Torn-missing 4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

up to watch.
    “Stay out of sight!” JB ordered.
    “Oh, sorry,” Jonah muttered, crouching slightly so his eyes would barely show above the top of the barrel. He expected JB to complain about that, too, but the Elucidator was silent.
    Jonah eagerly turned his gaze toward Henry Hudson. Hudson had been talking a few moments ago about being an old sea captain, but maybe that was just a bluff. Maybe he was really youthful and athletic and agile—and good with a sword. Maybe he’d had one hidden in his sleeve. He could have used it to slash the ropes binding his wrists, then flicked the tip of the sword against the gun, swinging it out of the other man’s grasp. Stuff like that happened all the time in the movies. Jonah hoped he’dsprung up in time to see some really fancy moves, like Henry Hudson spinning the gun around the tip of the sword a few times before flinging it out into the water.
    But Henry Hudson was still standing quietly by the door, his wrists still tightly bound.
    Only the man with the gun had moved. Rather than pointing the gun at Henry Hudson, he’d turned it, so he was now aiming at …
    Jonah had to crane his neck and try to look around the mast.
    A whole cluster of sailors was jumping around over by the stairs. Jonah saw a flash of sword, but he couldn’t tell who was holding it. One of the sailors on the edge turned around and yelled at the man with the gun.
    “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! You’ll hit one of us!”
    “Then stand back!” the man with the gun yelled.
    “But he’s chasing us!”
    The cluster of men scattered and re-formed, as the man with the sword lunged toward the others, and the others lunged toward him, trying to knock the sword out of his hands. This was nothing like a sword fight in a movie: The swordsman was clumsy and awkward, and the men around him were panicky and stupid, moving in a pack when they should have divided up.
    Jonah remembered that he’d seen much better swordsmanshipin the fifteenth century, at the Battle of Bosworth.
    He’d also seen swordsmen die.
    He closed his eyes.
    “Doesn’t he know he’s going to get shot?” Katherine fumed. “It’s like a game of rock-paper-scissors—guns beat swords, every time.”
    “Not necessarily,” JB said softly. “Guns weren’t very accurate in 1611.”
    “So that guy is afraid to shoot?” Katherine asked. “Afraid he’ll hit one of his friends?”
    Jonah opened his eyes just a crack, to see that Katherine was pointing toward the man with the gun. Jonah followed her gesture—and then stared.
    “Look at that!” he muttered.
    Henry Hudson had stepped forward and put his hand against the gun—not to grab it, but to push it aside.
    “My loyal mate, John King,” he called out.
    Jonah craned his neck again to see across the deck. The man with the sword glanced up.
    “Yes, Captain?” he said.
    “Put down the sword,” Hudson said. “Come with me in the shallop, and we shall meet our glory away from these cowards.”
    The swordsman, John King, stopped parrying and thrusting, but he kept a hold on the sword.
    “By ‘meet our glory,’ you don’t mean dying, do you?” King asked suspiciously.
    “No, no,” Hudson said, waving aside the question, as if death weren’t even a possibility. “I’m talking about the Northwest Passage. I know how to find it now.”
    Northwest Passage?
Jonah thought. He had a vague memory of talking about that in some social studies class.
I would have paid a lot more attention if somebody had told me I was going to end up on Henry Hudson’s ship in Canada. Or what’s going to be Canada someday.
    The sailors reacted as if Hudson had said he knew how to win the lottery, guaranteed. Some looked awed. Others were shaking their heads, rolling their eyes.
    “He lies!” the man with the gun yelled. “Just like he’s lied all along! Do you want to spend another winter here? Do you want this to be your grave?”
    He pointed out into fog, toward the dark water.
    Even the