To put the matter briefly and plainly, Captain Kidd was smarting under the indignity which the club had recently put upon him.

He had been unanimously blackballed, even his proposer and seconder, who had been browbeaten into nominating him for membership, voting against him.
"I may be a pirate," he cried, when he heard what the club had done, "but I have feelings, and the Associated Shades will repent their action.

The time will come when they'll find that I have their club-house, and they have--its debts." It was for this purpose that the great terror of the seas had come upon this, the first favorable opportunity.

Kidd knew that the house-boat was unguarded; his spies had told him that the members had every one gone to the fight, and he resolved that the time had come to act.

He did not know that the Fates had helped to make his vengeance all the more terrible and withering by putting the most attractive and fashionable ladies of the Stygian country likewise in his power; but so it was, and they, poor souls, while this fiend, relentless and cruel, was slowly approaching, sang on and danced on in blissful unconsciousness of their peril.
In less than five minutes from the time when his sinister-craft rounded the bend Kidd and his crew had boarded the house-boat, cut her loose from her moorings, and in ten minutes she had sailed away into the great unknown, and with her went some of the most precious gems in the social diadem of Hades.
The rest of my story is soon told.