CHAPTER II.
A FRIENDSHIP OF CHANCE.
THROUGH the gray mist of Plymouth’s dawn there came a sound of footsteps, and then a murmur of melodious humming, somewhat controlled and yet too sturdy and joyous to be readily accounted for in the strict Puritan village. Presently, looming out of the uncertain light, appeared the roughly-hewn figure of a young man of five and twenty. He was singing to himself, as he hastened with big strides through the deserted streets.
On the point of passing the place where the gibbeted head of King Philip made a rude exclamation point in the calm of gray Plymouth, the early riser suddenly noted the curled-up form of a human being on the ground, his arm loosely bent about the iron stake, his head resting loosely against it, his eyes fast closed in the sleep of exhaustion. The man started slightly, halted and ceased his singing.
He blinked his eyes for a moment, shifted his feet uneasily and rubbed stoutly at his jaw, as he gazed in perplexity at the picture before him. He then tip-toed as if to go on, quietly, about his own business. He glanced at the head, then back to the boy, from whose lips, in his sleep, a little moan escaped. The visitor noted the traces where tears had channeled down the lad’s pale cheeks. There was something unescapable in the attitude of the bare golden head against the stake. The man stopped and laid his big hand gently on the half-curled locks.
Instantly the boy awoke, leaped to his feet and fell down again, from sheer stiffness, staring at the man with eyes somewhat wild. He arose again at once, more steadily, overcoming the cramps in his muscles doggedly, never ceasing for a second to watch the man who had waked him.
“I give you good morrow,” said the man. “It seems to me you have need of a friend, since you have clearly lost one that you much esteemed.”
There was persuasion and honesty in the stranger’s warm-blue eyes, good nature in his broad, smooth face and a large capacity for affection denoted in his somewhat sensuous mouth. Such a look of friendship and utter sincerity as he bestowed on the startled and defiant boy before him could not have been easily counterfeited. The youthful know sincerity by intuition.
“Who are you?” said the boy, his voice hoarse and weakened. “What would anybody want with me?”
“My name is William Phipps,” said the stranger, simply. “I am a ship-builder of Boston. If you have no better friend, perhaps I would do till you can find one. I am on my way to Boston now. If you need a friend and would like to leave Plymouth, you may come with me, unless you feel you cannot trust any one about this village.” He paused a moment and then added, “I think you must be the boy I heard of, Adam Rust, brought in with the captured Indians.”
“My name is Adam Rust,” the boy admitted. “I have no friends left. If you have been helping to kill the Wampanoags I would rather not try to be your friend. But I know I would like you and I should be glad to go to Boston, or any place away from here.” In the daylight he could not bear to look up at the head above him.
“I have been too busy to fight,” said William Phipps, employing the same excuse he had used for friends with recruiting proclivities. “And I have been too happy,” he added, as if involuntarily. “So, you see, there is no reason why I should not be your friend. Have you had any breakfast?” He put out his hand to shake.
“No,” said Adam. He lost his hand in the big fist which Phipps presented, and restrained himself from crying by making a mighty effort. He had gone without eating for two days, but he said nothing about it.
“Then,” said Phipps heartily, “the sooner we start the better. We can get something hot on the brig.”
He began his long striding again. Adam hesitated a moment. He looked up at the features above him, his heart gushing full of emotion.
Some inarticulate farewell, in the Indian tongue, he breathed through his quivering lips. His eyes grew dimmed. He fancied he saw a smile of farewell and of encouragement play intangibly on those still, saddened lineaments, and so he held forth his arms for a second and then turned away to join his new-found protector.
William Phipps, having thought the boy to be following more closely than he was, stopped to let him catch up. Thus he noted the look of anguish with which the lad was leaving that grim remnant of King Philip behind. Phipps was one of Nature’s “motherly men”—hardly ever more numerous than rocs’ eggs on the earth. He felt his heart go forth to Adam Rust. Therefore it was that he looked down in the boy’s face, time after time, as they walked along together. Thus they came to the water-front and wharves, at the end of one of which the brig “Captain Spencer” was swinging.
“This ship belongs to me and I made her,” said Phipps, with candid pride in his achievement. “You shall see that she sails right merrily.”
They went aboard. A few sailors scrubbing down the deck, barefooted and with sleeves at elbow, now abandoned their task temporarily, at the command of the mate, who had seen his captain coming, to hoist sail and let go the hawsers. The chuckle in the blocks, as the sailors heaved and hauled at the ropes, gave Adam Rust a pleasure he had never before experienced.
Breakfast being not yet prepared for service, Phipps conducted his foundling about the craft for a look at her beauties. When Adam had putted the muzzle of the brig’s gun and felt the weight of a naked sword in his fist, in the armory, the buoyancy of his youth put new color in his cheeks and a sparkle in his eyes. He was a bright-natural, companionable lad, who grew friendly and smiled his way into one’s affections rapidly, but naturally. When he and Phipps had come up again to the deck, after breakfast, they felt as if they had always been friends.
The brig was under way. Shorewards the gray old Atlantic was wrinkled under the fretful annoyance of a brisk, salty breeze. The ship was slipping prettily up the coast, with stately courtesies to the stern rocks that stood like guardians to the land.
“I think we shall find you were born for a sailor, Adam,” said the master of the craft. “I can give you my word it is more joy and life to sail a ship than to make one. And some day——” but he halted. The modest boasts, with which he warmed the heart of his well-beloved wife, were a bit too sacred for repetition, even to a boy so winning. “But,” he concluded, “perhaps you would like to tell me something of yourself.”
Thus encouraged Adam related his story. He was the son of John Rust, a chivalrous gentleman, an affectionate husband and a serious man, with a light heart and a ready wit. John Rust had been the friend of the Indians and the mediator between them and the whites until the sheer perfidy of the Puritans had rendered him hopeless of retaining the confidence of the Red men, when he had abandoned the office. Adam’s mother had been dead for something more than four years. Afflicted by his sense of loss, John Rust had become a strange man, a restless soul hopelessly searching for that other self, as knights of old once sought the holy grail.
He went forth alone into the trackless wilderness that led endlessly into the west. Although the father and son had been knit together in their affections by long talks, long ranges together in the forests and by the lessons which the man had imparted, yet when John Rust had gone on his unearthly quest, he could not bear the thought of taking young Adam with him into the wilds.
He had therefore left the boy with his friends, the lad’s natural guardians, the honorable nation of Wampanoags. “Keep him here, teach him of your wisdom, make him one of your young warriors,” he had said when he went, “so that when I return I may know him for his worth.”
King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the tribe, had thereafter been as a foster-father to the boy. For more than two years the Red-man had believed John Rust to have found his final lodge, and this was the truth. And perhaps he had also found his holy grail. He perished alone in the trackless forest. Adam had learned his wood-lore of his red brothers. He was stout, lithe, wiry and nimble. He rode a horse like the torso of a centaur. He was a bit of a boaster, in a frank and healthy way.
King Philip’s war, ascribed, as to causes, to “the passion of the English for territory; their confidence that God had opened up America for their exclusive occupancy; their contempt for the Indians and their utter disregard for their rights,” had come inexorably upon the Wampanoags. In its vortex of action, movement, success and failure at last for the Indians, Adam Rust had been whirled along with Metacomet. He had never been permitted by King Philip to fight against his “white brothers,” but he had assisted to plan for the safety of the old men, women and children, in procuring game and in constructing shelters. He had learned to love these silently suffering people with all his heart. The fights, the hardships, the doom, coming inevitably upon the hopeless Wampanoags, had made the boy a man, in some of the innermost recesses of a heart’s suffering. He had seen the last sad remnants of the Wampanoags, the Pocassets and the Narragansetts scatter, to perish in the dismal swamps. He had witnessed the death of King Philip, brought upon him by a treacherous fellow Red-man. And then he had marched in that grim procession.
Adam made no attempt to convey an idea of the magnitude of his loss. It would not have been possible. There is something in human nature which can never be convinced that death has utterly stilled a beloved voice and quenched the fire of the soul showing through a pair of eyes endeared by companionship. This in Adam made him feel, even as he told his tale to William Phipps, that he was somehow deserting his faithful friends.
Bareheaded on the sun-lit deck as he told his story, lithe in his gestures, splendidly scornful when he imitated the great chieftains of the tribes, and then like a young Viking as at last he finished his narrative and looked far and wide on the sparkling sea, in joyousness at the newer chapter which seemed to open to the very horizons themselves before him, Adam awakened the lusty youth and daring in William Phipps and the dreams of a world’s career always present in his brain.
The man’s eyes sparkled, as he spun the wheel that guided the brig, bounding beneath their feet. A restlessness seized upon the spirit in his breast.
“Adam,” he said, “do you like this ship?”
“Yes!—oh, it makes me feel like shouting!” the boy exclaimed. “I wish I could straddle it, like a horse, and make it go faster and wilder, ’way off there—and everywhere! Oh, don’t it make you breathe!”
“Then,” said Phipps, repressing his own love of such a madness as Adam had voiced, “let us go for a long sail together. I have long had in mind a voyage for trading to Hispaniola. If you would like to go with me, I will get the brig ready in a week.”
For his answer young Adam leaped as if he would spur the ship in the ribs and ride her to the end of the earth forthwith.