"By damn, dey wanna see real piracy, Jerome, what say we jus' take dis damn' goelette for our own?" Balfa softly cackled. "Mak dem walk de plank, jus' like de ol' days, maroon dem, 'long wit' dem poor salauds down below, hein?"

"They're too rich and important to go missing, Boudreaux, and we'd swing for it," Lanxade countered, though not without a long pause to ponder it.

"But we won't for dat Dago guarda costa lugger? Merde!" The Spanish government lugger, outbound from Havana, returning rebel slaves for execution at Mobile-along with a profitable load of other negres and smuggled goods that her unscrupulous captain had meant to land on the sly-was their latest capture. The small crew of Spaniards had gone overside, as had the convicted rebels, though they'd kept the untainted negres for sale to the caboteurs, the itinerant backcountry slave dealers. After the Pointe Coupee slave insurrection four years earlier, though, even a blind planter would have spurned such lash- or manacle-scarred slaves as cutthroat troublemakers, not with brigands such as St. John or St. Malo leading vengeful runaway slave bands in the swamps of Louisiana.

Those captives had held no value, except for sport. With their hands free, but with leg shackles linked and weighted with shot, their struggle to stay afloat had been tres drole, the strong futilely trying to buoy up the weaker after they'd been forced over the side, once the lugger had been stripped of everything useful, then sunk. The Spaniards had had it kinder; they'd walked the plank with only their arms roped, free to kick-swim to stay afloat, and alive, 'til the game had palled, and the youngsters had honed their marksmanship skills on them. Now, there would be more fun.