The Buccaneers Read Online Free Page A

John?”
    “We could have Horn open the chest and show us what he keeps in there.”
    “And lose his trust?” said Butterfield. He turned to his reduction tables, to such long columns of numbers that I felt dizzy to see them. “No, it's best to let this run its course.”
    “But where will it end?”
    “It will just peter out, I should think.” He ran his finger down the columns. “Our Mister Abbey's got his nose out of joint. The crew have never looked up to
him
, much to his dismay. It's no wonder he doesn't like Horn.”
    The captain got down to his business then, his strange mathematics. He turned his sextant angles into a real placeon earth, and
that
—to me—was voodoo magic. Every day for twenty days I had listened as he'd tried to teach me. But I'd never had a head for numbers, and hadn't learned a thing. So we had both given it up as a hopeless task, and this was the first time that I'd seen him do the sights in all the time that Horn had been aboard.
    Now I watched as he worked out his time and his distance, and I waited for the moment when he would take up his pencil, make a mark on the chart, and tell me, “Handy-dandy, here's where we be.” Twenty times I had heard him tell me that. And at last he said it again.
    But this time there was a terrible doubt in his voice. And he added, “Or it's fairly close, I hope.”
    I looked at the chart and saw that his crosses didn't line up. They marched in a nearly perfect line out of the Channel, south to the trades, and west across the ocean. But then they took a dogleg, a sudden bend that seemed very odd to me, and carried on with greater space between them. I counted back along the crosses, and saw that the break in the line marked the day that Mudge had sent the sextant flying from the locker.
    “You don't know where we are,” I said. “Do you?”
    “Not exactly,” he admitted. “Mudge has made a liar of the sextant.” Butterfield tapped his pencil on the last of his crosses. “You see? It's telling me we're here, but I know we're not.”
    “Then where are we?” I asked.
    He sketched a large circle around the cross. “Somewhere in here, I suppose. But it doesn't matter, really. We can only carry on and find out where we are when we get there.”
    I shook my head, the dizzy feeling coming back. “But why are they farther apart?”
    “Why do you think?” asked Butterfield.
    “The
Dragons
going faster now?”
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “Then we're running with our eyes closed.”
    He smiled. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. But if the wind stays steady we're bound to hit the Indies, just not at the point we were aiming for.”
    “You'll get a new sextant in Kingston?” I asked.
    The captain gaped at me. “I most certainly will not. Sextants aren't like oranges, John. You don't pick a new one from a basket.” He shook his head. “I've had mine for longer than you've been alive, and I'd like to keep it, thank you very much. When I learn the error, I'll know what correction to make. There's no danger then, once we know where we are.”
    I was barely listening. As Butterfield spoke I'd been staring at the crosses, counting them again. And now I thought that what they really marked was Horn's first morning aboard. It seemed that he had brought a new strength to the
Dragon
, and was sending her rushing along toward a place that was known only to her. Or only to her and Horn.
    “Oh, blast that Mudge!” Butterfield threw his pencil down. It landed on the chart, but moved no farther. Nothing moved: not the lamp or the curtains or the pistol on its peg. Horn was steering, and his shadow fell through the skylight and lay on the table. “Ah, Horn,” said Butterfield.
    “You don't think he's a Jonah, do you?” I asked.
    “Of course not,” said the captain. “It's a travesty to ask me that.”
    “Why?”
    “Read your Bible, John. Jonah the prophet was trying to flee from God when the storm came up that nearly sank his ship. Yes, God made the