undertone. He was not speaking to me, but tohimself, or perhaps to companions he only imagined to be sitting by his side. “Call ’emselves pirates. These don’t be pirates nowadays,” he said in a thick voice. “None of ’em is a patch on old Morgan. Bunch of lily-livered landlubbers, the lot of ’em!”
    You may be sure I kept the rum flowing, and I hung about to hear as much as I could of his rambling. The old man stared down at the glass in his hands and talked to it. After a time, as I took away one glass and set down a fresh one, I again spoke to him. “They say Jack Steele’s a man.”
    “Aye!” he snapped. “Steele! There’s a right gentleman o’ fortune for ye. Strong as a ox, mean as a snake, that ’un. Sailed with ’im once on a time, did I.”
    Since he had not snapped my head off, I said in a low voice, “I’d give a lot to run away and join him, I would. This is no life for a lad of spirit.”
    He glared at me again. “You! You wouldn’t last a day on Steele’s ship. Show me your hands, boy!”
    I held out my hands, which were callused from my climbing the rigging on the
Aurora.
He grunted. “Well, well, so ye can do a day’s work, at that. But ain’t no odds, boy. Join up with Steele, says ye? No chance, says I. And for why? Ye can’tfind old Steele, that’s why! Nobody can, as he don’t want anyone to find ’im.”
    “But you’ve sailed with him. Do you sail with him still?”
    “Not I, laddie buck,” the old fellow told me. “Nah, ol’ Gaff is too broke of arm an’ wind to climb the riggin’ or point a cannon. Dismissed me, did Jack, with a bag o’ gold an’ not so much as a thank ye. But that’s better nor what most o’ my shipmates got, a knife in the back an’ a berth in the ocean!”
    He maundered on, going back to his youth in the north of England, where he was a minister’s son, or so he claimed. Then he talked of taking prisoners at Barbados when Steele raided that island in 1682. Then he was off on some other thread of memory. I saw that he was going to pass out soon, so at half past nine I asked again where Jack Steele might be found.
    “Anywhere,” was his slurred response. “’E might be makin’ the Pirates’ Round and be off to Madagascar for the India trade. Or ’e might have sailed round the Horn an’ be makin’ ’is way to Panama.” He hiccupped. “If ’e’s off the Spanish Main, ’e’s got a snug harbor at Bloodhaven. Inthese waters, maybe San …” His head reeled loosely on his neck.
    “Santiago?” I asked, naming the principal port on the southeastern coast of Cuba.
    “Nah, nah, San Angel. Tight little town, easy t’ keep the Spaniards quiet, quiet, qui—” He pitched forward all of a sudden, his old head crashing onto the splintered table. In a flash, I was back in the kitchen,