The Wreckers Read Online Free

nodded. “They saw me.”
    “Then you’re done for,” said he. “They’ll hunt you like a dog.” There was a strangeness in his eyes. One looked toward me and one away, and they shone in the shadows like tiny stars. “They’ll not stop till they kill you. Mark my words, boy. For it’s kill you or hang, it is. Aye, and when they do, you’ll be joining your shipmates in the bog upon the moor. And there you’ll lie with your lungs full o’ muck until the Lord pipes you aloft.”
    He turned his head and listened. There was a faint beating of hooves, steady as distant rain.
    “They’re up on the high road,” said the legless man. He put one hand on the stone floor and rolled back on his cart. Light spilled in around him, brightening the dark gloom of the blockhouse. I could see, against the wall, a pile of moldy straw and a threadbare blanket, a few narrow shelves propped on sea-worn stones. They held a candle stub and a sad collection of baubles: a bottle cracked at the neck, a whale bone and a seashell, a cutlass handle with holes where the jewels had been picked away—the sort of things a child might collect.
    In the moment that had passed, the sound of the horses had doubled in volume.
    “They’re coming,” he said, and yanked on my wrists. I fell toward him onto my knees. He shuffled back on his cart and pulled me after him. “Come,” he said.
    I could hear each stamp of the hooves, a creaking of leather. “Where?” I asked.
    “Damn you, boy.” He yanked again.
    The legless man was as strong as he looked. He hauled me through the door and, with one more pull, sent me sprawling headlong on the cobblestones. And in those worn and fitted rocks, where they pressed on my cheek and my chest, I could
feel
the horses. The beat of them shook the very stones.
    “Up!” he said, and wrenched my wrists.
    “Hide me,” I cried.
    “Not on your life.” He let go of my wrists. And I saw, for the first time, that the backs of his hands, his knuckles, were wrapped in bands of tattered leather. On his left hand, on his little finger, was a golden ring that I knew at once.
    “That’s my father’s!” I said.
    There was an eagle on it, wings spread. As a child, I’d liked to touch it, to turn it so the light danced upon the gold and the wings seemed to stir and flap. On my father, it was a loose fit on his ring finger; on the legless man, it barely passed the first joint.
    “Your father, you say?” His torn lips spread apart, showing broken teeth as brown as sod. “He’s wealthy, ain’t he? Rich as kings.”
    “Where is he?” I said.
    “This changes things, don’t it?” The legless man jerked me close against him. In the daylight he was a horrid figure, a thing all bloated and broken, stuffed into his gray and grimy rags. “You’ll have to hide yourself,” he snarled. “Or you’ll be the death of us all.”
    The beat of hooves thundered through the lane. The legless man pushed me away. “Now, off with you!” he said, and spun his cart toward the village.
    “Help me,” I cried again.
    “And have them find me with you?” He lurched toward me, his poor stumps of legs spread apart for balance, his fists pumping on the stone. “For seven years I’ve lived like a dog, hand to mouth in this squalid hole of a house. They call me Stumps, old Stumps the beggar man. And now I’m
that
close”—he rapped his fist on his cart—“to having more gold than I’ve ever dreamed of. A passage up the coast, one night at sea, and—” He stopped, wheezing. “And you think I’d trade that for you?”
    A horse came hurtling down the lane, the rider lashing it on with a short-handled crop. Behind it came another, leaning in the curve, eyes wild and nostrils flared. The legless man made a deep, awful groan. He twirled round. But a third horse appeared behind us, flying at a gallop up the street. And on its back, like a devil, rode the man named Caleb.
    The legless man grabbed my arm. He hauled me down until I