out from the Isle of Haut a
gentle undertow flirts with their bewildered craft. Then little by
little they are gathered into a mighty current against which all
striving is in vain, and in the white foam among the iron cliffs their
ship is pounded into splinters. The quarry which she gathers in so
softly at first and so fiercely at last, however, is soon snatched away
from the siren shore. The ebb-tide bears every sign of wreckage far out
into the deeps of the Atlantic, and not a trace remains of the
ill-starred vessel or her crew. But one of the boats in the fishing
fleet never comes home, and from lonely huts on the coast reproachful
eyes are cast upon the "Island of the Dead."

On the long winter nights, when the "boys" gather about the fire in Old
Steele's General Stores at Hall's Harbor, their hard gray life becomes
bright for a spell. When a keg of hard cider is flowing freely the grim
fishermen forget their taciturnity, the ice is melted from their speech,
and the floodgates of their souls pour forth. But ever in the background
of their talk, unforgotten, like a haunting shadow, is the "Island of
the Dead." Of their weirdest and most blood-curdling yarns it is always
the center; and when at last, with uncertain steps, they leave the empty
keg and the dying fire to turn homeward through the drifting snow,
fearful and furtive glances are cast to where the island looms up like a
ghostly sentinel from the sea. Across its high promontory the Northern
Lights scintillate and blaze, and out of its moving brightness the
terrified fishermen behold the war-canoes of dead Indians freighted with
their redskin braves; the forms of _c[oe]ur de bois_ and desperate
Frenchmen swinging down the sky-line in a ghastly snake-dance; the
shapes and spars of ships long since forgotten from the "Missing List";
and always, most dread-inspiring of them all, the distress signals from
the sinking ship of Mogul Mackenzie and his pirate crew.

Captain Mogul Mackenzie was the last of the pirates to scourge the North
Atlantic seaboard. He came from that school of freebooters that was let
loose by the American Civil War. With a letter of marque from the
Confederate States, he sailed the seas to prey on Yankee shipping. He
and his fellow-privateers were so thorough in their work of destruction,
that the Mercantile Marine of the United States was ruined for a
generation to come. When the war was over the defeated South called off
her few remaining b