The Guns of Tortuga Read Free Page B

toe and up again. “You’re all over blood, Patch.”
    â€œâ€™Twas not I that spilled it,” returned my uncle with a touch of impatience. “Come, tell me, are we sinking? For I have two sick men to think about.”
    â€œWe be not sinkin’, your honor,” Chips protested in a hurt voice. “But we be hulled beneath the water-line for certain, an’ takin’ on more water than I like.”
    â€œFother the hole,” Hunter ordered. “We’ll standin for Tortuga. Mr. Adams, we’ll fly no colors. And while we’re making our preparations, we’ll let that pinnace come up. I have no doubt it holds the survivors from at least one of the sloops.”
    â€œAnd where’s the other?” I asked. “The one that got away with us?”
    â€œTwo miles to larboard, off the bow,” replied Hunter, and when I looked forward, I saw her there, a trim, single-masted sloop keeping easy pace with us.
    â€œHow about the men?” Hunter asked.“Any dead?”
    â€œNone, and sure, that’s a wonder in itself,” my uncle snapped. “Are we to do this always, I wonder? Go charging in where a well-placed broadside could send us to the bottom? Would it not be better to scuttle the ship at once, if that’s your mind?”
    Hunter shook his head, smiling. He cocked an eye at me. “You look downhearted, Davy. What’s troubling you?”
    I hardly wanted to say, because it would just make my uncle that much more angry, but at last I blurted out, “Why did we have to run from the Spaniard? We did more damage to her than she did to us!”
    â€œA fire-eater!” Mr. Hunter said. Then, in a more serious tone, he added, “There’s some truth in what your uncle says, Davy. The
Concepción
has twice our crew, maybe five hundred men all told. She mounts forty-eight cannons, all of them twenty-four-pounders, besides her swivel guns and chasers. And her scantlings are twice or three times as thick as ours. She could punch a hole in the
Aurora
as easy as I could kiss my hand, but our cannonballs would bounce right off her sides. Our only chance was to disable her and run, if we were to fight at all. Our men have big hearts, but they couldn’t take a ship whose crew outnumbers us two or three to one.”
    â€œStill, we gave them a good fight,” I said.
    Hunter nodded. “That we did. And with any luck, word of that fight will get abroad. I hope that Jack Steele will hear it. He’s up to some devilry, you may be sure, for he’s been lying unnaturally low these last months. Whatever he’s planning, I hope we can come to grips with him before his plot has hatched.”
    I watched as the men prepared to fother the hole. That meant, as I saw, that they used an old sail. They lowered it from the bows with ropes andworked it back along the hull until they had it over the unseen hole, then made it fast. Soon Chips reported that we were taking on water at a slower rate. We’d still have to pump our way into port, but at least we would not sink.
    The time that the temporary repair took gave the little craft behind us the chance to catch up. Nineteen men crowded it, and our crew helped them aboard. Most of the newcomers were wounded, and my uncle met them as they came one by one to our deck. “You’ll wait,” he said to one. “I know a broken arm hurts like the very devil, but your shipmates are bleeding. This man’s dead. I’ll take you first,” he said to a pale man whose shipmates had lashed his chest with sailcloth through which blood seeped.
    Back we went to the sick berth, where the unlucky devil died before my uncle could do anything more than examine his chest wound. “Next,” he said, turning from the corpse. Of the nineteen men in the little craft, two were dead, including the chest wound, and eleven more were injured. We took off one unfortunate man’s leg at the