Tin Swift

scrambling down the netting, toward the windows.

He hung down off the netting, his harness line still attached to the Swift. If this was gonna get done, it’d have to be fast, before the lines fouled and he’d have to cut free.

That is, if he lived long enough to cut free.

He pulled his gun, shot the window, and then smashed the glass out of it with the heavy barbed end of the hook. No return fire, which meant he’d caught them away from the glass, maybe busy, say, trying to douse the flame crawling up the side of their ship.

He pushed in through the broken window. Not much slack on his line left, and he’d be damned if he was going to cut free to go any farther.

The smoke that rolled through the old tub was choking and hot. Captain Barlow was somewhere in that mess, shouting orders. The dim shape of men scurrying to do as their captain told them impressed Hink. Even though Barlow was a snake-bellied traitor, he knew how to run a tight ship.

If the Sledge had any luck still on her ledger, she might make it through this little debacle.

They say luck favors the brave and fortune favors fools. Hink decided that he must be just enough of both today. One of Barlow’s crewmen was shock-still and strapped to the side bar, likely watching his life march before his eyes. Hink didn’t have to take but a step or two before he was in front of the man.

“I’m commandeering your services, sailor.” Hink hit him across the back of the head with the blunt end of the hook. The man sagged and Hink took up some swearing as he pulled the extra hauling harness off of his belt and strapped it around the man. He attached a second line onto the rope that was latched to his own harness so they both had a chance to be pulled back up to the Swift.

“You better be worth the trouble,” Hink muttered as he lifted the man up across his shoulder and stomped back to the window.

Once he’d muscled the both of them out the hole and up the ropes on the outside of the ship, a yell from behind him clued him in that the crew had been stirred up. Then gunshots rang out, louder than the flames, louder than the fire, louder than old Barlow himself. Hink knew he’d better get off this puffer fast if he wanted to keep on living.

He pulled on the rope, three hard tugs in a row, and pushed away from the ship like a kid swinging for a water hole.

The added weight of the unconscious man on his harness near took the breath back out of him as they slammed into the side of the ship. But Mr. Seldom had caught his signal. Hink felt the jerk and pull of the rope winching upward.

The Swift’s engines changed tone as Guffin maneuvered her up and away from the foundering Black Sledge.

Hink glanced up at his ship. She was a shiny beauty, ghostlike and luminescent against the smoke and clouds. Even swinging the waltz on a string beneath her, he couldn’t help but smile.

The ground far, far below him twirled as he was hauled upward. The Black Sledge seemed to have done some fair good in putting out the fire, and was smoking downward at a relatively safe speed toward a green bowl of a valley cradled between two peaks. They might make it down just fine.

Or they might be stuck in the middle of a range, with little in the way of supplies and a winter storm bearing down.

As if reflecting on his thoughts, the sky flashed with a rattle of lightning, thunder rolling way up above the glim fields. Rain started off in spits that turned into a good hard-driven drizzle. Even at this height, it was still just rain and not ice or snow.

By the time Hink was reaching up for Mr. Seldom’s and Molly Gregor’s hands to haul him into the Swift, he was soaked down to his long underwear and shaking from the cold.

“Who’s this?” Molly asked of the man he deposited on the floor.

“Didn’t catch his name,” Hink said, shivering under the blanket she tossed over his shoulders.

“If you’re cold, Captain,” she said, “you can work the boilers on the way home.” Molly’s sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and sweat trickled down the side of her neck and glossed her cheeks. Every inch of her exposed skin was tanned and dusted with soot from the big engine.

Hink grinned. “Wouldn’t want to put you out of a job, Molly.”

“The way you handle a boiler?” She scoffed. “We’d be dead before sunrise. Captain,” she added.

Seldom finished unlatching the harnesses and ropes between Hink and their guest, and then dragged the man by the armpits off to one side where he could latch him into the straps and framework there and keep him from getting stepped on by the crew.

Hink shoved up to his feet and, holding the blanket around him, walked over to Guffin, at the wheel.

“Heading?”

“Due west. Thought we could bed down in one of the hollows there.”

“We got the guts for that, Molly?” Hink asked.

“We’ll need to take it slow, but she’ll get us there,” Molly said. “So long as the storm doesn’t kick up too strong.”

“Aim us over the ridge, Mr. Guffin,” Hink said. “Easy as you can.”

“Aye, Captain,” Guffin said.

Seldom stepped over to navigation and Lum Ansell kept steady where he was, humming a low song, as was his habit in the air.

Hink walked the planking, trying to pace the warm back into his bones and taking the time to think things through. Who he should have gone for was Barlow, not this ship plugger. For all he knew the man was new to the hills and didn’t have a darn idea of why Barlow was looking for him.

“He’s coming to,” Molly announced. “Want I should put the snore back in him?”

“No, he needs talking to, and I need to do the talking.” Captain Hink stopped pacing and stood in front of the man, who had a blanket thrown on him. Likely that was Molly’s doing. Sure, the man was a captive and they’d just as soon throw him out to kick the breeze if he so much as spit, but if he froze, they wouldn’t be able to chisel any words out of him.

Hink waited for the man to rouse himself enough to pull the blanket up around his chin and tuck his knees to his chest.

“Have a few questions for you, sailor,” Hink said. “And if you answer them nice and clear, and nice and true, I won’t have my second kick you out of this boat.”

He had to raise his voice enough to be heard over the engines and the wind and rain squalling around out there. From the rock and yaw of the Swift, it was darned clear they were airborne.

Hink watched as the man scratched the tally of each of those things in his brain.

“I don’t want no trouble,” he finally said. Well, croaked was more like it. The smoke and the cold had run roughshod over his vocals.

“Then we’re of an agreement,” Hink said. “No trouble. You give me answers, and I’ll see that your boots are planted on solid ground. Here’s question number one: who is Captain Barlow answering to?”

“Said his name was the Saint,” the man said.

Hink tried not to let his surprise show. The man jumped so quick into telling him the truth, it caught him quiet for a second. Which worked out just fine. The man must have interpreted Hink’s surprised silence as an invitation to keep on babbling.

“I don’t know anything else, mister. Captain,” the man said. “All I know is the cap said there’s a general who had a need for us to do our job and do it quickly.”

“What was your job?” Hink asked.

“Find Marshal Paisley Cadwaller Hink Cage and bring him in.”

“Paisley?” Molly said, smiling. “What kind of pansy-pants name is Paisley?”

Hink did not answer her, though he sent a glare in her direction that would have burned through steel. His mama had her reasons for giving him so many names.

“So once you found this marshal, what was it you were going to do to him?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “Take him to the Saint for the thing he was holding out Vicinity’s way.”

“Holding?” Hink said, bending down over the man. “What thing? What thing is the marshal holding?”