~ An Execrable Business, continued…
"It's them!"
"Who?" Jack swung around, saw two men with Martha, turned back to Nell and she was gone! She'd slipped from her chair and, bent double, was trying to reach the door to the kitchen unseen.
A futile effort.
Martha turned toward their table, the men looked at Jack, then spotted Nell and started after her. Nell yelped, abandoned her ineffective subterfuge, and ran for the door. Jack leapt to his feet, grabbed a chair from an adjacent table and slung it hard. Happily it caught the first of Nell's pursuers, and the second man, close behind, barreled into the first, flooring them both.
"Jack Sparrow!" roared Martha, outraged.
"Sorry, love!" Jack shouted back as he bolted after Nell, avoiding the struggling pair on the floor with a dexterous hop, skip and jump.
He rushed through the deserted kitchen and out the back, clattering down the steps into the moonlit night. The deeply shadowed perimeters of the garden would have offered convenient concealment, if she'd considered, but she was doubtless too rabbit scared. He ran along the side of the house, instead, and gaining the front he caught sight of her, sure enough, racing for the corner, back the way they'd come.
But the inn's front door burst open and Claypool's men saw her, too. Jack shrank against the house as they bowled down the steps and sprinted after the girl. Then he took off, in quite another direction.
There was more than one way back to the waterfront.
TBC…
