Free The Guns of Tortuga by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER

“This is for the lieutenant. My captain says he’s willing to help.”
    The folded paper passed from me to him, and then vanished somewhere inside his rags. He was wearing his outlandish great straw hat with a wide brim, and this hid most of his face from me. Indeed, since he seemed interested only in his toes and looked down at them the whole time, all I could see of him was the tip of his chin. He carried a straw basket, too, and this he raised as he said, “I’m to buy fruit.”
    Thinking that if one boy would pass unnoticed, two could scarcely be more obvious, I tagged along back to the market. Michael had a few words of French—mainly “
Non!
” whenever a cart ownernamed a price—and they served well enough for him to collect so many papayas, melons, and mangoes that the basket drooped with the weight of them. He had a few silver pieces, and these diminished as the basket grew heavier. At last he said, “This is enough.” We left the market square behind, and he growled, “Where are you going?”
    â€œI’ll help you carry it,” said I, “for it’s a heavy burden.”
    Taking turns about lugging the basket, we walked through twisting, rutted streets until we came to the cleared ground around the Commodore’s. The two guards standing beside the door were not the same men I had seen earlier, but they looked no less bored and no less cruel.
    One of them said something sour and angry in a rush of French. Michael shook his head. The other gave him a rough swat. In heavily accented English, the second guard snarled, “He says what does the English do with so much fruit, eh?”
    â€œEats it,” said Michael, staring sullenly at the ground.
    The other man took the basket from me and went through it, making sure we were smuggling inno twenty-four-pound cannon, I suppose. He said something else.
    The other guard translated: “Who is this boy?”
    â€œThe basket’s heavy. I asked him to help. My master will give him a penny.”
    The first guard plucked a mango from the basket, smashed it against the wall, and bit into the flesh, juice trickling down over his chin. He thrust the basket back at me, and I took it. “Be quick,” the English-speaking guard snarled, helping Michael and me through the gate with a kick apiece.
    Inside the gate, Michael rasped, “Did you
have
to come?”
    â€œSure, and I’d like the penny,” I replied, maybe a bit too smartly.
    Approaching the Commodore’s, I thought how fortlike it looked, with its heavy walls and musket-slit windows. The front door was a tight squeeze, as if made for easy defense from within. Just inside the doorway was a narrow winding stair, and up this we went, emerging into the one big room that made up the entire top floor of the house.
    It was as dark as could well be in the noontime,for the narrow windows let but little light in, but it was cooler than I had expected. The shadowy room looked shabby enough. In a corner was a homely China chamber pot, and together with a drunkenly leaning table, a narrow straight chair, and a broken-down sofa, this was the whole of the furniture. Two tattered and worn hammocks were slung in the corners opposite the door, but these were empty.
    Lying stretched out on the sofa, dressed in black slippers, loose white trousers, and a loose gray shirt, lay a figure fanning himself with a palm frond. To my eye he looked oddly lazy. He raised himself on one elbow, staring at us. I had no doubt he could see the two of us better than we could him, because our eyes were still dazzled by the bright sunlight outside. “Who is this?” asked the stranger in a surprisingly soft English voice.
    To my surprise, Michael dashed his straw hat to the floor, snatched up the chamber pot—fortunately empty—and hurled it straight at my head. I dodged, and it smashed against the wall behind me. “Who is it?” raged