Mickey could keep his footing on anything, had in fact danced on roof eves for coins when a whelp. Nevertheless, the feeling of the sloop sliding off beneath him struck a chord in his soul. The two darkies had not noticed for they cowered on the deck in the shadows of the leaping lunatic, his toes without nails and raw as Pig Street scrapple. But the crazy man who danced so manically, he felt the small ship slide off toward deeper water, pushed along by the mass of fresh water that The Captain had said plumed out to sea in this bay.
Mickey and the Madman now stopped their feet and looked at each other, knowing and slack-jawed. The anchor cable had been cut! They were not alone; not done with the round-headed, red men of night. A long brown, stringy cord of gooey saliva drooled from the mouth of the Madman as he began to shiver, and moan, and sway listlessly, clutching the curious parcel to his chest with an unsettling intensity.
“What is it Mickey?” cried Blackie Boy, his voice all aquiver.
“The anchor cable has been cut. We slide away off this shallow bank into the deep sea. The push of The Captain’s undersea river takes us.”
Mickey seemed to himself, to sound more like a man now, his voice less boyish, deeper. At 16 he could not even be an apprentice back home. But here, on this ship, just now, he was—if anyone could make the claim of this ship turned sea phantom—a captain; a man who was heeded.
Sam whimpered and Clay commented absently, “Glory be, we are to be away from this cursed land.”
The Madman’s eyes were now dark with a bloodshot spark, his pupils turning to raving pinheads under the lamp-light, the reddened field of his eye whites seeming to expand into a crazed question. Mickey, momentarily frozen with the responsibility that now rested upon his shoulders, hesitated for a long, long moment. The tall man swayed unsteadily on his tattered feet, his filthy torn clothes clinging wetly to his body, giving all the more appearance of skeletal haggardness.
A gasp and a bump was heard to his right, up in the bow, which was shrouded in blackness, the western sky above streaked with dark gray and deepest blue, where stars had yet to twinkle. The four of them now turned to look at the narrowing shadow that was the darkened quarter of the ship, farthest from the stern lamp.
Blackie shivered and clutched at Old Penny as if to protect the dead man from some menace.
Sam blubbered something that did not become a word and stepped back away from the dead body of his taskmaster—suddenly now repelled by the proximity of death—to lean with his back to the mizzen mast.
Mickey saw the Madman’s eyes glaze as he fell to his bony knees whimpering, “Dick. Dick, no. No, Dick! No! Away with your mesmerist curse! Away! Away I say!”
And there he cackled.
A sound of heaving, and dragging, with the quality of squished water sacks bursting under pressure, gave him a start. As he turned squarely to face the slithering menace Clay quaked and groaned, “The sharks have sent one of their number up from the sea to finish me.” He then frantically began to tear at a piece of seaweed that clung to his bare ankle.
Mickey stepped protectively before Clay and studied the gloom ahead, which began to take form. He then thought to The Captain’s easy way and patted Clay’s shoulder. “I b’lieve, Blackie, that it’s another old penny fo the pocket.”
As soon as he spoke the ghostly red face of a naked man, a cross of Christ also branded above his heart, hauled himself painfully into the lamplight’s edge. A broken sword was clenched between his broad flat teeth, blood coursing from his lips. He came on low though, for he dragged himself with his brawny arms, hands like feet, one bloody scraped knee pushing him along, the other knee but a bloody stump gushing blood on the deck. The man made one mighty attempt to haul himself toward the Madman, who screeched like a fiend and began jabbering about that Dick person again. But the shark-bitten man could drag himself no farther, and collapsed, face smacking on the deck, the broken blade clattering beneath it.
Clay rushed to the man, ripping away the cord that bound his own britches, and tying the stump, and then yelled for Sam, “Heat an iron, Sam. We have to sear the wound.”
Sam was now animated and scrambling about behind them. Burning the mangled leg of a man seemed crazy to Mickey. “Blackie, why would you burn a man who has been bit?”
Clay was all business, like he was caring for one of those fool cows over in Jewel Crawford’s farm. He was no longer frightened in the least, even as the fingers of doubt clutched at Mickey. “This is normally sewed. But The Captain once said that a man on his Union crew stopped the bleeding of his blown off hand by pressing the wrist against the hot barrel of a canon. It is called cart-arising.”
Clay was now pressing his hands against the stump to keep the blood in. A scream sounded behind him, like the cackling of an old brothel woman powered by a man’s lungs. Mickey turned to see the Madman on Sam’s back, somehow holding the strong fat boy down on his belly by pressing his bony knee into the small of his back. One hand was still frantically crooked around the spiral leather case, the other pressing down on the back of Sam’s head, smashing his face against the deck. The boy was seized with terror and unable to take action because of such things as plague certain people in their mind when it comes to fighting.
Such things never afflicted the mind of Mickey Durst.
He was supremely confident when his voice sounded, “Blackie, you and Sam take care of Old Lurch. This Madman ‘ill be made ta mind.”
As he stepped, skipped and then leaped, launching his agile form at the back of the Madman, he once again felt the ship slip away from beneath him as some unseen hand of the deep seemed to pull—not push—them out into the limitless rolling black, that was just now beginning to glint under the first stars of night.
