Chapter 6

It was now about seven months after the sale of FFF was finalized, and we were in the doldrums. We had done everything interesting that we could think of doing in and around St. Louis, and we were looking for something else that might be interesting. We were at one of those ungodly boring afternoon tea and booze parties that so many of the rich use to kill time, and the subject of travel came up.

Some woman commented that she had heard about an interesting trip to the Yucatan of Mexico. In fact, she was so intrigued by what she had heard that she was planning to book a trip from New Orleans via a cruise ship to the Yucatan. A lot of people spoke up at that point with pros and cons of such a trip. Most of the cons centered around the pirate situation.

For some reason nobody could fathom, there had been an increase in piracy in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Ah-ha, the mention of pirates had caught our ear. The word was that many cruise ships were being hit by pirates down there, and most people were avoiding the area for that very reason.

We were not really interested in going on a cruise because we expected to be bored to death; however, a hunt for pirates sounded like great sport. We were both sure enough of ourselves with guns not to be afraid of the run of the mill pirate based on our experience with the river pirates that one time. We talked about leasing or buying a yacht and outfitting it with whatever we might need to go after pirates.

We could hire a captain and a crew who thought like we did and were interested in a share of pirate loot. The only change I wanted to make in my personal weapons was to switch to Starr DA revolvers in .44 caliber. My Schofield .45s were a great pistol, but I wanted to switch to double-action and six cartridges in each cylinder instead of the five in the Schofield. Actually, I had once seen a Le Matt, and its nine shots drew me like an ant to sugar. The problem was that it was not double-action, and I wanted that more than I wanted the capability of nine shots.

The more we talked about pirate hunting, the more the idea grew on us. Sure, we were crazy to stick our necks out like that, but that was what boredom was doing to us. Okay, we could give it a try, and we could always come home if it did not turn out to be as much fun as we hoped. At least, we could spend the winter on the Gulf and possibly the Caribbean and escape some of the cold weather.

A friend of a friend was also intrigued by our idea for adventure, but he was not so adventurous as to join us. However, he did have a number of contacts in the Gulf ports from Mobile to Beaumont. He gave us a list of potential contacts and a letter of introduction. Now we were really excited. We spent three weeks getting everything ready before we set out for New Orleans. That was to be the place where we started our search for a boat and a crew of like-minded people.

During that three weeks while Nina was doing the mundane details that had to be done, I was searching every gunshop in St. Louis looking for Starr DAs in .44 caliber. I did find several in .36 caliber, but I was going to take nothing less than the .44 caliber. Oh, well, at every opportunity, I was going to keep up my search for what I considered the ideal pistol for our coming adventure.

I was idly chatting with one gunshop owner over what I really wanted in a pistol. I mentioned the Le Matt and the fact that it had a cylinder with nine chambers. He suggested that I have a pistol custom made to my specifications, though such a pistol would be very expensive. Well “very expensive” was no problem for me. I was willing to pay as much as $250 to get the kind of gun I was looking for.

I really liked the top-break action of the Smith & Wesson pistols and the clever ejection system that would spit out only the used cartridge cases. The gunshop owner suggested that what I really needed to do was to have a Scofield revolver modified to be a double-action revolver with a nine-chamber cylinder. He commented that he thought that would be a lot cheaper than reworking a Le Matt or starting from scratch to build a pistol.

He sent me to a gunsmith who was renowned among those in the know as a man who could make practically anything in the way of guns if he was interested in the challenge. I told him what I was looking for, and included the notion that it would be nice to use the Starr or Remington system for blocking the hammer so that every chamber could be loaded. The more we talked, the more interested the gun smith became, and it was not much longer that he was begging me to let him build a gun for me that fit all of my specifications.

I agreed to go along with the project, but only if he agreed to make four of them, two for me and two for Nina. I also said that there was a possibility that I would want more of them, but I could not say for sure at this time. By the way, I was already calling this pistol the “Schloss,” after the gun smith.

The problem was that I would not see the product of this project for several months, and I expected to be in the far South by then. Oh, well, I would just have to wait until we returned to St. Louis in the spring. Nina was as excited as I was when I told her of my order with the gun smith. We had enough money that the $1,000 I agreed to pay for the four guns was negligible, so that was not a problem. The problem was having to wait so long for the guns.

We took a riverboat downstream on the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. Nina had five trunks of clothes for the trip, but I expected her to discard most of them when we put to sea. I had only one trunk of clothes, and I also had our rifles and shotguns packed in that trunk.

It was a boring trip to New Orleans—we did not see any sign of river pirates. There were now so few riverboats hauling passengers that the pickings were just too slim for river pirates. The river was full of boats going in both directions, but most of them were hauling freight. They could still beat the cost of moving freight by rail if the river was where you wanted it to be.

Undoubtedly, upon our return to St. Louis, we would be traveling by Pullman. That was just faster and more convenient. Our reason for taking a riverboat was to start getting the feel of being on a boat for a long period of time. If we could not stand the time on the riverboat, then we would have to cancel our hunting expedition.

When we got to New Orleans, we found that we had acclimated to live on the boat and were not nearly so bored as we had feared that we would be. We moved into a recommended hotel away from the French Quarter and reasonably close to the waterfront. We took a day to make sure that we were back to comfortably being on dry land before we started looking for our contacts and a suitable boat.

The more I thought about this, the more it occurred to me that we did not know enough about boats to be able to make a reasoned choice. What we needed was our ship’s captain to lead us to the boat that we should have. Therefore, when we met our contact for the first time and explained what we had in mind, he was primed to help us find the captain we wanted. Of course, everybody we talked to thought that we were crazy, and probably we were, but we were hooked by the prospect of this adventure, so we were not going to give up until forced to do so.

The contact, Mr. Jules Pontifort, said that he would send out feelers to try to find us a captain who would go along with what we wanted to do. He noted that we probably needed someone who had had a very bad experience with pirates and hated them very deeply.

Much to the surprise of everybody, Pontifort came up with a possible captain for us in only four days. We were called to his office one morning and introduced to Capt. Amos Scruggs. Capt. Scruggs had just come in on a tramp cargo ship from the middle of the Gulf. Scruggs had been left to die in a lifeboat without oars, food, or water. This was an act of pure meanness by a pirate crew that had run down his boat and killed the entire crew, except for Scruggs.