Rapscallion by James McGee Read Free Book Online

halfway home already."
    The introduction
had been manufactured in the prison yard.
    Lasseur had been
by himself, back against the wall, enjoying the morning sun, an unlit cheroot
clamped between his teeth, when the two guards made their move. The plan would
never have been awarded marks for subtlety. One guard snatched the cheroot from
between Lasseur's lips. When the Frenchman protested, the second guard slammed
his baton into Lasseur's belly and a knee into his groin. As Lasseur dropped to
the ground, covering his head, the guards waded in with their boots.
    A cry of anger
went up from the other prisoners, but it was Hawkwood who got there first. He
pulled the first guard off Lasseur by his belt and the scruff of his neck. As
his companion was hauled back, the second guard turned, baton raised, and
Hawkwood slammed the heel of his boot against the guard's exposed knee. He
pulled his kick at the moment of contact, but the strike was still hard enough
to make the guard reel away with a howl of pain.
    By this time,
the first guard had recovered his balance. With a snarl, he swung his baton
towards Hawkwood's head. But the guard had forgotten Lasseur. The privateer was
back on his feet. As the baton looped through the air, Lasseur caught the
guard's wrist, twisted the baton out of his grip, and slammed an elbow into the
guard's belly.
    Shouts rang out
as other guards, wrongfooted by the swiftness of Hawkwood's intervention, came
running. It had taken four of them to subdue Hawkwood and Lasseur and march
them off into a cell.
    The clang of the
door and the rasp of the key turning in the lock had seemed as final as a
coffin lid closing.
    Lasseur's first
action as soon as the door shut was to take another cheroot from his jacket,
put it between his lips and ask Hawkwood if he had a means by which to light
it. Hawkwood had been unable to assist. Whereupon Lasseur had shrugged
philosophically, placed the cheroot back in his jacket, extended his hand and
said, "Captain Paul Lasseur, at your service." Then he'd grinned and
touched his ribs tentatively. "I suppose it was one way of getting a cell
to ourselves."
    Hawkwood hadn't
thought it would be that easy.
    Lasseur had
managed to maintain the devil-may-care facade up to the moment he'd seen the
men in the longboat being cast adrift from the hulk's side.
    Around them, the
other fresh arrivals assigned to the gun deck were also looking for places to
bed down. The invasion of their living quarters had caused most of the
established prisoners to pause in their tasks to take stock of the new blood.
The mood, however, seemed strangely subdued. Hawkwood wondered if the original
prisoners resented this further reduction of what was already a barely
adequate living space.
    Among the new
batch was the boy. He was standing alone, weighed down by his hammock, mattress
and blanket, utterly bewildered by the activity going on around him; though he
was one of the lucky ones in as much as he did not have to amend his posture in
order to move about inside the hull. He looked like a small boat tossed by
waves as he was turned this way and that by the men brushing past him, mindless
of his size.
    The boy turned.
One of the other prisoners, a slight, weak- chinned, effete-looking man with a
widow's peak of thinning hair - a long-standing resident of the hulk if the
decrepit state of his yellow uniform was any indication - was crouched down
with his right hand on the boy's shoulder.
    Hawkwood watched
as a look of doubt crept over the boy's face. The boy shook his head. The man
spoke again, his expression solicitous. The boy tried to squirm away from the
man's touch, but the latter took hold of his jacket sleeve. The hand on the boy's
shoulder slid down and began to make gentle circular movements in the small of
the boy's back. The boy looked petrified. Hawkwood took a step forward.
    "No,"
Lasseur said softly, "I'll deal with it."
    Hawkwood watched
as Lasseur ducked beneath the beams and the hanging sacks.