Shark fins were about, Clay noticed as he bobbed in the cold drink of the cruel sea, kicking his scrawny legs but barely to avoid attracting attention to his helpless presence and calling up the hungry sharks from the nameless depths that spawned them to hasten his doom.
He did hear a plaintive squeak echo above the water off the side of the sloop that had been conceived as an angel's dream and a father's hope and was now the centerpiece of a red swirling nightmare. That squeak, he knew with a shame-hearted realization, had been his own pathetic puppy dog peep.
You are a disgrace, Scrawny Boy, and should sink away from the shameful recognition of your betters!
But I oh so want to live, at least long enough to die less terribly than this.
A thrashing and a splashing sound so loud that it made him wonder if it was him being seized shook him from his self-pitying daze even as the water turbulence caused by the two sinuous hounds of the sea ripping the red man in half made him bob more crookedly and caused him to drink a sip of salt water and blood.
The launch was deserted except for a red man that was being shot through the belly by the musket of Jonah Heel, who stood with one foot on the gunwale of the sloop, a picture of some grim pirate captain daring any and all to scuff his deck. The sight of Jonah Heel—cruel though he was, cruel as this sea it sometimes seemed—did fill Clay's heart with hope, hope that that cruel man's indomitable will would save them all—even foundering, and soon to be drowning, Clay.
Two bodies floated near him. Two other bodies, naked, red, and rippling with muscle, scaled the gunwale of the sloop near the prow. It occurred to him then, as he bobbed, that the two bodies floating near to him were not naked, red or rippling with muscle, but sad, sodden-clothed forms with wan faces peering nightward in death. Pea-Brain and Slanty Hoover somehow seemed wiser in their current departed state than they ever had in life.
Mister Eager, the one hard man who had believed in him, and whom he had failed, was nowhere to be seen, but, Clay supposed, was still grappling with that red fiend at the bottom of the sea—an infinitely deeper sea, he sensed, than the near weed-covered bottom he had touched mere moments ago.
With a "wooshing" heave, Fat Sam was hauling the crazed gibbering white man up the side of the ship near the stern—and here I float, but barely, thrashing and splashing to stay afloat, with sharks circling about the dead bodies I keep company with.
With a tear rolling from each eye he began to think of sinking, if only he knew how—Oh, I must drink the water, I think. Nasty that will be.
A call came to him. It was wild Mickey Durst, the nasty, bar-fighting, rigging-monkey, now holding to a docking rope, preparing to swing out like some carnival acrobat to grab him. Mickey's voice was charged with surety in his own physical abilities that were such a wonder to Clay, “Raise your hand and kick those feet, Blackie!”
Oh, I am to be saved.
Then another voice, harsh and dour, roared from the mouth of Jonah Heel as he charged a musket, “We have boarders, Durst. You must let him sink.”
So I am lost after all?
Clay felt the sea move around him in a circular motion and the bobbing body of Pea-brain Harvey was ripped to pieces by two gleaming white sets of ivory saw-blades reaching up from the deep, to disappear in a fury of twisting fins instantly beneath the inky black sea—so much darker now as the last rays of the sinking sun failed to crest the hill where Captain Evenstar buried his angel daughter and died sending many a red devil back to hell.
The only light in the world now was that cast by the stern lamp; a decidedly unfriendly light, illuminating larger than life as it did the taciturn form of Jonah Heel, the ships Purser; the accounting man, who had just accounted Scrawny Clay Evenstar not worthy of account.
