The Pirate of Panama

Jack Sedgwick is twenty-five, Irish by descent, and stuck doing routine legal grubbing that helps a street railway corporation dodge damage claims. Waiting for his car one wet San Francisco morning, he watches a yellowed sheet of paper drift down at his feet, thrown from an upstairs window by a girl struggling with a dark-faced man. It is a treasure chart with one lower corner torn away, and it pulls him into Evelyn Wallace’s fight with her second cousin, Captain Boris Bothwell, lately cashiered from the British army. An English friend lends his steam yacht Argos, and they run south for Doubloon Spit on the coast of Panama through fog, mutiny, a night attack and shore leave in the Canal Zone. Raine wrote Westerns; here he carried the same first person swagger to sea.