Free Captain Caution by Kenneth Roberts Page B

ashamed for your" Corunna cried. "It isn't the first timer"
    Slade's voice, it seemed to Marvin, set the chains of the hanging lamp to vibrating, so metallic was its harshness. "It's plain to see," he told Corunna, "that he considers himself your master."
    Diron silenced him with a glance, and spoke courteously to Marvin. "Your question concerning a convoy, sir, is a fair one, but I have already answered it when I said that the Olive Branch is slow, and that English frigates are plentiful on your coast. You would
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    hardly expect my schooner to engage a frigate. No schooner afloat would last five minutes, once she came within range of a frigate's guns."
    "That's true," Marvin agreed, "but as you say, you fought the Beetle so you might get possession of the Olive Branch, and you must have ordered your prize crew to take her to Charleston rather than to France. Otherwise you would have made an argument out of it, I think."
    Diron threw himself back in his chair, laughing heartily. "But you are suspicious, you Americansl" he exclaimed. "If you heard one of our French larks singing in the sky, you would say it was not a real lark."
    "Well," Marvin said slowly, "I've never had much difficulty recognizing larks when I see 'em or when I hear 'em. Some time ago I heard one of you gentlemen mention the fact that if the Olive Branch sets sail for France, she'll not only have enough men aboard to fight off a heavy vessel, but even to take a small one. That's a suggestion I'm able to recognize as easily as I recognize larks. It's a suggestion that the Olive Branch be used to make prizes of enemy merchant craft or maybe of friendly ones." He looked hard at Slade, who tossed back his long black hair and coldly returned Marvin's gaze.
    "If I'm not mistaken," Marvin went on, "that suggestion came from Captain Slade. He knows that none of us aboard the Olive Branch has a commission or a letter of marque entitling us to capture, burn, sink or destroy any enemy vessel. If we should attack one, we'd be in danger of being hanged at the yardarm every last one of us. What Captain Slade suggested is piracy. While I'm in command of the Olive Branch I'll allow no such thing and with Captain Dorman dead, I am in command."
    Captain Diron placed his hand on Corunna's arm, as if to restrain her. "No, not" he said. "You do not understand. Here on this table are the papers of Captain Argandeau, you see. Here is his letter of marque, my friend, for the Formidable. With these papers the Olive Branch will be the Formidable if she has occasion to attack any vessel, and still she will be the Olive Branch at all other times, oh?"
    Corunna shook off Captain Diron's restraining hand. "Yes," she said, and to Marvin her eyes had the hardness of agates, "and you have forgotten that I am the owner of the Olive Branch. Therefore I have made myself captain, with Captain Slade as first mate and Captain Argandeau as second mate."
    "What did I tell you about the slush bucket?" murmured Argandeau softly. "Two mules together could not more completely kick it overt"
    IX CORUNNA DORMAN impatiently pacing the weather side of the
    Olive Branch's quarter-deck, watched the last boatload of wounded rocking uneasily toward her from the near-by Beetle, escorted amidships by lazy-seeming sharks that rolled their eyes upward at the long-boat like affectionate dogs. The wounded who had already made the journey, twelve of them, were ranged close under the larboard bulwarks, where they might have the benefit of the steamy, sweltering breeze. All about them was piled the dunnageof the seamen who had come aboard and now clung to shrouds and ratlines to see the last of the Decatur and the Beetle, while the litter resulting from the capture of the Olive Branch still cumbered her decks and gave her an air of slovenly dejection.
    Corunna, looking around suddenly, saw Slade smiling gravely at her, one eye half hidden by his drooping eyelid. There may have been meekness and