Free My Name Is Not Angelica by Scott O’Dell Page B

steps, but cactus spines pierced my feet and I had to stop. There was no way I could get at them unless I returned to where I started.
    Under a turpentine tree I put the load on the ground and pulled out the spines. A drop of blood followed them. I wiped the blood away and as I did so, the thud of hoofs came from the stony trail below me. Quickly, I lay flat in the bushes.
    Through the trees I saw two donkeys and their riders hurrying up the trail. With them was the boy I had seen on the trail. They came to the trees and stopped. The donkeys were sweating.

    One of the men got off. He was white and had a pistol in one hand, his wig in the other, and was sweating like his donkey.
    "What do you think?" he said to the other man, who was black.
    "I think she got away," the man said.
    "She had long legs, longer than yours, Daddy," the boy said. "She ran fast, faster than you did, Daddy. She was gone before you ever told me."
    They searched for footsteps. The boy ran up and down. The white man mopped his head and put on his wig.
    "She can have gone up the trail to Annaberg," he said.
    "No," the black man said. "She didn't go up the trail. Here are her steps. Right here."
    They all gazed at the mixed-up footsteps, some that belonged to the boy. They looked out at the spiny forest for a while.
    When they had gone I walked toward the sounds the woodchoppers made. I walked sideways, then in a wide circle. I got lost and found a trail, then suddenly I broke out of the jungle into the runaway camp.
    Screaming children ran toward me. They were pale under their black skin and their bones stuck out. Certain that I carried food, they would have pulled me down had not the woodchopper scared them with his ax.

    At the threats and shouts, Konje ran across the clearing. He lifted me in his arms and put me down.
    "What do you bring?" he said.
    "Food and some gunpowder."
    He grasped the bundle.
    "Pot fish. I caught them at Whistling Cay. I caught a lot. Enough to keep me for a long time."
    "A long time?" He tore the bundle open and spread the fish on my sleeping mat. "That time is upon us," he said.
    He was surrounded now by runaways, by their wives and children. He told them to be quiet. He gave each of them a handful of pot fish.
    "Do not eat them today," he said. "Eat them tomorrow. That way tonight you will have food to dream about."
    Unhappy sounds came from the throng, but no one ate one fish that day.
    I marveled at the way Konje ruled. More than one hundred and fifty runaways lived in the camp. One was a prince from the Gulf of Guinea. Yet Konje's word was law.
    He had held the camp together from the beginning, I learned, through days when there was nothing to eat and drink but cactus pulp. Through a time when the prince threatened to leave and take the runaways to a different hideout. Konje had listened to his complaints, then drove him out of Mary Point.
    My friend Lenta was here in the camp. She hadfled early from the plantation owned by the two brothers. They had forced themselves upon her and she had run away with her son when the drums first began to talk at Mary Point.
    She was a fine cook, as I have said. Konje often came to our home in Barato just to eat her food. Before the day was out he sent me to work for her.
    Everyone in the camp had work to do. Some of the women gathered wood. Some kept the fronts of the huts clear and the paths that ran between them, through a field of catch-and-deep, a hooked thorn bush that caught everything it touched, to the rocks at the edge of the cliff.
    Others gathered organ cactus, twice as tall as a tall man, and cut it into chunks. It gave us the only water for the camp. Men went down to Maho Bay at night and set traps for pot fish. This was the food we ate most of the time.
    More than a hundred of the men had muskets. Before supper that night, by the light of turpentine torches, they drilled at the cactus wall, the only place the plantation owners and the Civil Guard could force their way into