After sundown we climbed back aboard ship, bags of nature's deadliest profusion slung over our shoulders. There were toadstools, some brightly colored toads (some still alive and complaining in chorus), datura, oleander, and daggerweed. We had also retrieved some powdered puffer fish that I had brought back from Hispaniola, along with some white lead powder mother used to mix with linseed oil to make white paint for the fence. We had retrieved Mr. Birdsong's mob pistol, and I also brought mother's snake handled dirk, and her silken waist sash, which I now wore with her two littl pistols with their mother-of-pearl handles tucked into it. We had saved her hat, too. I now possessed a wardrobe befitting my new position in life as co-navigator.

A barefoot tar scrubbing the deck took little note of us as we passed. His eyes were bloodshot. On each of his feet the big toe was dimpled in at the tip so that it hinted at being two toes, and there was an extra little toe halfway up each foot's edge. He was just the sort of fellow who would be kept down by a proper navy but who flourished among the buccaneers. He would no doubt receive as much extra booty for losing one of those malformed toes as any other tar would for losing a perfectly good one.

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