The Wreckers Read Online Free Page A

knelt beside him. And with a twist of his hand, he brought my face up to his.
    “Remember this,” he said, in a voice I could hardly hearabove the sounds of the horses. “If you put the wreckmen on me, your father will rot where he lies. Only I know where he is, and there he’ll stay.” His fingers were clamps. My father’s ring pressed like a branding iron through my sleeve. “You tell them he’s dead, you hear? You tell them he’s drowned. Or dead he’ll be; mark my words. Dead he’ll be, all right. He’ll die of thirst, boy. His lips will turn black and rotten. They’ll ooze like splattered worms. His tongue will swell and crack, and he’ll choke on it—choke on his very own tongue.”
    He held me there as the horsemen closed round us. They sat in a half circle, leaning forward in their saddles, and the horses heaved wisps of breath through their nostrils. Somewhere in the village another horse was coming, hooves clopping on stone.
    With a creak of leather, Caleb swung down from a huge gray mount. His coat rippled around him. His hair, black as tarred rope, swept to his shoulders.
    “Well, there’s a sight,” he said. “The lad crowds on sail like a frigate. But it’s Stumps—old dismasted Stumps—what gets the wind of him.” He stepped forward. “Give the boy to me.”
    Stumps made no move to protect me. He passed me over with a nod and a little smile. “Came right to me, Caleb. Just begging for help, he was. Crying out”—this he said in a shrill little voice—“ ‘Oh! They killed them all. They killed every one but me!’ ” Then Stumps reached over and gave me a cuff on the back of the head. “So there he is, Mr. Caleb Stratton. And he’s the last of ’em, no doubt of that.”
    There was a look in Stumps’s eyes—deep and smoldering—that kept me quiet. A stranger man I’d never met, nor one so horrid. But it wouldn’t save my father—or me—to speak of him now. If the wreckers meant to kill me, I could only hope that Stumps would tell Father, when all was done, that I’d gone bravely, with no pleading or tears.
    Caleb Stratton took me by the shoulder. The fourth horseman came riding onto the harborfront, his black pacer high-stepping on the cobbles. But no one turned to look; they were all intent on me. And the village seemed as quiet as a graveyard.
    The two silent riders stared at me, one with an evil glee that set shivers down my spine, the other with a nervous, frightened glimmer. The nervous one’s face was riddled with smallpox. It was that man who spoke, and at that it was little more than a whisper.
    “He’s only a boy,” he said. “Just a boy, Caleb.”
    “And so was Tommy Colwyn, wasn’t he?” Caleb, with my coat bunched in his hand, lifted me nearly clear from the ground. “Have you been up on the moor, Spots?”
    Spots shook his head.
    “Go, then. Go have a gam with young Tommy Colwyn. Follow the crows, old son; you’ll see them from a mile away. His eyes, they’re dangling down like watch fobs.”
    Spots swallowed. “But who’s to know?” he said, and licked his lips. “We could turn the boy loose. Let him—”
    “You know the law, Spots.” Caleb turned to the other man. “Give us your knife there, Jeremy Haines.”
    The grinning man reached for his belt. A knife appeared in his hand, a long blade that he flipped in his palm, andflipped again to hold it out handle first. He was tall, his stirrups hanging nearly to the horse’s knees, and he had to lean far down from the saddle.
    Spots looked as though he might be sick. “Least make it quick,” he said. “Don’t cause the boy no pain.”
    Caleb took the knife. The way he looked at me, his thumb flicking on the blade, it made me think of Father eyeing the Christmas goose. And it was too much to bear. All my courage and resolve drained away, and I fell to my knees on the cobblestones.
    “Bear up,” said Stumps, beside me. He sat on his cart like a boy in a wagon, watching with bored