Preacher's Frenzy

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  At the moment, however, he couldn’t do a blasted thing about it.

  Over the popping of the sails and the whoosh of water past the ship’s bow, he heard someone calling his name and turned to see Jabez Sampson motioning to him from that raised deck at the rear. Preacher looked at Rowland and Finch, who had followed him up out of the ship’s bowels. Rowland jerked his head to indicate that Preacher should join Sampson back there.

  A very narrow set of steps went up at the side of that deck. Preacher warily eyed the water beside and below him as he climbed those steps. If the ship pitched at just the wrong moment and he went over the side, would they bother fishing him out? Or would they just sail away and leave him there?

  He reached the upper deck without mishap and joined Sampson and the man at the tiller.

  Sampson extended a silver flask to him and said, “I promised ye a couple of swigs of rum. Here ye go. Don’t get carried away.”

  Preacher took the flask and lifted it to his mouth. The rich, fiery bite of the rum had an immediate bracing effect on him. The second swallow kindled a welcome fire in his belly.

  Then Sampson held out his hand. “I’ll have it back.”

  Preacher surrendered the flask and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He asked, “What now?”

  “Now you get to work,” Sampson answered with a grin. “You’ve never crewed on a sailin’ ship, have ye?”

  “Nope.”

  “We’ll start with somethin’ simple, then.” Sampson pointed forward. “See those fellows on their knees up yonder, t’other side of the mast? They’re holystonin’ the deck. You can help ’em.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You’ll learn.” Sampson made a shooing motion. “Go along with ye, then. Ol’ Bramble’s in charge. He’ll tell ye what to do.”

  Preacher spent a couple of seconds wondering how hard it would be to kill Sampson, knock out the man at the tiller, and turn this blasted ship around. Of course, he’d probably wind up sinking them, he thought, assuming Abner Rowland or another member of the crew didn’t just shoot him.

  Without saying anything, Preacher turned and carefully went down the steps to the main deck and started forward. As he passed Rowland, the tattooed man smirked at him. Preacher did his best to ignore him.

  Bramble turned out to be a wiry, elderly sailor with a tangled white beard that had given him the nickname. He handed Preacher a rectangular chunk of some sort of porous rock and said, “This here’s holystone. Get down on your knees like them boys there and go to scrubbin’. That’s the only way to keep these decks clean.”

  Preacher grumbled to himself as he followed the order. Four men were lined up on their knees, bent forward to rub the stones over the planks that formed the deck. Another man stood nearby holding a bucket of water, which he sloshed over the area from time to time to wash away whatever the men had scraped up.

  Preacher joined the line at the end of it, next to a young man with bright red hair and an abundance of freckles. “Howdy,” the mountain man said under his breath.

  “Save your energy for the work,” the young sailor advised, equally quietly. “Bramble may look like somebody’s kindly old grandpa, but you don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  “Why not?”

  The youngster just shook his head and continued scrubbing at the deck with the holystone. Preacher followed his example.

  The work didn’t look that hard, but Preacher soon found his knees and back aching. The rough stone irritated his hands. Whenever the sailor with the bucket washed down the deck, some of the water inevitably splashed up in his face. Maybe this chore actually needed to be done, he didn’t know about that, but it became obvious to him that being assigned to it was something of a punishment, too.

  His clothes were already wet from being down in the bilge, and they didn’t dry because water kept being flung in his general direction. That added to the misery, as did the sun, which beat down without pity on the men working on deck.

  After a while, Preacher had had enough of it. He stood up and tossed the holystone onto the deck at his feet. Beside him, the freckle-faced sailor drew in his breath with a frightened hiss and whispered, “What are you doing?”

  “You there!” Bramble barked immediately as he leveled a gnarled finger at Preacher. “Pick that up and get back to work.”

  “I ain’t no sailor,” Preacher said, “but that deck looks plenty clean to me. I don’t mind workin’ for my keep, but there’s got to be jobs that make more sense than this.”

  “Your betters will decide what you’re to do!” Bramble stomped up to him, beard bristling in outrage. “Now pick up that stone and get back down on your knees, blast your eyes!”

  Slowly, Preacher shook his head. “I don’t cotton to bein’ on my knees.”

  The confrontation caught the attention of most of the men on deck. They stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at Preacher and Bramble. Preacher’s back was turned toward the spot where Sampson stood, but he had a hunch that was the captain’s gaze he felt boring into his back.

  Bramble was a head shorter, but he squinted up fiercely at the mountain man and said, “A touch of the lash’ll knock some of that starch outta you, boy.”

  “I ain’t a boy, and I won’t be whipped.”

  Bramble snorted. “We’ll just see about that. Cap’n!”

  Preacher heard a footstep behind him.

  “What’s going on here, Bramble?” Jabez Sampson asked.

  “This new feller don’t want to work. Says he’s too good for holystonin’ and won’t get on his knees. Won’t be whipped, neither, he says.”

  Sampson strolled around so Preacher could see him from the corner of his eye. The captain wasn’t alone. Abner Rowland and two more burly sailors were with him.

  “A ship’s crew has to have discipline, mister,” Sampson said to Preacher. “Sailors have to take orders, or the whole system breaks down. Ye understand that, don’t ye?”

  Preacher just stared stonily at him.

  After a moment, Sampson sighed and said, “All right, if that’s the way it’s to be. String him up to the mast. Bosun, fetch the cat-o’-nine-tails from my cabin.”

  “I’d be happy to, Cap’n,” Rowland said. “And I’d be happy to use it on this man, too.”

  “How many lashes do you think?” Sampson asked. “Five?”

  “More like a dozen,” Rowland said.

  The casual way they were discussing whipping him made anger boil up inside Preacher. He was unarmed. His head still ached from whatever drug had been on that dart, and his muscles and reflexes weren’t at their peak. He was outnumbered fifty to one.

  But despite all that, if they laid hands on him, he would fight. He would make them kill him before they subjected him to the indignity of stringing him up and whipping him.

  His hands clenched into fists as the sailors who were with Sampson and Rowland began to close in on him.

  That was when one of the sailors up in the rigging cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Sail ho!”

  CHAPTER 26

  Everyone immediately forgot the confrontation with Preacher and craned their necks to gaze up into the rigging and see which way the sailor was pointing. He hung on with his left hand and leveled his right at an angle, ahead and to starboard.

  Preacher was as curious as anybody else. He peered in that direction, narrowing his eyes as he tried to spot the sails on the other ship. He didn’t see a blasted thing—

  No, wait, there it was! A tiny triangle of white on the horizon, miles away. Preacher had no trouble estimating distances in the mountains or on the prairie, but out in the middle of the seemingly endless sweep of blue water, he had no real idea how far away the other ship might be.

  Sampson reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a brass telescope, which he extended and lifted to his right eye. Squinting through the lens, he studied the distant ship for a long moment, then announced, “’Tis a
merchantman, boys. British, I think, but that doesn’t really matter, now does it?” He lowered the spyglass and bellowed at the man at the tiller, “Take us to starboard, Florey!”

  “We’re goin’ after her, Cap’n?” Rowland asked.

  “Aye!”

  Rowland gestured toward the mountain man and said, “We were supposed to take him to San Patricio.”

  “And we will, lad,” Sampson assured him. “But there be nothin’ wrong with makin’ a wee detour first, especially if ’tis a profitable one!”

  The man at the tiller hauled on it and sent the ship angling to the right. Rowland shouted more orders to the men in the rigging, who adjusted the sails accordingly. The process was incomprehensible to Preacher, but he couldn’t help but admire the skill with which the sailors worked and the way they scrambled around up there like monkeys.

  “What about those lashes Preacher was supposed to get?” Rowland asked.

  “A prize is more important than a whippin’,” the captain snapped. “And there’ll be time for all that later, after we’ve dealt with that beauty up yonder.”

  That was never going to happen, Preacher thought. They weren’t going to whip him.

  Rowland didn’t seem to like the answer, either. He glared and said, “Discipline on board—”

  “Is my responsibility, Mr. Rowland,” Sampson broke in, and his jovial tone turned ominous. “See to the guns. You claimed to be good with them.”

  “I am,” Rowland said. With a last scowl at Preacher, he turned to the cannon and began calling out orders to the crew members who would be manning them.

  Sampson regarded Preacher and frowned in thought. “You’re a frontiersman, aye?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then ye must be a hunter, and a good shot with a rifle.”

  “Fair to middlin’,” Preacher said, although that was a vast underrating of his skill.

  Sampson lifted a finger and said, “I’m goin’ to do a bold thing. I’m goin’ to give ye a rifle and a powder horn and a pouch of shot. You’ll be up there with me, and ye will pick off the targets I tell ye. Can ye do that?”

  Preacher’s jaw tightened. Sampson was asking him to murder innocent sailors on that merchant ship. He was never going to do that, no matter what happened to him.

  But he saw a narrow opening and took it by saying, “I can.”

  He didn’t promise that he actually would, though.

  “Good! Now, don’t get any ideas about turnin’ that weapon on me. I’ll have a man right there with us, holdin’ a pistol aimed at your head. If that rifle so much as starts to turn any direction except where I tell ye to point it, he’ll put a ball through your brain. I told the African when he brought ye aboard that I’d try to keep ye alive so’s ye could go to the sugar plantation on San Patricio, but I made no promises.”

  Preacher gave a curt nod and then gestured toward the sea surrounding them. “Like you said . . . out here, where could I go?”

  A bustle of frantic activity filled the ship during the next few minutes. The gun crews prepared the cannon for firing. The sailors who’d been aloft climbed down out of the rigging, except for one man who perched in the crow’s nest at the top of the mast. He had a mouth trumpet so he could call down information to the captain during the battle, if there was one. Long oars were brought out and fastened in the oarlocks, to help with fast maneuvering if it became necessary.

  Preacher went back up on the rear deck with Sampson. A man brought him rifle, powder, and shot, as the captain had said. As Preacher looked over the weapon, he saw that it wasn’t as fine as his own long-barreled flintlock, but at least it appeared to be in good working order. His own rifle, pistols, knife, and tomahawk were probably somewhere back in New Orleans, and he wondered if he would ever see them again.

  At least Dog and Horse were safe and well cared for at the livery stable in St. Louis. Preacher had an understanding with the man who ran the place. If he left his trail partners there and hadn’t returned in a year’s time, Patterson would be free to sell Horse as long as he was confident the stallion was going to someone who would be a good owner. Dog would remain there and live out his life at the stable, since Patterson was fond of the big cur.

  Preacher wasn’t going to even consider the possibility of not being reunited with his friends, though. For now, he needed to concentrate on the challenges directly ahead of him.

  “You plan on chasin’ that other ship down?” he asked Sampson.

  “Aye. The Calypso is faster than any merchantman, have ye no doubts of that.”

  “I don’t know enough about boats to have doubts one way or the other.”

  Sampson threw back his head and laughed. “Ah, ye landlubbers never fail to amuse me. We all came from the sea, lad. Bein’ out here on the bonnie blue foam is the most natural thing in the world for a human bein’.”

  “Maybe so, but that don’t make me like it any better.”

  “How’s your belly holdin’ up?”

  “I ain’t sick, if that’s what you mean,” Preacher said.

  Sampson slapped him on the back. “Ye’ve got your sea legs already! We’ll make a sailor outta you!”

  Preacher seriously doubted that. For one thing, he didn’t intend to be on this blasted boat for that long.

  Slowly but surely, the Calypso cut into the lead the other vessel had. When they were closer, Sampson studied the ship through the spyglass again and said with some satisfaction, “She’s flyin’ the Union Jack, just like I thought. ’Tis a British ship, and I never tire of makin’ those scoundrels uncomfortable. I fought ’em durin’ the war, ye know. The one about twenty-five years ago.”

  “So did I,” Preacher said.

  Sampson looked at him with new interest. “Is that true, now?”

  “I was with Andy Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.”

  “Ye must’ve been but a lad at the time. I did all my fightin’ on this very ship, with ol’ Catamount Jack in command then. A finer man there never was. Never could really understand how he could give up the sea like he did and move back onto the land. ’Twas the young’un he had with that Cajun woman, I reckon. He didn’t want the boy bein’ raised up while he was away at sea all the time.”

  So Sampson didn’t know that “Simon” LeCarde was really Simone. By using Balthazar Crowe and Long Sam as go-betweens, she had kept her true identity a secret from nearly all of her associates. There was no real reason for that secrecy, other than wanting to live up to what her father’s dream had been for his offspring, Preacher mused. The past had a powerful grip on most folks and steered them in their day-to-day lives and in the big decisions they had to make, whether they ever realized that or not. He had never dwelled overmuch on it himself, but he had realized a long time ago that he wasn’t exactly the normal sort of fellow.

  Preacher began to make out more details about the ship they were pursuing. He didn’t know what type it was, but it had three masts instead of one and a lot more sails. Even so, it was moving considerably slower than the Calypso, and he supposed that had to do with the vessel’s weight. More sails didn’t necessarily equal more speed.

  Even though he wasn’t happy about his situation, he couldn’t help but take some interest in what was going on. He asked Sampson, “Do they know we’re chasin’ ’em?”

  “Oh, aye. They keep a watch for other ships, just like we do. I reckon they laid eyes on us about the same time we did on them, mayhap even sooner. But there be nothin’ they can do about it, ’less’n they figure out how to sprout a giant pair o’ wings!” The captain’s wit evidently struck him as hilarious as he bellowed with laughter and slapped his thigh.

  “It don’t seem like they’re even tryin’ to get away,” Preacher commented.

  “They’re tryin’, all right, but they know they can’t outrun us.”

  The man at the tiller spoke up for the first time. “So they’ll wait until we get close enough and then try to blow us out of the water.”

  “To
do that, they’d have to be better shots than any Englisher ever born!” Sampson made a disgusted sound and shook his head. “And Preacher’s gonna help us, too.” He pointed and said to the mountain man, “See those guns in the stern?”

  They were close enough to the other ship for Preacher’s keen eyes to spot the twin muzzles of a pair of cannon mounted at the back end of the ship. “I see ’em,” he told Sampson.

  “As soon as we’re close enough, I want ye to start pickin’ off the lads who try to man those culverins. They can’t shoot at us if they’ve got rifle balls in their guts!” Sampson found that funny as well.

  Preacher took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked to his right. One of the sailors stood there, as Sampson had promised, with a loaded pistol in his hand. Sampson had made it plain that if Preacher didn’t follow orders, he’d be shot.

  “I’d better get to loadin’ this rifle, then,” he said.

  “Aye, ye do that.”

  By the time Preacher had the rifle ready, the Calypso had closed to within a few hundred yards of the British merchantman. Suddenly, smoke and fire belched from the two cannon at the other vessel’s stern. The man at the tiller leaned hard on it, and the sloop veered left. The two cannonballs splashed into the water well to the right.

  “How close do we need to get before ye can start makin’ things hot for those gunners?” Sampson asked. His voice was tense, and he didn’t sound amused anymore.

  “Maybe half this distance, if you want me to have a good chance of hittin’ ’em,” Preacher replied.

  “All right, just be ready when the time comes.”

  Preacher had the hammer drawn back on the rifle. He held it ready to lift to his shoulder and take aim. The Calypso continued racing over the water as the gunners on board the British ship scurried around preparing the cannon to fire again.

  Soon they were close enough that Preacher saw sparks sputtering from the slow match a sailor held in readiness to touch off the powder charge in one of the cannon. Preacher raised the rifle to his shoulder, drew a bead, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle boomed and kicked against his shoulder as smoke gushed from the barrel.