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“And you still love her?” asked the Amazon queen, excitedly.

“Aye, forever!”

“Noble youth. Here take the reward of thy fidelity, for know, Bromley Chitterlings, that I am Eliza Jane. Wearied with waiting, I embarked on a Peruvian guano ship–but it’s a long story, dear.”

“And altogether too thin,” said the Boy Avenger, fiercely, releasing himself from her encircling arms. “Eliza Jane’s age, a year ago, was only thirteen, and you are forty, if a day.”

“True,” she returned, sadly, “but I have suffered much, and time passes rapidly, and I’ve grown. You would scarcely believe that this is my own hair.”

“I know not,” he replied, in gloomy abstraction.

“Forgive my deceit,” she returned. “If you are affianced to another, let me at least be–a mother to you.”

The Pirate Prodigy started, and tears came to his eyes. The scene was affecting in the extreme. Several of the oldest seamen–men who had gone through scenes of suffering with tearless eyes and unblanched cheeks–now retired to the spirit-room to conceal their emotion. A few went into caucus in the forecastle, and returned with the request that the Amazonian queen should hereafter be known as the “Queen of the Pirates’ Isle.”

“Mother!” gasped the Pirate Prodigy.

“My son!” screamed the Amazonian queen.

They embraced. At the same moment a loud flop was heard on the quarter-deck. It was the forgotten mermaid, who, emerging from her state-room and ascending the companion-way at that moment, had fainted at the spectacle. The Pirate Prodigy rushed to her side with a bottle of smelling-salts.

She recovered slowly. “Permit me,” she said, rising with dignity, “to leave the ship. I am unaccustomed to such conduct.”

“Hear me–she is my mother!”

“She certainly is old enough to be,” replied the mermaid; “and to speak of that being her own hair!” she added with a scornful laugh, as she rearranged her own luxuriant tresses with characteristic grace, a comb, and a small hand-mirror.

“If I couldn’t afford any other clothes, I might wear a switch, too!” hissed the Amazonian queen. “I suppose you don’t dye it on account of the salt water. But perhaps you prefer green, dear?”

“A little salt water might improve your own complexion, love.”

“Fishwoman!” screamed the Amazonian queen.

“Bloomerite!” shrieked the mermaid.

In another instant they had seized each other.

“Mutiny! Overboard with them!” cried the Pirate Prodigy, rising to the occasion, and casting aside all human affection in the peril of the moment.

A plank was brought and two women placed upon it.

“After you, dear,” said the mermaid, significantly, to the Amazonian queen; “you’re the oldest.”

“Thank you!” said the Amazonian queen, stepping back. “Fish is always served first.”

Stung by the insult, with a wild scream of rage, the mermaid grappled her in her arms and leaped into the sea.

As the waters closed over them forever, the Pirate Prodigy sprang to his feet. “Up with the black flag, and bear away for New London,” he shouted in trumpet-like tones. “Ha, ha! Once more the Rover is free!”

Indeed it was too true. In that fatal moment he had again loosed himself from the trammels of human feeling, and was once more the Boy Avenger.

CHAPTER III

Again I must ask my young friends to mount my hippogriff and hie with me to the almost inaccessible heights of the Rocky Mountains. There, for years, a band of wild and untamable savages, known as the “Pigeon Feet,” had resisted the blankets and Bibles of civilization. For years the trails leading to their camp were marked by the bones of teamsters and broken wagons, and the trees were decked with the drying scalp locks of women and children. The boldest of military leaders hesitated to attack them in their fortresses, and prudently left the scalping knives, rifles, powder, and shot, provided by a paternal government for their welfare, lying on the ground a few miles from their encampment, with the request that they were not to be used until the military had safely retired. Hitherto, save an occasional incursion into the territory of the “Knock-knees,” a rival tribe, they had limited their depredations to the vicinity.