Startled at Hal’s bellow by his ear, Robert jerked. The sextant slipped from his grip. With a wild lunge, he snatched the instrument out of the air before it fell over the ship’s rail into the green ocean, and turned to see what could possibly be wrong now. They had been at sea two days since the last landfall—the worst of this West Indies station was the island-hopping involved. No blue-water sailing at all, no months at sea, where the soothing rhythm of day upon day of naval routine might quiet a crew’s restiveness and weld them into a unit. No, the West Indies station was all small journeys interrupted by anchorage, and even those journeys were as likely as not to be fretted by encounters with the French and the Spanish and the Dutch, and pirates of every nation. The tension took its toll. And Hal—Hal had been vibrating with it ever since they left Kingston. Robert’s quick look disclosed no enemy ship on the horizon. The trouble was on board then.
