Captain Caution (3 page)

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an old scow; and so shell close with us. When she does, we'll fire with the upward roll and chop her masts and rigging to pieces."

Noah Lord nodded; but Marvin, his lips pressed tight together, stared silently at the oncoming brig.

Captain Dorman moved close to him. "Dan'l," he said, "nearly every cent I've got in the world is in this barque and her cargo. Maybe I did wrong to risk so much. I won't say as to that. What's done's done. If I get this barque home safe, I'll be a rich man. If I don't, I Won't have a penny, and neither will Corunna. No pirate's going to stop me, not while I've got the say. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking what's going to happen if we don't chop her to pieces. Well, Dan'l, we got to, that's all. 'They cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses . . . he bringeth them unto their desired haven.'"

"These guns haven't been fired in a year," Marvin said slowly. "The men can't lay 'em or serve 'em properly."

Corunna came close to her father, a sturdy figure in her jacket and trousers of grey silk, and stared at Marvin with what seemed to be almost oriental placidity. "They're going to be fired now, Dan, even if I have to fire them myself."

Marvin seemed oblivious to her words. "Why," he said thoughtfully, "there is a wayl There is a way to lay 'em properly! I never thought of it beforel We could hang a pendulum a gangway pendulum if only we had the time."

Captain Dorman sighed, a quivering sigh. "If only we had the time, we wouldn't need a pendulum, and we wouldn't need guns, either. Now, Danl, Noah and I, we'll tend to the two after guns. Take Steven off the wheel and put him on the bow gun, and you lay the two 'midship guns yourself. Wait for me to fire, Dan'l; then cut her up in the tops."

He stepped to the break in the quarter-deck and shouted to the sweating men who crouched close under the bulwarks. "Take it slow when you get your orders to veer," he said. "We figure on putting a fright and the fear of God into this craft, provided she needs it. When she's had her lesson, we'll clap onto the sweeps, get before the wind again, and be homeward bound as quick as you can say fish."

Behind them the brig yawed. To her mastheads rose the British ensign and pennant; and a moment later those on the quarter-deck of the Olive Branch clearly saw the orange flame that stabbed from the muzzle of her starboard bow gun, to be engulfed in the ball of white smoke that followed. There was a high thm screaming above CAPTAIN CAUTION 293

the barque's weather beam a screaming that ended when the shot, striking the water ahead of them with a thumping splash, sent a silvery cone of water high in air.

"British?" Captain Dorman cried incredulously. "Either 'tain't so, or shell haul off when she sees we're willing to fights They ain't so eager for war as all thatl"

From the brig there came a hoarse shouting, indistinguishable above the small creakings of the barque. When the barque held on her course, another hail bellowed from the brig, following which her bow fell off again to larboard.

With that, the Olive Branch veered slowly to the westward. Less than a pistol shot away, the strange brig followed her example.

Marvin, tinkering with the elevation of his gun, saw Captain Dorman do the same saw him prod and prod again at the quoin beneath the breech.

The captain stepped back to the lanyard, and in the same moment he seemed to twist and break and crumble almost to fly to pieces with a thunderous roar. A burst of flame and smoke obscured the quarter-deck, and from the smoke came shouts and strangled cries. The captain's gun, Marvin saw, had burst.

As he ran toward the stern, he saw Corunna rise from her knees beside the heap of rags that had been her father. Behind her, Noah Lord moaned and clutched the bloody stump from which his lower leg hung by shreds and splinters.

She ran to the gun next to that which had burst, and it was there that Marvin caught her by the shoulders and held her. She strove to push him away, staring at him out of eyes as black as coals in her dead-white face. "The lanyard!" she whispered, in a voice that trembled and broke. "This gun hasn't been firedl"

"It's no good, Corunnal It's like breaking rock with your fists."

She struck him in the face and kicked at him. "Damn your" she cried. "Fire that gum Fire that gun! They've killed my father!"

He clutched the front of her grey silk jacket and dragged her, struggling and panting, to the mizzenmast. "Let go everything!" he shouted down the deck; and as he shouted, he slashed with a knife at the mizzen halyards and hauled down the American ensign that drooped from the mizzen truck.

She plucked at his arms and shoulders with fingers that scratched dike claws. "You coward You dirty damned coward!" she cried.

He caught her to him, pinning her arms to her sides, and looked at her quickly from head to foot. There were clots of blood on her paper-white face and her grey silk garments, but the blood, he knew,

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was not hers. Over her shoulder he saw that a boat had been lowered from the brig's after davits a boat with a British naval officer in her stern sheets, and on her thwarts a dozen armed men. From near at hand there rose a steady moaning.

"Go to your cabinl" Marvin said. "Clean yourself and put on decent clothes! I want you back on this deck when that boatload comes aboard!"

She pulled against his arms like bent whalebone. It seemed to Marvin that her lips drew back from her teeth. "Damn youl Damn youl Damn you! You sneaking, cowardly turn-tail rail"

He shook her as if she had been a folded staysail; shook her until her head sagged on her shoulders and her lips went slack. As suddenly as he had started, he stopped; her head fell back, and with the flat of his hand he struck her on the cheek. On her white face the prints of his fingers stood out with even greater whiteness.

"Noah Lord's bleeding to deathl" he told her fiercely. "Get below, you little fooll If you've got brains, use 'emI" He dragged her to the companionway and thrust her into it. She stumbled and fell; then got to her feet and vanished toward her cabin.

Marvin ran back to Noah Lord, cutting loose and knotting the lanyard of his knife as he ran. He slashed the blood-drenched trousers from Noah's shattered stump, slipped the lanyard around it, pushed a belaying pin beneath the cord and rapidly twisted it until the cord, cutting deep into the leg, made an end of the crimson stream that flowed into the scuppers.

"Steven!" he shouted, his head bent over his sorry task, "Steven! Bring water buckets and a sail and two meet"

When, in five minutes' time, an English lieutenant in a wrinkled blue coat, soiled white ducks and a battered hat came over the side, a limp roll of canvas lay on the newly wetted deck, and Noah Lord, greyer than the rag of sail that covered the spot where his left foot should have been, was stretched motionless and seemingly lifeless in the shadow of the weather bulwarks.

The lieutenant was tall and young, with an air of having grown weedily in a space too small for him. His head was thrust forward, like that of a melancholy bird; his thin legs, half covered by soiled and shrunken duck trousers, gave him the look of a crane, stalking suspiciously at the water's edge. Marvin, watching him come over the rail, hitching at his sword to keep it from between his knees, was in doubt whether the redness of his face was due to the searing rays of the tropic sun, or to anger: but beyond question he was angry

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so angry, indeed, that he forgot to demand immediately the name, destination and port of departure of the vessel he had boarded.

"By Ged," he said with no preamble whatever, "I should have blown you to pieces and left you to sink, and be demned to you for a lot of filthy Yankeest" His boarding party of eight men, in glazed hats, and shirts and trousers that might once have been white, dragged their cutlasses over the rail to cluster behind the lieutenant and peer at the wrecked carronade-slide and the blood-stained heap of canvas in the scuppers.

Marvin eyed the lieutenant calmly. "This is the American merchant barque Olive Branch. Her papers are in order. The only filth

you'll find aboard this craft is what you've brought with you. What's! your authority for this act of piracy?" i

"Piracy!" the lieutenant ejaculated. "Piracy! Why, you ~ He gestured largely toward the hilt of his sword and frowned horribly. "His Majesty's cruiser Beetle, eighteen guns, and by Ged, sir, you're in luck, all of you, not to be shark meat this very moment. Why, demn you, sir, why didn't you heave to? You might have cost us a maul You're no better than madmen, all of you, always playing the fool declaring war when you've nothing to declare it with, and now running from a cruiser that could knock you to driftwood with half a broadside!"

"Warl" Marvin cried. "Did you say war?"

"A fool and deaf to bootl" the lieutenant said savagely. "D'you think it was a Maying party your clown of a Madison asked us to last June? A conversuzione? My Gedl It's a pity all your carronades didn't explode, so to let a little light into your"

Corunna Dorman stepped quickly from the companionway and walked between Marvin and the lieutenant, her arms, tight at her sides hidden in the billowing folds of a thin black dress. She swayed a little, staring at the lieutenant out of eyes like black flints. Marvin, watching her apprehensively, saw that one of her hands, deep in a pocket of her gown, clutched something, he knew not what. Filled with a sudden fear, he grasped her wrist. "Easy, Corunnal" he said. "We've been at war since June. At wart We've been at war with

Englandl" ;

She turned a somber glance on him. When he released her, she lifted sad eyes toward the boarding party from the British brig. Her hands, obscured no longer, were clasped before her. "My father - " she said, and on the word her voice broke and failed. "My father - " She drooped toward the lieutenant, and with that he caught and held her.

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"Great regrets, meml"he said huskily. He cleared his throat and laughed in a way that he may have thought pleasant. "Didn't expect the pleasure ah, Gedl Frighfful pity, meml Not for worlds, oh? Do what we cam"

She freed herself from the lieutenant's arm. "We knew nothing of ill" she said. "We left Canton in May. What had we what made you fire on us what - "

The lieutenant laughed ingratiatingly. "You'll come aboard the Beetle, eh? Ged, mem, a pleasure! We're for the Azores with our prizes a slaver and a Frenchman, mem; and now you, thank Gedl"

He turned to Marvin. "Get your men into boats and over to the brig. You've got five minutes to collect your dunnage. Don't take too much or we'll pitch it overboard."

He turned back to Corunna. "Sorry sorry to cause you the in- convenience."

.,

IV

FORTY seamen and twenty scarecrow marines crowded close around the crew of the Olive Branch as they scrambled over the bulwarks and into the waist of the Beetle war brig, spurred on by the fractious voice and intemperate words of the Beetle's red-faced, thin-shanked commander, Lieutenant the Hon. Vivian Strope.

Lieutenant Strope himself followed hard on their heels, calling angrily for Mr. Benyon and Oddsly. Mr. Benyon, Marvin discovered, was a small child, attired in the white ducks, the glazed hat and the dirk belt of a midshipman. Marvin's discovery came about through being struck sharply in the small of the back and then brusquely elbowed to one side by Mr. Benyon in response to the lieutenant's call.

"Mr. Benyon," Lieutenant Strope said, "if any of you young gentlemen happen to know where there's a prayer book, bring it at once. There's an ah lady on the prize and we kent do a thing with her until we've fed the old man to the sharks in a manner to suit her! In this heat I couldn't remember a word of the burial service, by Ged, even if I knew the demned thingl"

The pale child saluted smartly and disappeared. His place was taken by the elderly, bald, disillusioned-looking sailing master in shrunken nankeen breeches and a gingham coat.

"Oddsly," the lieutenant said, "send ten men aboard the prize, with one of the young gentlemen in command I think Mr. Jowkes. See to it, Oddsly, while I'm getting this Yankee overboard. They tried to fight us, Oddsly, the demned ruffians. Demnedest nuisance of all, Oddsly, is that one of 'em blew his leg offl Demned well wish it had been his headl Can't put him with the prisoners, demn ill See to it, and search the prisoners; then clap 'em in the hold. And just bear in mind, will you, that we've got to close with the other two prizes before nightfall?"

Clutching a prayer book that Mr. Benyon had brought him, the lieutenant scrambled down into the boat once more; while a detail of marines, under the eye of the sailing master, searched Marvin and the crew of the Olive Branch, removing from them not only knives but even belt buckles, coins and every metal thing.

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"Smartly, nowI" Oddsly told them, when this was done. "You'll go under guard in the main hold and we'll stow your dunnage where it'll be safe. You'll be allowed on deck in sections, starting as soon as the hatch comes off in the morning. Settle your differences peaceably if you don't want a bullet in your gizzards. We're overburdened with prisoners, and the guards have orders to take no chances not with such ugly brutes as you Yankees. Step lively, nowl"

He stared arrogantly at the dejected group of seamen and jerked a thumb toward the hatchway. Marvin raised a protesting hand. "Leave us our dunnage," he said. "It's not right to clap these men under hatches half naked, as they are. They'll need clothes."

Oddsly's reply was contemptuous. "No they won't! Not here they won'tl This brig ain't Buckingham Palacel The state bedrooms were overlooked when she was launched, and you'll find your quarters somewhat restricted." He laughed appreciatively at his own facetiousness and swung himself down the ladderway at the main hatch.

Marvin, waiting for the men to follow the sailing master into the darkness below, cast a look astern. The Beetle's crew had mounted to the carronades and the hammock nettings to watch the Olive Branch, wallowing under the brig's lee, her slack sails a bright pink from the setting sun. Between the shoulders of the British sailors, Marvin could see small figures on the barque's quarter-deck, and as he watched, a grey lump fell from the larboard rail, half turned in mid-air, struck the water with a clumsy splash and vanished as if it had never been.