Untouched By Man by Laura Leone

Author:Laura Leone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePublishing Works!
Published: 2012-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“What are they?” Clowance asked breathlessly as Shady hauled himself aboard the Harlot. She helped him off with his tank and put his fins aside.

“Pieces of eight,” he told her, his heart pounding. “Ezra and Ludwig are still down there, but I wanted to show you.”

The magnetometer had indicated something only a day after their arrival at the new location, and the three men had gone down to investigate while Clowance kept watch aboard the Harlot. Shady had emerged from the blue waters after only twenty minutes.

“There’s ballast down there, too,” he said, sitting down on a chair and handing her a coin. The piece of eight, so often described in pirate legends, was a coin about the size of a silver dollar, originally worth eight reales—hence its name.

“It’s just a greenish lump,” Clowance said in disappointment.

“It’s been sitting in saltwater for hundreds of years, Slim. It’ll shine again after a good soak in hydrochloric acid.”

Later that day, he and Ludwig brought up a clump of silver coins, blackened and welded together by chemical action, weighing almost fifteen pounds. The shouting, whooping, cavorting, and general merriment on deck was so loud that Clowance thought people must be able to hear them way back in Key West. They celebrated that night, drinking their way through a moderate amount of beer and toasting Clowance repeatedly.

“We’d still be scouring the ocean floor west of Upper Matecumbe Key, if it weren’t for you!” Ezra exclaimed, beaming with pride. “That’s my granddaughter,” he informed the men.

Ludwig made a toast in German and took Clowance’s hand, which Shady decided to overlook. It was a night to be generous, after all, so he figured he should let Ludwig touch her extremities for a moment or two without objecting. When Ludwig’s moment had passed, though, Shady pulled Clowance away, put his arm around her, and raised his mug.

“To the only person smart enough, after nearly three centuries, to track down the Riaza.” Clowance’s limpid eyes made him feel unusually poetic, and he added, “Untouched by man for all these years, she’s finally going to be mine.”

He figured the beer must have loosened her up since, smiling bashfully, she leaned over and kissed him warmly, right in front of Ludwig and Ezra. Ludwig swallowed his disappointment like a man, which made Shady like him a little better, and Ezra chuckled at them all with the wisdom of age.

“I hate to mention this,” Clowance said a little while later, after a few more toasts had gone down the hatch, “but we don’t really know if the silver we picked up today was from the Riaza.”

“The coins don’t prove it?” Ezra demanded.

Clowance shook her head. The angular, crudely minted coins Shady had handed her earlier were stamped with a cross on one side and what appeared to be a royal coat of arms on the other. “The mark M that I could decipher on three of the coins identifies them as products of the Mexico City mint, and they appear to be from the early eighteenth century, but that doesn’t identify the ship for us, Grandpa.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.