Deadly Shoals (9 page)

“Of course, sir, once we have daylight.”

“And pilot us up the river?”

“Of course,” said the pilot promptly, and repeated the word, “Sir,” at the prospect of such a lucrative commission. Then he invited them all to partake of liquid hospitality, but much to the regret of the seamen Mr. Peale firmly but politely turned the offer down, and after making arrangements for the pilot to come on board in the morning, he led the way out of the cabin.

It was a lot easier for the boat's crew to find the schooner than it had been for them to locate the landing place, because someone on the
Sea Gull
had been brave enough to hang lanterns in the rigging. Then, with a hail and a click, the bow of the boat touched the side of the schooner, and with a single jump Wiki arrived on deck. He had never called on the 110-ton craft before, but he had visited her sister ship, the schooner
Flying Fish,
and stepping on board was just as easy. Not only was the little craft only a fraction higher out of the water than the boat but she had hardly any bulwarks.

It was even easier to recognize the tall figure of Captain Ringgold, with his flop of fine, fair hair, and patrician, clean-shaven features. One of the older members of the expedition at the age of thirty-seven, he was also one of the most popular, known for running a taut and happy ship. However, he looked irate enough as he bellowed at the boat's crew, “What the devil do you mean by bringing one of those goddamned desperadoes on board?”

“It's Wiki Coffin,” Mr. Peale informed him, arriving on board.

“Wiki Coffin?” echoed Ringgold, and swung round and had another look. “Wiki, why the hell are you rigged up as a gaucho?” he demanded, losing none of his aggression. “Is it on account of the war? Are you pretending to be some sort of spy?”

“Not at all,” said Wiki. “And there isn't any war—it was just a comical mistake. As for me, I was simply investigating a robbery, only it turned out to be a murder. Tell me,” he went on, “did you happen to raise a sealer when you were on the way into the coast?”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

And Wiki proceeded to explain.

Five

January 27, 1839

“Forget this murder,” Captain Ringgold crisply instructed in the morning.

Wiki frowned. “Just like that?” He and Ringgold were standing on the diminutive deck of the schooner, watching the boat being put overboard ready for a return to shore. The early wind was chilly, and Wiki pulled his poncho closer.

“Even a blind fool could see what happened. Adams stole the schooner after he bought her from Hallett, sent her upriver to load with salt, packed goods from his own store to provision her, and then was murdered by some local ruffian who dumped his corpse in the desert and sailed off with the prize. It's a matter for the governor's attention, not ours. Report it to him, and put it out of your mind. Do you hear me?”

“Aye, sir,” said Wiki, though he wondered what Stackpole would say about it, and wondered, too, if the whaling master had had any luck in tracking down either Hallett—who might not be as innocent as Captain Ringgold suggested—or the clerk. He also thought that if Ringgold had been the one to find the half-buried corpse, he would not be nearly so dismissive of the matter.

“And you should've reported to the governor the moment you arrived in El Carmen,” Ringgold continued, quite unaware of this. “Even a blithering idiot could see that informing him the expedition was on the way would've prevented all this panic and confusion. And why the devil did you cut your hair?” he demanded with a disconcerting change of subject. “At least it was
tidy
when you tied it back, even though it made you look like an out-of-work opera singer, but now it's a bloody disgrace.”

“I thought the bandanna would keep it neat,” protested Wiki, who had no intention whatsoever of revealing the romantic reason for cutting his hair.

“It's mostly on account of that red rag that you look like a rascal of a gaucho. You're damned lucky you weren't shot as a spy during the fright about the French,” opined Ringgold, who appeared to have spies on the brain. “Or hanged,” he went on meditatively. “Did you know that the great Connecticut patriot Nathan Hale, the first American spy of the Glorious Revolution, was hanged by the British?”

“Good heavens, was he?” murmured Wiki.

“He was,” Ringgold assured him. “And where the hell is the pilot? Mr. Peale was positive he'd be here by dawn to get us up the river.”

Wiki looked around. Mr. Peale—like the pilot—was nowhere to be seen. “It seems we have to fetch the pilot from the pilothouse,” he said, and followed Ringgold into the boat, where a boat's crew was ready to pull them ashore.

To their consternation and dismay, as they arrived on the riverbank a guard of lancers galloped around a bend, hauled their steeds to a stop, and jumped down with leveled weapons. The boat's crew and Captain Ringgold beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the boat, while Wiki explained the situation to the man who was in charge of the squad. Finally, to his relief, the pikes and cutlasses were lowered, and Ringgold bravely stepped ashore. Then the chief guard revealed that though they were still very jumpy about the rumored French invasion, their real mission was to arrest the pilots and carry them off to the fort.

“For God's sake, why?” Ringgold demanded, after Wiki had conveyed this.

“It seems that agreeing to pilot a foreign vessel without getting permission from the governor first is a heinous offense.” The crime, Wiki thought, was trivial enough, but the state of the two pilots when they were dragged out of their cabin was pitiable. As they were hauled off in shackles they begged Captain Ringgold to intercede for them, vowing their lives were at stake.

Ringgold scarcely listened. Instead, as the lancers cantered off down the riverside path with the pilots in tow, he fell into a fit of swearing. He had good reason, Wiki admitted. Since she had grounded, the
Sea Gull
had been sitting relatively still, but now, as they could all see from the riverbank, with the ebb tide she was starting to thump up and down.

Then Ringgold's flow of invective was abruptly interrupted. A man stepped out of the scrub, glanced around in a surreptitious fashion to make sure that the troopers had left, and then offered his piloting services in good American English.

He was a weathered man in his thirties, with a short beard that was redder than his brown hair. Though not large in stature, he carried such a strong impression of an electric abundance of energy that he seemed bigger than his size. He also had wonderful self-confidence. Everyone stared in silence, completely confounded by this sudden apparition, but this didn't faze him in the slightest. Stepping up to Captain Ringgold with his hand outstretched, he announced in hearty Yankee tones, “Benjamin Harden, junior, at your service.”

Instead of shaking hands, Ringgold took a quick pace backward, saying with disgust, “You're an
American
?”

“Was left behind by my ship in Buenos Aires quite some years ago,” said this fellow, not put out in the slightest. “Came here to make my pile, sir—an ambition that has remained unrealized, unfortunately.”

Ringgold stared him up and down, and then observed to Wiki, without bothering to lower his voice, “He's nothing but a confounded adventurer!”

“There's two or three of them around here, sir, or so Captain Stackpole told me,” Wiki told him.

“Good God. What's our great nation coming to?”

Wiki was saved from finding an answer by Harden himself, who abruptly improved his position by revealing, “I have my Protection, sir.”

Ringgold's brows shot up, and Wiki was equally surprised. The Seaman's Protection was a slip of paper testifying that the bearer was a citizen of the United States, with the right to apply to a U.S. consul for help if he was sick, marooned, or shipwrecked. Any American seaman who failed to go to the local customshouse and get this certificate before he sailed was foolish, as it was valuable evidence of his identity. However, if Harden had been adrift in South America for years, as he claimed, it was amazing that he'd managed to retain it.

While they all watched, Harden felt around in the interior of his shirt, and hauled it out. The captain stared at him for a long moment before taking it, and then gave it only a brief look. “You're a Rhode Islander?”

“Born in Providence thirty-five years ago, sir, just the way it says there.”

“And you reckon you can pilot our schooner off the sandbar?”

“And back out to the fleet, sir.”

“Not up the river to El Carmen?”

“Ain't possible, sir, not with the tide against us.” Harden licked a finger, wetting it, and then held it up in the air, reminding them all that there was no breeze at all, let alone one that would help waft the
Sea Gull
upriver.

Another pause. Then Ringgold nodded, and handed the paper back. “All right,” he grunted. “Come on board and navigate her off the sandbank and into deeper water, so we can get her a hundred or so fathoms upstream with the sweeps. Then we'll discuss what happens next.” He turned to Wiki, and said abruptly, “Since we're going to El Carmen by land, I need horses.”

“How many horses?”

“Lieutenant Perry will come, and I'll take Mr. Waldron, and Mr. Hale, too—so we need four, quick as you can.”

Wiki had heard of all three men before, though the only one he had met personally was Mr. Waldron, the purser of the
Vincennes
and one of Captain Wilkes's particular cronies. Wiki had noticed Mr. Waldron on board the
Sea Gull
the night before, but had not paid much attention to anyone else. The schooner had been extremely crowded, having two surgeon-scientists on board as well as Mr. Peale and the crew of fifteen men, and Wiki's major goal had been to find a place to sleep—which had turned out to be within the folds of a spare sail stowed on the foredeck, where he had reposed quite comfortably, wrapped securely in his poncho.

Now, realizing that the crowd must have included Mr. Hale, who was the expedition philologist, he wondered why the oddly named Titian Peale was not taking part in the jaunt to El Carmen. And what about the two surgeon-scientifics? Wiki knew only one, Dr. Fox, by sight—not just because he lived on the
Vincennes,
but also because he was a native of Salem, Massachusetts, Captain Coffin's hometown. John Fox was only three years older than Wiki himself, and during Wiki's first year or so in Salem, he had often seen him walking in and out of the prestigious Salem Latin School, where he was a noted scholar. The other surgeon looked equally high-toned and intelligent, so why had the pair been excluded?

Wiki wasn't foolish enough to ask. Instead, as soon as the boat had pushed off for the
Sea Gull
with the new pilot on board, he went back to the pilots' cabin. His mare, thankfully, was still tethered to the hitching post, the lancers having forgotten to steal her. She shied madly when she saw him, greatly disliking the prospect of another jaunt, and it took several minutes to get the saddle cinched. Then she bucked and kicked viciously when Wiki grabbed a hank of mane, set a bare toe on her knee, and jumped on board.

Curbing her with difficulty, Wiki set off along the top of the headland for the
estancia
where he and Stackpole had hired the horses. So much had happened in the meantime that when the silvery fence and then the cluster of buildings came into sight, it seemed much more than two days since he'd been here last. The
estanciero
had no trouble remembering him, though. Another bout of bargaining commenced, and then, after signing a paper on behalf of Captain Ringgold, Wiki led a string of four ponies back, to find the schooner a half-mile farther upstream, well out of the shoals and bobbing serenely at her anchors. Obviously, Harden had made good his boast that he could pilot her to safety.

However, another crisis had arisen. To Wiki's consternation, when he got to the landing place on the riverbank, he found the six men of the boat's crew holding a posse of gauchos at bay with pistols and rifles, while Ringgold and three companions watched from the safety of the boat.

“They're friends,” Wiki hastily said.

The gauchos were, in fact, Manuel Bernantio and his men. They sat at ease in their great sheep-fleece saddles, not even deigning to notice the seamen, who looked scared to death despite their armament. Bernantio was smoking, while others scraped at tobacco plugs with the enormous cut-down swords they used as knives, the little squares of paper they used for making their cigars gripped between their bare toes.

“
Friends?
They look even more rascally than you do, Wiki,” Ringgold declared, stepping from boat to shore. “What the devil do they want?”

Wiki asked Bernantio, tactfully rephrasing what Ringgold had said. Then he turned back and said, “They say you need an armed escort to El Carmen, the countryside being in a ferment, still. For a sum, they are willing to provide it.”

“H'm!” said Ringgold, thinking this over. “How much?”

Wiki told him, noticing at the same time that Bernantio watched him with the fond expression of a man contemplating a continued source of wealth.

“Do any of them speak English?”

Wiki shook his head.

“Then you will have to come to translate.”

And to report to the governor, Wiki silently added, and see if Stackpole had managed to track down the clerk and Hallett in the meantime. He was surprised, though, that Horatio Hale, the philologist—who was supposed to be expert in the science of languages—was not expected to interpret.

As it happened, when the three other men stepped out of the boat, he was not at all sure which of the two younger ones was Mr. Hale, because both were wearing lieutenant's undress uniform of dark blue trousers and claw-hammer coat, and a round hat with a beak. One, according to what Ringgold had said, was Lieutenant Perry, while the other was the twenty-one-year-old philologist. But which was Perry, and which was Hale? And why was a scientific wearing lieutenant's dress?