Read Online Run Afoul by Joan Druett - Free Book Online Page A

hard in one huge hand that it threatened to be crushed. Evidently, Wiki deduced, the ruckus had happened while he was in charge of the deck.
    â€œWhat the bloody hell was all that about?” he roared.
    â€œThey were trying to murder Festin,” Wiki said shortly. He turned to the cook. “Are you all right?”
    Festin was not all right. His eyes were crossed, and it was obvious that his ears were ringing loudly, because he kept on hitting the sides of his head with his open palms. Wiki said, concerned, “Do you remember your name?”
    Instead of answering, Festin smiled seraphically, giving Wiki cause for even more alarm for his health. Then he realized that the Acadian was simply enchanted by being rescued not just by his hero, Lieutenant Forsythe, but by Wiki, too, whom he considered his friend. To spoil the effect, however, blood suddenly gushed out of his mouth and down his chin and chest.
    Festin spat out a tooth, caught it in his palm, and studied it with an expression of great interest. Lieutenant Forsythe scowled even more deeply, and demanded, “Why the hell did they want to beat the living daylights out of him, apart from being tired of looking at his ugly face?”
    â€œHaven’t you heard?” Wiki asked. During his seven years at sea he had often noticed that the common seamen knew shipboard gossip long before the officers, but still it never failed to surprise him. “The men think he poisoned Assistant Astronomer Grimes.”
    Forsythe laughed in disbelief. “Poisoned?”
    â€œAye. Grimes had an attack of diarrhea in the night, and blames it on Festin, because he reckons that he put poison in either the fish he cooked last night for us all, or the pudding he made just for him.”
    â€œJesus,” said Forsythe, and shook his head in disgust. “That was a stupid bloody choice. Why Grimes, and not Lawrence J. Smith?”
    â€œI’ve not a notion,” said Wiki.
    â€œSo how did the men hear about it?”
    Wiki frowned. Then, remembering the hiss of foreign muck, he jumped to the obvious conclusion. “Jack Winter must have told them,” he said.
    â€œH’m!” grunted Forsythe, and nodded as if it were exactly the kind of behavior he expected of the steward. Then he looked at Wiki and barked, “I should call the marines, and have you thrown into the brig.”
    Wiki thought about it, and shrugged.
    â€œYou don’t care?”
    â€œIt solves my accommodation problems.”
    â€œWhat the devil do you mean?”
    Wiki paused, studying the big Virginian, wondering if there was a chance he would understand. Forsythe had once hired himself out to a Ngapuhi chief as a mercenary fighter. He had hunted the forest warpaths and voyaged on waka taua —canoes of war—and he had lived and fought with Wiki’s people, though after Wiki had left the Bay of Islands. So Wiki said, “I berth with Astronomer Grimes, and if he dies I’ll have to cope with his kehua —his ghost. And the room will be too tapu to live in.”
    â€œFor God’s sake!” Forsythe exploded. “Why can’t you remember that half of you is a civilized American? Aren’t you embarrassed to behave like a bloody ignorant savage?”
    Wiki maintained a chilly silence. Then he saw Forsythe’s thick lips pursing in and out as he glowered at Festin, who was still contemplating his tooth. Finally, the lieutenant said with an air of decision, “Come with me.”
    â€œWhat? Where?”
    Instead of answering, Forsythe cast sharp glances all about the gun deck. Wiki looked, too, but the only life to be seen was a trickle of rats, scuttling from shadow to shadow. The fires glowed redly under the big cauldrons where great lumps of salt meat were simmering, but right now there was no one to tend them. Evidently, he thought, the cooks had been part of the party that had attacked Festin, and had run away with the rest.