Gangway!

    "Yeah?"

    "Get all your crew over there with you on Captain Flagway's ship. Every man-jack."

    "Yeah? What for?"

    "Just do what I say."

    Crung walked out onto the planks between the ships and stood there steady as a rock. Vangie shuddered. Crung said softly, with menace, "And if I don't?"

    "Maybe," Gabe told him, "I'll release Captain Arafoot here and let you explain to him why you wouldn't obey orders when I was holding him hostage. Or maybe I'll just throw him over the side and feed him to the sharks. I haven't quite made up my mind yet."

    Crung nodded thoughtfully. It wasn't that he was giving in. It was just that he was thinking, and with Crung that was obviously a slow process.

    His one eye blinked. His one hand toyed with the marlin spike. He turned slowly and surveyed the deck of San Andreas. His eye flicked from Francis to Vangie to Captain Flagway. "Well now," he said slowly, "if it don't look like I've got me some hostages, too. How about that now?"

    Vangie whipped out the knuckle-duster. "Forget it, buster."

    Captain Flagway staggered out from the tiller, braced his feet and addressed himself to Crung. "Now, look here. I'm a peash-peace-loving man. I have never disemboweled anyone in my life. I'm a bit long in the tooth to start gouching-gouging men's eyes out and chopping their heads off, and crashing-cracking their skulls with clubs. I just don't think I could stand to do things like that."

    "Yeah?"

    "So I wish you would just pay attention to what Mr. Beauchampsh tells you, and do what he says, and not make any fuss."

    Crung blinked at Captain Flagway. He blinked at the knuckle-duster wavering in Vangie's hand. He turned his head and blinked at Ittzy and the sword. He blinked at Gabe, and saw him holding the flask. In a tone of exasperated despair, he cried, "And what's that supposed to be?"

    "It's supposed to be a flask," Gabe said, and fired a shot in the air. "But it's a gun."

    Crung turned his head back and forth, looking from one of them to another. "You're all crazy people," he said. "All of you. All except that fruity-looking one there."

    Francis stiffened. "Anyone who dresses himself in that overmasculine way," he said coolly, "and chooses to spend utterly months at a time at sea without women, nothing but men for companionship, is hardly in any position to cast aspersions. I've met a goodly number of you sailor types, believe you me, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that…"

    "Alright! Alright!" Crung turned very quickly toward Sea Wolf and bellowed: "All hands!"

    "Fruity indeed," Francis said.

    Vangie said, "Never mind, Francis, just consider the source."

    "Oh, I do."

    "Get over here onto this miserable hulk," Crung yelled at his crew, and at once they slunk and slouched across onto the San Andreas, never meeting anyone's eyes.

    After the Sea Wolf had been emptied of all its original perso

    Vangie had been propping the knuckle-duster on the tiller. "Francis," she said, "would you mind terribly holding this for me?"

    "Oh, my dear, of course not. How remiss of me. Here, I'll carry it."

    The knuckle-duster looked, if anything, less appropriate in Francis' hand than in Vangie's; still, he wore it with a certain dash.

    The three of them skirted the muttering crew and crossed the planks to Sea Wolf. Midway, Vangie looked down at the water heaving between the two ships and for the first time truly understood Gabe's reaction to the sea. But she forced herself to keep moving, following the weaving, perilous Captain Flagway, and once aboard the solid Sea Wolf, she felt better again.

    "Okay, Percival," Gabe said. "Time for you to walk the plank."

    "ROAR."

    "Move, now," Gabe insisted. "You can take your teeth with you, or you can leave them behind. Which is it?"

    "Roar."

    Ittzy pricked the tarp with the point of his sword, and the tarp-wrapped figure felt its way out onto the planks, guiding on the sound of Crung's voice: "Keep that son of a bitch off here, damn it! He'll kill all of us. Can't you have a little goddamn decency and shove him overboard?"

    Ittzy and Francis were fumbling with knots in the ropes that held the two ships together. Captain Flagway was making his way to the controls on the bridge.

    The ships began to draw apart. Gabe said, "Hey Crung."

    "Yeah?"

    "Keep him tied up, he won't do any damage."

    "You don't know him."

    "Well, he's your problem now, I guess. But you've got some help. You'll find Roscoe and his gang down below in the hold. And listen-one more thing. The Olivers are looking for that ship you're on. You better move on out of here fast. I'd head north along the coast if I were you."

    Vangie saw the look of satisfaction on Gabe's face as he turned away. She felt proud and sad, both at once: all that brilliance in a doomed enterprise.

    He said, "Well, what do you think now? Are we going to get away with it?"

    "Not in a million years." She smiled sadly, fondly. "But nobody else could have come as close."

CHAPTER THIRTY

    Out in another part of the ocean the two police launches closed in on Daniel Webster. It took several minutes-and one shot across the steamer's bow-to convince the captain to slow down and listen, and then he did nothing for a while but bellow unintelligibly through a megaphone. Eventually he became calm enough to hear the questions they were asking; then he gestured violently northward, losing his megaphone over the side in the process.

    The two launches veered around and went charging away to the north. The captain of Daniel Webster flung his hat after his megaphone, screamed at heaven, and went raging back to the bridge to kick his helmsman.

    Farther north, the Sea Wolf was traveling south. Below, in the heat and noise and semidarkness of the bowels of the ship, Gabe was working as coal handler. Stripped to the waist, he was shoveling coal from the bin into the wheelbarrow, pushing it laboriously through the narrow corridor to the engine room-risking his knuckles along the metal walls every time-and dumping it on the small sooty pile behind Ittzy.

    Ittzy was the stoker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Sweaty, dirty, also stripped to the waist, gasping for breath, Itzzy turned a broadly smiling face toward Gabe and yelled over the roar of the engine, "This is fun!"

    Gabe looked at him. He panted, but had nothing to say.

    "Well," Ittzy yelled, a bit less exuberantly, "it's anyway better than being locked in that back room."

    Gabe turned and plodded away with his wheelbarrow.

    Up on the bridge Captain Flagway was steering. The coast was to his left, San Francisco was just beyond the horizon to the south, and Baltimore was not very far beyond that. Baltimore; Daddy; the apothecary shop. After all these years.

    Sea Wolf was a lean, fast, hungry ship-a pleasure to operate. Captain Flagway, for the first time he could remember, smiled.