Tin Swift(23)

They say luck favors the brave and fortune favors fools. Hink decided that he must be just enough of both today. One of Barlow’s crewmen was shock-still and strapped to the side bar, likely watching his life march before his eyes. Hink didn’t have to take but a step or two before he was in front of the man.

“I’m commandeering your services, sailor.” Hink hit him across the back of the head with the blunt end of the hook. The man sagged and Hink took up some swearing as he pulled the extra hauling harness off of his belt and strapped it around the man. He attached a second line onto the rope that was latched to his own harness so they both had a chance to be pulled back up to the Swift.

“You better be worth the trouble,” Hink muttered as he lifted the man up across his shoulder and stomped back to the window.

Once he’d muscled the both of them out the hole and up the ropes on the outside of the ship, a yell from behind him clued him in that the crew had been stirred up. Then gunshots rang out, louder than the flames, louder than the fire, louder than old Barlow himself. Hink knew he’d better get off this puffer fast if he wanted to keep on living.

He pulled on the rope, three hard tugs in a row, and pushed away from the ship like a kid swinging for a water hole.

The added weight of the unconscious man on his harness near took the breath back out of him as they slammed into the side of the ship. But Mr. Seldom had caught his signal. Hink felt the jerk and pull of the rope winching upward.

The Swift’s engines changed tone as Guffin maneuvered her up and away from the foundering Black Sledge.

Hink glanced up at his ship. She was a shiny beauty, ghostlike and luminescent against the smoke and clouds. Even swinging the waltz on a string beneath her, he couldn’t help but smile.

The ground far, far below him twirled as he was hauled upward. The Black Sledge seemed to have done some fair good in putting out the fire, and was smoking downward at a relatively safe speed toward a green bowl of a valley cradled between two peaks. They might make it down just fine.

Or they might be stuck in the middle of a range, with little in the way of supplies and a winter storm bearing down.

As if reflecting on his thoughts, the sky flashed with a rattle of lightning, thunder rolling way up above the glim fields. Rain started off in spits that turned into a good hard-driven drizzle. Even at this height, it was still just rain and not ice or snow.

By the time Hink was reaching up for Mr. Seldom’s and Molly Gregor’s hands to haul him into the Swift, he was soaked down to his long underwear and shaking from the cold.

“Who’s this?” Molly asked of the man he deposited on the floor.

“Didn’t catch his name,” Hink said, shivering under the blanket she tossed over his shoulders.

“If you’re cold, Captain,” she said, “you can work the boilers on the way home.” Molly’s sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and sweat trickled down the side of her neck and glossed her cheeks. Every inch of her exposed skin was tanned and dusted with soot from the big engine.

Hink grinned. “Wouldn’t want to put you out of a job, Molly.”

“The way you handle a boiler?” She scoffed. “We’d be dead before sunrise. Captain,” she added.

Seldom finished unlatching the harnesses and ropes between Hink and their guest, and then dragged the man by the armpits off to one side where he could latch him into the straps and framework there and keep him from getting stepped on by the crew.

Hink shoved up to his feet and, holding the blanket around him, walked over to Guffin, at the wheel.

“Heading?”

“Due west. Thought we could bed down in one of the hollows there.”

“We got the guts for that, Molly?” Hink asked.

“We’ll need to take it slow, but she’ll get us there,” Molly said. “So long as the storm doesn’t kick up too strong.”

“Aim us over the ridge, Mr. Guffin,” Hink said. “Easy as you can.”

“Aye, Captain,” Guffin said.

Seldom stepped over to navigation and Lum Ansell kept steady where he was, humming a low song, as was his habit in the air.

Hink walked the planking, trying to pace the warm back into his bones and taking the time to think things through. Who he should have gone for was Barlow, not this ship plugger. For all he knew the man was new to the hills and didn’t have a darn idea of why Barlow was looking for him.

“He’s coming to,” Molly announced. “Want I should put the snore back in him?”

“No, he needs talking to, and I need to do the talking.” Captain Hink stopped pacing and stood in front of the man, who had a blanket thrown on him. Likely that was Molly’s doing. Sure, the man was a captive and they’d just as soon throw him out to kick the breeze if he so much as spit, but if he froze, they wouldn’t be able to chisel any words out of him.