The Smugglers Read online

  “I'm no paying for that!” bellowed Captain Crowe. “Levezvous! Back to work, ye mangy dogs. And don't forget the barley sugar; I've got to color every drap o' that.”

  I felt a shiver of despair. I wished I had never come to France.

  He saw me watching, and turned his anger onto me. “Whit are ye gawking at?” he said. “Ye were telt to stand a watch.”

  “You're paying for this?” I asked.

  “Ye think they give it away?” He spread a hand across his face and squeezed with thumb and fingers. And slowly the color drained from his skin. He dragged his hand across his nose, across his mouth and chin. He scraped away his anger.

  “Look,” he said. “Use some sense, lad. Ye canna just come waltzing in and waltzing out wi' cargo.” He took my arm and bent closer; his cravat tickled my chin as he whispered in my ear. “If they think for a moment that a' that brandy's no waiting for the Dragon, then the game's up right there and then.”

  I shook off his arm. “They know you here,” I said. “You speak French; you knew which dock to come to.”

  “Whit are ye saying?”

  “Don't cross him,” Dasher had said. But it was too late for that. I squared myself up beside him. “I think you're a smuggler, Captain Crowe.”

  His mouth fell open; he gaped at me. I waited for a rage like none he'd shown before, and cringed when he raised his arm. But he didn't strike me. He only scratched his ear, and he hung his head like a repentant child. “It's true enough,” said he. “I was a smuggler. To my everlasting shame, I was.” He turned his back to me. “But no more, Mr. Spencer. That Burton gang the manny wrote about? I want to see it ruined. I want to see every one o' they villains hanging from a gallows.”

  “Hanging?” I said. “That's not the way you talked at the Baskerville.”

  “Och, that's a' it was, is talk.” He sat on the rail, and his toe scraped at the deck. “I remember when I first saw ye, your father and yourself,” he said. “At the old Baskerville, mind. I thought your father was the doubter, the one to smell the smoke where there wasna any.” He glanced up, then down again. “Yet now he trusts me wi' his ship and his very own son, but yourself, ye give me none at a.”

  He seemed truthful enough, but I'd seen his acts before.

  “Ye're a careful one,” said Crowe. “That's good; I like that in a man.” He fumbled at the cloth below his chin. “Weel, look at this,” he said as he whisked away the white cravat. It was the first time I'd seen his neck, and around it was a livid welt of frightening proportions.

  “They tried to hang me,” said Captain Crowe. “The smugglers did. It's whit they do to they who turn against them.”

  I could see the patterns of the rope burned upon his skin, the weaving of its strands in bright and shocking red. I could imagine how tight the noose had drawn, how he must have gasped for breath.

  “I've a score to settle,” said he, already covering the mark again. “And that's why I'm here, do ye see?”

  “And the white-haired man?”

  “He was one o' them,” said Crowe. “He'd like nothing better than to slit my throat for what I did to wreck that gang. So tak' my glass, lad–it's by the binnacle–and get yourself up to the crosstrees. Watch for him there. And mind, too, that ye watch for a sail in the offing. If that smuggler comes, she'll likely be armed to the teeth.”

  I still didn't trust the man, not fully. But there was no undoing what I had done by bringing us here. So I climbed up to the crosstrees and sat with my back against the mast. Through the captain's long glass, I studied the Channel and the land around us, as the sounds of the loading–a rumble of barrels–went on below me. Once I thought I saw the white-haired man flitting over the crowded quay. Round a team of horses, past a derrick, past a wagon, he was just a movement at the corner of my eye. Then he vanished in the curve below the Dragon's bow, and I trained my spyglass there. But he never came out on the other side, and he never went back again. If I had seen him at all, he had disappeared.

  The sun crossed above the mast and started down before our job was finished. But at last I heard the thump of hatches slamming closed and looked down to see the men tramping from the deck. Our signal flags were lowered and our lines were cast away. And the Dragon, freed again, headed for the sea.

  Where once we had run before the wind, now we tacked against it. Back and forth across the harbor, shore to shore, we went. At each side we rounded up and turned again. Stuffed with barrels, the Dragon was slow and almost sluggish. But the tide was behind her, and she beat her way from the sheltered harbor and out beyond the cape.

  No longer did she rise to meet the waves. She battered through them, drenched with spray; she lunged, and tossed, and smashed a passage north toward the shores of England.

  And before another dawn had risen, one of us aboard her would die upon her decks.

  Chapter 10

  CANNONS IN THE FOG

  France was wreathed in fog, twenty miles behind us, when a sail was sighted far to windward. Captain Crowe took his spyglass and climbed the mainsail hoops, “to have a squint,” said he.

  Mathew and the cook were huddled at the bows. Dasher was beside me at the wheel. I kept the Dragon by the wind and held her steady on her course. But still the captain swung madly across the sky, clinging to the wooden bands as the schooner thrashed along. Though the wind was warm, the spray was bitterly cold, and he wore his boat cloak now to shield himself against it. The cloth flapped against his arms and streamed out behind him.

  From the deck, the distant sail looked like nothing more than another whitecap among the thousands leaping in the Channel. Yet even as I watched, it grew larger, looming up from the seas, as though a swirl of spindrift had taken shape to come bearing down upon us.

  “A cutter,” shouted Captain Crowe. “Coming fast. She's laid a course across our bows.”

  Already I could see the curves of her headsails. She was flying toward us, down the wind.

  “Come about!” roared Captain Crowe.

  I spun the wheel. The Dragon hurled herself across the waves, and the men at the bows leapt toward the jib sheets. Captain Crowe, halfway to the crosstrees, was tossed from side to side as the mast came straight and heeled again. His cloak billowed up around his head, and he beat it down as he struggled with the spyglass.

  The approaching sail grew wider.

  “She'll come behind us now,” shouted Captain Crowe. He swung the spyglass from bow to stern and round again, as though he might find a place in that empty sea in which to hide a schooner.

  The cutter was faster than our Dragon, and she slowly grew as she closed the distance. She was thirty tons or more.

  Captain Crowe came down the hoops. He went straight to the weather rail. In his hands, the spyglass shrank and grew, and it made a tapping sound as the pieces slid together. “Twenty miles to France,” he said. “Twenty miles to home. Whatever we do, they devils there will run us doon like dogs.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  He gave me barely a glance. “Who do ye think?” said he.

  The smugglers, of course. They had waited out the weather and found us now fleeing for home, laden with the cargo that was theirs. “She'll likely be armed to the teeth,” the captain had said. And he watched her now with fear in his eyes.

  “She's got the weather gauge,” he said. “Damn this wind.” He peered over the side, then off toward the cutter. “Bring her a point to leeward,” he shouted at me. “By and large, ye hear?”

  Dasher grinned. “By and large. Oh, there's a lovely bit of talk.”

  I spun the wheel, and the Dragon lurched around to take the waves farther down her side. The sails bellied full, and she hurried along, faster now by a knot or more. “By and large,” I said.

  The Dragon thundered on across the Channel, and all of us aboard watched by turns the sea ahead and the cutter behind. I could see the power in her swollen, bulging sails, and her bowsprit, now thrusting from the sea.

  “Three hours and
she'll be on us,” said Captain Crowe.

  Our bowsprit climbed above the waves, then dropped and rose again in a plume of silvered mist. I heard the roaring from the dragon figurehead and the thrumming of the mainsail leech, loud and steady.

  The waves came tumbling down and pitched us over, and the mainsail boom slammed against the sea. The sails were spattered dark with spray, pouring water from tack and clew, as though the Dragon sweated from her headlong rush to England.

  I could feel the weight she carried. It dragged her down and made the sea run high and thick around her counter. No longer did she gallop like a magical stallion; she'd become a draft horse, fat and trudging, maned with spindrift.

  And the cutter closed the distance.

  “She goes better with a corpse behind her,” said Dasher, with a nervous laugh. “Where's a dead man when we need oner

  “Stow it,” said Crowe. He stood at the weather rail, his fingers hooked like talons to the wood, his cloak tangled in the wind. He looked like a part of the ship, not moving at all as the deck rolled and plunged. He never took his eyes from the cutter.

  The other two had moved to the foremast shrouds, as close to the stern as ever I'd seen them, except for their turns at the wheel. They held to the ropes and peered to windward, and again I wondered which of them had come to me in the darkness. And was the other the man I had to fear, the one least Likely? I studied their faces, but neither gave the slightest sign of seeing me there at all. As one man, they watched the cutter. All of us, we watched it coming closer.

  Then, suddenly, Dasher started singing. His voice was rich and powerful, his song so deeply sad that I felt it beating time within my heart. On the vastness of the stormy sea, in the peril of that moment, I felt as though he sang us to our doom. The cutter came in full sight, the water splitting across her bow into tumbling streaks of foam. She heeled and straightened, dipped toward us and away, and I saw the men, thirty or more, upon her decks.

  Dasher sang; he faced ahead, and the spray ran like tears along his whiskers.

  “He rode the highways of the night;

  His milestones were the stars.

  Past Polaris and Andromeda,

  Round Jupiter and Mars.”

  At the cutter's bow, a tarpaulin mushroomed in the wind. It flew away to leeward, and a dozen men fought to bring it in. And underneath it, gleaming black, was the barrel of a cannon.

  There was a cry from forward, and Mathew thrust an arm through the shrouds, pointing at the cutter. Captain Crowe seemed to tilt toward the sea as the Dragon rolled to windward. And Dasher sang with aching melancholy.

  “A phantom horse of moonstone shod

  A rider swathed in shrouds

  And a maiden fair who longs to hear

  His thunder in the clouds.”

  “Shut up, I told you!” roared Captain Crowe. He whirled round, his face red with anger. “Batten down your trap, ye hear?”

  The song dwindled into nothing, and I heard again the roaring of the sea, the drumbeat of the mainsail.

  “Ye great dandified noddy. Ye lummox,” bellowed Captain Crowe. He was either very angry or very, very scared. “I'm sick o'ye. I'm sick o'your larks and your airs. And I'm sick o' the sight o' they damned corks ye're aye wearing.”

  The grin trembled on Dasher's lips. He tried to hold it there but couldn't, and he turned away, as though to study the sea at the leeward rail. The Dragon rolled, and the tilt of the deck made me soar above him, until he seemed very small, like a little boy dressed for a childish game in his pathetic suit of corks.

  “Ye're a blether,” said the captain, still ranting at Dasher. “Ye're full o' prattle and rubbish. No heart for killing, ye say. Weel, I hope to hear ye singing when ye're dancing in a noose.” Then he turned on me, his eyes like furnace doors. “And you,” he said. “I should – ”

  His sentence went unfinished. A cloud of smoke jetted from the cannon's mouth, and a long moment later the sound reached us. It shook the very air; it rattled in my bones. Then the sea beyond our bowsprit erupted in a geyser, and already the tiny, distant figures were swabbing out the barrel.

  “They missed,” I said.

  “Och, they weren't aiming for us, ye gowk!” yelled the captain.

  Dasher smiled at me. A pathetic smile. “Not yet,” he said. “But soon enough, my friend. A warning shot, was all that was. And when they tire of their little game, they'll bring the sticks down, John. Just you wait and see.”

  Captain Crowe pushed me from the wheel. He took the spokes in his enormous fists and sent the Dragon reeling down the wind. So suddenly did he turn the ship that I barely kept my balance. Dasher didn't; he fell across the planks with a thud and squeal, as though his corks were mice that he had landed on.

  We twisted through the waves, and the cutter twisted with us, coming always closer. Again we saw the cannon fire; again we heard the awful thunder of its blast, then saw the ball land close ahead. With every puff of smoke I cringed inside, for a ball of iron weighing nine pounds or more was rushing through the air, and it seemed the gun was aimed at only me.

  Captain Crowe turned his face toward the wind and sniffed. “Ye smell that?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Fog. I dinna see it, but I smell it right enough.” He went up on his toes, squinting like a badger. “A few minutes more; that's all we need.”

  “Show them a flag,” said I. “The ensign.”

  He frowned. “Och, ye're daft.”

  “No,” I said. “We could hoist it, and … They wouldn't shoot at the ensign, would they?”

  Crowe stared at me. Then his face twisted into his old and cunning smile. “O' course,” he said. “Damn my eyes, I might have thought o' that myself.” He laughed and clapped my shoulder. “Ye've got the wheel,” he said, and took himself below.

  Dasher had hauled himself up from the deck. He adjusted his corks and shook his hair. “He's a mean old cove,” he said. “But he's never wrong about the fog.”

  In a moment Crowe was back, and he thrust a bundled flag into my hands. “Here,” he said. “Dasher, give him a hand.”

  We clapped the ensign on the halyard, and the wind tore it loose into a flurry of white and red and blue. But in our haste, I saw, we'd set it upside down, the sign of a ship in trouble.

  “Leave it,” said Dasher. “We're in distress all right, I guess.” But I turned it straight, and hand over hand we hoisted the flag to the gaff. It snapped and flogged against the topping lift, the big red cross and the Union Jack flashing in the wind.

  Dasher gazed up at it, then aft at the cutter. “Oh, they're talking now,” he said. “They're wondering, all right. 'That's a king's ship up there,' they're saying. And now there's someone asking, 'Why's the navy running like a thief?' ” He laughed. “That's a sight they won't see every day.”

  The flag gained us only a moment. Then the cutter, rolling on a crest, fired again, far across our bow. And a dab of color appeared at her peak, streaming in the wind. They had hoisted the same white ensign.

  “Oh, that's droll,” said Dasher. “Sometimes I think we're all in the navy out here.”

  I watched the distant flag curl and stiffen from the cutter's gaff. It was a strange sort of joke, I thought, for a smuggler to answer our ensign with another. I said, “Maybe it is the navy. That might be a revenue cutter.”

  “Too far to tell,” said Dasher.

  “I'll fetch the captain's spyglass.”

  I turned to go, but Dasher held me back. “Too late for that,” he said.

  For a moment I was angry, and I tried to shake off his hand. But Dasher had caught me off balance, and I stumbled back against the cushion of his corks. One of them broke loose and bounced across the deck.

  “Look there,” he said, pointing at the cutter.

  A band of clouds, laced with blue and yellow, tumbled in behind her, rising up in feathered wisps like steam upon a cauldron. The sky grew darker; the sea began to simmer.

  “Fog,” cried Da
sher. He laughed; he danced a little jig. “Bless that poor old Captain Haggis. He's right again. He always is.”

  It came quickly then, spreading across the water, billowing up against the sun. It touched the cutter and made a ghost of her, a gray and frightful ghost.

  And the pattern of her shooting changed. With a shriek that scared the daylights from me, a ball passed overhead. It left a round and perfect hole in the belly of the mainsail, like a piece of sky pasted on the canvas. And the next shot came right after, in a moment that was utter terror. I heard the whistle of the ball and, already looking up, saw the tip of the foresail gaff shatter into splinters.

  Dasher ducked behind the rail. His face looked suddenly old, suddenly very scared. “Oh, ho!” said he, with a grimace meant to be a grin. “They're down to business now.”

  And the cutter vanished altogether.

  A waft of fog seemed to hang above the Dragon's bow, then swirl around the masts. We raced through it, and through another after, and then the sun went out, and all our world was white. I couldn't see as far as the wheel; I could hardly see the water right below. And with every nerve atingle, I waited for the next ball to come speeding straight toward me.

  The Dragon tilted heavily as Captain Crowe brought her up to windward. But he wasn't quick enough. I heard again that dreadful whistle, and right behind it a human scream, an awful, chilling shriek. The Dragon, head to wind, shivered like a frightened horse, and the scream rose high, then went on and on.

  “He's done for,” Dasher said, cowering by the rail. In his voice I heard the horror that I felt. “Good God, the captain's dead.”

  Chapter 11

  NO TASTE FOR BLOOD

  We ran forward through the fog and found the wheel empty, turning by itself. Of Captain Crowe there was no sign at all, as though he'd vanished from the schooner. Dasher was almost frantic. He looked down in the scuppers and behind the binnacle.

  “Captain Crowe!” he shouted. “Captain Crowe!”