Captain Caution by Kenneth Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

my smaller gifts."
    Marvin and Slade rose from their places to stand close beside him. "How do you know they've sent her below?" Marvin whispered. "What did you hear?"
    "I heard a rabbit!" Argandeau said. "That is something I make no mistake about, ever, because I have had great experience. I would not hear her unless she had come down the ladder."
    "How did you know she was frightened?" Marvin asked.
    "Rabbits are always frightened," Argandeau said calmly. "Also, this one is weeping, and she said to someone, 'Let me alone! Let me alonel' If you will listen, maybe you hear her."
    "Hoist me up," Marvin said. "Let me climb on your shoulders."
    "If you're thinking of trying to go up," Slade said, "you're madl You'll get a bayonet in the face and they'll clap the grating on the rest of usl"
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    "Hoist me upl" Marvin repeated. "She's not frightened! Nothing ever frightened her. There's something here I don't understand."
    They took him on their shoulders, steadying him by clutching his knees. He crouched just below the level of the hatch, listening. Beneath him the voices of the prisoners again swelled to a wild tumult of shouting. Marvin turned his head from side to side, striving to catch some sound from Corunna, but he could hear nothing save the cries of his comrades in misfortune, the lapping of the seas against the Beetle's bends and a rush of feet from the deck above.
    Argandeau shook him impatiently by the ankle. "What you thmk you are doing up there? Picking coconuts?"
    The words had scarcely left his lips when Marvin pitched sideways. The three of them fell in a heap. In the darkness of the hold the whole world seemed to reel and stagger. "Take caret" Argandeau said, and though his voice was gentle it almost echoed in the hold's dark stillness. "Guard yourselves! We luff to, and now will come something! Those who rest against the planking, move clear, unless you wish broken bones!" He quickly repeated the words in French.
    Beneath them the brig steadied, only to burst at once into a paroxysm of gigantic jerkings and tremblings, accompanied by a thunderous roar. She had, Marvin knew, let off her broadside, which must mean that the Beetle had come to close quarters with her adversary; for he had seen that the bulk of her guns were carronades, useful only at short range. His muscles ached from the tightness that had come into them a tightness that grew ever greater as he waited for the enemy vessel to let off her broadside in return.
    Into his mind there came a picture of the Arundel marshes, empty and silent within their walls of spruce and maple, and of a marsh hawk dropping with outspread claws on a helpless animal that could neither fight nor run, and so lay flattened against the marsh, waiting. He thought, too, how for years there had been glib talk of war in the shipyards and taverns of Arundel and a hundred other towns; and it came to him that not one of those who talked had ever thought of such a war as this a war in which men lay in the dark and hoped that death would pass them by.
    "Do you think they sank her?" he asked Argandeau, and he hurried his words, to get them out before they should be smothered and lost in the crash of the stranger's guns.
    "Hal" said Argandeau, and to Marvin his voice seemed somewhat breathless. "Not with carronades! You know what I think?" He made a faint sound of protest in his throat, as though he found some slight discomfort in the caked mud on which he rested.
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    "What?" Slade demanded, and his voice trembled with irritation. "Say it, damn itl"
    "What I think - "
    Again the mud beneath them jerked and shook, and continued to do so irregularly, as though the brig had burst into a spasm of gigantic coughs.
    Slade laughed harshly. "I should say they hadn t sunk her. That's random firing! That means the stranger's closing with us, and it's every gun crew for himself!"
    "What I think," Argandeau continued gently, "is that this stranger has one large