He was a good man. My mother was a good woman. They were happy together. Our home life was ideal; I look back upon it with only the happiest memories. I mention these facts to demonstrate that I was not influenced toward a life of lawlessness by education, training or environment; there was absolutely nothing in my early life that remotely suggested that I might become a pirate.

My great-great-great-grandfather was Jean Lafitte, the French corsair of the Gulf of Mexico; between him and me lay a long line of respectable mediocrity.

As a boy I fell desperately in love with a little girl named Daisy Juke; but my best friend loved her, too. We all went to school and to college together and as I felt that I didn't have a chance against Frank Adams I paired off with Shirley Huntington; we were almost engaged once. She was a peach of a girl.

During our senior year in college something happened in Glenora, the little town from which we all came, that worked a tremendous change in the lives of all of us. Our fathers were all in either poor or moderate circumstances. Even Billy Perry's father, who was the town banker, was far from being a Croesus. Frank's father was barely keeping one jump ahead of the sheriff by writing wills and drawing up deeds and bills of sale; once in a while he had a real case, but not often. Shirley's father was a real estate man, but that was slim pickings in those days. Old man Juke was a farmer and not a very good one; if he ever had a good year his profits all went to Billy Perry's father for interest; he tried raising a lot of things on his farm but could never raise the mortgage.

Then, bango! they struck oil on the Juke farm. That was the beginning of the great Glenora oil fields. In less than a year the town was full of millionaires. Frank Adams's father owned a farm that he'd had to take in lieu of money for a legal fee. As farm land it wasn't worth a whoop in Hades, but as oil land it made him rich. Huntington owned a subdivision where no one had ever bought a lot; he got rich. It seemed to me that everyone got rich except Dad; he kept right on half soling shoes.

I was studying law, but I had about two more years work after I graduated from college before I could hope to pass the bar examination. Having no money, I had to find a job and study nights. Frank Adams's father got me on the police force, and I became what is vulgarly known as a motorcycle cop. I was a minion of the law. Outside of the pay, I liked it chiefly because I could wear a good-looking uniform and pack a gun. Lots of men are that way.

Right after the oil strike Billy Perry's father died, and the bank passed into other hands. The old man's estate wasn't nearly as large as had been supposed, and it sure looked like the hole in the doughnut compared to the new standards of wealth that had descended upon Glenora in a shower of oil.

Billy knew a lot about banking, and the new people put him in as cashier. I guess they thought, too, that his name would mean a lot to them; and it did. His old man was respected by everyone. I guess they didn't know about Billy's maternal granddad.

Billy had gone nuts on aeronautics. He'd built himself a big hangar just outside town and was working on a dirigible that was going to make him the Ford of the air some day. He figured on making a little blimp that he could turn out under mass production at a price of $563 F.O.B. Glenora, or something like that.