The Buccaneers Read Online Free

ever.
    “Look at him,” said Abbey. “Thinking he's better than anyone else. Telling me how to care for my guns.”
    “Ah,” I said softly. I understood then why the man disliked Horn so much. Nothing would anger the gunner more than being told how to look after his cannons.
    “He told me to load them with chain,” said Abbey. “Chain! When it's roundshot that you-want against pirates.”
    His fierceness alarmed me. “What makes you think we'll be fighting pirates?”
    “Well, there's always a chance,” he said, and looked down at the sea. “My guns are getting hungry.”
    I nearly laughed at the tone of his voice. It was all he wanted, I could see—to get a crack at a pirate ship, to relive a bit of the glory from his years long past. I remembered the day he'd come aboard, wrapped in his tattered cloak, a beggar boy at his heels to carry his canvas duffel. “Who's that old blind man?” I'd asked my father, and he'd laughed an embarrassed sort of laugh. “Why, that's your gunner,” he'd said.
    I looked at Abbey now, and had to squint against the glare in his glass eye.
“Are
there still pirates?” I asked.
    “Picaroons!” he said, using an ancient word as though that alone diminished them. “It's all that's left, and not many of them. Keep clear of Hispaniola, stay away from Cubaand New Orleans, and you'd find a kangaroo before you'd see a picaroon.”
    It was hard to tell if he saw this scarcity of pirates as a pleasure or a disappointment. But then his rage at Horn bubbled again to the surface. “Chain!” he said. “If you're close enough for
that
, the battle's lost.”
    He knocked his fist on the deck and cursed. “It will be a grand day when we fetch Jamaica and Horn goes ashore for good.”
    “He's not going ashore,” I said.
    The gunner looked up. “You didn't sign him aboard, did you?”
    “Yes,” said I. “He made his mark, an albatross.”
    “The
man's
an albatross.” Abbey grunted. “Never touches land. Watches everything and seldom speaks. Listen, Mr. Spencer: no good has ever come from an albatross. No good at all. And ill befall the one who harms him.”

Chapter 4
A D EATH S HIP
    T he stories of Horn and his sea chest flew round and round the ship like birds through a house of glass. I heard from George Betts that the box was full of pistols, and from Harry Freeman that it was shaman's bones that rattled in there. But in the end, the story that Abbey told was the one that came to be seen as the truth, though neither he nor anyone else had ever lifted the lid of that strange and wonderful chest.
    “I don't
need
to see inside it,” Abbey told me one day. By his own account, he was the expert on Jonahs. “I
know
what's in there.”
    “Then tell me,” I said. And I listened to his story, then went below to tell it again to the captain.
    It was just after noon on Horn's twelfth day aboard, and we sat in the shadows of the curtained cabin while Butter-field worked out his sextant sights.
    “Abbey says he knows what Horn keeps in his chest,” I said.
    “Does he?” Butterfield was thumbing through his almanac. “And what does he say, exactly?”
    “That it's full of bits of ships,” I said. “That Horn travels from one to another and takes something from each.”
    The captain sniffed. “What a strange pastime. Why would he want to do that?”
    I tried to tell him in the same words that I'd heard from Abbey. I remembered how the sun had glinted in the glass eye, and how that wizened head with its helmet of gray hair had turned up toward me. “All those pieces of wood, those bits of metal, they're his Jonah charms. He uses them in voodoo magic,” I said.
    The captain laughed wholeheartedly. “Jonah charms! You don't believe that rubbish, do you?”
    “No, sir,” I said, though in truth I had started to wonder. “But I'm afraid others might. I'm afraid Abbey will turn their heads.”
    Butterfield jotted numbers on a bit of paper. “What would you do about it,