“Sho, now, that ain’t so. I never seen a better—now, I never seen—” Jean Lafitte’s reticence in friendship, again, was getting the better of him.
“So we said we’d call you Black Bart,” added L’Olonnois.
“That is a most excellent name,” said I after some thought. “At present, I can find no objection to it, except that I wear no beard at all and would have a red or brown one if I did; and that Black Bart was rather a pirate of the land than of the sea.”
“Was he?” queried L’Olonnois. “Wasn’t he a pirate, too, never?”
“There was a famous pirate chief known as Bluebeard or Blackbeard, and it may be, sometimes, they called him Black Bart.”
“Wasn’t he a awful desper’t sort of pirate?”
“He is said to have been.”
“It sounds like a awful desper’t name,” said Jimmy: “like as though he’d fill up his ship with captured maidens, an’ put all rivals to the sword.”
“Such, indeed, shipmate,” said I, “was his reputation.”
“Well,” concluded L’Olonnois, “we couldn’t think o’ any better name’n that, because we know that is just what you would do.”