somebody, and smoked some of the meat. (I showed them some.) That was that. I was not French, and they must have known it, but I had been talking with Valentin for two or three weeks by then, and some of them spoke pretty bad French, too. There were five hunters, a pack of dogs, and a couple servants. The servants kept fires burning to keep off the mosquitoes while the rest of us slept.
Next day we went hunting. I got a good, clear shot at a bull and missed. At the end of the day, we had a calf, two cows, and a bull, none of them mine. We cleaned the carcasses and carried them back to camp, where the servants skinned them about as fast as I can write it, and started cutting up the meat to smoke.
I asked whether we were not going to save some for dinner, and the man I asked spat at my feet. His name was Gagne. He missed them and I think he meant to, but I did not like it. After that, one named Melind explained to me that by the Custom of the Coast no one could eat unless the hunting party killed at least as many animals as there were men in it. I just about ate some of the smoked meat I had brought with me that night when everybody else was asleep, but I did not.
We got six the next day, none of them mine. When we were back in camp and the servants were cooking for us, Gagne asked to see my dagger. I drew it and handed it to him. He looked at it in an admiring way and asked for the sheath. When I gave him that, too, he stuck my dagger back into it and put it in his belt.
When I asked him to return it he just cursed me, so I knocked him down, kicked him a couple of times, and took it back.
About the time I did that, the others grabbed me and told me we had to fight, Gagne and me. Melind explained that it would be a fair fight, which it was, with muskets.
Here is what we did. Melind paced off twenty paces for us just outside camp. We stood there, twenty paces apart, and fired our muskets into the air so we would each have a fresh load to fight with. After that we reloaded, pouring powder down the muzzle, ramming a ball, priming the pan, and so forth. Gagne was a lot faster than I was, and stood with the butt of his musket on the ground and the barrel in one hand while I finished. Melind made me stand like that, too.
'Now I'll count to three,' Melind told us in French. 'At the count of three, you're free to fire. If you both miss, you can reload and fire again if you choose. When one draws blood the combat is over.'
It meant I had to win with my first shot, because I had seen that Gagne could reload a lot faster. I figured he would be a lot faster to aim and shoot, too. So here is what I planned. I would shoot first, very fast, drop my musket, and run. It was almost dark, everybody was tired, and I figured I would have a good chance of getting away. I would get my musket back when they were asleep if I could. If I could not, I would live in the rain forest like Valentin until something else turned up.
Melind cleared his throat. I was not looking at him. Neither was Gagne. We were looking at each other.
'Un.' It seemed to take forever. 'Deux.' I was ready-so was he. I could see the hate in his eyes even twenty paces away. I knew what I was going to do.
'Trois!'
I jerked my musket up, pointed it at Gagne, and shot. My musket jumped up and back, but for some crazy reason I held on.
For a second or two, I lost Gagne in the smoke. When I saw him again, he was bent over. He had dropped his musket, and all I could do was stare at it. I was the one who was supposed to do that.
Melind went over to him and squatted down beside him. After a minute or two he stood up, told us Gagne was dead, and said we ought to eat now and get some sleep. Gagne was the first man I ever killed, and I prayed for him that night.
The next morning he was still there when we went out to hunt. I downed a bull with one shot that day although Joire had to shoot it again, in the head and up close, to finish it. By the time we got back to camp, the servants had done something with Gagne's body. I never did know what.
After that I hunted with the buccaneers for a couple of months. I made some good shots and missed some easy ones-if you are a hunter, you will know how that is. By the time we went to Tortuga, I was pretty good friends with all four of them.
It was a shantytown there, huts made out of whatever they could cut down roofed with palm fronds. You could buy just about anything, and that included white servants like Valentin had been and black slaves. People told me that the slaves got better treatment, usually. That was because you had the slave for life. If you bought a white servant for three years, and he died after two years and eleven months, why should you care? Look at all you had saved on his food! I watched some auctions, thinking that if there was a big price difference between Tortuga and Jamaica somebody could turn a quick buck. Prices were a little cheaper, maybe, but pretty much the same.
I bought a musket for Valentin, too, with a musket bag. And a pair of pants and a shirt. We wore leather, mostly, but I figured Valentin would not want to look like he'd been on the island a long time, so this was better. I wanted to get him a copper powder flask like mine, but they only had horns. The big end had a plug in it that you pulled out to fill it, and the little end had a little one you pulled out to pour the powder in the gun. That was what all the other buccaneers had. The bad thing about those horns is that you have to guess at the right amount or use a separate measure for the powder.
I asked about priming powder, and the shopkeeper had small horns for those. But he said you could just use the coarse powder and maybe grind it a little finer in the pan with the end of your finger. Nothing metal, because it might spark. So I just bought the big horn. It was too big to go in a musket bag. You just slung it over your shoulder on a cord.
By now you may have guessed what I almost forgot. It was not until the morning of the day we were going to leave that I remembered. Then I ran off quick and got a mirror, a comb, and a pair of scissors for Valentin.
I had been able to buy everything (and more besides, because I bought stuff for myself, too) from what I had made hunting. My money belt was still under my shirt. I had never let anybody see it, and I never touched the gold. When we were about ready to go, the others came to me one at a time, asking to borrow a little for things they really needed. Mostly it was powder, and lead to cast into bullets. They had gone through all the money they had made in months of hunting in just a few days-drank it, or gambled it away, or spent it on women. All three for most of them. I lent each of them a little because I wanted to get in good with them, but I kept the amounts small. They promised to pay me back before we went Tortuga again.
But to tell the truth, I was not sure I was ever going. Pretty soon a ship I liked that needed another hand was going to come by to buy our smoked meat. That was how I was thinking then. I kept thinking about the Windward, and how nice that had been. I was a good sailor by then, and I knew it.
So we paddled back to Hispaniola, me thinking to get a good berth and them just thinking to do more hunting as far as I know. We did hunt for a few more days, but before I get into that I ought to say that we had a piragua, a big boat made by hollowing out a tree, Native American fashion. They are very handy boats, those piraguas, although they do not have keel enough for you to put a mast and a sail in them. Or at least, a sail will not work very well unless the crew keeps its paddles in the water to stop the piragua from drifting too far to leeward.
The same day we got back to our camp, I went inland and found the cave, way up on a mountain, that Valentin and I had hidden our smoked meat in. I left the new musket and that musket bag there for him, and the mirror and so on. I left him my big powder flask, too, because by that time I had got to liking the horn so much I wanted to keep it. If you had asked me then, I would have said Valentin would be joining us in a few days. He never did, and pretty soon I was glad he did not. Now I wish he had.
It was not more than a day or two after we got back that the Spanish men-of-war came. There were three, one of about sixty guns, one of about forty, and a flushed-decked three-master of twenty. At first we thought they wanted to buy from us.
The officer who came talked to us in Spanish with the Castilian lisp. I could understand him, but nobody else could, and I played dumb. After that he used French about as bad as mine.
'This is the island of His Most Catholic Majesty,' he told us. 'You are here without his permission, which you will not receive. You are to depart it at once. If you do not, your lives are forfeit.'
Melind asked, 'Who is this who will kill us, Monsieur? You?'
The officer shook his head. 'His Most Catholic Majesty.'
'He must be a fine shot, Monsieur, to fire so from Madrid.'
We laughed, but the officer frowned, and the men who had rowed him ashore looked like they were ready to kill us. I counted a coxs'n and twenty-two at the oars of the longboat, and it looked like every man had been issued a pistol and a cutlass.
