"He is meaner-looking than Roscoe," Vangie whispered.
Captain Flagway sighed. "I wish I was in Baltimore."
The big man with the eyepatch and the hook and the Marlin spike gradually narrowed in on Gabe, fixed him with his eye, and said, "Where's Roscoe?"
Gabe moved forward, mostly because he so much wanted to move back. "Roscoe's below," he said. "You his brother?"
"Me?" Chuckling, the big man shook his head and said, "I ain't that tough. I'm First Mate Crung."
Gabe said, "Well, where's Percival?"
"You shouldn't call him that," First Mate Crung said softly. "He mought hear you. Captain Arafoot is who he prefers to be."
"Well, where is he?"
"Captain Arafoot never leaves his cabin at sea."
Gabe started to grin. "Seasick, huh."
"Naw. It's just that every time he comes out he kills two or three guys, and we can't afford to lose crew that fast."
Vangie uttered a faint moan.
Well, it was no time to turn back. And the San Andreas had gone just about as far as she could. She was settling in the water-even a landlubber could see that much. Gabe said bleakly, "Well, I'll go over to him then. Meanwhile why don't you get your crew to start moving that wagon over to your ship? We're a little short-handed over here."
Crung frowned around at the deck. Ittzy, Francis, Flagway, Gabe, Vangie. Nobody else around. "So I see."
Vangie grabbed Gabe's sleeve. "Don't go."
"Vangie, when you're caught in a rising flood you don't just sit down and pray for drought. I got to." And he stepped past Crung, walked across the planks onto the rusty deck of the steamship, and stepped aside to let the half-dozen crewmen past who'd been summoned by Crung. They were a slinking, cowering lot, scurrying across and ducking away from him and from everybody else who stood upright. Something, he judged, had scared the guts out of all of them. It wasn't hard to guess what it was.
Vangie watched Gabe walk on board Sea Wolf as if it were a tightrope. She wanted to cry. It was such a shame. So much ingenuity and courage, devoted to a doomed mission.
She watched Gabe climb across coiled hawsers and reach the door of the captain's cabin. He knocked briskly and waited.
Even from here she could hear the sudden roar that boomed from the cabin. She shrank back and felt herself wanting to cower just like Captain Arafoot's crew.
Gabe pulled the door open and strode into the cabin. She watched with one eye. He'd left the door ajar behind him, but she couldn't see into the darkness within.
The roar increased to a ROAR.
Meanwhile, the Arafoot crew pushed and shoved, sweating and whining. They were trying to maneuver the gold wagon toward the planks that bridged the two ships, but the wagon weighed close to three tons and wasn't very helpful. When they finally got it away from the stack of hay bales, it began to roll in the wrong direction-toward the windward rail.
Ittzy leaped onto the wagon and grabbed the brake handle.
After that Ittzy stayed on top of the wagon to steer with the wagon-tongue and stay close to the brake. The crewmen hustled and groaned and heaved and sweated, and slowly the wagon moved toward the planks.
Vangie saw the activity out of the corner of her eye while she watched the dark doorway of Captain Percival Arafoot's cabin. Her hand was to her mouth. What could be going on in there?
Suddenly Gabe came pelting backwards out of the cabin as if he'd been nudged in the chest by a railroad engine doing ninety miles an hour. He tumbled head over heels across the deck.
But at once he scrambled back to his feet, rushed to the cabin door, slammed it shut and jammed a bar down across it.
It didn't make the ROAR recede to a roar. It remained a ROAR, growing louder if anything. The door began to rattle and shake against the bar.
Vangie saw Gabe brush sweat from his brow and lean shaking against a rusty ventilator hood.
The gold wagon was up on the planks now, with Sea Wolf's crew cringing under Crung's shouts, trying to manhandle it across to their ship.
But the two vessels were riding up and down on the water, not in unison, and the planks kept tilting back and forth, so that the wagon rolled forward and back, forward and back, never quite making it all the way to the deck of either ship and never quite falling into the sea between them.
Vangie saw Gabe react to the sight of all that gold out there swinging precariously above the frothy sea. His face filled with pale alarm; he moved forward with arms outstretched, calling something. It was as if he wanted to gather the wagon into his arms and bring it gently and safely to the deck of Sea Wolf all by himself through sheer strength of will.
And then the tilt of the ships sharpened. The wagon careened forward onto Sea Wolf's deck, scattering sailors like birdshot.
The wagon made a sweeping curve around the deck with Ittzy steering madly on top. It teetered near the far rail, and Gabe was running after it like a crazed jilted lover, waving his hands in the air. It began to topple over the side. Gabe jumped up and down, yelling.
The sea lifted. Sea Wolf tolled a few degrees. The wagon was returned to the deck by that motion; it kept on moving, and Vangie suddenly realized it was juggernauting directly toward Captain Arafoot's cabin. With Gabe still in hot pursuit.
The wagon swept past a tangle of ropes and barreled with a tremendous crash into the cabin.
It demolished the outer wall. Dense dust and debris flew in all directions. Everybody stopped to stare.
In the sudden silence the ROAR climbed to a ROAR that vibrated through both ships, shaking them to their keels.
Vangie blinked. She tried to stare through the pall of dust and flying objects. What was happening?
From the cloud emerged a giant figure draped in the tarp that had been covering the gold.
The tarp walked on legs. It was tied around with ropes, and with every ROAR, it shimmered and vibrated like the asbestos curtain at the finale of a cancan show.
Behind the canvas-wrapped giant there emerged from the dust a sword. After the sword came Ittzy.
The point of the sword was lightly prodding the rear of the ROAR.
As the two figures progressed out of the cloud, Gabe stepped in front of the ROAR, stopped it with a hand in the middle of the canvas, then bopped it on the top with a belaying pin.
The ROAR modulated through ROAR to roar to roar to a kind of clogged silence. The tarped figure swayed on its feet.
Gabe yelled across to the San Andreas: "Crung. Hey, Crung!"
"Yeah?"
"Get all your crew over there with you on Captain Flagway's ship. Every man-jack."
"Yeah? What for?"
"Just do what I say."
Crung walked out onto the planks between the ships and stood there steady as a rock. Vangie shuddered. Crung said softly, with menace, "And if I don't?"
"Maybe," Gabe told him, "I'll release Captain Arafoot here and let you explain to him why you wouldn't obey orders when I was holding him hostage. Or maybe I'll just throw him over the side and feed him to the sharks. I haven't quite made up my mind yet."
Crung nodded thoughtfully. It wasn't that he was giving in. It was just that he was thinking, and with Crung that was obviously a slow process.
His one eye blinked. His one hand toyed with the marlin spike. He turned slowly and surveyed the deck of San Andreas. His eye flicked from Francis to Vangie to Captain Flagway. "Well now," he said slowly, "if it don't look like I've got me some hostages, too. How about that now?"
Vangie whipped out the knuckle-duster. "Forget it, buster."
Captain Flagway staggered out from the tiller, braced his feet and addressed himself to Crung. "Now, look here. I'm a peash-peace-loving man. I have never disemboweled anyone in my life. I'm a bit long in the tooth to start gouching-gouging men's eyes out and chopping their heads off, and crashing-cracking their skulls with clubs. I just don't think I could stand to do things like that."
"Yeah?"
"So I wish you would just pay atte
ntion to what Mr. Beauchampsh tells you, and do what he says, and not make any fuss."
Crung blinked at Captain Flagway. He blinked at the knuckle-duster wavering in Vangie's hand. He turned his head and blinked at Ittzy and the sword. He blinked at Gabe, and saw him holding the flask. In a tone of exasperated despair, he cried, "And what's that supposed to be?"
"It's supposed to be a flask," Gabe said, and fired a shot in the air. "But it's a gun."
Crung turned his head back and forth, looking from one of them to another. "You're all crazy people," he said. "All of you. All except that fruity-looking one there."
Francis stiffened. "Anyone who dresses himself in that overmasculine way," he said coolly, "and chooses to spend utterly months at a time at sea without women, nothing but men for companionship, is hardly in any position to cast aspersions. I've met a goodly number of you sailor types, believe you me, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that…"
"Alright! Alright!" Crung turned very quickly toward Sea Wolf and bellowed: "All hands!"
"Fruity indeed," Francis said.
Vangie said, "Never mind, Francis, just consider the source."
"Oh, I do."
"Get over here onto this miserable hulk," Crung yelled at his crew, and at once they slunk and slouched across onto the San Andreas, never meeting anyone's eyes.
After the Sea Wolf had been emptied of all its original personnel except for Captain Percival Arafoot, Gabe cried, "Vangie, come on over! Francis, Captain Flagway!"
Vangie had been propping the knuckle-duster on the tiller. "Francis," she said, "would you mind terribly holding this for me?"
"Oh, my dear, of course not. How remiss of me. Here, I'll carry it."
The knuckle-duster looked, if anything, less appropriate in Francis' hand than in Vangie's; still, he wore it with a certain dash.
The three of them skirted the muttering crew and crossed the planks to Sea Wolf. Midway, Vangie looked down at the water heaving between the two ships and for the first time truly understood Gabe's reaction to the sea. But she forced herself to keep moving, following the weaving, perilous Captain Flagway, and once aboard the solid Sea Wolf, she felt better again.
"Okay, Percival," Gabe said. "Time for you to walk the plank."
"ROAR."
"Move, now," Gabe insisted. "You can take your teeth with you, or you can leave them behind. Which is it?"
"Roar."
Ittzy pricked the tarp with the point of his sword, and the tarp-wrapped figure felt its way out onto the planks, guiding on the sound of Crung's voice: "Keep that son of a bitch off here, damn it! He'll kill all of us. Can't you have a little goddamn decency and shove him overboard?"
Ittzy and Francis were fumbling with knots in the ropes that held the two ships together. Captain Flagway was making his way to the controls on the bridge.
The ships began to draw apart. Gabe said, "Hey Crung."
"Yeah?"
"Keep him tied up, he won't do any damage."
"You don't know him."
"Well, he's your problem now, I guess. But you've got some help. You'll find Roscoe and his gang down below in the hold. And listen-one more thing. The Olivers are looking for that ship you're on. You better move on out of here fast. I'd head north along the coast if I were you."
Vangie saw the look of satisfaction on Gabe's face as he turned away. She felt proud and sad, both at once: all that brilliance in a doomed enterprise.
He said, "Well, what do you think now? Are we going to get away with it?"
"Not in a million years." She smiled sadly, fondly. "But nobody else could have come as close."
CHAPTER THIRTY
Out in another part of the ocean the two police launches closed in on Daniel Webster. It took several minutes-and one shot across the steamer's bow-to convince the captain to slow down and listen, and then he did nothing for a while but bellow unintelligibly through a megaphone. Eventually he became calm enough to hear the questions they were asking; then he gestured violently northward, losing his megaphone over the side in the process.
The two launches veered around and went charging away to the north. The captain of Daniel Webster flung his hat after his megaphone, screamed at heaven, and went raging back to the bridge to kick his helmsman.
Farther north, the Sea Wolf was traveling south. Below, in the heat and noise and semidarkness of the bowels of the ship, Gabe was working as coal handler. Stripped to the waist, he was shoveling coal from the bin into the wheelbarrow, pushing it laboriously through the narrow corridor to the engine room-risking his knuckles along the metal walls every time-and dumping it on the small sooty pile behind Ittzy.
Ittzy was the stoker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Sweaty, dirty, also stripped to the waist, gasping for breath, Itzzy turned a broadly smiling face toward Gabe and yelled over the roar of the engine, "This is fun!"
Gabe looked at him. He panted, but had nothing to say.
"Well," Ittzy yelled, a bit less exuberantly, "it's anyway better than being locked in that back room."
Gabe turned and plodded away with his wheelbarrow.
Up on the bridge Captain Flagway was steering. The coast was to his left, San Francisco was just beyond the horizon to the south, and Baltimore was not very far beyond that. Baltimore; Daddy; the apothecary shop. After all these years.
Sea Wolf was a lean, fast, hungry ship-a pleasure to operate. Captain Flagway, for the first time he could remember, smiled.
On deck, Vangie frowned, and paused in her labors. She and Francis were packing gold ingots into small wooden boxes marked TEAK. Once all the gold was packed away, the wagon would be broken up and dumped over the side.
Still frowning, pensively gazing toward the horizon, Vangie said, "Francis?"
"Mm?"
"I want you to know," she said, "that I like you very much."
"Well, thank you," he said, surprised.
She looked at him, a sad smile touching her lips. "Very soon now," she said, "we're all going to be arrested and put away forever in separate prisons, but I do want you to know I've grown very fond of you."
Touched, Francis said, "You've been a sister to me, Vangie."
"And you to me."
"But maybe we won't be caught," he said. "We've gotten away with it so far."
Vangie sighed. "Maybe you're right," she said, without conviction.
Farther north, aboard the San Andreas, First Mate Crung was untying Roscoe in the knee-deep water in the hold, while other crewmen were doing the same for Roscoe's companions. From above, a steady malevolent ROAR could be heard.
Roscoe, free of his gag, looked up and said, "Percy's all right, eh?"
"He's a little annoyed. I figured I'd better keep him tied up a while."
"Not a bad idea," Roscoe said. Rubbing his wrists where the rope had chafed them, he looked around at the water lapping everywhere. "This damn tub's sinking," he said. "We better get to the lifeboats."
Gabe was taking a breather on deck, his place below being temporarily taken by Francis, who had insisted on finding out how, real sailors live.
Gabe and Vangie leaned against the rail, their arms around one another. Neither had much to say; Gabe out of weariness, Vangie out of pessimism.
Captain Flagway called from the bridge, "Ships ahead. Coming this way."
Gabe watched them, idly interested. "In a hurry," he said.
Vangie suddenly clutched his arm. "Police."
"Take it easy," he told her. "They're not looking for this ship. It's the San Andreas they want. That was the whole idea of the switch."
Nevertheless, he could feel how tense she was as the two police launches arrived and shot past to starboard, thundering northward. Standing up in the bow of the lead launch was a red-haired figure, straining forward. McCorkle.
Gabe frowned, watching that shock of red hair go by. "Is that bluebottle everywhere?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Vangie said. "Some bluebottle is everywhere. You just can'
t get away, Gabe."
He looked at her, trying to keep his confidence. Rational problems he could work out, but superstitions were harder to deal with. Could she be right after all?
Then, from the bridge, Captain Flagway sang out, "There it is! San Francisco, dead ahead!"
Gabe laughed, in sudden relief. "They're not everywhere," he said, and looked out toward the distant hills of the city.
***
The police launches very nearly missed the San Andreas entirely. All that was left of her when they arrived was the gently descending top six feet of her foremast, with the Paraguayan flag fluttering in the breeze, as though somewhere beneath the surface of the water someone was holding a garden party.
Officer McCorkle, in the prow of the lead launch, removed his hat and held it over his heart. His red hair flew and flickered in the breeze, like an answer to the Paraguayan flag.
The two launches circled the sinking ship. The mast settled slowly, as bubbles popped to the surface here and there. The flag dipped, wetted itself, wrapped itself dankly around the mast, and disappeared at last into the sea.
Officer McCorkle replaced his hat. Then he took out his notebook, flipped through it, studied an entry here and there, shook his head, and tossed the notebook into the ocean.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Up the dusty slope toward Francis's gold mine came a large wagon full of small boxes marked TEAK. Ittzy was driving, and Gabe was sitting on the high seat beside him, smiling around at the countryside. Captain Flagway was perched atop the cargo with his braided cap at a jaunty angle and half-full flask of whisky dangling from his hand. Francis and Vangie rode a brace of matched white horses beside the wagon.
The sun shone. Birds sang. An occasional rabbit hoppity-hopped across the green and sunny landscape.
They arrived at the entrance to the mine, and all dismounted. Francis said, "I can't help it, you know, I just have trouble absorbing this. We're bringing gold to a gold mine."
Gangway! Page 16
