The Dark Canoe Read Free Page B

toward the channel and the shore. An hour passed before I reached a narrow point fringed with low-lying mangroves and above them a white, hat-shaped peak where shorebirds nested. Rounding this point, I came to a sandy cove and here I beached the launch. By daylight the cove was within view of the ship, so I untied the chest and waded through the shallows and pushed it up the beach to where the mangroves grew.
    I could see that the chest was heavily encrusted with barnacles and trailing weeds, as if it had long been in the water. Yet, as I had noted before, it was not formless. About three feet in depth and a full seven feet in length, it was somewhat smaller at one end than the other. At one moment it seemed to be a small canoe. Then, as the moonlight struck in a different way, it looked like a big Nantucket coffin, the kind that my grandfather was buried in.
    With great effort I pushed the chest back into the mangroves, tied the line taut to a mangrove root, and broke off some branches and carefully covered it over, for fear that it would be seen by daylight. Our men gathered clams in the cove and twice I had noticed Indian canoes pulled up on the beach. I then rowed back to the ship, planning to come back at my first chance with the tools, a hammer and bar, to pry the chest open.
    Instead of finding Blanton on deck, as I expected, it was Captain Troll who greeted me.
    â€œA fine night for rowing,” he said.
    â€œYes,” I said. But a pool of water already was forming where I stood and my clothes were smeared with mud. There was no use to pretend that I had been out for a row. “I went to the cove to catch a mess of clams,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.
    Captain Troll laughed. “The way you look, the clams caught you .”
    Troll was curious, but I was sure that he had not seen the chest. I said good-night and walked on toward the ladderway.
    â€œDid you speak a word to your brother?” he called after me.
    I turned around. “No,” I said. I should have addressed him as “sir,” but this I found hard to do and for some reason he did not demand it. “He was locked in his cabin.”
    â€œAnd for two days hasn’t dived,” Troll said, walking to where I stood. “Let’s leave your brother out of it. Just the two of us can talk.”
    In the moonlight his thin, straight mouth seemed changed, even friendly.
    â€œAfter all,” he said, “you’re part owner of this ship.”
    â€œNot until I reach the age of twenty-one.”
    â€œThat’s looking at things in a legal way, not a sensible way,” Troll said. “For weeks you’ve noticed how the men scamp their work, how they shirk on deck, grumble at this and that. Since your brother Jeremy…well, left us, they’re worse. Suspicious of each other, wondering all the time who’s going to be killed next. They didn’t like Jeremy much, but he made them toe the line. Caleb, they don’t like at all, and what he says they laugh at.”
    â€œYou are captain of the Alert , ” I said. “It’s your duty to see that they don’t laugh.”
    â€œRemember,” Troll said, “there’s only two of us who care what happens to the ship, you and me. The rest we can’t count on, even Caleb Clegg, him the least of all. And against us are a dozen men who would as leave toss us in the bay as not.”
    â€œThere’s nothing I can do about it. I am only the cabin boy. They’d laugh at me, too, if I gave them orders.”
    Troll walked down the deck and came back and cleared his throat. “You’re wrong. There’s something you can do,” he said. “As part owner of the ship, give me the order to raise anchor and in two hours we’ll be at sea, homeward bound.”
    â€œIf I gave this order, then you wouldn’t be to blame. Is that what you mean?”
    â€œExactly. If I take matters into my own hands,