...The bullet would have hit Roberts’s chest, if not for the jerking roll his shoulder had just made. Instead it ungraciously grazed his armpit. It was the signal for the temporary peace amid the fray to end. The deck was consumed by a cacophony of shots, grunts and screams.
Roberts fell upon his right knee as he felt the blood pool out from his wound. Defying his pain, he tried to find the quartermaster with his gun, but Taylor was faster. Taylor swooped his machete across the quartermaster’s face and then fired a blunt round into his chest with the other hand.
Torrance’s face had hardened into a steel gargoyle’s mask. His saber was raised above his head and he closed in on the kneeling Roberts. With a swift swing, Torrance had disarmed Roberts of his pistol. Before he could decapitate Roberts with a backswing, however, Roberts had somersaulted out of Torrance’s way across the wooden deck floor.
As Roberts tumbled across the deck, he managed to pick up a pistol dropped by another man earlier in the fight. He turned over onto his back and held the gun above himself, pointing it madly at Torrance, who was swaggering atop him wielding that vicious blade. He squeezed the trigger and recoiled. The back-fire on the gun sent a shock wave through his arms and into his throbbing wound. But the pain stinging from his armpit was nothing compared to the look of blank horror on Torrance’s face. His eyes bulged out in recognition of death and he slumped to his knees and then backwards and then into nothingness.
“Well that was anti-climatic,” Roberts grumbled to no one but himself. He didn’t know whether to feel a surge of pride at killing such a famed hero or to feel offended that such a legend gave so poor a fight.
He glanced around the deck and saw that in less than a minute, his men had indeed overtaken the ship. The bodies of Torrance’s men laid strewn across the deck like seaweed upon a beach.
Taylor held out his hand to help his captain up. “Sir?”
“Gonna need the other hand, Taylor,” he replied, motioning to his right armpit. His white shirt was now drenched in blood seeping out from the center of the wound.
It took Roberts a moment to steady himself on his own two feet. Taylor and the rest of the men looked on at him with a bit of worry, which Roberts immediately swatted off. “I’m fine…fine.”
To show them, he arched his back and stood up tall. He centered his balance and then began to stolidly walk across the deck with the same proud strut he always used. Once the men ceased their concern, he asked Taylor, “Where’s Hanson?”
“He took three men down below to see if they could rendezvous with Tamsin and the Southerner.” Taylor never referred to Jackson Wilkes by name. He was still too sore that the crew had elected the new Southern steampacker to the position of quartermaster—a position that had previously been his.
“And we did!” Hanson’s voice whooped from below. He and his party of men were heaving a large, metal chest with pride.
The youngest of his men cried, “And we got us here the loot, too!”
“Let’s move out. Fast as you can, boys! Fast as you can!” Roberts said. A steam rat was coming to and Roberts drolly shot him dead.
Jackson came lumbering up behind Hanson’s boys. He rushed past them and grabbed at Roberts’s left elbow. “They got Tamsin. The Chinese Box had trapdoors and she fell.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, at least twelve feet. I think she’s knocked out. I called and called for her, but—”
Roberts clucked. “And your point is?”
“We can’t leave her.”
He chuckled at the new kid’s naivety. “If Tamsin needs help to survive a short little fall, then we don’t need Tamsin.”
“What about ‘No man left behind’?”
“Never took to that mode of thought. I prefer ‘No gold left behind’.”
“We can’t go! We can’t go!” Jackson cried.
Roberts slapped him cold across the face. “We’re going.”
***
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