Deadly Shoals (38 page)

At last the climbers had reached the top of the cliff—and the nearer horseman raised his weapon and aimed. His movements were careful and precise as he selected his target. Wiki thought he heard a shot, though perhaps he imagined it, because of the distance. One of the escaping figures threw up his arms, and fell, tumbling down the precipice. The other seven men paused, then ran more frantically than ever. Seconds later they had disappeared, leaving their fallen comrade at the bottom of the cliff.

*   *   *

With the consummate skill of experienced whalemen, Stackpole's boat's crew put their boat down on the water while the
Osprey
was still under way. Scrambling down to deck at a headlong pace, Wiki had to take a running jump to get into the boat before they had pulled out of range. Captain Stackpole grinned tightly as Wiki landed in the stern sheets, and then barked out an order. The crew hauled mightily at their oars, and the boat scudded swiftly through the water.

The grounded schooner made an easy landmark, standing upright in the surf, dismasted but otherwise apparently entire. Wiki saw Captain Stackpole's head turn as he scrutinized the state of his property, but he said nothing, and the whaleboat surged on for the beach. With a long crunch of gravel, the boat grounded, sending a wash up the sand that surged and foamed almost as far as the fallen man.

Four oarsmen leaped out and held the whaleboat still, while Wiki and Stackpole jumped out into the surf. Looking up, Wiki caught another glimpse of the two horsemen at the edge of the precipice, still watching. Then he ran toward the sprawled body at the foot of the cliff.

The man was lying partly on his stomach and partly on one side, his head resting in the crook of an upturned arm. His bloodied shirt had torn, exposing part of his smooth back, and the pistol stuck in his belt. Wiki turned the body fully over onto its back. It flopped awkwardly, because of the jumble of broken bones inside the skin. The shielding arm fell away from the unmarked face just as the whaling master arrived.

Stackpole cried,
“That's Caleb Adams!”

Wiki straightened, brushing dirt off his palms as he looked down at the body of the man he had known as Benjamin Harden. Adams's eyes were shut, and there was sand in his reddish beard and the creases of his face. The front of his shirt was scarlet with blood that leaked from a shot hole in the upper left side of his chest, but Wiki reckoned it was the fall that had killed him.

He looked at Stackpole and said dryly, “No mistaken identity this time?”

“I'd know him anywhere, even with those whiskers.” Captain Stackpole's tone held utter certainty. Then he blinked. “So the other body—the body buried at the foot of the Gualichú tree…?”

“Harden's,” said Wiki. When he turned to look at the
Osprey,
the brigantine was dowsing her sails and dropping anchor. His father had lowered a boat, which was pulling for the schooner.

He looked back at Stackpole. “If we had taken him out of the grave, we would have seen the scars on his back from that flogging. Otherwise, it was natural to identify the remains as Adams's corpse, just the way Adams planned when he buried Harden that way. The body was wearing the right clothes, and the right medal hung round the neck. The skull was picked clean, so the face was gone.”

“Dear God,” said Stackpole, and shook his head in rueful disgust.

“Adams probably also planned on whoever blundered over the skull being too spooked to heave the corpse right out of the grave,” Wiki reassured him.

But Stackpole wasn't even listening. Instead he said, as if to himself, “So Caleb Adams murdered Harden, not the other way around.”

“And stole his Protection Paper,” Wiki agreed.

The whaling master abruptly paid attention. “So he could impersonate him?”

“Aye.” Wiki remembered how Adams had furtively checked the riverbank before he had accosted Ringgold; he remembered the confident flourish with which Harden's Protection Paper had been produced. His audacity had been astounding, but the masquerade had worked.

“Dear God,” said Stackpole again. Then he said to Wiki in an accusing kind of voice, “You're not even a bit surprised that this is Adams.”

Wiki shook his head. “It just didn't make sense that a revolutionary would recruit sealers for the rebel cause,” he said. “The instant I realized that Adams was a professional sealer, it was easy to work out what really happened.”

Stackpole's face wrinkled in the shadow of his hat while he thought this over. Then he shifted from boot to boot, and said, “So it was Adams who was hiding in the surgery while you and I was talking?”

Wiki shrugged. “It was his store,” he pointed out. The trader had slunk back to home territory like a dog to its den. “He probably moved in there right after the schooner was safely hidden.”

The whaling master squinted at him. “The two Gomes brothers would've had to help him to hide the schooner.”

“There's no reason why they wouldn't,” Wiki said. “While they could have guessed that he was stealing the schooner, they didn't know that he was a murderer, as well as a thief—and were used to obeying him, anyway. Their father had worked for him for at least two years, remember. Remember Adams's temper? He probably had them all intimidated.”

“So that's why the clerk kept quiet about his boss hiding in the surgery,” Stackpole guessed, and added grimly, “And got knifed for his trouble.”

They both turned as Captain Coffin's boat arrived in the surf. He'd left men on the wreck, Wiki saw, because there were still several figures clambering all over it. His father was smiling as he trudged toward them, and then his face suddenly went stiff with alarm, and he shouted, “Look out!”

Wiki whirled. Adams's eyes were open. Wiki saw the pistol aimed in one bloodied hand, and jumped for it. The pistol went off an instant after his bare foot slammed down on the upraised wrist, clamping it to the sand. The explosion was deafening, followed by a loud whine and the slam of a ricochet. When Wiki kicked the pistol away the clunk as it hit rock seemed faint by comparison.

Stackpole cried, “My God, he's still alive!”

Not for long, Wiki thought. Adams was staring at him with such ferocity that the nape of his neck crawled, but there was agony in the storekeeper's face as well, and his eyes were beginning to glaze.

Stackpole didn't seem to notice that death was so close. Instead, he shouted furiously at Adams, “Why did you steal the
Grim Reaper
from me? All you needed was to ask for a goddamn berth—I would've made you sealing master!”

Adams didn't speak. Instead he turned his head and spat. It obviously hurt, and the phlegm was thick with blood, but the contempt was unmistakable.

The whaling master took an abrupt step backward, looking shaken. He said to Wiki, “He stole my schooner, he cheated me—yet I dealt with him, I
trusted
him! And he killed the man he'd hired as sailing master! Why would he
do
that?”

Wiki was silent a moment, thinking that the more interesting question was why Harden had agreed to ship as sailing master in the first place. Was it because he had plans for the moment when the schooner, with the storekeeper on board, disappeared upriver?

He said to his father, “What's the schooner's condition like?”

Captain Coffin's expression became surprised at the unexpected question, but he said matter-of-factly, “She'll float off with the next high tide.”

Stackpole cried, “She's undamaged?”

“Tight as a bottle, and floats like one, too,” Captain Coffin assured him. “All she needs is new masts and rerigging. She didn't ground hard, because she's not heavy enough—there's hardly anything inside her, apart from ballast and salt.”

Wiki nodded. Not only did he remember the way the
Grim Reaper
had yawed every time the swivels had fired, but this was what he had expected.

“Not much in the way of provisions?” he checked.

“Hardly anything at all,” replied his father.

Wiki looked down at Adams. “You got back to the store to find that Harden had stolen all your provisions,” he stated. “He'd brought in a party with plenty of horses, and they had packed out your entire stock, and carried it to the caves.”

“For his goddamned revolution!”

They all flinched at the tortured fury in Adams's unexpected shout. His broken body spasmed with remembered rage. He was glaring at Wiki, apparently unaware of the thick gout of blood that bubbled out of his mouth.

Wiki continued, “You pursued them, but by the time you caught up with Harden all your goods had vanished, along with the horses and the rebels.”

Adams's head jerked in a grotesque affirmative. Then he swore in the same harsh, loud voice,
“But I made the bastard pay, by God!”

He had knifed him in a blind rage—just as he had later killed the clerk. Wiki said, “You found him alone at the
salinas
?”

Adams jerked again, but though he tried to speak, nothing but a dreadful croak came out. A second great glob of blood poured out of the twisted mouth, and then the madly staring eyes glazed over forever.

The silence was broken by a distant shout. Wiki roused himself, and took several backward steps to look up at the horsemen, who were still waiting and watching at the edge of the cliff.

The shout had been a question. Wiki called out an affirmative, and received a brief message in reply.

Captain Coffin said curiously, “Is that Bernantio and one of his men?”

“Gauchos don't carry guns. And didn't you hear him call out in Portuguese, not Spanish?”

Captain Coffin shook his head. “What did he ask?”

“He asked if Adams was dead.”

“Ah.” A nod, and then Captain Coffin asked, “What did he say then?”

“He said,
The storekeeper killed my father,
” Wiki translated. However, he had to repeat himself, because the words were drowned out by the distant thud of hooves as the Gomes brothers wheeled their steeds and galloped away.

Epilogue

February 3, 1839

When the cutter drew up to the tall side of the flagship
Vincennes,
seven men were being punished for the crime of attempted desertion. The awful sounds of a ritual flogging echoed down to the water.

The seven sealers had been easily hunted down—because Bernantio and his gauchos had materialized on the riverbank landing of the estuary, and gracefully offered their services to the officer in charge of the search party. Wiki, though delighted to become reaquainted with the
rastreadores,
had surveyed them rather cynically as he translated. Not only did he think that Bernantio had had a good idea of the whereabouts of the
Grim Reaper
's hiding place all along, but, remembering how the
rastreador
had shown no interest at all in the worn tracks that had led from the riverside path to the rebels' caves, he had a strong suspicion Bernantio had known who had stolen the provisions, too. However, life was hard on the pampas and the steppe, and Wiki held no grudge, even when Bernantio gave him a conspiratorial grin as he received the fee for turning in the runaways after they had been hunted down and lassoed.

Back on the
Vincennes,
the sealers had each been condemned to forty-eight lashes—though without the court-martial that should have preceded such an extreme punishment—and so the flogging was protracted. Forsythe motioned his men to still the boat with their oars, and they waited for the thuds and screams to finish. For Wiki, the interval seemed endless, and even Forsythe shifted about uneasily.

“They should've let 'em go, and bloody good riddance,” he muttered.

Wiki couldn't have agreed more. The seven sealers had been trouble from the start, and now they had a hurt to fuel their grievances. However, he said nothing. Forsythe's cuttersmen, all proper tarry sailors with a wealth of sea experience, were equally silent, studying the progress of the rerigging of the schooner, now afloat and swarming with Stackpole's men, instead of betraying their thoughts.

Then Forsythe, just like several times before, said smugly, “So it was because of things what I pointed out that you figured Harden was the murdered man.”

The southerner had listened with riveted attention to the story, asked many questions, and been both unsurprised and complacent when informed that his comments had provided vital clues.
“You reckon the storekeeper's killer missed the boat because he wanted to get hold of that bill of sale … But the bloody schooner was gone!… If he's got such a grand mission for revolution, why would he want to leave the Río Negro?”

Forsythe was coming to regard himself as quite a sleuth, which boded ill for the future, thought Wiki. However he smiled as he agreed, “That's right.”

“Next time there's a murder, you'll listen real bloody careful to what I say, I reckon.”

“Heaven forfend there is one,” Wiki prayed.

The last man had been flogged, and the decks above vibrated to the sounds of marching feet as the crew was dismissed. The cutter pulled over to the side of the ship, and an oarsman held a rope to steady the boat while Wiki scrambled onto the ladder. When he stepped over the gangway, a bucket of water was being tossed over the foot of the grating to wash away the blood.

To Wiki's surprise, his father was standing near the portico of the afterhouse, talking with Lawrence J. Smith. He had a folio of documents under his arm, so Wiki deduced that he had come on board to receive the last of the scientific reports before taking his departure for Philadephia. As soon as their eyes met, Captain Coffin abandoned the conversation, and walked toward him.

“Bloody awful way of doing things,” he declaimed before he even arrived, without bothering to lower his voice. “Men must be punished, but the punishment should come hot on the heels of the crime, and not with this ghastly ceremony.”