The Captain`s Vengeance

musket in his hands, fired, and whooped with joy to see him tumble over and sprawl, instantly lifeless.

'Pick your targets… make 'em count, lads! Take aim, and…fire!' Lt. Devereux commanded, sweeping his sword blade chopping down.

'Merde!' Boudreaux Balfa gawped at the first shots, eyes fixed on the approaching shalope with her gunports open. 'Oh, merde! We be up 'shit's creek.' Fusilier? Viens ici, son, come here, quick.'

'He's not aboard,' Pierre La Fitte told him as he scrambled up from below-decks. 'He and Jean went ashore… after you went to sleep.'

'What? I told him…!'

'They went to see the girls, get, ah…' Pierre confessed.

'Damn you! Damn your little brother, too! Fusilier get poxed, by damn I kill you both!' Balfa vowed. 'We gonna lose de prize, maybe lose Le Revenant, we don't act quick. Get de men together, take dem to Lanxade, so he can man de guns! I cut de cables, an' let dis bitch go on de tide. Move, man! Vite, vite, allons!'

'I get my little brother,' Pierre objected. 'The Spanish have us for certain. All we can do is run for it, And I won't let those salauds hang him. I'm taking a boat for shore, then…' Pierre backed his decision with a hand about the hilt of a large dagger. 'You can do what you like.'

'Mutinous dog!' Balfa sneered, spitting at the man's feet. 'Go, den! Run wit' your tail 'tween your legs, faithless son of a whore!'

Pierre was overside in a twinkling, paddling like mad in one of the hollow-log pirogues. Balfa shouted for his remaining sailors to go to Le Revenant and man the guns; he'd take care of their prize and all their silver. He'd be with them in a twinkling. Or… not.

That damned Pierre was right, things were all up with them, and it was time to obey the old maxim of sauve quie peut; run like hell and save what one could! Balfa ran forward and plucked a heavy boarding axe from the foremast arms chest. He stood, straddling the nine-inch anchor cable a moment later, and began to hack at it. It took only a few powerful strokes to part it, then leap out of the way as the last strands exploded apart, the inner end snapping inboard, and the bitter end slithering into the murky depths of the bay.

The Spanish schooner began to sidle sternward, driven by an incoming tide, began to make a slight leeway, even under bare poles, to the faint land breeze. Balfa ran aft and quickly did the same to the stern kedge-anchor cable, but realised that the prize would drift 'til she took the ground on Grand Terre, perhaps no more than two miles to the west. He'd have to burn her.

Bare feet thundering on the mid-ships companionway, Boudreaux Balfa dashed below and snatched a lit lanthorn from a hook set in one of the overhead deck beams. And, dire as things looked, he started to grin a sly little grin.

He and his Acadian friends and neighbours had gotten a bit more than carried away shifting coin kegs during the night, like they would when snacking on the peanuts their slaves insisted on growing. Greedy arms and hands had loaded hundreds of silver-filled barricos aboard a fleet oi pirogues, flatboats, and luggers, leaving only half the 1,200 kegs that had been aboard. Six hundred thousand Spanish dollars!

'Spanish never know where it go,' Balfa mused, starting to titter and wheeze over his little geste. 'Dem bebes and Jerome never know, neither!'

By the light of the lanthorn in his meaty paw, Balfa lumbered all the way forward to the cable-tiers and the Spanish bosun's stores. He ripped out fresh, resiny spare planking, rigging rope, loose oakum bales, and kegs of paint and linseed oil, and liberally sluiced down the cable-tiers and the decks. Another lanthorn hung overhead, but not for long. It was filled with whale oil, already hot and runny from being lit all night, and at once it made a dandy splash of fire.

Amidships, there were looted sea chests, hammocks and bed linen by the bale, too, and a second lanthorn set them alight quickly. Aft, the mates' and captain's quarters were full of papers and trash, with even more lanthorns available. His tortuous straw mattress, torn open and scattered, went up in a twinkling, and serve it right for his itches, by damn!

Balfa went over-side to larboard, what had been the dark, unlit side the night before, where a last little flatboat trailed from its painter at the foot of the main-mast chain platform. With two pistols in his belt, a dagger and cutlass on the boat's sole, Balfa freed the boat and began to row round the schooner to go save his boy.

'Take aim… fire!'

Atop their earthen mound, the first crackle of musketry snapped the de Guilleris from their rough beds as if a bolt of lightning struck the hillock, all sudden blue-white light, sizzle, and thunder crack! Hippolyte and Helio, sharing a lean-to, both sat up quickly, gasping as if throwing off a shared and terrifying nightmare, cracking heads on the bound-together saplings in a flurry of arms and legs and thrashing blankets, their eyes blared owl-wide in alarm. They were bootless and coatless, their weapons laid handily aside, but for long moments, any thought of dressing or arming themselves was lost in shaky fumblings as they tangled with each other… even as a second harsh volley rattled out, and shouts and screams assailed their ears. Hippolyte crawled to the open end of the lean-to and began to stand with a boot in hand, hopping as he raised his foot to draw it on, but the humming of musket balls past his head, and his older brother's sweeping arm, threw him fiat. 'Keep down!' Helio growled in his ear. Regaining his wits faster than Hippolyte, Helio groped for his boots, writhed on his side to don them, then belly-crawled on his elbows and knees for his weapons. 'Rubio! Jean!' Helio yelled.

'We're with you!' Don Rubio shouted back, from behind the lean-to he shared with Jean-Marie Rancour. Both had slithered out to hide behind its insubstantial shelter, dragging boots, clothes, and rifled muskets with them. 'Charite? Stay down, cherie. 'We'll deal with it!'

Don Rubio stomped into his boots and fastened his sword about his waist. He clapped his egret-plumed wide hat on his head, flung up the tarpaulin that had covered the lean-to, and reached between the saplings for his pistols to jam into his waistband, then warily stood up, hands working the complicated mechanism of his Girandoni air-rifle. A fresh air-flask buttstock had to be screwed on, the magazine under the barrel topped off with lead balls.

'Mon Dieu, merde alors!' Jean-Marie quavered as he gathered up his clothes and guns, hands visibly shaking and his white face pinched. 'Who is it, Rubio, what's happening?'

Don Rubio Monaster didn't answer him. The son of a pure-blooded Spanish hidalgo, a genuine Creole, did not panic, as that weak-kneed Rancour boy did. He was horn to command, born to lead lesser people!

His eyes did widen in shock, though, much as Jean-Marie's did, to witness the camp and its doings. Their bold pirates, the hangers-on, and the whores were dashing about like witless chickens, scrabbling in their bedding for their portable loot or their weapons, crying aloud in chaos, and not knowing which way to stumble! They swarmed as unknowing as bees from a hive that someone had shot from long-distance, wheeling and darting ready for vengeance, but unable to discover where the shooter was.

'There! At the shell mounds!' Don Rubio cried, pleased that he could

keep his head, feeling that he was as sanguine as a professional soldier to react so quickly and so well. 'Jean, your rifle, quickly. Helio, Hippolyte! The shell mounds! Shoot at them!' Another volley was fired from the shell heaps, the powder smoke almost hiding a ragged double line of men dressed like sailors!

'Garde vous, mes braves!'Rubio bellowed down to their sailors. 'There is the enemy, in the oyster piles! To arms, I tell you, and fight them!'

On the next mound east, where some sentries had been posted, he saw from the corner of his eye a buccaneer or two raise their muskets and shoot back, which cheered him greatly. A second later, there was a lone cracking discharge, and one of the sentries screamed as he was struck in the forehead, his skull and brains erupting in a gory