ir jolly shipmates.

The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunes
in those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and had
no mind to fritter away his time in the West Indies squeezed dry by
buccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a bold
stroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.

On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself--two sloops
off Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of India, and for
a time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain history. But
only for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of glory. It was
reported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul, laden with treasure
and bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy pilgrimage to Mecca
(they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the pirates, and after a
short resistance had been surrendered, with the damsel, her court, and
all the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and gold aboard. It was rumored
that the Great Mogul, raging at the insult offered to him through his
own flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe out of existence the few
English settlements scattered along the coast; whereat the honorable
East India Company was in a pretty state of fuss and feathers. Rumor,
growing with the telling, has it that Avary is going to marry the
Indian princess, willy-nilly, and will turn rajah, and eschew piracy as
indecent. As for the treasure itself, there was no end to the extent to
which it grew as it passed from mouth to mouth.

Cracking the nut of romance and exaggeration, we come to the kernel of
the story--that Avary did fall in with an Indian vessel laden with great
treasure (and possibly with the Mogul's daughter), which he captured,
and thereby gained a vast prize.

Having concluded that he had earned enough money by the trade he had
undertaken, he determined to retire and live decently for the rest of
his life upon what he already had. As a step toward this object, he set
about cheating his Madagascar partners out of their share of what had
been gained. He persuaded them to store all the treasure in his vessel,
it being the largest of the three; and so, having it safely in hand, he
altered the course of his ship one fine night, and when the morning
came the Madagascar sloops found themselves floating upon a wide ocean
without a farthing of the treasure for which they had fought so hard,
and for which they might whistle for all th