Read Online The Last Ship by William Brinkley - Free Book Online

flukes. Make them dig deeper.”
    He waited, then exclaimed it again, as a thing of a certain wonder.
    “Aye, sir, grapnels.”
    It was simply a metal pole ending in a four-pronged anchor; an ancient tool of ships on the seas, little changed in thousands of years, with many and discrete uses; fishing objects—or people—off the bottom of the water; anchoring dories; in the old days of the sea, for holding an enemy ship alongside for hand-to-hand combat. I could not remember that ours had ever seen use, but somewhere in the holds of this ship Delaney had found them. I glanced at Thurlow. The navigator had something of the same look in his eyes, deriving from the excitement and astonishment, and the pure delight, one always feels at a device intended for one thing, or a series of things, being seen, possibly for the first time, by the intelligent mind—in this case, Delaney’s—as having application to altogether another. He gave an affirming nod.
    “Grapnels: They’ll make all the difference,” the gunner’s mate was going on. “Fetched me up when I saw how much like they are to what our mules used to pull.”
    “Where do we get the mules, Delaney?” I knew of course. I wanted to hear him say it, and, more important, how he was working it out.
    He looked up, his eyes moving across the decks at some of the crew engaged in the work of the ship.
    “Why, the men, naturally, Captain,” he said, as if I were a terribly ignorant person in these agricultural matters, a judgment which would not have been far off the mark. “Men like Preston. He may even be stronger’n a mule. Ship’s lines rigged from the grapnels, hitched around a man’s waist, shoulders. I been studying on it; begun a mule list already,” he said soberly. “Besides grapnels . . . we got some
tools,
Captain. Like this here.”
    He pulled it from somewhere under him. Earth clung also to the blade.
    “We got thirty-five of these entrenching tools.” These were meant for digging protective cover against people eager to harm you; by, for example, a trapped shore party; again never used. “Short handles. Other’n that, good as any shovel—or hoe. A man would just have to bend down more. But for stoop labor a short handle’s even better . . .”
    The gunner’s mate’s bright-voiced zeal kept coming at me, bringing something like an exhilaration; outsized perhaps; almost certainly not that justified. But we had known so little of its portion of late that I let it flood in. He was going on. “. . . I thought I’d try in small patches, Captain. Everything we got plantings for in the greenhouse. See what takes. Then go for them . . .”
    “Grapnels,” I said. “Entrenching tools. Beating swords into plowshares, Delaney?”
    “Aye, sir. Come to think of it. And spears into pruninghooks,” the gunner said quietly, a touch of a smile. “Isaiah 2:4, sir.”
    “You know your Bible, Gunner.”
    “The Bible’s mighty big in the Ozarks, Captain.”
    It was the favorable facts, of course, an edge in our favor or at least the odds made more even, suddenly proffered, since on nothing else can decision be based. But as much, too, was the belief in what such men could do. I felt an immense surge in me, the greatest in time remembered. I looked silently at Thurlow, at Silva, at Delaney. Then stood up, they with me. As one we turned and gazed across the lagoon at the island, as one followed down it until our eyes came to rest on the plateau which rose high above the sea on its southerly end; stopped there awhile, eyes fixed profoundly on it, as if in some final assessment; the island, hushed across the blue water, radiant in its greenness, seeming to await our decision as to whether we proposed to take it on. I looked at the boatswain’s mate then the gunner’s mate. Thought suddenly, wryly: now Silva the fisherman, Delaney the farmer.
    Then let’s start,” I said quietly. “Tomorrow.”
     *  *  * 
    As an afterthought I found