“Yes, I have observed that your country is now experiencing one of those unprecedented waves of crime for which it is justly celebrated,” remarked Captain Kidd as he unsheathed a huge bowie knife and proceeded to cut off a man’s dose of particularly black eating tobacco. “For a nation that’s been so busy makin’ the world safe for democracy you don’t seem to be doing much to make it unsafe for the gunmen and stick-up artists. A few months ago everybody was talkin’ about the ‘uplift.’ And now they’re trying to dodge the hold-ups. I was down below the other night. Had a date at a Philadelphia seance. And the moment I appeared the whole audience started bombarding me with questions about the location of my buried treasure. I didn’t tell ’em, of course, but I did give ’em some good advice for the present emergency. I told ’em that any man who carried more than carfare and lunch money in his pockets these days, and nights, was a fool. And I also suggested that anybody who buried his treasure in a sand bank instead of a savings bank or a safe deposit vault was entitled to admission to the nearest home for the feeble-minded without an entrance examination.
“I went out for a walk down Chestnut Street and in going four blocks had my pocket picked three times. The fellow who was supposed to be looking after that other block must have been off his beat. I got scared and wanted to hustle back up here, but to oblige the medium I stayed over until the next day. I took another walk, down Market street this time, and found it was a tag day. There were female hold-up artists at every corner. I turned over what the pick-pockets had missed the night before and made my escape. Terra firma is no place these days for a reformed pirate. It reminds him too painfully of the many good bets he overlooked.
“Sometimes, especially after I’ve been readin’ of the activities of your cabaret waiters, bootleggers and Pullman porters, I can’t help thinkin’ that history has been too hard on us plain, unornamental pirates. We had to pick up a livin’ best we could. We didn’t have our tools and equipment provided for us. We had to furnish our own cutlasses and pistols, while your modern waiters and porters have their trays and whisk-brooms anyhow supplied free of charge. There wasn’t an unwritten law, either, that anybody who didn’t cough up freely was a piker, and we had the greatest difficulty sometimes in getting a victim to produce. Folks found all sorts of mean little schemes for hiding away their valuables. That’s why we had to invent the ingenious device known as ‘walking the plank’ to make ’em give till it hurt. But nowadays it’s amazing to me to see the way the people hand over without even a pistol clapped at their heads. They’re meek as lambs. The pirate business would have been a lot less wearing on the nerves if the public had co-operated then the way it does now.
“Holding up a shipload of passengers used to be a complicated, annoying business. First, we’d run up the black flag with the skull and crossbones on it. Then we’d fire a round shot across the vessel’s bows to bring her to. We’d paint our faces sometimes to make ourselves look as horrible as possible, and taking a pistol in each hand and a cutlass in our teeth, board the ship and line up the passengers and crew in a row. By the time we’d gone through their pockets and searched the cabin and lugged out the strong box we’d put in an eight-hour day, straight time. Hard, exhausting work, and all because people hadn’t been properly trained in those days to hand over quickly and gracefully so that we could get on to the next job.
“If I were flying the Jolly Roger today on my old pirate ship, with my crew of hard-boiled sinners around me, possibly we’d find merchant and passenger ships pestering us to come and take their money away from them. I’d be taking a quiet snooze in my cabin, maybe, when the bosn’s mate would wake me up and say: ‘Cap’n, a vessel on the starboard bow has just signalled for us to stand by and it will send over a boatload of treasure.’ And we’d have to get a cash register and a card index of customers and a press agent, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight, as Jesse James suggests, and an ad writer to put a piece in saying: ‘Why go elsewhere to be robbed? Come to old reliable Captain Kidd & Co., Inc., and be immediately relieved.’ But at that I don’t suppose with my old-fashioned ideas I’d be able to compete with your up-to-date hold-up games.
“I guess the best plan, if I were ever able to resume business, would be to start a ‘drive’ or hold a tag day. From the way the public gives up, I don’t know but a drive for a $100,000 fund to establish a home for worn-out pirates would bring in a lot of coin. First thing I’d get up a dinner for my executive committee of one hundred. You can’t start anything without a lot of eating these days. Then we’d have a daily luncheon to receive reports from the captains of the various teams, winding up with a mass meeting where we’d take up a collection and announce the result of the house-to-house canvass. Still, a general tag day might bring in more money. I’d have pretty girls at all the street corners to pin a miniature artificial lemon on every contributor to the Captain Kidd Refuge for Reformed Robbers. What do you think?”
“There are many excellent causes, Captain, that have adopted these devices to raise money and I hope you don’t intend to reflect upon them.”
“Oh, not at all, not at all. But don’t you think yourself that the idea has been worked a little hard? It’s all right for the public to give to the things it knows about, but I was thinking it was becoming such an easy mark I might as well have my share. What I object to is being set down in history as the world’s champion pirate and all around bad man, when the fact is I was naturally the most peaceable individual you ever met. The trouble is, I was born about a hundred years too soon. If I were in business today I wouldn’t be a pirate; I’d be a head waiter in a New York hotel, with a foreign accent but able to understand all languages. Money talks. Probably I’d have served an apprenticeship at the place where they check your hat and coat.
“If I wasn’t a head waiter I’d be a steward on an ocean ship. Perhaps I’d feel more at home on the sea anyway. I was talking to my old friend, Jesse James, the other day and he said the difference between him and the modern professional tip extractor was that he never robbed the same man twice. But I suppose his successors believe that anybody who is worth doing at all is worth doing well. One of these days the American people will probably adopt a new Declaration of Independence against foreign waiters and resolve to give the enemy no quarter—and no half dollar either. They’ll change the old naval hero’s slogan to ‘Don’t give up the tip.’ ‘Millions for good meals, but not one cent for tribute.’ ‘All things come to him who waits.’ Well, I’m sorry for the waiter if he ever gets all that’s coming to him. Ta, ta! young man.”
And as he hobbled off to splice the main brace I could hear the old fellow muttering to himself: “And they used to call me a pirate!”