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

his voice soft and earnest. “Then listen well. Now, it seems to me that the first step, the very first one, is to learn who this other officer is and where he is held—”
    And with Hunter nodding agreement and me fighting exhaustion and the call of sleep, Uncle Patch talked on, far into the night.

My Discovery
    Do not lose hope. Rescue is near. Be prepared.
    â€”A Friend
    I SIGHED AND SHOOK A SPLASH of fine sand from the sand shaker over the words I had just written. Then I shook the sand off and added the page to the pile by my side. By my count I had done two round dozen of the blessed things.
    For three days, my uncle, Captain Hunter, and all the crew who weren’t patching the Aurora had been scouring Cayona Town, hoping for news of M. du Pont’s mysterious other British officer. My part, much to my annoyance, was to copy the letter theywere to slip to the captive if and when they found him. Captain Hunter informed me it was a very important duty since, while his men were all brave and true, most of them thought their names were spelled with an X. In his usual charming way, Uncle Patch warned me that I was to plant my breeches in the room and under no circumstances was I to move.
    So I scraped and copied and sprinkled and stacked. It was deadly dull because the captain insisted they all be neat and legible and exactly the same. When my fingers cramped, I would brush and clean my clothing and shoes, just to have something to do. In the heat of the day I dozed, taking what the Spanish called a
siesta.
    The rest of the time I was bored. I even started to read some of Uncle Patch’s precious medical books he had brought ashore with him.
Wiseman on Surgery
was one, I recall, and in it was an account of the very operation my uncle had done upon poor Captain Brixton. It was almost interesting until I realized that reading the books was precisely what my uncle hoped I would do. As much as I hate to admit it, I spent a great deal of my time sulking and feeling quite sorry for myself.
    From talking to the crew every night after they returned from the ship, I knew that the search was not going well. The town, the port, the ships in the harbor—none of them yielded any news. Mr. Adams said that everything was just sealing up, like a great oyster protecting a pearl. “Something’s going on, though,” he concluded. “The people of Tortuga are afraid of something.”
    â€œOf what?” I asked him.
    â€œAye, that’s the nub of it. What? I have the feeling that the people of town are so on edge, they barely are talking to one another, let alone to strangers.”
    The night that Mr. Adams said these words, I came to a conclusion of my own. The problem was they were sending men to do a boy’s job. So the people of Cayona were suspicious of English sailors, were they? I had an answer to that.
    I went through my uncle’s chest until I found a fine piece of parchment he had saved just because he truly hated to throw anything away. In his portable writing-desk I found a stick of red sealing wax. I carefully wrote out my message one more time, then neatly folded the parchment into three sections and closed it with a large dollop of the hotred wax. Before it could cool, I pressed into it the Spanish coin that Sir Henry Morgan had given me as a good-luck piece. When I took the coin away, the parchment looked like a sealed, official document.
    I calculated that the French of this island might not want to talk to a pirate, especially an English pirate. But a not-too-bright ship’s boy, afraid he’d be beaten if he failed to deliver his scrap of fine parchment with its fine seal, well, him they might talk to.
    My plan was simple. I would dress myself in my most ragged clothes, clutch my letter in my grubby hand, pull my hat down over my eyes, and just tell everyone I saw that I had a message for a British officer and did anyone know where one was?
    So the next day, I waited