The Mole Pirate

Начало книги

The story of the Mole Pirate properly begins neither with Jack Hill, who built the Mole, nor with Durran, who stole it and used it to acquire more loot and do more damage than any other pirate ever managed in an equal length of time.

The records begin with a Mrs. Frank P. Hohenstaufer, who appears only once in the entire affair, and with Professor Eisenstein who, whatever his prominence in history, vanishes with equal promptness from this tale.

Really, the career of Durran as the Mole Pirate was simply one long battle between himself, the scientist-criminal, and Jack Hill, the inventor we remember as the man who made the earth-plane possible. But the story does begin with Mrs. Hohenstaufer, however briefly she remains in it.

She was, it seems, washing dinner dishes on the screened-in back porch of her home in Wausakkee, New York. It was three o'clock in the afternoon of June 16, 1935. The sun was hot. The radio in the dining room droned through a news bulletin, amid sundry cracklings of summer static:

Читать дальше →