The Mucker

A Chicago street tough is shanghaied aboard a ship sent to kidnap an heiress, and the voyage takes them to a lost Japanese island and a headhunters' village — after which the real trouble is Chicago. Burroughs wrote it in 1914, between Tarzan and Mars, and gave the brute a conscience he never asked for; the second half, in which the mucker comes home, is better than the first.