What the Tide Returned

The smoke would still be there in an hour. The metal might not. Tom limped south on his one bare foot, the wet sand sucking at his step. The glint grew as he neared it — not a coin, not a buckle, but something longer, curved, half-swallowed by the beach. He knelt and dug with his fingers, and the sea gave it up grudgingly. A pistol. A long-barreled flintlock, brass-banded, the walnut stock waterlogged but whole. He turned it over and his breath caught. Set into the butt-plate, in fine silver wire, was a coiled serpent eating its own tail — the mark of Captain Marrow himself. Marrow had carried two such pistols always, one in each sash. Tom had seen him oil them by lamplight a hundred nights. But Marrow had gone down with the Wren. Tom had watched the deck go under. He sat back on his heels with the pistol across his knees and felt the cold creep up his spine that had nothing to do with the wind. Either the sea had carried this here from the wreck — or Marrow himself had. And if Marrow had, then somewhere on this shore, the captain might still be drawing breath. He scanned the sand around him. There — fainter than he'd wish, but unmistakable — a single drag-track led from the surf-line into the dunes. One man, hauling himself, or being hauled. The track vanished into a stand of palmetto perhaps twenty paces off. The drum sounded again, deeper in the jungle. Closer this time, or only seeming so. Tom thumbed the pistol's cock. Wet powder, almost certainly. But the weight of it in his hand was a comfort he had not earned and would not refuse.