Сердца трех / Hearts of Three

Here’s a thing to go fishing after that there’s real recreation in, full-size man’s recreation, and not the Persian palace recreation of an Adirondack[6 - Adirondack – горный хребет в штате Нью-Йорк.] camp, with ice and servants and electric push-buttons. Your father always was more than a mite proud of that old family pirate. He claimed to look like him, and you certainly look like your dad.’

�Sir Henry,’ Francis smiled, reaching for the card.

He looked up questioningly from the reading of the card.

�He’s a plausible cuss,’ Regan explained. �Claims �to have been born right down there on the Mosquito Coast, and to have got the tip from private papers in his family. Not that I believe a word of it. I haven’t time or interest to get started believing in stuff outside my own field.’

�Just the same, Sir Henry died practically a poor man,’ Francis asserted, the lines of the Morgan stubbornness knitting themselves for a flash on his brows.

�Good fishing,’ Regan girded good-humoredly.

�I’d like to meet this Alvarez Torres just the same,’ the young man responded.

�Fool’s gold,’ Regan continued. �Though I must admit that the cuss is most exasperatingly plausible. Why, if I were younger but oh, the devil, my work’s cut out for me here.

�Do you know where I can find him?’ Francis was asking the next moment, all unwittingly putting his neck into the net of tentacles that Destiny, in the visible incarnation of Thomas Regan, was casting out to snare him.

The next morning the meeting took place in Regan’s office. Señor Alvarez Torres startled and controlled himself at first sight of Francis’ face. This was not missed by Regan, who grinningly demanded:

�Looks like the old pirate himself, eh?’

�Yes, the resemblance is most striking,’ Torres lied, or half-lied, for he did recognize the resemblance to the portraits he had seen of Sir Henry Morgan; although at the same time under his eyelids he saw the vision of another and living man who, no less than Francis and Sir Henry, looked as much like both of them as either looked like the other.

Francis was youth that was not to be denied.