CHAPTER XVI
In Which Archie Armstrong Joins a Piratical Expedition and Sails Crested Seas to Cut Out the Schooner “Heavenly Home”
It was quite true that Archie Armstrong could speak French; it was just as true, as Bill o’ Burnt Bay observed, that he could jabber it like a native. There was no detecting a false accent. There was no hint of an awkward Anglo-Saxon tongue in his speech. There was no telling that he was not French born and Paris bred. Archie’s French nurse and cosmopolitan-English tutor had taken care of that. The boy had pattered French with the former since he had first begun to prattle at all.
And this was why Bill o’ Burnt Bay proposed a piratical expedition to the French islands of Miquelon which lie off the south coast of Newfoundland.
“Won’t ye go, b’y?” he pleaded.
Archie laughed until his sides ached.
“Come, now!” Bill urged; “there’s like t’ be 144 a bit of a shindy that Sir Archibald hisself would be glad t’ have a hand in.”
“’Tis sheer piracy!” Archie chuckled.
“’Tis nothin’ of the sort!” the indignant Skipper William protested. “’Tis but a poor man takin’ his own from thieves an’ robbers.”