Read Bride of the Baja for Free Online

wedding gowns. He didn't want that either, not a life sentence as punishment for a few minutes' roll in the hay.
    Malloy sipped his drink. What a fool you are, Amos Malloy! he told himself. Calling this your ship. Dreaming of returning in triumph to Boston with Alitha at your side. He looked down at his hands. You'll be naught but a horny-handed seaman for the rest of your life, Amos Malloy. A short life at that, he feared, one fated to end in a watery grave. It wasn't right--it wasn't fair.
    And then slowly, one thought laboriously added to another, as a ship's carpenter might fashion a sea chest, he began to construct a plan in his mind. He crafted it with care, and when he had finished, he inspected it from every side. He could find no flaws. Malloy smiled. Soon the Yankee would be his, Alitha would be his. He stood up, ready--there was no reason to delay. Picking up the bottle, he emptied the last of the whiskey and raised his glass in a toast.
    "To Captain Amos Malloy!" he said aloud.
    After her father's burial service Alitha returned to the forecastle, where she meted out swallows of the ship's precious water to the sick crewmen. She cleaned and bathed them, trying to soothe them in their misery. When she saw there was no more she could do, she hurried aft, warily keeping out of Malloy's sight. She went to her father's cabin and closed the door behind her. Such a small cabin, she thought, though it was the largest on board. The ship seemed so small, so cramped. After they left Boston, while they sailed south into the Southern Hemisphere's summer, the ship had seemed spacious, with each day offering her new vistas of sea and sky as the they left the bitter New England winter behind. Now, with the seas running high, and a storm bearing down on them with her father dead, she felt trapped aboard the Yankee. A prisoner on her own ship.
    Dropping to her knees in front of her father's sea chest, she took his keys from her pocket and tried them one by one in the lock. After the lid sprang open she laid her father's folded clothing to one side until she found, at the bottom, a Bible and an intricately crafted rosewood case. She opened the Bible, a small black volume with pages edged in gold, and, as she often did when she needed guidance, read aloud the first verse she saw:
     
    And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.
     
    Alitha shook her head. What did the verse mean? How did Ezekiel's words apply to her? Closing the Bible and returning it to the sea chest, she removed the rosewood case.
    Taking the case in both hands, she turned and placed it carefully on her father's desk. She raised the lid. Inside, lying on the purple velvet lining, was a pistol with a silver barrel and a carved wooden handle. She tested the weight of the gun in her hand, finding it heavier than she had remembered.
    She frowned. Could she load the weapon? Her father had taught her how long ago, even letting her practice firing the pistol. She remembered closing her eyes when she pulled the trigger and missing the tree-stump target by several feet.
    Now she removed a cartridge and ball from a packet in the rosewood case, tore off the paper end and poured a small amount of the powder into the pistol's hollow pan and the rest down the barrel. She dropped the ball and the paper wrapper into the barrel and rammed them down with a rod. After relocking the sea chest, she picked up the pistol gingerly by the handle and carried it to her cabin.
    Once she had slid home the bolt on her cabin door, Alitha laid the pistol on her bunk. She removed her shoes, unbuttoned and stepped out of her dress and petticoats, then pulled her chemise over her head. She held a sheer white batiste nightgown in front of her, admiring for a moment the delicate blue of the ribbons threaded through the bodice, then put her arms in the sleeves and shrugged the gown down over her body.
    The pistol.