As the mountain man was prodded over to the hatch leading down into the orlop, Tyler called from the poop deck, “I’m sorry, Preacher.”
“Not as sorry as you’re gonna be, lad,” Sampson said.
Preacher heard that and stopped short. With his arms manacled behind him, he jerked around and said, “You promised you wouldn’t punish him!”
“I did no such thing,” Sampson replied. “I said I wouldn’t kill him if ye cooperated, and I’ll keep my word on that. But for defyin’ orders and tryin’ to help ye murder Mr. Rowland, the lad must pay.” He looked at a grinning Rowland. “Eight lashes, I’d say. To be carried out immediately.”
Still on his knees, Tyler went pale with horror, making the freckles on his thin face stand out even more than usual.
“You son of a—” Preacher yelled at Sampson as he tried to lunge away from the hatch. The burly sailors flanking him grabbed his arms and threw him backward. Manacled the way he was, he couldn’t catch his balance. He fell through the open hatchway and crashed down on his back into the orlop with stunning force.
CHAPTER 32
The fall knocked the air out of Preacher’s lungs and paralyzed him long enough for men to leap down around him and tackle him when he tried to surge back up. Their weight pinned him to the deck. He couldn’t use his arms to fight, but he kicked out at them the best he could. Men seized his legs, and a second later he felt the iron shackles closing around his bare ankles.
“Make ’em good and tight!” Rowland called down through the open hatch. “I want him to feel them!”
In irons, Preacher couldn’t walk, so his captors picked him up and carried him over to the ladder leading down into the hold. Some of them descended and reached back up to take him as the others lowered him through the opening. If Preacher had been the type to yell and curse, he would have loosed a storm of invective on them, but he knew that wouldn’t do any good and maintained a grim, stony silence instead. Again they carried him over to an open hatch. Below was the bilge. He heard the filthy water sloshing around down there.
They held him over the opening and dropped him. Preacher grabbed a breath and held it, knowing that his head might go under before he could struggle back into a sitting position. The reeking, oily bilgewater splashed up around him as he landed, blinding him and getting in his nose. Snorting, he fought his way up out of it. He pressed his back against the hull, grimacing because it was still tender and sore from the flogging.
With all the hatches open, enough light penetrated for him to be able to look around. There was nothing to see except the planks of the hull and the water with greasy scum floating on top of it.
“Is he down there?” Rowland called from the main deck.
“Aye,” one of the sailors answered. “Want us to close him up in the dark?”
“No, leave the hatches open for now,” Rowland said. He laughed harshly. “I want him to hear what’s gonna happen next.”
That statement made Preacher’s heart slug harder in his chest. He remembered what Jabez Sampson had said about Tyler being flogged. Eight lashes, the captain had decreed—three more than Preacher had received.
He knew how much he had suffered from those lashes, and Tyler wasn’t nearly as hardy. That much agony might be enough to kill the boy. Preacher’s teeth ground together as he strained against the iron bonds on his wrists and ankles.
He couldn’t do a thing to ease their painful grip. They didn’t budge.
A few minutes later, he heard Tyler scream.
The mountain man closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a brief pause, Tyler screamed again. Fury burned so fiercely inside Preacher that it threatened to consume him. He knew Tyler was probably trying to hold the screams in, but the youngster wasn’t strong enough to do that. Again and again, the agonized shrieks drifted down to Preacher in the bilge, and his hate and resolve grew stronger each time.
Unfortunately, at the moment none of that did Tyler one blasted bit of good.
The screams seemed endless, but of course, they really weren’t. Preacher didn’t count them. As they went on, though, he heard other cries. Angry shouts, from the sound of them, and he wondered if some of the crew members were calling on Rowland and Sampson to lay off on the punishment. Tyler had told him that some discontent existed among the crew. Those sounds might be a demonstration of that.
If so, it didn’t do any good. Tyler’s cries continued, then abruptly fell silent. He might have passed out or the ordeal might have reached its end.
Or Tyler might have died.
Preacher tried not to consider that possibility. Tyler might not be a hardened frontiersman like himself, but he had worked as a member of the crew on the Calypso for a while and had to have toughened up some in that time. Before that, he had led a helter-skelter existence as an orphan in New Orleans, so he had to know something about survival.
The boy was going to be all right, Preacher told himself.
It had been late in the afternoon when the storm took place. Preacher figured evening was closing in. Darkness descended suddenly, as it did at sea, closing in around him even though the hatch above his head was still open. He sat there in the gloom, pondering on his next move.
He had only limited options. He had hoped to stir up a mutiny before the ship reached the end of its voyage at San Patricio. That seemed unlikely with him in chains, stuck down in the bilge. At the moment, he saw no way out of that plight. Down there, he had nothing to work with, no way to free himself.
That bleak realization didn’t make him give up. That just wasn’t in his nature. But for the moment, he couldn’t do anything except wait for a better chance—and resolve to seize it as soon as he could.
* * *
A while later, flickering light spilled down through the hatch. Preacher heard several sets of footsteps approaching the opening. A man with a lantern held it over the hatch while Tyler was lowered into the bilge. The youngster wasn’t chained or tied, but from the way his head lolled loosely on his shoulder, Preacher could tell he was unconscious. He wasn’t dead, or they wouldn’t have bothered taking him down there. When Tyler’s body twisted in the grip of the men dangling him from his arms, Preacher saw the bloody stripes on his back where the cat-o’-nine-tails had shredded the flesh.
They dropped Tyler, and he splashed into the water. Preacher thought the shock would revive him, but it didn’t appear to. As Tyler slid down, his face went under. Preacher cursed and stuck his legs out. The fetters around his ankles didn’t prevent him from getting his feet under Tyler’s shoulders and lifting his head out of the water. Tyler began to sputter and cough.
“Hang on, son,” Preacher told him.
The sailors up in the hold laughed and spewed curses down on the two prisoners. They were loyal to Sampson and cut from the same brutal cloth as the captain, no doubt about that. Preacher knew he couldn’t hope for any help from the likes of them. They weren’t the only ones on board the Calypso, though.
After a minute or so, the men tired of the verbal abuse and left, taking the lantern with them. Darkness closed around Preacher and Tyler again.
Preacher held the youngster up so he wouldn’t slip under again and drown, until finally Tyler groaned and muttered, “Wh . . . where . . .”
“You’re down in the bilge with me,” Preacher told him. “Can you sit up on your own?”
“I . . . I don’t know . . .” Tyler moved around a little, and his weight lifted from Preacher’s legs. “I think I’m . . . all right . . . Ohhhh.” Pain filled the long moan.
Preacher said, “No, you ain’t all right, but you will be. You’re strong enough to make it through this.”
“I never . . . I never hurt like that. I don’t remember . . . Rowland stopping. He just whipped me . . . and whipped me . . . I must have . . . passed out.”
“Probably a good thing that you did.”
“My back . . . hurts.”
“I saw it when they brought you down here,” Preacher said. “I won
’t lie to you, son, it looked pretty bad. But it’s nothin’ you won’t get over.”
Unless the wounds festered from being dunked in this bilgewater, he thought. He ran the same risk, since his back was far from fully healed. But there was nothing they could do about that except hope they wouldn’t come down with a fever. In the tropics, such maladies were usually fatal.
“Sit up and keep your back out of the water as much as you can,” Preacher went on.
“I don’t know if I can. I’m so tired.”
“You got to. If you lay down in this water, you’ll drown, and I won’t be able to help you.”
“I . . . I’ll try.” A few moments passed in silence, then Tyler said, “I’m sorry, Preacher.”
“Sorry? What in the world for? You’ve tried to help me more ’n once when nobody else on board this ship would.”
“But if Cap’n Sampson hadn’t threatened me, you wouldn’t have had to surrender.”
“And likely they would have killed me,” Preacher pointed out. “I don’t blame you for a thing, son, and you hadn’t ought to blame yourself, neither. I’m just grateful to you.” He paused. “No matter how this voyage turns out, I made a friend along the way.”
Tyler made a little choking sound. Preacher thought the youngster was too moved to speak, but then he got to worrying that Tyler had gone under the water again and that sound had been him dying. He said sharply, “Tyler! You still there?”
To Preacher’s great relief, the young man said, “Y-yeah. I’m here, Preacher.” He took a deep breath, and what he said next put a grin on Preacher’s face in the darkness. “We need to start thinking about how we’re going to get out of here.”
* * *
In the dark, Preacher and Tyler had no way of telling how much time had passed. No one bothered to bring them any food or water, so eventually hunger and thirst made it obvious that quite a few hours had gone by. Preacher kept them talking so Tyler would stay awake and not slip under the water. Unfortunately, they didn’t come up with any workable escape plans.
A few shafts of light began to penetrate the tiny cracks in the deck above them. Preacher didn’t know if that meant it was morning and all the hatches had been opened, or if someone had carried a lantern into the hold.
The latter case proved to be true. The hatch lifted and swung back, and a bearded face peered down into the bilge. The owner of the whiskers called, “Tyler? Are you alive down there, boy?”
“I’m here, Chimney,” Tyler responded in a weak voice.
“If I drop a bundle to you, can you catch it?”
Tyler squinted up into the light. “I . . . I’ll try.”
“I got you some bread. Here you go.”
A small bundle wrapped in sailcloth dropped through the hatch. Tyler caught it before it hit the water.
“There’s a little jug of rum in there, too,” the sailor called Chimney went on.
“You’re a lifesaver, friend,” Preacher told the bearded man.
“The cap’n don’t want either of you fellers to starve down here,” Chimney explained. “He still figures on gettin’ work outta you, Tyler, and as for you, mister, he plans on deliverin’ you to the plantation on San Patricio just like Balthazar Crowe told him to.”
With shaky hands, Tyler opened the bundle and took out a chunk of bread. He tore a piece off it and leaned over to put it in Preacher’s mouth. With his hands chained behind his back, the mountain man couldn’t feed himself.
He’d been without food long enough that the bread tasted mighty good just then. He chewed and swallowed while Tyler ate a piece of bread, too. Being careful to keep the bundle above the filthy water sloshing around them, Tyler took out a small jug and pulled the stopper with his teeth. He held the neck of it to Preacher’s mouth and tipped it up so Preacher was able to get a drink of the rum inside the jug. He immediately felt its bracing effects.
“Rum ain’t normally what I drink for breakfast, but I’m sure obliged to you for it, Chimney.”
“Well, the cap’n just tol’ me to bring you boys somethin’ to eat and didn’t say nothin’ ’bout no grog, but I figure what he don’t know won’t hurt me.” Chimney laughed about that, then went on, more quietly. “Here’s somethin’ else for you. I’m gonna drop it in the water, and you can let it lie there until after I’m gone before fishin’ it out.”
Preacher caught a glimpse of something metallic as it fell through the lanternlight and landed in the bilge with a small splash.
Chimney went on. “Me and some o’ the other boys been talkin’, and we’ve had enough of bein’ pirates. We’re gonna take the boat, jus’ like you said we oughter, Tyler boy. So you and that Preacher feller be ready when they come to get you later, and when you take ’em by surprise, so will we.”
Preacher’s heart pounded faster at those words. That was exactly the sort of trouble he’d been hoping to stir up when he’d planted the seeds of mutiny in Tyler’s head. It looked like the effort had been successful—if this wasn’t some sort of trick.
“Somebody comin’,” Chimney exclaimed. “I got to go.” The hatch cover dropped back into place, and darkness once more enveloped the prisoners. Chimney’s rapid footsteps pattered away on the deck above them.
Preacher and Tyler sat in tense silence for a moment before Preacher asked, “Do you trust that fella?”
“Chimney Matthews? Yeah. Yeah, I do. He’s been a good friend to me.”
“Why’s he called Chimney?”
Tyler chuckled in the darkness. “Because when he gets that pipe of his going, so much smoke billows out of it that he looks like a chimney.” He sounded more like himself than he had ever since the flogging. The bread and rum had given him some strength—and the flicker of hope hadn’t done any harm, either.
Preacher heard a faint stirring in the water and knew Tyler was looking for the second item Chimney had dropped. After a minute or so, he said, “I can’t find . . . Wait! There it is! It . . . it’s a key, Preacher.”
Preacher had a pretty good idea that it would unlock the chains on his wrists and ankles. A savage grin pulled his lips back as he thought that when Sampson’s men came to drag him out of this filthy bilge, they would have a surprise waiting for them.
CHAPTER 33
Working by feel in the darkness, Tyler unlocked the shackles from Preacher’s ankles and removed them. He unlocked the manacle around Preacher’s right wrist, too, but at the mountain man’s suggestion, he left the one on the left wrist fastened, so that the foot-long length of chain and the other manacle dangled from it.
“That won’t make a bad weapon,” Preacher commented to explain his request. “When I go to swingin’ it, along with those shackles you took off my legs, I should be able to mow down some of those varmints like a scythe goin’ through wheat.”
“I like the sound of that,” Tyler admitted.
“They’ve got it comin’. Especially Rowland and Sampson.”
The thought of settling the score with those two invigorated Preacher, despite everything he’d been through. The chance to do that couldn’t come soon enough to suit him.
Unfortunately, the opportunity didn’t seem to be in the offing any time soon. Time dragged by. The bilge lightened a trifle, and Preacher knew that meant the sun was up and high overhead. After a while, he said to Tyler, “You said we’d be off Cuba later today, didn’t you?”
“That’s right. I don’t know if the captain plans to put in to port, but we’ll be sailing near there, at least. Why do you ask?”
“I was thinkin’ that might be a good place to put any survivors ashore, once we’ve taken over the ship.”
“You don’t plan to kill all of them?”
“Like I said before, I ain’t no murderer. If any of that bunch surrenders, we’ll find somethin’ to do with ’em, even if it’s just puttin’ ’em in that little boat hangin’ from the back of the ship and givin’ ’em some food and water. At least that way, they’d have a chance to survive.”
“I wasn’t planning on taking any prisoners,” Tyler muttered.
“I don’t blame you for feelin’ that way. And to be honest, it may not come to that. They may put up enough of a fight that we don’t have any choice.” Preacher chuckled. “For that matter, we don’t know how many fellas are willin’ to throw in with us. We may be the ones who wind up on the losin’ end. But if that happens, we’ll go down fightin’, and that’s always been the way I figured on crossin’ the divide.”
“Crossing the divide,” Tyler repeated. “You mean . . .”
“Yep. Comes to all of us sooner or later. Worst thing about it is when you don’t have any say in how it happens. As long as a man can go out on his own terms, I figure it ain’t nothin’ to fear.”
“I’ll try to remember that. But I’d just as soon not have to deal with that any time soon.”
Preacher laughed. “I understand, boy. I plan on bein’ around for a long time myself.”
They sat there in the shallow, sloshing water and waited some more. Preacher was about to decide that Jabez Sampson intended to leave them down there until the Calypso reached San Patricio, but then heavy footsteps sounded above their heads.
Two men, Preacher judged.
A moment later someone opened the hatch and let it drop to the deck with a loud thud. One of the men lowered a ladder into the bilge.
A harsh order followed it. “Get on up here, Tyler. The cap’n says it’s time for you to get back to work.”
“I . . . I can’t,” Tyler responded. The shaky weakness in his voice wasn’t completely an act. The youngster wasn’t in good shape, but he and Preacher had decided earlier that if anyone came to get them, they would try to lure the men down into the bilge.
“You’d better be able to,” the man snapped. “If you can’t work, there ain’t no reason for the cap’n to keep you alive, after what you done.”
“I . . . I’ll try,” Tyler said, “but maybe . . . maybe one of you could help me up the ladder.”
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