"
Then he told them of the strange club of the place, called "The
Exiles," made up chiefly of "younger sons" of English and British-
Canadian families, every member possessed of a "past" more or less
disreputable; men who had left their country for their country's
good, and for their family's peace of mind--adventurers,
wanderers, soldiers of fortune, gentlemen-vagabonds, men of
hyphenated names and even noble birth, whose appellations were
avowedly aliases. He told them of his meeting with Billy Isham,
one of the club's directors, and of the happy-go-lucky, reckless,
unpractical character of the man; of their acquaintance, intimacy,
and subsequent partnership; of how the filibustering project was
started with Captain Jack's forty thousand, and the never-to-be-
forgotten interview in San Francisco with Senora Estrada, the
agent of the insurgents; of the incident of her calling-card--how
she tore it in two and gave one-half to Isham; of their
outfitting, and the broken sextant that was to cause their
ultimate discomfiture and disaster, and of the voyage to the
rendezvous on a Panama liner.
"Strike me!" continued Captain Jack, "you should have seen Billy
Isham on that Panama dough-dish; a passenger ship she was, and
Billy was the life of her from stem to stern-post. There was a
church pulpit aboard that they were taking down to Mazatlan for
some chapel or other, and this here pulpit was lashed on deck aft.
Well, Billy had been most kinds of a fool in his life, and among
others a play-actor; called himself Gaston Maundeville, and was
clean daft on his knowledge of Shakespeare and his own power of
interpretin' the hidden meanin' of the lines.
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