X

WINTERS in Arundel and all our Eastern country lie hard and burdensome on idle folk. There are heavy skies and spittings of snow in November, a weighty fall or two in December, and through January and February and March enough snow and ice and bitter wind to make the devil himself press close up to the flames of hell, and still feel a chill on the side removed from the fire. The birches are bent out of shape by the weight of snow. Ancient pines, weakened by rocky soil or overcrowded by their neighbors, sink to their knees under the snow bundles on their exposed polls, thus forming the deadfalls that madden us when we travel forest trails.

Our winters are not, as some would have you think, seasons of silence and stagnation. There are splitting sounds behind the walls of our garrison house, as though a furtive giant tested boards across his knee. The eaves drip, seeming to weep for the sins of those the roof has sheltered. At night the mournful plaint of horned owls—whoo; who-who—emerges endlessly from the pines across the creek, punctuated occasionally by the howls of hunting wolves or the distressing scream of a wildcat. When there is ice in the river, it complains and ejaculates as the tides rise and fall beneath it. There are always chickadees clinging upside down to trees and bushes, sometimes alighting on one’s musket barrel in their trusting blindness, forever uttering their dreary, weary song. There is always the quawking of ducks and geese and night-herons; the wailing of gulls; the abrupt tapping of woodpeckers; the squeaking and clattering of mice between the floors; the moan of the wind fingering at the sashes.

I have long held that if a person plans chores to keep him busy, he will find our Eastern winters a time of relief from the blinding sweat and the countless small tasks of summer, instead of a stagnant period during which each man comes to hate his neighbors, his family, and at last himself.

For all that, I am glad, in late March or early April, when the first thunderheads of the year roll up over the long blue coast line of Wells, and the rumble of distant thunder comes to us from the towering masses of silver-edged clouds. We know then that within the week the last of the drifts and the slabs of ancient ice must vanish from the easterly side of ledges; that the salmon are in the rivers; that mayflowers will soon lie hid among their rough leaves at the edges of clearings; that before we know it the baby frogs will set up their pipings in the roadside pools. They are a sign, these first thunderheads, that a new world of rich harvests, lush meadows and billowing groves is on its way to replace the barren fields, bleak outlines and devouring chills that have so long oppressed us.

That first winter after my father and I returned from our pursuit of Guerlac and Mary, whenever I could steal a few moments from my chores, I practised the tricks I had seen Arnold perform aboard his schooner; but toward the end of the winter a terrible occurrence put an end to such practising, and left no part of any winter hanging heavy on my hands.

It was a bitter afternoon in February, with the wind in the north and a dirty scum of gray clouds across the sky, when my father heard a blast on the horn that hung from a post on the far side of the ferry. Being in his smithy, he called for Jethro Fish, but got no answer; so he went himself to the skiff and pulled across. The tide was low, the water running out swiftly in the narrow bed: so as he swung the skiff alongside the tall, gangling passenger who stood on the far bank, he leaned over and set his oar in the sand to hold it in place. Feeling by the motion of the skiff that the man was aboard, he withdrew his oar and dropped it into the oarlock, looking up at his passenger as the skiff swung off into the stream. The passenger was the Reverend Ezekiel Hook.

Hook recognized my father at the same moment and stepped backward, croaking, “I’ll cross with no blasphemer!”

It may be that in staring so intently at my father he forgot the skiff had left the bank and thought to step off, or he may have lost his balance; but for whatever reason, he fell backward over the stem. From the way he bobbed beneath the surface and up again, beating the water with his arms, rigidly, his mouth open to scream but emitting only gasps and gurgles, my father saw he couldn’t swim; so he pulled alongside him, reaching down to grasp his coat. Hook gave a convulsive flop, clutched him, and pulled him in as well.

Unable to cope with his thrashing arms, my father hit him on the chin and knocked him unconscious, breaking his jaw at the same time, I am happy to say, though it would have been better for all of us if he had broken his neck. He pushed him into shallow water; then struck out after the skiff, which was whirling downstream. Overtaking it, he climbed in, pulled back, picked up the senseless Hook, and rowed him to our shore. When he had drawn up the skiff and made the rope fast, he carried Hook to the house, where my mother bound up his jaw and put him to bed.

It must be my father had sucked overmuch bitter cold air into his lungs on top of a throat trouble he had caught from travelers—such a trouble as spreads out of the cities, now and again, like a flame running through the woods—for he fell to shivering and shaking and burning up with fever. Hook departed the next day, saying nothing because of his bound jaw, but glaring maledictions at my mother and myself. My father had taken to his bed, breathing with difficulty, so we sent Jethro Fish posting to Portsmouth to pray a doctor there to come at once to my father’s relief; and to make sure he came, we sent him an otter skin.

That night my mother called me to her room, where my father lay between the feather mattresses. As well as he could, because of the pain in his chest, he told me how I must be governed by my mother in the management of the inn and the ferry; how I should invest our earnings in beaver and otter skins, and especially in sables when I could get them, always sending word to the governor’s house in Boston when there was an accumulation of sables, so that the Boston bloods could ride down for them, and get drunk doing it; how my mother and I should continue to deal with Captain Callendar of Boston, sending skins to England by his brig, so that with them he could buy tea in Holland, wine in Portugal and molasses in the French Sugar Islands, and smuggle all of them into Boston, like so many of the Massachusetts and Connecticut merchants; and how we should add to the gold in the barrel buried under the kitchen until we had enough to build a brig of our own.

With that he patted me feebly on the arm and motioned to my mother to send me away.

I went into the kitchen and sat unhappily with Malary. Late that night the doctor came from Portsmouth, half frozen. He put blisters on my father’s chest, but shook his head, for my father recognized neither him nor my mother. The next morning, just after the sun had risen and the wind had swung into the south, my father died.

We made out after a fashion. Seemingly Guerlac’s hatchet had released some spring in me; for I shot up to a great height for one of my years. From necessity I worked in the smithy when there were musket locks to be mended or horses to be shod; and between times I raced from the smithy to the sawmill, and from the sawmill to the ferry, getting this done and that done by asking those who worked for us to show me how they should be done; for my father had often said to me that people in our part of the country were independent-minded, and wanted less to be told how things should be done than to tell others how to do them.

Indeed, it often seemed to me, as the seasons rolled on, that the independent-mindedness of many of our people would have better borne another name—opposite-mindedness, belike, or cussed-mindedness.

We had hard times when the French wars were over. There were two years of drought and no more selling of supplies to the English, so the farmers could not get shut of their com. They were in debt to the merchants for stock and supplies, and too often in debt for their land as well, though they could usually find enough for a glass of rum. Rich men in Portsmouth and Boston and Connecticut were investing in land speculations in the distant West, along the Susquehannah and farther. It was possible for settlers to get Western farm lands for fifty cents an acre, since the speculators obtained it for a cent an acre, or less, by stealing it from the Indians. Therefore there was no demand for land near old settlements, such as our own; and the value of our farms sank so low they could scarce be given away.

When some of our farmers came to the inn of a winter’s evening and filled themselves with French rum, you would have thought from the way they pounded the tables and cursed that they were going to march to Portsmouth or Boston the next day and carve their initials on the livers of the land speculators who were causing them such grief, and making it difficult for them to get their hands on ready money, and thus robbing them of their liberty.

Those who worked in the shipyards, and some of the fishermen, too, got wind of a way to make money, just by printing it and giving it to people who would pledge land as security against the money they received, or some such foolish scheme. They went yelling and squalling around in a teeter of excitement, always in a rage because the sensible merchants who had the right of voting, which these crazy-headed people didn’t have, refused to let them print money. They were angry against the merchants, and angry because they had no votes with which to beat the merchants and get paper currency. One who heard them ranting about liberty in the tavern of nights would have thought that liberty was somebody like a female relative, and that she had been assaulted around the corner somewhere a few minutes before and had her scalp taken.

For the matter of that, they seemed to have some reason on their side. I could see no good cause why the town meetings of our New England towns should be controlled by a lot of overwealthy robbers who had made themselves rich while less careful and less godly men had fought in the wars, and the mass of people in the towns, including those who did the fighting, have no voice in elections.

When the paper-money roarers and anti-capitalist bellowers had finished pounding on tables, the English-haters would begin pounding; and it was hard to tell which of them could pound hardest. On some nights, when I had been busy serving out rum and copying accounts from the board on the wall until my brain was all thick and curdled, it seemed to me I must get down my hatchet from the slot over the front door, where I kept it in case Guerlac should come back again, and sink it into the head of the next man who bawled “Sugar Act” and banged the table with his fist.

For years everybody in Arundel and the other New England seacoast settlements had traded wherever he pleased and with whomever he pleased, and thought no more about it. Our New England rum was made out of molasses smuggled into Portsmouth and Boston from the French Sugar Islands, there being insufficient molasses in the English Sugar Islands to supply our rummeries; and the French molasses being cheaper to boot. Also our sugar for hot rum punches and other purposes came from the French Sugar Islands, as did our French rum, all of it being smuggled, since only a madman would pay duty on what everyone was smuggling; and since any customs officer, for the gift of a pair of shoe buckles or a new hat, would close his eyes to anything. Everybody south of Halifax who owned a vessel larger than a hash-chopper had busied himself at smuggling at one time or another, even though not pretending to such operations as Peter Faneuil or John Hancock of Boston, and the other merchants with plenty of money made from the wars.

Then, of a sudden, after the Sugar Act against smuggling had been ignored by everyone for more than a generation, the lunk-headed English decided that the ancient, bewhiskered, forgotten law must be enforced. The merchants in Boston, not wishing to be disturbed in their smuggling, hired a man to travel around and explain the evils of the law. He stopped at our inn one night and out-bawled and outpounded all those in the gathering-room, buying rum for them and telling how a duty on molasses and sugar would ruin both the distilleries and the fisheries, which were our greatest industries.

He did more than curse England and her mouse-headed lawmakers. He told the open-mouthed crew of drinkers in our gathering-room how, if the Sugar Act should be enforced, five thousand New England seamen would be turned out of employment and would starve; and how other workmen who depended on the seamen would also suffer—coopers and farmers and tanners and shoemakers and sailmakers and innkeepers and God knows who-all. From that night onward, then, the wild folk who bawled for paper money, forgetful of their rage against the merchants, began to join with them in bawling that England was crushing their liberty; and our inn was in an uproar every night.

Always, since my father’s death, I had sought eagerly for news of Mary and Guerlac, thinking to go to Quebec as soon as I felt myself sufficiently strong to clout Guerlac on the head when I found him, and carry Mary away with me to wear figured brocades and rule over my kingdom at the mouth of the Arundel River—though I knew I would have to banish the bawlers and table-pounders before I could provide the proper kingdom for her.

For a time, though I spoke with every passing trapper who had set foot in Quebec, I could get no word whatever of Mary, nor of Guerlac either. Natanis came to see me, bringing sable skins which I sold to the governor of Massachusetts, Bernard, who sent his scented secretary to get them. Natanis brought me news of Manatqua; how his pride at the two wigs he had received from my father had been so great that he dared not leave either of them in his cabin lest it be stolen or lost. He would wear one and hold the other in his hands, and do no hunting at all, hardly, so that the Abenakis had deposed him as sachem, a pitiful case. Natanis gave me reports, too, of Hobomok and Jacataqua; how Hobomok had learned to out-scream every m’téoulin in the valley of the Kennebec, and how Jacataqua was becoming beautiful, slender and straight like her mother. Learning that I had heard nothing of Mary, he offered to travel to Quebec; and that summer he did so, but could discover nothing save that Guerlac was in France.

Even had I learned anything, I doubt that I could have availed myself of it. My mother and sisters were half distracted because of the noisy and discontented gatherings that cluttered our inn; and it was my task to keep order, since a woman could not make herself heard, while hired men like Jethro Fish, instead of keeping order, would join in the arguments and become as tumultuous and contentious as any of the others.

I doubt, even, that these discontented folk, when full of rum, would have consented to be kept in order by any but myself; but me they regarded as a boy; and since I had some strength from working at the forge and practising Arnold’s tricks, I could haul them from the house when their feet became unmanageable, slap their faces to bring back their senses, and dowse them in the creek, all with an apologetic air, and all without arousing their displeasure.

Also my mother, still having her looks because my father had not made a pack horse and a brood mare out of her, as is the custom in our section of New England, and being the owner of a tidy property, was constantly snuggled up to by widowers and bachelors who hoped to be supported handsomely for the remainder of their days. Being a woman of gentleness, and having an eye, furthermore, to our earnings, she forbore to send these snugglers about their affairs, and so had little time to watch over the inn’s business.

To me, however, she spoke her mind about those who pursued her, saying that my father had been the only man in all New England, she believed, who would not hurry out to get a new wife within five minutes after his previous wife died; and that there was no distinction in men’s minds between a shirt and a wife; almost anything would do; and they were to be worn out, both of them, and replaced at once if lost; and few cared whether or not they were ever washed so long as they were serviceable.

When, therefore, Phoebe Marvin came to the inn one morning and asked to be allowed to work for us for a dollar a week, with some instruction in letters thrown in, I could not make the protest I would otherwise have made.

She was less unendurable than she had once been, but I still found her capable, at times, of trying the patience of Job. She was thin, but with a compactness about her thinness that came, I think, from the hours she spent in the water during the warm weather, when there was scandalous talk about her because her swimming garment was an ancient gingham dress, cut off above the knee and sewn at the bottom so that it ended in pantalettes instead of a skirt. Scandalmongers had trouble seeing her because of her persistence in remaining under water when onlookers were about, swimming on her back so that nothing showed but her nose and chin, and emitting derisive jets of water from time to time between pursed lips; but those who had seen her complained that she went about in the sun with the top of her dress unbuttoned.

All the day she was in the water or on it, fishing from a crazy skiff she had dug from the mud and patched with pitch and rotten canvas, and calked with rags and old rope. In this fearful craft she sailed in and out of the river and around the reefs until every seaman in the place threw up his hands and swore that by rights she should have been drowned ten times each month. Because of this, doubtless, she was a golden color on those portions of her that could be seen, as well, I suspected, as on several portions that could not be seen: a most unmaidenly color, wholly unlike the beautiful whiteness of Mary.

She had recovered from her hellish manner of bursting into eldritch screams or hoydenish titterings at her own rude remarks; and she had even learned to be silent in the presence of her elders and betters. Yet there came often into her eyes, which were gray and could seem as hard as the ledges that crop out in our pine forests, a look in which was concentrated all the rudeness and jeers she had been wont to express aloud.

One evening I came on her looking out of a window into the red clouds in the west and weeping silently. Being, as I have shown, of a forgiving nature, I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her why she cried. Since she did not move, and since the twilight bent me to gentleness, I reached around her and turned her against my breast, repeating my question. She was as taut in my hands, when I turned her, as a bowstring, and as unyielding as a quiverful of arrows; and her eyes examined me as though from a distance, with a scoffing look in them that made me take my hands from her and cry, “Don’t you say that!” Not with a torrent of words and eldritch screams of laughter could she have sneered at Mary more effectively.

She wished to work for us, she said, because she must have schooling which she could not get elsewhere; but I think it was because she knew my father had liked her father, and was sure I would give her rum for him—rum he needed for dulling the pain in his arrow-pierced shoulder, but could no longer buy. Otherwise I doubt she would have worked for anyone; for our girls are so independent that some of them will starve rather than take orders from strangers. In a way I counted myself fortunate to have her help, though she irked me so sorely, with her jeering glance, that I often longed to hit her with my mother’s wooden pestle.

We put her to helping in the gathering-room of nights; and her squirrel-like quickness stood her in good stead when the men tried to maul her. She knew more tricks to escape from a man than any wench I ever saw. If it had not been so my mother would have refused to let her stay there, just as she refused to let my sisters go into the gathering-room when the men had commenced on their rum.

When it seemed as though the unrest and cantankerousness of our farmers and fishermen could grow no more, there began to be even louder rantings over a damnable business called the Stamp Tax, and bitter complaints concerning press gangs from English ships of war, which were coming into any port and snatching up our seamen to round out their crews. In talking of these things the talkers raked up all the other matters concerning which they had been ranting since the fall of Quebec—the need of paper currency; the Sugar Act; the damned Virginia and Rhode Island land speculators with their Ohio Company and their Susquehannah Company, sending colonists out to countries so wild that armies had to be maintained to protect them; the special privileges of the great merchants; the King’s trees, set apart for masts for the King’s navy and so not to be cut by the settlers on whose lands they stood, though most of the settlers persisted in cutting them because they were the best trees; the senseless English law against making hats or iron goods in our colonies. It seemed as though every man had a bitter grievance for which he longed to bash someone over the head; and through all the talk there ran the moan that our liberty was being taken from us, and that no nation or people had the right to steal liberty from other people.

I could not help but see that those who talked the loudest about their loss of liberty were those who had lost the least, or had the least to lose, being the poorest and wretchedest of our people, with little land, less money and no vote. Yet I learned from travelers that this was the way of it throughout New England.

In the spring of my eighteenth year, when all this hullabaloo about liberty was swelling like the incoming tide in a creek, there came a warm, glittering day with the wind in the southwest, and a flight of sickle-bill curlews, large, slow-flying birds, near as big in the body as a partridge. Moved to hatred of the inn and all its works by the soft odors of marshland and sweet grass and mallow, I took my musket and old Ranger and his young wife Ginger and went to the beach to kill a few curlews for supper and speak to Eunice, who had grown so fat from a surfeit of salmon, pollock and bluefish that she could no longer come to the house, but lay in the wash of the breakers and barked hoarsely for me with tearful eyes.

While I stood on the beach, kicking Eunice gently in the side and making her groan with pleasure, a traveler rode up over the high land at the far end of the beach, and along the white crescent of sand toward me. There was something about the hugesome manner in which he towered over his horse and bulged out on each side that made me think of Cap Huff, though years had passed since I had seen him. As he drew near I saw it was indeed Cap Huff, as enormous and jovial and sweaty as ever, his buckskin shirt so wrinkled and stained that it might have been the same one on which he wiped his hands after throwing Guerlac in the creek. But in place of his ancient coonskin cap he was wearing a three-cornered hat with gold lace on it, and beautiful jack boots where once he had worn leggins tied with eelskins.

He told a strange tale when he had done bawling curses at me and roaring his pleasure at seeing me again. There was, he said, a secret organization called the Sons of Liberty spreading through Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut. Recently the Sons of Liberty had been formed in Portsmouth, and he was one of the leading Sons—so much so that the Portsmouth Sons had now sent him to Arundel to select and instruct other Sons in their secret duties.

“By God, Stevie,” he roared, banging me on the shoulder, “there’s none of these damned merchants can put me in gaol any more, because if they do, my Sons of Liberty’ll tear their old hell’s gaol to pieces, and tar and feather ’em into the bargain!”

When I asked whether the secret duties of the Sons of Liberty were to keep him out of gaol, he became mysterious.

“Stevie,” he said—and I knew from the way his eyes turned inward that he was fishing out words he had learned from other folk—“it’s this matter of the Stamp Tax. If the English can take a shilling in the pound from me without my will, why not twenty shillings? Why not my liberty or my life? If anything of ours can be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands?”

“Since when have you had lands?” I asked, but he waved my question impatiently aside.

“If these things can be taxed,” he continued, becoming fiercely virtuous, “why not everything we possess? Why not the kettles in your kitchen or the coat on your back or—or—” he cast around vainly for other taxable articles, and finally ended, weakly—“or your little dog, playing on the sand?”

“Well, why not?” I asked, watching Ranger scratching at the back of his neck and looking with lackluster eyes at Eunice. “I wouldn’t have to pay it, would I, any more than I pay taxes on our smuggled rum?”

“Ah ha!” Cap shouted in a great booming voice, “then the English could run their ships into the mouth of your river and make slaves out of you, if they saw fit. There it is, Stevie! Sam Adams says that’s what we’ll come to: slaves! We’ll all be slaves, unless we look out! That’s the reason for the Sons of Liberty!”

Still I could not see what he was driving at, and said so.

“Look here, Stevie,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and clearing his throat, so that I knew he was dry from talking, “everybody talks and nobody does anything. The merchants whoop and howl, but they don’t do anything, only write letters to each other and to the Boston Gazette. Well, to hell with that, Stevie! What we got to have is men that’ll do something when it’s time to do something, and not write a letter to somebody about it. By God, Stevie, if I had my way there wouldn’t be a man in the Sons that could write a letter!”

He thrust out his right leg and gave his new jack boot a resounding slap. “See this boot, Stevie?”

I could no more have overlooked it than I could have overlooked a brigantine in the river.

“Last week,” he bellowed, “there was a merchant in Portsmouth who said the Stamp Tax was reasonable and all right, and he was in favor of paying it.” Cap slapped his boot again, thrust his hands in his belt, and eyed me knowingly.

“What happened?”

“Well, the Sons went down to his store and turned it inside out and pulled it down. Then they left a sign on the door saying Enemies of Liberty Beware.’” He took off his new hat and eyed it moodily. “It was a boot store, and it had a few hats, but there wasn’t a shirt in the place.”

“What did the merchant do?”

Cap replaced his hat. “I ain’t heard. He’s still getting the tar and feathers off him.”

“Won’t he have you put in gaol?”

“My gosh!” Cap shouted, “ain’t I told you? This is a secret organization, and anybody that lets out the secrets, like who’s in it, gets treated the same as a merchant or anybody else who’s willing to see Sons of Liberty made into slaves. Sam Adams says all we got to do is hang together, and we can get rid of England and be our own masters. Then nobody can make slaves of us.”

“Get rid of England!” I protested. “What in thunderation would we want to get rid of England for?”

Cap Huff jabbed me in the chest with a forefinger like a marlin spike. “You blamed idiot! Can’t you see there ain’t nobody around here any more that’s got a chance to make money or do anything, except the merchants? Sam Adams says if we take the government in our own hands, and everyone gets a chance to vote, we can stop the merchants from hogging everything and pick up a little something for ourselves. Sam Adams says we got to fight England to do it. He says it’s coming, sure as shooting!”

“Sam Adams says!” I objected, befuddled by his talk. “Sam Adams! Sam Adams! Sam Adams! Who in hell is this Sam Adams? And what do we want to fight England for? I don’t know what you’re talking about! If you talked about fighting the French, now, it would mean something. They’ve been fighting us for a hundred years, and my father said there never was a bunch of dirtier, underhandeder, rottener fighters than the French! I’d rather fight the damned Virginians, with their high and mighty airs, and every cheap drunkard telling about being a Cavalier! I’d rather fight the Rhode Islanders! There ain’t meaner white folks anywhere than the Rhode Islanders, and everybody knows it!”

“Listen, boy,” Cap said. “You’re living back in ancient times! Sam Adams is the biggest man in the colonies. He’s the people’s friend. He knows everything. He says there’s Frenchmen over here now smelling around to see if we’re willing to fight England, and he says France’ll help us whenever we’re ready.”

“Well, if they come smelling around here,” I said, “I’ll treat ’em the way you treated the one that stole Mary.”

Cap looked at me blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll tell you one thing: after I get the Sons of Liberty organized, you want to be careful what you say! Don’t get rambunctious with any Frenchmen! If you and your father weren’t friends of mine I could bring my Sons of Liberty over here and wreck your place, just on account of what you’ve said. Say, how is your father?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “He died because he tried to save the life of a man who hated him.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Cap said. “That’s the sort of thing the Sons of Liberty aim to change. We aim to kill off the ones that need killing, so the good ones can stay alive.”

“You’re aiming pretty high,” I said.

“There you go again,” Cap said, “talking too much! After the Sons of Liberty are organized you don’t want to say anything. Not anything! You want to keep your mouth shut so tight you can’t get a knife into it without hammering it in.” He eyed me appraisingly. “Of course, I could make you head of the Sons in Arundel; only, being as how you run the inn, I guess maybe you’d have to keep all the other Sons in liquor, and that wouldn’t help you any.”

We went up to the inn, and at once Cap lighted on a worker from the shipyard above the upper ferry—James Dunn, who had come to town three years since, and lived mostly on ship’s bread and greens that he picked himself in the spring, putting them in a barrel with salt and pressing a board on them with a rock, so they could be eaten at any time, providing one had the stomach for them, though as for me I had as lief eat poison ivy.

James Dunn was such a man as we have in most of our New England towns—grave and determined in appearance; tall and gaunt; kindly-looking, yet obviously a man of inflexible will and passionate intensity; a quiet man, smiling at times a little bleakly, as if disillusioned by clear judgment and profound wisdom; but underneath it all the greatest nincompoop that ever tried to puzzle out his left hand from his right.

I don’t know where James Dunn got his nobility of face; but he looked wise enough to give advice to the King of France without half trying, whereas my dog Ranger could solve any ordinary question in less time than it took James Dunn to decide whether he should first take a bite of greens and then a bite of bread at his dinner, or first a bite of bread and then a bite of greens.

I know well that if James Dunn could confront those given to talking about the character to be seen in people’s faces they would guess him to be a general or a governor, or the sagest of theologians, instead of a humble adze-wielder in a shipyard, and such an adze-wielder that Thomas Scammen, the master shipwright across the river, declared he often longed to hit him over the head with an adze, but dared not for fear the blade would be shattered and ruined.

Cap selected James Dunn to be secretary of the Arundel Sons of Liberty, nor would he hear any word from me against his choice; so it may be he knew what he was about, and planned to use James for his own ends. For the rest of the members, he took all the noisy brawlers and table-bangers, so long as they had no property to speak of. He was especially pleased to get the wild and foolish fellows who had no vote and had sereamed the loudest for paper money; and he went so far as to send to the Upper Village to summon three other paper-money brawlers, so they too could be made Sons of Liberty.

When he had made his selections, he herded them into our big upstairs room along with a barrel of French rum. As I passed back and forth between the gathering-room and the kitchen, I caught the rumble of such words as “Stamp Act” and “slaves” and “slavery” and “taxation” and “Liberty” and “Rights of Man,” all in Cap’s thunderous bellow, and such salvos of cheering as our inn had never heard before, not even on the night when my father told how Wolfe took Quebec.

When the Sons of Liberty emerged from their secret meeting, flushed and noisy with rum, Cap Huff clapped me on the shoulder before them all and said I was doing secret duty for him, and must be guarded carefully, which was his way, I suppose, of keeping me from harm in case I spoke overfreely of subjects displeasing to the Sons of Liberty.

It was that night that Cap, happy at his success with the Sons and feeling amiably disposed toward all, slapped at Phoebe as she passed him with a hot rum punch, thinking to strike her toward the base of her spine or thereabouts, according to his playful custom. In some way she whirled so that Cap pitched forward, and the hot rum punch fell down the back of his neck, almost as though she had studied how to do it. If I had not held him by the slack of his breeches and given her time to run into the kitchen, I make no doubt he would have caught her and squeezed her to death in good-natured play.

That was my introduction to the Sons of Liberty. In the beginning they were the poorest and scurviest knaves that our village could boast, so that instead of being called Sons of Liberty, they were more often called Sons of something entirely different, when mentioned by respectable folk. Yet they were no different, travelers told me, from the Sons of Liberty in Massachusetts and Connecticut and the rest of our colonies, and I have no doubt it could not have been otherwise, if they were to do the work they did.

Late that night Cap Huff came to my mattress in the kitchen, smelling powerfully of sweat and rum and his new boots, and asked me what I meant, that afternoon, when I spoke of the Frenchman that stole Mary. What Frenchman, he wanted to know, and who was Mary? I told him the whole tale, while he sat rubbing his bulbous knuckles in silence. When I had finished he got up and fell against the stove, upsetting some pots. He righted himself and scratched his neck thoughtfully.

“He was the one,” Cap said, “that talked of affection. What I said about Frenchmen to-day is said as a statesman. I can talk differently in my private capacity. When I’ve tended to this Liberty business, we’ll make a social call on Guerlac and stuff him up his own chimney.”

There were times when I thought I could, if I wished, raise a regiment to punish Guerlac for his sins.