CHAPTER I.
A ROVER AND HIS RETINUE.
His only gold was in his hair;
He had no silver hoard;
But steel he had, enow to spare—
In his thews and in his sword!
TOWARD the close of a glorious day in September, 1683, William Phipps beheld a smart brig nose her way up the harbor of Boston, and drop in her anchor in the field of water wherein his ship-yard thrust its toes. A small boat then presently put forth and made straight for the ship-yard landing, where three men calmly alighted, throwing ashore a small heap of shabby-genteel-looking baggage.
Somewhat annoyed, thus to have his precincts employed by any Tom, Dick and Harry of chance, Phipps stepped from between the ribs of a ship’s skeleton, which was being daily articulated, and strode toward the intruders. Then a rumble, which ought to have been a shout, broke from his lips, about the same second that a roar of joy appeared to leap out of the foremost of the strangers, who had landed and who were coming boldly forward.
William Phipps and the leader of the invading trio then rushed hotly together and collided, giving each other a bear-like hug from which the ship-builder presently extricated himself at a thought of how he might be shocking all or any good Puritans who might chance to be witnessing the scene.
“Well, shatter my hilt! and God bless you! if it isn’t your same old beloved self!” said the stranger, heartily.
“My boy! Bless your eyes, Adam, I never thought to see you again!” said bluff William Phipps. “You big young rascal! You full-rigged ship! Where have you come from? What do you mean by making me swear myself into purgatory at your carelessness in getting yourself killed? You twenty-gun frigate—you—you big——”
He left off for very constraint, for his throat blocked up, despite his most heroic efforts. He and Adam Rust began to roar with laughter, the tears in their eyes needing some excuse. Meantime the two companions who had come with the young rover, stood gazing about them, in patience, and likewise looking in wonder on the two men before them.
There was reason enough to look, for Adam and Phipps were a pair to command attention. It seemed as if a founder had used the big ship-builder as a pattern on which to refine his art in casting the younger man. Adam’s back was a trifle narrower; his chest was a bit wider; he was trimmer at the waist, neater at the thigh, longer-armed. His hands were smaller, just as his movements were quicker and lighter.
Although Adam’s hair crowned him with tawny ringlets of gold, while that of Phipps was browner, and though the young fellow wore a small mustache, in contrast, to the smooth-shaved face of his friend, it might yet be said that the two men looked alike. Both were bronzed by weather, both had steadfast eyes with the same frank expression, the same blue tint and the same integrity about them.
In their dress the two men differed. William Phipps, whatsoever he might indulge himself in doing when away on the sea, conformed to the dark-brown simplicity of the Puritans when in Boston. Adam, on the other hand, wore a brown velvet coat which, though at present somewhat faded and moulting, had once been fine feathers in England. His waistcoat had been of royal purple, before its nap fled before the onslaughts of the clothes-brush, while his breeches were of a time-tanned forest green which disappeared into the maw of his wide-topped leather boots. He wore at his hip a veteran blade of steel, in a scabbard as battered as the outer gate of a stronghold. When not in his fighting fist, the hilt of this weapon contented itself with caresses from his softer hand, the left.
The two men having shaken hands for the third time, and having looked each other over from head to foot, and laughed and asked each other a dozen questions, to which neither had returned any answers, Adam suddenly remembered his comrades, waiting in the background. He turned to them now, not without affection.
“Here, Pike and Halberd,” he said, “you must meet my third father, Captain William Phipps, a noble man to whom you will owe allegiance all your miserable lives. William, these are my beef-eaters. Don’t ask me where I got them. They are neither out of jail nor heaven. But they have let me save their lives and feed them and clothe them, and they are valiant, faithful rascals. To know them is to love them, and not to know them is to be snubbed by Satan. They have been my double shadow for a year, sharing my prosperous condition like two peers of the realm.”
The beef-eaters grinned as they exchanged salutations with Phipps. Pike was a short individual, inclined to be fat, even when on the slimmest of rations. The pupils of his eyes were like two suns that had risen above the horizon of his lower lids, only to obscure themselves under the cloud-like lids above. Their expression, especially when he gazed upward into Adam’s face, was something too appealingly saint-like and beseeching for anything mortal to possess. Halberd was a ladder of a man up which everything, save success, had clambered to paint expressions on his face, which was grave and melancholy to the verge of the ludicrous. He had two little bunches of muscle, each of which stuck out like half a walnut, at the corners of his jaws, where they had grown and developed as a result of his clamping his molars together, in a determination to do or to be something which had, apparently, never as yet transpired.
The two looked about as much like beef-eaters as a mouse looks like a man-eater. They were ragged, where not fantastic, in their apparel; they were obviously fitter for a feast than a fight, for the sea had depleted both of their hoardings of vigor and courage.
“Sire,” said Halberd, theatrically, “we have had nothing but good reports of you for a year.” Whether he placed his hand on his heart or his stomach, as he said this, and what he meant to convey as his meaning, could never be wholly clear.
“We shall be honored to fight for you, if need arise,” said Pike, who panted somewhat, on all occasions, “while there is a breath in our bodies.”
“It is a privilege to know you both,” said Phipps, whose gravity was as dry as tinder.
“Any friend of the Sachem’s is a friend of ours,” responded Halberd. He said this grandly and made a profound bow.
“The ‘Sachem’?” repeated Phipps, and he looked at Adam, inquiringly.
Adam had the grace to blush a trifle, thus to be caught in one of the harmless little boasts in which he had indulged himself, over sea. “Just a foolish habit the two have gotten into,” he murmured.
“Ah,” said William Phipps. “Well, then, Sachem, it will soon be growing dark, you had best come home with me to dinner.”
Involuntarily Adam turned about to look at the beef-eaters. Their eyes had abruptly taken on a preternatural brightness at the word dinner.
“I have much to ask you and much to tell you,” Phipps added. “And the goodwife would exact this honor if she knew you were come.”
The invitation did not include Adam’s retinue. He swallowed, as if the delicious odors of one of Goodwife Phipp’s dinners were about to escape him.
“Well,” he said, “the honors are all the other way about, but—the fact is—a previous engagement—I—I have promised a rousing hot din—I have accepted an invitation to dine with the beef-eaters, at the Crow and Arrow.”
The ship-builder knew all about those “rousing hot dinners” of cold eel-pie, potatoes and mustard, for which the Crow and Arrow tavern was not exactly famous. He looked at Adam, to whom as their sachem the beef-eaters appealed with their eyes, like two faithful animals. Adam was regarding the pair silently, a faint smile of cheer and camaraderie on his face.
“But—but my invitation included our friends,” Phipps hastened to say. “Come, come, the tavern can wait till to-morrow. Gentlemen, you will certainly not disappoint me.”
“’Tis well spoken that the tavern can wait,” said Pike.
“To disappoint the friend of the Sachem would be a grievous thing,” said Halberd. “Let the galled tavern sweat with impatience.”
They would all have started away together at once, had not Phipps noted the heap of baggage, left untidily upon his landing when the travelers arrived.
“Well,” said he, “Adam, you know the way to the house, suppose you and your friends carry your worldly goods to the tavern, engage your apartments, and then follow me on. I, in the meantime, can hasten home to apprise the wife that you are coming, with the beef-eaters, and she can therefore make due preparations in honor of the event.”
“This is good sense,” said Adam. “Go along, or we shall be there before you.”
Phipps, with a half dozen backward looks at his guests and their shabby chattels, made his way out of the ship-yard without further delay. Adam and his retinue gripped three or four parcels apiece and started, with clank of sword, and in some discomfort, for the Crow and Arrow.