Pirate

I pushed my way through two palmetto palms, cursing as I cut my forearm on a stray branch, and entered the clearing. “What! No watch and a fire?” I looked around at Red, Swift, Johnnie, and Syd. “Where’s Rhames?” I asked, as I looked back at the men to see if they had the pistol aimed at me.

“Over by the boats. Probably sleeping,” Red said. “Tough bastard—that one.”

“Finish cooking and get that fire out before dark. We need to move and put more water between us and them before we stop for the night.” I said.

“Aye, but they’ve no boats. We trashed and holed the canoes left behind. They won’t be coming by water,” he said.

“Truth be told, we don’t know how or with what force they will come after us with, but they will.” I didn’t need to say anything else, as Rory entered the clearing and caught the eyes of the men.

I watched their reaction, trying to gauge if any would be trouble, when I saw Johnnie flinch. Was it in recognition, or did he feel the same things that I did when I looked at her? She walked toward the fire and took a piece of meat off the stick that was holding it. We had smoked all the turtle, so there would be no need to cook that. I looked around the clearing and saw the carcass of a four-foot gator, then turned to the sky, thankful that no buzzards had sensed it as they would alert the Indians to our location.

The meat appeared cooked, and I doused the fire, using the hard base of a dead palm frond as a shovel. “I need to check on Rhames,” I said to the group, then looked at Rory, who I hoped would follow and walked out of the clearing toward the boats.

He sat in the stern of one of the longboats, propped against the seat. His eyes were wide open; a vacant look was on his face, and I had a moment of panic as I thought he was dead. Finally he snapped out of his trance, looked at the girl, but spoke to me, “See, you’ve found a bit of trouble there, boy.”

“It had to be done. I couldn’t leave her with those heathens,” I replied, unsure how a real pirate would have acted.

“Aye, but now we’ve got more trouble than Lafitte and the Navy.” He sat up.

“We should have lost them by now. No one goes this far upriver.”

He turned his gaze to me. “No one but a bunch of pirates with treasure. They’ll follow us through the gates of hell for what we’ve got in these chests.”

I turned to the chests. “Right. So we should move out,” was all I could think to say. It seemed that leading was much easier when we were moving than when we were camped.

“Think we might at least want to know who’s after us? If they’re fighters and how they’re armed,” he said.

“How would we know?” I asked, and shrunk as I watched him turn toward Rory.

“Got a name, girl?” he asked.

“Rory,” she responded. “And they are properly equipped to fight you. They hunt with the bow, but they have firearms.”

I watched her recount their manpower and armaments, feeling stupid, as I had spent most of the day fixated on her beauty and ignoring her brain. As she told Rhames about their ways, I swore I would not make the same mistake again.

“Hear that, boy? We’ve got plenty of trouble on our hands. I figure with rowing against the river and pulling the canoes that we made ten miles today. They know the land and even without boats they can be on us in minutes.”

I did the math in my head and realized he was right. A war band knowing their footing could easily make three, maybe four, miles an hour. The head start I thought we had was gone.

“Can you travel?” I asked him.

“Aye. Get the men.”

I watched his face and saw a twinge as he repositioned himself, but there was nothing to be done. “Stay with him,” I told Rory, and went back to the clearing to get the men.

They must have sensed my urgency, because they were already packed up and ready to leave. In minutes, we loaded the boats and were ready to push off. I felt the need to stay close to Rhames and Rory, and we took a longboat, hoping she could row as well as she handled the canoe.

“I can row,” she said, and sat by the port oar.

The other men sorted themselves out; two in the longboat pulling the canoes, as the other two pushed us off the bank before taking the canoe that Rory and I had brought. I was impressed again, watching Rory row. I kept watch behind us and cursed, as I noticed the first buzzard circle the camp.

“What’s that you’re thinking?” she asked.

Rhames cut me off, “The bird. It’ll surely attract the Indians.”

“Any luck it’ll be dark before they see it,” I said, as I watched the sun break the horizon behind us. As it sank, I noticed the grunts of the gators from the banks as they slid into the water for their evening hunt. I knew we were safe behind several inches of oak, and I tried to ignore them as we moved upriver.

I tried to quiz Rory about the geography here as we rowed, but we were well past the extent of her travels. The hours slipped numbly by as we ate up miles of water, and I was in the kind of trance a man can fall into when working monotonous labor.

Until I lost my oar—and my body shot forward.

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