Captain Adam

by Chidsey, Donald Barr, 1902-1981

  Carrying her, trying to hold her still, while she beat his breast and reached with fingernails for his face, he ran through the cheering crowd. He was given plenty of advice, but nobody followed him.

  Clear, he ran among empty tents and huts. He passed Tarpaulin Hall. He put Maisie down.

  She slapped his face, first right, then left. He shook his head impatiently.

  "No, no! Don't waste time! We've got to—"

  "Before all those niffiansl"

  "Why'd ye come then? I told you to—"

  "You're one of them! You're the worst one, yourself!"

  She slapped him again.

  "Tarnation," muttered Adam. "We could go on like this all night."

  He swept her up into his arms again. He ran to the beach.

  It was dark. He had picked the place well. He raced around the end of the island's only warehouse, a ramshackle structure one end of which

  was right at the edge of the sea, and found the Goodwill's tender there, as planned. Resolved Forbes also was there—but he wasn't alone. "You are leaving so soon, Captain:'" asked Everard van Bramm.

  (^ O They can be mighty odd, the thoughts you have in an instant

  ^(3 of peril. They can shame you with their incongruity, their triviality.

  Adam Long's first thought as he faced van Bramm, who was backed by Cark, each of them with a pistol in his fist, was: Well, I'm glad he's got a shirt on at last.

  He heard Maisie gasp. Until now—as had been the case with Adam until a few hours ago—she had but glimpsed Everard van Bramm from a distance. To be in the very presence of the monster was a shock.

  Adam made a low mocking bow. A bold approach, he'd learned, was the best for van Bramm. Also, he could use time to study the situation.

  "Surely you wouldn't seek to detain me, Captain van Bramm. Haven't I always been told that a gentleman never imposes his company upon another gentleman? If either of us could be called that."

  The pistol van Bramm held was a large brass one. It was cocked, and there was powder in the priming pan.

  The man went on smiling. But then, he always smiled. The Spaniards, who knew him too well, called him El Sonriso, The Smiler.

  "Detain you. Captain?" His voice made you think of something scaly slithering across the stones of a cellar floor. "Certainly not! Indeed, sir, I am delighted to have you go."

  Just then, as though at a signal, it began to rain. Here was no torrential tropical downpour, but a warm clean easygoing rain that fell with a tinkly sound on the bay and chuffed apologetically into the sand at their feet, kicking up small silvery spears. There was a land breeze, just right for the schooner.

  Van Bramm was wearing a broad-brimmed yellow hunting beaver. He pulled the pistol in close to his body, to protect the powder under that brim as roof. His hand was utterly steady.

  Cark, slightly behind him, had turned a bit so as to face Resolved Forbes, who stood right where he had been surprised by these two, ankle-deep in water, the painter of the Moses in his hands. Cark was not so sure of himself.

  It was dark. There was nobody else in sight. There was no sound from the settlement save the distant rumble-bumble of laughter and shouting

  at the mock trial, none from the bay excepting the thin discouraged squeal of timbers as this vessel or that lackadaisically rocked. The rain prattled, pert, gay.

  "There is only one thing I feel I should object to," said van Bramm.

  Adam flicked a glance at Resolved Forbes. The mate, motionless, was not looking into Cark's face but at Cark's pistol, staring not as though fascinated but as though he aspired to fascinate it. The pistol wobbled. Resolved Forbes, seemingly so relaxed, in truth, Adam knew, was taut as a bowstring. Adam was glad that it was Forbes here. There wasn't any man he'd rather have on his side in a fight.

  "Didn't you tell me this afternoon, sir, that I could leave with all my men who cared to go with me?"

  "I did. Captain. I did indeed."

  "Thank you." They were both being excessively polite. "Mister Forbes, will you haul that tender up a bit further, so that milady won't have to get her feet in the water?"

  He turned, and gallantly offered his hand to Maisie. She wetted her lips, gave an absent nod, put a hand into his; but all the while she was looking at van Bramm.

  They started for the boat.

  "I said your vessel and all your men," said Everard van Bramm.

  Adam stopped. Maisie stopped. Resolved Forbes was still staring at the pistol Cark held.

  What van Bramm said next was so appallingly brutal that for a moment they found it hard to credit their ears. Yet the man was serious.

  "I must be paid something. Leave the lady. I'll take her."

  Had this been accompanied by a leer, had van Bramm moved toward Maisie or even extended a hand in that direction, doubtless Adam would have been unable to control himself. As it was, Adam did very well indeed. He even managed to produce a smile.

  "Indeed, Captain, you do me a great favor in taking her oft my hands. And may I wish you—happy nights?"

  He took a step toward van Bramm, who tensed. Adam reached for his hat, like van Bramm's a broad-brimmed one. He swept it oft' his head. Most elaborately he made a leg, bowing low.

  The hat swished through the air a good eighteen inches from the muzzle of the pistol, but so great was its force that its wind blew the powder clear out of the priming pan.

  Van Bramm cursed, stepping back.

  From the bottom of his bow Adam jumped.

  Van Bramm pulled the trigger. He got a spark but there was no flash. He started to slam the side of the pistol with his left hand, meaning to

  jar powder up through the touch-hole; but by that time Adam was upon him.

  The other pistol, the one Cark held, exploded stunningly. It was like a cannon shot. The jumble of sound from the marketplace instantly ceased.

  Cark had been wild, seemingly. Adam never did learn where that ball went—nobody ever did—but he knew that Resolved Forbes wasn't hit, for though he couldn't spare a glance he could hear the scuffle of a struggle back there.

  He punched the pistol and the hand that held it, not van Bramm's face. He treated the pistol like a living thing, to which the pirate himself was no more than an accessory. Van Bramm kept stepping backward, swinging the gun away from Adam's rush. He stumbled. Adam's fist caught his right wrist, stinging it. Van Bramm dropped the pistol.

  The pirate then didn't punch, didn't back up any further. He simply threw both arms around Adam, fighting as a bear would. He was immense and very strong. Adam got a short hard left punch into the belly, but the man didn't even grunt. Then the arms tightened, and Adam could no longer move. From the first touch of that embrace he became light-headed. Soon the blood thundered and banged in his temples, and his eyeballs, furiously hot, seemed to be striving to spring out of his head. Small warm greasy blobs of sweat meandered down his face, down his neck, tickling him.

  Yes, like drowning. Soon he would have to let go the breath he held. And he'd never get another.

  It was no gallant way to die, he thought—just standing there on a dark beach, not being able to move, not making a sound, even a moan, simply being hugged to death.

  Then van Bramm slipped and fell. Adam had enough strength left to push against him, so that he fell backward, Adam being on top.

  There was another great stroke of luck—the pirate's head hit a rock. The steely arms were loosened a moment—not much, not enough to permit Adam Long to get his fists free, but he was at least able to hunch one shoulder up smartly, catching van Bramm under the chin, slamming the man's head back against that rock again and again. He grunted noisily each time he hoisted that shoulder. Somehow it gave him relief to grunt.

  Everard van Bramm never made a sound.

  The arms, slippery with sweat, flopped off right and left like a couple of seals from a slimy rock. Adam wriggled away, got to his knees, to his feet, swaying. He was afraid of a trick, so he stepped away. But van Bramm was not playing
'possum. A moment later, shaking his head to

  clear it, Adam rushed at him again and kicked him three times in the jaw. The head was slammed back against the rock each time. Van Bramm did not stir.

  Not until then did Adam look around.

  All this had happened fast. Through the echoes of the pistol shot, and through the tinny clatter of rain, he could hear the shouts of men who were running down from the marketplace.

  He sprang to Maisie's side. She stood as though she'd never moved, too startled even to be frightened. While he bustled her into the boat and shoved her toward the sternsheets, she moved like a sleepwalker. He clambered in after her.

  Resolved Forbes rose from a dark figure on the beach, and he was wiping his knife on his breeches.

  "Kill him?" Adam asked.

  Forbes shrugged.

  "Might have."

  He seized one pair of oars. Adam had the others, the stern oars. They pushed out.

  Suddenly the beach was black with men. There was a splatter of musketry, but the distance was too great. Boats were put out, meaning pursuit, but they didn't get far. There were still oars in those boats, but the thole pins had all been removed: the Goodwill's mate, on order of the distrustful skipper, had seen to this.

  "And right—right before all those—beasts!" Maisie whispered.

  She started to weep.

  Some of those on the beach were running out to the point, to give the alarm at the fort.

  Goodwill to Men was in fact under way when they reached her. Jeth Gardner had sacrificed both anchors, but the vessel was moving.

  They were through the pass before the guns of the fort finally spoke.

  The first three shots were wild, each one worse than the previous one. Evidently they couldn't see the splashes from up there in the fort.

  The fourth slished the air just forward of the bowsprit, uncomfortably close.

  The fifth actually hit. It screeched along the deck amidships, virtually caroming off that deck, showering splinters everywhere. It missed by a few feet the clutter of barrels the pirates had loaded aboard the schooner and hadn't got around to stowing below. It tore a hole in the larboard gunwale and plopped into the sea.

  "If I was one of them Roman Catholics, I'd be crossing myself licketty-split right now," said Jeth Gardner to Captain Long. "That was hot shot. Tell by the smell. They know what's in them barrels."

  "What is?"

  "Gunpowder."

  Half an hour later they had the sea to themselves, and the rain had ceased, and the moon began to ooze over the horizon.

  Only a fevu minutes earlier, when it got between his legs and all but threw him flat, Adam had suddenly remembered that he was wearing a sword. It made him feel a fool, having plumb forgotten it in the first fracas he'd been in since strapping it on.

  There was a subdued sobbing in the captain's cabin below.

  "You all right, Jeth?"

  "Sure I'm all right. You could cut the other leg off me and I'd still be all right."

  "I believe you would, Jeth. I truly do. Well, take the deck." He nodded toward the hatch cover. "Reckon I'm needed down there."

  PART FIVE

  The Shortest Way Home

  (^ /^ The sea sloo-ooshing along the side on its way toward the j^ tZ^ hurly-burly of the wake, the doleful clunk of blocks on deck, the squeal of lines and squeak of timbers—these noises, to which Adam awoke, may not be dear to a sailor's heart, since he takes them for granted; but their absence can make him mighty uneasy. Adam heard them before he opened his eyes to gaze with gratification at the sun's rays reflected from off the sea, shimmering and wavering above him.

  He rolled his head. In the larboard bunk, so close that he could have reached out and touched her, lay Lady Maisie. She had an air of sweet childishness, the girl he'd first known. Her mouth was a little open, she was sleeping well. This was natural. They'd had considerable of a quarrel here last night, but it had been followed by an unforgettable making-up.

  Adam watched her for some minutes, thinking how lovely she was, swearing that he would always protect her.

  He remembered Deborah Selden, as sometimes he did when he lay like this, and he was glad, again, that'd he'd eluded her ruse. He supposed that she was getting ready to have her baby by now, and he wondered whether she had been able to trick or bribe some other man into playing the part of a father. Well, no matter. Adam had almost heard the clack of the cage door closing on him that night. Just when he'd been freed to grab his place in the world, too.

  As though to remind him of this, his freedom suit, hanging from a peg above his head, swung with a movement of the schooner and brushed his face. Maybe it wasn't as easy as all that—just getting handed a statement that your apprenticeship had expired and stepping into a linsey-woolsey suit? Maybe there was a heap more to it? He was not so sure that he was free, even now.

  Maisie moaned a bit, stretching. The movement brought out the curve of her hips under the sheet, and Adam, swiftly stirred, for a moment was almost in pain. He reached out. But tenderness overtook him, and he fished for and found his Book instead.

  It fell open to the Song of Solomon; but clearly that wouldn't do, if 136

  Maisie was to be permitted to slumber; and he leafed back a bit, coming to rest at last, as he so often did, on Job. He didn't know how many times he'd read Job. Sometimes he read it, as you should read any part of the Book, with devout attention, going back over certain parts that he wasn't immediately sure of, pronouncing each word in his mind, pondering the meaning of that whole story. At other times he would read it rather with his ears than with his eyes, caring nothing for pronunciation and not at all concerned with what God was getting at, but just plain enjoying himself, the way he might have enjoyed himself if he'd leaned back against something and listened to lovely music.

  When he put the Book down, then, he felt better; but still he deemed it prudent not to venture another peek at Maisie. He picked up his ledger.

  It was Adam's habit not to enter anything in the ledger until he had rehearsed it in his mind. The figures he finally set down were no more than a recording. The calculations themselves, by steps and in the whole, were mental. Adam was not quick at figures but he was thorough.

  So that now he did not touch a quill, only stared at the pages, while his mind weighed possible insertions and amendments.

  On the whole, he was proud of the report so far. He recapitulated. He'd lost a couple of jibs, the longboat, the foremast boom, a great deal of molasses.

  The widow of Eliphalet Mellish would be paid his wages up to the day he died, of course. Adam already had this money put aside, in a place the pirates had not found. Seth Selden, carried as a stowaway, never rated wages, and Peterson and Waters had quit all claim on theirs. The new man, Willis Beach, would not have to be paid until he was officially signed on—if he was. To be sure, this left the Goodwill seriously undermanned, and Adam would have to pick up some hands. But even allowing for this, he was keeping the payroll down first-rate.

  Thanks in part to the weather, in part to his decision not to run all the way down to the Leewards, but chiefly to good stowage, very few barrels of eels had gone bad. And he had sold the rest at a record price.

  Only a quarter of the one hundred pounds he had taken as passage money for Maisie had been spent for Seth Selden's share of the schooner, a notable bargain.

  He'd had another purely personal windfall—those twenty-nine hogsheads of gunpowder the pirates had piled on his deck. Gunpowder was something you could always sell. This rated as a fortune of the sea, something like an act of God. It was, legally, all Adam's. It had been put there by pirates, who enjoyed no standing, being outlaws; and this was the same, in the eyes of an admiralty court, as if it had been thrown up there by the sea.

  Well and good. But there remained the matter of the missing molasses.

  The hoops and staves and the fish had been paid for in cash, and this he had still, hidden away. But of the molasses from Horace Treadway's plan
tation fewer than fifty barrels remained. More than three hundred had been rolled into the sea.

  Adam feared that he was going to have to ask somebody for a loan. He shook his head, clucked his tongue.

  "Are you bankrupt, too, my chick?"

  He grinned, slapping the ledger away, slipping out of his bunk, and knelt beside her, and they kissed. They kissed for some time.

  "La, what an importunate lover," she laughed when she got the chance. "I do declare, I think you'd beg me for it if we was in a hurricane."

  "It'd be a delight then, too."

  "Damned undignified though. Not that it ain't always. The position,

  I» mean.

  He sighed, with a seriousness not wholly mock.

  "Some day, sweet, we'll be alone. And we'll do whatever we want, as many times as we can, without worrying about storms or mutinies or pirates or anything else. Some day."

  The smile slid off her mouth, which desire now was tugging tight.

  "Some day," she whispered as she pressed closer. "And in the meanwhile, my Adam—"

  While he was dressing she said lazily that she supposed they were at last making a course direct for New York? No, he replied, they were heading back to Jamaica. She sat up.

  "Why?"

  "Different reasons," he replied. "Get more for the gunpowder there. It's no safe cargo anyway. Best to get rid of it as soon as possible. Then we need a real boom. And a longboat. And a couple of hands. In Kingston we can get niggers or deserters from the Navy for next to nothing. But most of all it's credit I'm after. To replace that molasses. I'd thought, uh, of going back to your cousin."

  "Oh— Horace again, eh?"

  "I'd hoped maybe 3'ou might talk him into taking my note, on my share of the schooner.

  "I see. Well, I'll try, Adam."

  He was about to start up the ladder when she spoke again.

  "Adam-"

  "Yes, dear?"

  "What my poor weak womanly mind still can't encompass is: why do you have to make up for that jettisoned cargo? You were lightening the ship in the hope of escaping, isn't that right?"