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Title: A bad penny

Author: John T. Wheelwright

Illustrator: Francis Gilbert Attwood

Release date: May 28, 2025 [eBook #76172]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1896

Credits: Susan E., David E. Brown, Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BAD PENNY ***

A Bad Penny

“‘IS THIS YOUR BOY?’”

See page 16

A BAD PENNY

BY

JOHN T. WHEELWRIGHT

AUTHOR OF

“A CHILD OF THE CENTURY,” “ROLLO’S JOURNEY

TO CAMBRIDGE,” ETC.

Illustrated by

F. G. ATTWOOD

BOSTON

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY

1901

Copyright, 1896,

By Lamson, Wolffe, and Company.

All rights reserved

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

“‘IS THIS YOUR BOY?’”

Frontispiece

“MISS ELIZABETH SAT IN HIGH STATE AT HER TEA-TABLE”

12

“A PUFFY AND CONSEQUENTIAL-LOOKING MAN WAS DEACON FAIRBANKS”

46

ALICE

56

“THE BOAT WAS FLYING DOWN THE HARBOR”

64

“CHEEVER LOOKED THE MAN STRAIGHT IN THE EYE”

82

“SOME BOYS WHO NEVER WERE BOYS”

102

“JAMES TURNED AS HE HEARD THE NOISE”

119

“‘WE CANNOT BE TOO CAREFUL AT OUR AGE, MISS WOODBURY’”

137

“ANOTHER CUTLASS PIERCED THE AMERICAN’S BREAST”

154

A Bad Penny

I

WITH our modern habit of huddling together in cities, fair urban gardens, together with many other pleasant things of an age which loved elbow room, are now rare: yet in some of our New England seaboard towns, which commerce has deserted and the hands of modern improvers left unmarred, such gardens still exist, to rest the spirits of men, tired of living at lightning express rate.

In one of these unprosperous Massachusetts towns, Oldbury, on the broad High Street, there stands a great square brick house, with a broad comfortable lawn stretching down to a high fence. A pathway leads from the street, between two rows of giant elm-trees, to the front door of the house; an entrance dignified by a portico of wooden Corinthian columns painted white. The house itself is severely simple, as befits a mansion, built by a Yankee ship-owner, but there is about it a comfortable air of solidity, which makes it more attractive than the gimcrack villas, which our successful men build nowadays. It was evidently built to last, and to be lived in by the builder and the children who should come after him.

On a day in June, more than eighty years ago, this house was new, and its owner, Captain John Woodbury, was standing, his hand on the shoulder of his son, in the garden at the back surveying with pride his mansion. He was a short, square-built man, his legs were encased in knee-breeches and stockings, although long trousers had already begun to shroud the symmetry or cover the defects of most male legs. But the Captain’s legs were stout and well developed, and were stretched apart, as their owner stood gazing at his new house, as if he had been used to standing on the quarter-deck and to giving orders to his crew. His red, weather-beaten face, with its strong aquiline nose, firm mouth, and keen black eyes, indicated that he was a seafaring man; though his service in the land forces of the Provincial Congress in the war against the British entitled him to the title of Captain, as well as did his command of a ship.

There was no rollicking air of the sea-dog about the Captain; life had been a serious business to him, although he had been used to value it little in times of danger. New England, at the first part of this century, was a peculiar community; the old Puritan stock, unmixed with foreign blood, yet strengthened by founding a nation, was beginning to break through its narrow shell, but the old faith was strong in the land. The Captain, as he stood on his demesne, believed that he owned it deep down to an actual Hell where the wicked and unbelieving were in eternal torture, and that he read his title clear to his estate far up to Heaven, where a talent for leading hymns could not be hidden during the eternity of paradise.

A shrewd and skilful trader, as well as a navigator, was the Captain, and during the great wars with which Napoleon fretted the world, he had seized the opportunities offered to Americans to make money in the carrying trade, and the new house, at which he was gazing with pride, was the monument of his success in life; a success which had come too late to be shared in by his wife, who had died some dozen years before.

The light-hearted boy standing by his side did not notice the tears which filled his father’s eyes at the thought of the dear face whose image time had not dimmed in the sturdy Captain’s remembrance. Indeed, the boy’s laughing blue eyes, joyful mouth, and fair curly hair recalled the mother to the old man; and the love which he bore him was made the deeper and tenderer by the resemblance.

It had been her darling wish that her son should be educated for the ministry; for her father had been a distinguished divine in the last century. His name was handed down to posterity in a volume of sermons wherein unbaptized infants and unpredestined fared but badly. Young James had been intended from infancy for the church, by his father, and since his mother’s death the boy had been left by the Captain, during his voyages, in the charge of his unmarried sister, Elizabeth, who lived in a small house on a street in Oldbury leading from the aristocratic High Street.

The life of Aunt Elizabeth had not been made happy by her charge, nor had he been happy with her. The good lady was an uncompromising Puritan, rigid in bearing and severe in visage, whose life was spent in a constant struggle with the powers of dirt and ungodliness. She was such a noteworthy housewife that it was a saying in Oldbury that the ministers whom she entertained at tea might have eaten off the dining-room floor as well as off her polished mahogany. Of course James’ muddy boots sadly disturbed his aunt’s peace of mind. Indeed, the boy, after that brief period of infancy when he was declared by his female relatives to look like an angel from heaven, had little excepting his good looks to recommend him to his aunt. He did not, like a good boy, love his books, and he was continually in mischief, so that he gained with surprising facility the distinction of being the bad boy of the neighborhood. The ill-natured remarks which reached Miss Woodbury’s ears as to “old-maid’s children” made the affliction hard for the old lady to bear. The boy was continually wandering off to the wharves, where the ships were laying, so that he might chat with the old salts over the wonders of the world. There he climbed up the shrouds of the vessels and skylarked over the decks and into the holds, returning home late to tea, covered with an unpleasant mixture of tar and molasses, which never could be removed from his clothes, and which would only wear off from his hands by slow attrition. Or, he would be missing till late at night, and return declaring that his boat had run aground on some one of the shifting sandbars of the harbor and that he had been compelled to wait for the tide to float it off; but I doubt whether he was really the unskilful navigator that he claimed to be. The mantle of the Rev. James Cheever did not seem to have fallen upon his grandson. The world seemed to the boy to be a beautiful place, full of color and adventure, as indeed it was, at the time when the great Napoleon was pulling down the old kings and setting up his unroyal brothers upon ancient pedestals.

At church, the boy used to sit through the long dreary sermons, wriggling in his seat, greatly to the annoyance of his aunt, and a quiet smile would play over his mouth as he thought that he was destined by his family to occupy such a pulpit and to be as dreary and as long-winded as good old Dr. Canterbury. His mind was always full of schemes to avoid this painful predestined fate; of plans for stowing his little body away in the hold of a ship, to appear upon deck in a few days after the vessel had left port and take up the important duties of a cabin-boy. In that happy estate of life, there would be no more Latin lessons for him, and, best of all, no Aunt Elizabeth to scour his face, and no long sermons on the Sabbath, to say nothing of the escape from the lesser evils of prayer-meetings and Sabbath-school catechism.

More than once he had stolen towards the wharves with a bag of biscuits and a brown jug of water to sustain life while a stowaway, only to go back home when he remembered what his father’s sorrow would be upon returning from a long voyage to find his son gone. His father’s short stays at home in the intervals of his voyages were the pleasantest days of the boy’s life, for there were friendly though somewhat formal relations between the two Woodburys; and now the old gentleman had retired from seafaring and for the last year had been rearing the fine mansion at which he was gazing with such sorrowful pride. His son had been growing during this last year almost as rapidly as the new house, and now at fifteen was as tall and as good-looking a youngster as Oldbury could boast.

He stood by his father’s side that morning, a little ill at ease. He was nearly ready for college and would be sent up to Cambridge for examination in a few weeks, unless he could obtain his father’s consent that he should go to sea. All day long he had had the words upon his tongue’s end, which should frame the arguments by which his father would be persuaded to relieve him from the dreadful life of a scholar and let him take to his natural element,—the water.

But as he looked at the Captain’s stern face, it became every moment more difficult to broach the subject, and his arguments became more and more unconvincing to himself. Finally he mustered up courage to speak:

“Father,” he said in a faltering voice, “I wish to have a talk with you. You know that I am almost prepared for college?”

“Mr. Dillaway tells me that he hopes you can pass your examinations, but that you have been very idle. It was not by idleness and skylarking that your good grandfather became such an ornament to his profession, James,” said his father, patting the boy’s shoulder as he reproved him, to show him that the words were meant in kindness.

“I know that, sir,” said James; “I am anything but a good scholar, and indeed, sir, I do not think that it is worth while for you to waste so much money upon my education.”

The Captain looked for a moment into his son’s face, and then said with a gesture of command: “Come into my room, my son, we must talk this matter over.”

The interior of the house was like that of other good houses of the period; a long broad hall stretched through it from the front door to the back; from this hall rose a staircase with carved and twisted balustrade; on either side of this hall were two large square rooms, the two sunny back rooms being for a dining-room and living room, while the two front parlors were kept sacred to dark respectability, samplers and furniture covered with hair-cloth, and were rarely used except for weddings, funerals, or other entertainments. They went through the back door into the sitting-room, in the corner of the house overlooking the garden. Over the high, white mantelpiece hung the picture of the Captain’s last ship, the Arethusa, a gem of nautical art, depicting the staunch craft, ploughing her way under full sail, through waves of gray-green paint as regular as the teeth of a saw. The carved teak-wood furniture gave the room a romantic charm, and the great lips of two blue china vases told to the receptive ears of the boy, sweet tales of the remote earth, just as the large pink shells sang of the Spanish Main. In a sandal-wood chest in one corner were rich stuffs and laces which the Captain had brought with him from the voyage to France for the wife whom he found dead on his return. The boy’s wife should wear them some day, the good old man thought as he packed them away. They were too sacred for any one else, though Aunt Elizabeth knew of their existence and coveted them; for even a Yankee old maid is a daughter of Eve.

In another corner of the room was a great iron box studded with heavy nails and fastened by a padlock, in which the Captain kept his valuables. James always looked at this with awe. He supposed it to be full of gold and silver and precious stones, and that his father was rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I could not in many pages describe all the contents of this wonderful room; it would be as hard as to enumerate the contents of a boy’s pocket; but I must not pass by the musket which the Captain carried through the war of the Revolution, nor the cutlasses which were in a rack in the corner, with the pistols and a great brass blunderbuss used for repelling pirates from the Arethusa, nor the curious old decanters filled with New England rum or port wine, which were in a little locker in a corner of the room.

On stormy nights, James, as he sat with his father in this room poring over his Latin grammar, would fancy that they were sailing through the Caribbean Sea, and that a pirate would soon heave in sight and a desperate conflict ensue. Pretty thoughts these, for a budding parson; and dreadful to relate, the boy quite as often dreamed that they were pirates under the “Jolly Roger,” and he would look earnestly at his father’s wrinkled, stern face and close-shut mouth, and wonder how he had acquired the gold supposed to be in the strong box. It would be but a passing thought, however, of which he was ashamed the next minute as he saw his father turning over the leaves of the little Bible which he knew to have been his mother’s.

“The truth is, father, I do not want to go to college, I want to go to sea; I am not fit to be a minister, and oh,—I cannot be one,” blurted out James as soon as they were seated in the Captain’s room.

There was silence for a moment, then the Captain, clearing his throat and wiping his gold-bowed spectacles with a great red bandana handkerchief, spoke: “James, you know my wishes and those of your dear mother, whom you do not remember.”

Here the old man removed his spectacles and rubbed them again quite violently with the bandana, while James considerately turned his face away that he might not observe the emotion which he had learned to expect whenever his father mentioned his mother’s name. “She dedicated you, James, as an infant to the service of the Lord, and it is with this end in view that I have had you educated. And now, just as I am on the point of sending you to the college at Cambridge, you tell me that you wish to go to sea.”

The boy looked down at the ground under his father’s stern, sad gaze and tried to speak. “I do not believe that I can ever stand up in a pulpit and preach long sermons, and I am very sure that I should not enjoy it,” he finally stammered.

“Enjoy it!” interrupted his father, sternly. “Do you think that you were put into this world for the purpose of enjoying yourself? To think of your speaking of a holy calling as if it were a game with the devil’s books. Why, boy,” he continued, “I have labored all these years that you might have a higher place in the world than mine has been. I had no advantages of education, my parents were poor and could not give them to me, I have led a hard rough life from boyhood up, and have lived often with wicked men. I might have been wicked myself had it not been for your mother, who led me to the faith and for her unseen presence which has blessed me since her death. Through my long voyages in the solitude in which a master of a vessel lives, I have always thought that I would save you from the wretchedness of a sailor’s life. It is a dog’s life, lad.”

“Sailors are not hypocrites,” said the boy, petulantly. “They like their work better than they would any other, and they do it well because they like it. If I am made a minister, I shall be a hypocrite.”

“My son,” interrupted the Captain, bringing his hand down sharply upon the table, “you are talking very foolishly and wrongly. In a few weeks, your teacher informs me, you will be ready for college, and so far I may compel you to go in the career I have marked out for you. I do not choose that you shall go before the mast. Of course, it is in your power to disregard my opinion and disobey me. I trust, however, that your love for me and for the memory of your mother will prevent your taking a wilful course. I wish that I knew enough to help you in your work, my boy.”

“You don’t know how stupid the Latin grammar is, father. I believe that I can learn a great deal more by seeing the world than by committing such stuff as this to memory.” As he spoke, James opened his dog’s-eared Latin grammar which lay upon the table and showed his father a formidable table of irregular verbs. The Captain started to put on his spectacles to look at the book, but stopping as if an idea occurred to him, he laid them upon the table. He saw that he was being craftily led from the region of the known to the unknown. As an honest, truth-telling man, he would have had to confess that the process of acquiring a knowledge of the Latin tongue did not seem to him an inspiring pursuit.

“James,” he said, after shutting the Latin grammar, “I shall not discuss with you about the details of a matter of which I know nothing. The education which produced your good grandfather, James Cheever, after whom you were named, is not to be criticised by an ignorant old sea-captain like me.”

“What is one man’s meat, is another man’s poison, father,” replied the boy, whose delicate features took something of the old man’s severe expression, as the two contended in argument. “I’m afraid that I have only my grandfather’s name, not his disposition. It makes me sick to stay in doors moping over books: I take no pleasure in them. I do not think that I could skate very well if every motion I took was disagreeable to me. Now, Tom Gaston, who went to Cambridge last year, is a good boy and loves his books, but he always ties granny knots when he reefs a sail; and his chest is as flat as a flounder’s. He would make a good parson. Do you wish me to try to be like him?”

“Go to your room, James,” interrupted his father, sternly; for Tom Gaston was his pet abomination and his parental authority had been too long questioned. “You have had my decision, and I will have no more talk about it.”

James bowed respectfully to his father (if he had been born sixty years later, I fear that he would have slammed the door), and went slowly to his room.

The June day had lost its beauty for him. What was the loveliness of nature to a poor chap whose future life must be passed in libraries, at the odious task of writing sermons in sixteen parts, or, worst of all, in delivering these sermons after he had written them, to a nodding congregation twice a Sunday for fifty-two weeks every year, to say nothing of the Friday prayer-meetings? Could a man, who in spirit was navigating the Spanish Main, in the body discourse for an hour upon a Scriptural text? He had gone into the conflict with his father with little hope and much fear. He had long pondered over what he should say to him and rehearsed the arguments to be used on that momentous occasion; but when he came to face the dreaded authority, the arguments disintegrated, and he felt that his father had got the better of him. Even the irregular verbs had failed—well, to college he must go—worse luck!

II

THAT evening, Miss Elizabeth sat in high state at her tea-table, behind the silver service, which was at once her pride and her greatest responsibility. The possession of a silver service was, of course, a badge of the greatest respectability, and Miss Elizabeth did not allow one jot of the dignity consequent thereon to be abated. She was a likeness of her brother done in vinegar. She had his bright eyes, prominent nose, and firmly closed mouth, but her skin was very white and fair. Her hair, on her depressed, blue-veined temples, was done into rigid curls, as formalized as the waves on an English lawyer’s wig. What a wonderful crystallization a formal curl is! Compare the Sun-god’s careless, waving locks with Aunt Elizabeth’s gray corkscrew curls! Her figure was very slight, and her dress gray and formal. She was exquisitely neat in appearance, and her hands and feet were small and pretty, and she was very proud of them. Poor Aunt Elizabeth! She was proud of many things, but there had been little joy in her solitary life.

The elderly ladies in Oldbury declared that Elizabeth Woodbury had never had a love affair, but how did they know the secrets of the withered virgin’s heart? Among certain kindly women, there is a saying prevalent that every woman of thirty, be she fair or ill-favored, has received at least one offer of marriage. Let us hope that this may be so, however improbable it seems to those who dwell in our Eastern States, where the fair sex so greatly preponderates; for it is pleasant to think that every heart has been at least once warmed by the sunshine of love.

“MISS ELIZABETH SAT IN HIGH STATE AT HER TEA-TABLE.”

For aught any one knew, Aunt Elizabeth may have been ill-treated by a faithless lover, or she may have requested any number of disconsolate suitors to endeavor to forget her. Certainly there was in her chaste apartment, in an upper bureau drawer, carefully covered with an Indian silk handkerchief, a miniature of a young man in a British uniform: James had found this one day, when rummaging the drawers for pennies. On discovering her nephew at this outrageous piece of intrusion, Aunt Elizabeth had boxed his ears soundly, and her eyes were red when next he saw her.

But as she sat at the supper-table this evening over her shining silver service, she seemed far removed from the darts of Cupid.

The table was spread with a good New England supper; an excellent informal meal, too seldom enjoyed in these days of late dinners and borrowed English manners. Against the rich gloss of the Spanish mahogany table, the silver gleamed, as no silver service can shine unless rubbed by the hands of a gentlewoman.

The blue china plates were heaped with pleasant burdens of cold chicken, strawberries, preserves, cakes, and hot rolls. A great glass pitcher of milk and a plate of butter from the Captain’s farm stood in the middle of the table. The room was hung with family portraits and conspicuous among them Copley’s portrait of Rev. James Cheever, in a black gown and white bands, surprisingly good in texture; his waxen but well-shaped hands holding the election sermon preached once by him before the Massachusetts legislature, a discourse which had not been filled with loyalty to King George. Two female Woodbury ancestors simpered in faded pastel on either side of the reverend gentleman, and the Captain himself, in continental uniform, stood amid the rage and turmoil of battle, defying the scarlet-coated British. The good old gentleman, as he sat at his supper-table, looked almost as stern as his warlike picture; for the obstinacy of his son in struggling against the plans which had been made for him, sadly troubled the old man.

“Elizabeth,” he said, breaking for the first time the silence which had followed the grace before meat, “I have just told the boy that he must go to college next month.”

Miss Elizabeth gave a severe sniff, and looked at the portrait of the Puritan divine, as if to show her idea of the gulf which lay between him and his degenerate descendant.

“I hope that it will be all for the best, Brother John; that is all I have to say about it,” she replied, after her withering glance at the picture. “There is little of the saint about that boy!”

“He is a fine, high-spirited fellow, without a mean streak in him,” replied her brother, rather hotly. “A boy must be a boy, after all.”

Miss Elizabeth shook her head sadly, as if to express a doubt as to whether boys ought to be boys after all, when the culprit under discussion slouched into the room with red eyes, and hair which a hasty application of brush and comb had made smooth only on the surface, the locks below still being in delightful confusion.

He took his seat at the table, after having inclined his head slightly towards his father and aunt, and proceeded to attack his supper with an appetite undiminished by the thought that he was not in the good books of the rest of the family.

Finally, not liking the gloomy silence which hung over the table, he looked up from his plate and said:

“A schooner came in to-day from Havana. I saw her lying at anchor in the harbor when I came in from sailing. She doesn’t belong here.”

“How did you find out she sailed from Havana?” asked the Captain.

“I hailed her as I sailed by,” replied James. “There was a tall man leaning over the starboard rail, and he told me that she was the Tempest from Havana, laden with sugar. There was a monkey running up the rigging, a funny fellow with no tail, and a yellow parrot in a cage swinging from the main-boom. What do you suppose the man asked me? Whether Captain John Woodbury was alive, and if he still lived in Oldbury.”

“What kind of a looking man was he?” exclaimed the Captain.

“Oh, he was about six feet tall, I should say. He was smooth shaven and had a hooked nose. He stuttered a good deal, and waved his arm in the air when he stuck at a word as if he was trying to pull it out.”

The Captain and his sister looked at each other for a moment. “Did he say anything more?”

“No, sir; but the parrot cried out something in Spanish, and he covered up the cage with a sail cover and swore at the bird. I sailed up to the wharf, and he came to the port side of the schooner and watched me as I picked up the moorings. Do you know who he is from my description, father?”

“I knew a man once who had the trick of stuttering and raising his arm as you describe,” answered the Captain, in a sad voice, as if an unpleasant remembrance had been recalled to his mind. “But he has been dead these many years.”

Miss Elizabeth seemed much interested in the conversation of the last few minutes, and kept turning her eyes towards the portrait of the Rev. James Cheever.

At this moment there was a sharp triple knock at the front door, a knock which echoed through the big hall and made the three people at the supper-table start in their chairs. The maid-servant ran to open the door, the Captain and James involuntarily following her. As they stood in the hall room James heard the stuttering voice which had spoken to him from the schooner and saw the arm waving against the glowing sunset light which slanted in through the front door.

The Captain walked forward mechanically, and the stranger, brushing past the girl, who shrank back, approached him and held out his hand.

“John, you don’t k-now m-me?” he stammered, as the Captain looked at him with dazed face.

“By George! Thomas Cheever! I heard of your death at La Guayra ten years ago.”

“And you were g-glad to hear it, I suppose,” answered the stranger, rather grimly; then, pointing to James, he asked, “Is this your boy? Why, he is the very chap I saw out sailing in the harbor this afternoon.”

“It’s your uncle, Thomas Cheever,” said the Captain in a low voice.

“Why, Uncle Tom is dead,” said James, sidling away from the stranger, not knowing what to make of the apparition.

The strange man deposited a valise on the floor, and the Captain motioned him towards the dining-room, the three maintaining a strange constrained silence.

The Captain did not seem to fully grasp the whole bearings of this resurrection. Thomas Cheever had disappeared from Oldbury at the end of the last century, leaving behind him a name stained with low dissipation and with suspicions of worse things. He had written to his father but once from the West India Islands, where the vessel upon which he had embarked had touched. This letter had been a demand for money, without a word of affection for the broken-down old parson. There was a long interval during which nothing had been heard of him, and finally the news came from a merchant at La Guayra that Cheever had been one of the crew of a vessel, more than suspected of piracy, and that he had met his death from a knife-stab in a street fight. His father had never mentioned his name after his disgraceful actions, and his tender-hearted sister, while she shed a few tears for the brother, who had been a pretty boy once, could not but feel relieved that the scapegrace should trouble the family no more.

In the dining-room Miss Elizabeth sat pale and trembling. She had, with a woman’s instinctive perception, felt that Tom Cheever had come back to life and mischief again, as soon as James had described the stutter and the waving arm. As the three came into the dining-room, lighted with candles dimly twinkling in the twilight, she looked sharply and sternly at the returned prodigal. He seemed a little backward in coming forward, and he shuffled his feet uneasily; for in all these years he had not forgotten the tang of Miss Woodbury’s tongue.

“Indeed, Thomas Cheever!” said that organ in a clear, shrill treble, “having died, much to every one’s satisfaction, it is a great pity that you could not stay dead.”

Cheever smiled, a half-humorous, half-cunning smile, though his eyes turned a deeper green, and shot a gleam of hatred at the old lady.

“Well, Miss Woodbury, in waking to a new life, it is agreeable to be welcomed by an angel!”

“I do not wish any impertinence, Thomas Cheever,” replied the frank spinster, returning his malevolent gleam with a scornful look, the value of which her spectacles enhanced. “For twelve years you let your family believe you dead. What have you been doing all this time? Nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

The Captain waved his hand as if to enjoin silence upon his sister, and motioned Cheever to draw up a chair to the table. The latter did as he was bid, and helping himself in sailor-fashion from the dishes before him, proceeded to eat his supper. The others watched him intently, with somewhat of the feeling that one would have in entertaining a burglar, who had ill-concealed designs upon the spoons.

His rough black hair was short-cropped and tinged with gray; his skin bronzed and weather-beaten; the lines on his face were deeply drawn; his green eyes flitted from side to side and did not meet the gaze of his inspectors; his thin and long frame was clad in a rough blue suit of nautical cut. “Vagabond” was written on every feature of the man. James watched him with open eyes, as he cut off junks of bread with his knife and covered them with butter before eating them. The Captain, at the head of the table, twisted the fob of his watch around, and glanced uneasily at his brother-in-law, while Miss Woodbury, in her stony glare, seemed to protest against the very existence of any person so shameless and wicked.

The hungry man’s first keen appetite was soon appeased by his rapid method of shovelling his food into his mouth, and dropping his knife and fork for a moment, he looked uneasily at the others.

“I wasn’t killed in that fight, you see—I was attacked in the dark, along by the wharves as I was going to my ship, and stabbed in the back. I grappled with the fellow, a cursed ‘Yellow-belly’—I beg your pardon, Miss Woodbury, that’s what they call them.”

The Captain still seemed dazed at the events of the evening, and sat listening to his relation’s stammering speech without changing expression. James was fascinated with the curious gestures of the waving hand, which seemed to pull out the obstinate words over which the speaker stuck, as if they were corks in a bottle. At this juncture the muscles of Cheever’s neck stood out in the physical strain of the attempts to master the obstinate consonants. His mouth gaped open, the corners curving to form the word, which finally came out with a pop as if it had been a material thing sticking in his throat.

“I took his knife away and cut his throat with it, and we were found in the morning lying in a pool of blood. Mine was an awful wound; my ship sailed away, leaving me for dying in the prison hospital. I recovered, though God knows how I did so in that fearful place. The man who attacked me had influential relations in Venezuela, and they swore that I had tried to rob him, and that he had stabbed me in self-defence. I was kept in the prison there for five years, without a trial. You’ve seen a Spanish-American prison, Captain Woodbury, haven’t you?” The vagabond’s face was contorted with disgust as he spoke, and the Captain nodded assent to his question.

“Five years in that hell, with the vilest of mankind, with no covering but an old blanket, fed with stuff poked through the bars at me as if I were a wild beast. It was an awful time.” He shuddered as he spoke, and looked around the group for sympathy.

“Think of it,” he kept on, “five years in such a place as that; I think it was punishment enough for all the evil I have ever done. I was finally set free, through the aid of an American sea-captain, with whom I managed to communicate. He gave me a berth on his ship, and I went to Liverpool with him. I didn’t write home. I knew they thought me dead, and, as Miss Woodbury has kindly suggested, I thought I’d better stay dead. Since then I have knocked about the world on ships; the Lord knows where I haven’t been, and am now mate on the Baltimore schooner, Tempest, at anchor in this harbor. When I found myself at Oldbury, I came to life again. It is simple enough. When did he die?” he suddenly asked, nodding his head at his father’s portrait.

“In January, 1806,” answered the Captain, solemnly.

“And my sister, your wife?”

“She died seven years before her father.”

“Did he take it hard, when I ran away?”

“He never mentioned your name from that day to the day of his death,” answered Miss Woodbury in sharp metallic tones.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly a model son,” replied Cheever, after a moment’s silence, during which he stuck his knife rather savagely into a piece of bread. “And Sally Fairbanks, is she alive?” Something of a blush came over the man’s face as he asked the question.

“She married Joshua Pickering, who died and left her a widow,” answered Miss Woodbury—as if Joshua could have died and left her in any other status.

“So Sally married, did she?” Cheever inquired, “and she didn’t care when she heard of my death either, I suppose; she would be about as glad to see me as you folks are, if I should go to see her. Have they stopped talking about me in town?”

“Years ago; your tombstone is in the burying-ground on the hill, set there by your father,” answered the spinster. “I guess, if you don’t want to find yourself in a fix, you’d better not—”

“James,” said the Captain, suddenly remembering that the boy was listening with all his ears, “leave the room.”

Reluctantly, from the presence of this great mystery, the boy withdrew, gazing with open eyes at his uncanny uncle as he left. When the door had been closed by his reluctant and slow-moving hands, Miss Woodbury continued her interrupted speech.

“You’d better not let it be known that you’ve come back to life. The Law does not forget, though other people do.”

Cheever winced for a moment under this home-thrust, but soon rallied to ask with a droll stutter:

“Do they say anything flattering about me on my tombstone?”

“Only this, ‘Thomas Cheever, son of James Cheever, D.D. Born in Oldbury, April 1778; died in La Guayra, Venezuela, Feb. 23, 1799.’”

“I thought that a tombstone, like Hope, always told some ‘flattering tale,’” murmured Cheever, his lips twisting into a humorous curve. “I think the old gentleman might at least have put something flattering on the stone, if only to wish me to rest in peace. I must look up my burial-place before I leave town. If it’s still such a gossiping old place as it used to be, I suppose they have by this time got hold of the fact that a stranger carrying a gripsack has called upon Captain Woodbury. Who shall I be? A man from Cuba on business? As you say, Miss Woodbury, I guess I’d better not come back to life again, publicly—though I think it hard that they can’t forgive a fellow after all these years.”

“The way of the transgressor is hard, Tom Cheever,” said the old lady, “and I don’t believe that you’ve done a straight thing since you were born. What’s brought you back to Oldbury?”

“The schooner Tempest.”

“What motive brought you here?”

“Love of my native land and my kinsfolk, of course,” answered Cheever, with his peculiar smile. “To be sure, I have not had a very hearty welcome, you’ve treated me as if I was a cross between a ghost and a burglar, but I didn’t expect anything better.”

“How long will your ship be in port?” asked the Captain, feeling that the female head of the house should not do all the questioning.

“Blessed if I know,” replied Cheever, pushing his chair back from the table and putting one leg over the other. “I worked my passage in the schooner to get back here. I tell you, when a man has been banged round from pillar to post, the way I’ve been, it knocks the stuffing out of him. I’ve brought everything I have in the world with me in that bag out in the hall. Everything, that is, but my parrot, which I left aboard ship. Did you build this house, Woodbury? It’s a pretty comfortable one. You must have coined money while I’ve been a-rolling around the world, gathering no moss, except what’s in the bag.”

“What do you propose doing?” asked the Captain, his forehead contracting into an anxious frown.

“Perhaps I’d better go up to that empty grave yonder and put myself into it, Woodbury,” remarked Cheever, tipping his chair back and looking about the room. “The best of us before long will use only six foot of ground, but it’s hard work killing time until that blessed period of equality between prince and pauper comes round.”

“Do you wish any assistance from me?” asked Woodbury.

“I don’t wish any assistance; I only wish what is due me. I wish half my father’s estate; it’s my right. How much did he leave?”

“Not enough to quarrel about, Thomas, if we were disposed to do so,” answered the Captain. “A few thousand dollars.”

“A few thousand dollars! Hear the man talk. Why, that’s a fortune to a man of brains.”

“Do not trouble your mind about that, Thomas,” said the Captain, “you shall have your fair share of that.”

“How long do you suppose it will last you?” queried Miss Woodbury, not pleased at having been shut out from the conversation.

“I haven’t entered into any calculations as to that,” answered Cheever, “and I don’t know as it would be any business of yours if I had. What’s mine’s mine, even if I have got a tombstone over me.”

“Your father left a will,” continued the Captain, “leaving all his property to my boy, but as he supposed you dead when he did so, I think that you should have your share by fair rights.”

“Of course I should. I ask only what’s right. And when you give me the cash, I won’t trouble you here much in this town. It’s a stupid old place at best, and I’m afraid that somebody will recognize me. I can disguise my face, but this cursed stutter of mine would show who I am, I’m afraid. I guess they’d have mighty hard work though in proving I was Tom Cheever, even if they could prove that Tom Cheever ever did anything he hadn’t ought to. This stutter would be a strong fact against me, but that tombstone up there is a poser on t’other, ain’t it? Guess I’ll keep rather shady! Is the Deacon alive?”

“The Deacon is very much alive,” answered Miss Woodbury, who wished to make Oldbury as uncomfortable a residence as possible for the man; “and it’s my opinion that he would know you the minute he saw you, and have you taken up the next. I wonder you dared to come back here.”

Cheever looked at her with his flitting, hunted eyes, and thinking that the conversation was growing unpleasant, changed the subject.

“You will not mind my smoking a cigar?” he asked, drawing from his pocket a black Regalia.

“I certainly do object to your smoking in the house,” said Miss Woodbury. “You may go out doors and poison the air if you choose.”

“All right,” answered Tom, drawing up his tall body from the chair; “the Captain and I will talk over our business matters.”

The poor Captain had been very quiet during all this time, but he had been doing a deal of thinking. He saw that the disgrace which had been brought upon his wife’s family by the man, now forgotten, would again settle upon his household, should the fact of Cheever’s reappearance be known to the neighbors. He felt that he would make any sacrifice to get the man away from Oldbury. He could not help wishing that the record of his death upon the tombstone were true. While he felt sure that any sum he might give the man, as his share of his father’s estate, would be soon spent by him, and that he would be demanding more, he made up his mind that he would settle accounts with him and get him away as quickly as he could.

Cheever’s return, besides its natural depressing effect, also awakened the fear, which had more than once arisen in the Captain’s mind, that some of his wicked blood might be in his son’s veins. He could not bear to think that his boy should be exposed, even for a moment, to the man’s contaminating influence. If he could get Cheever out of the house at once, he would be satisfied, but how was it to be done? It would take some time to get the ready money necessary to pay him the half of his father’s estate to which he was entitled, since the building of the new house had reduced the Captain’s cash on hand, and the Cheever estate, which he held for his son, was invested in real property. He might have to sell some part of one of his ships to get the money necessary to pay Cheever, and this would take time.

The two men were standing upon the back veranda of the house, Cheever calmly lighting his cigar with a flint and steel. The last glow of the sun in the west had died away, and the stars were beginning to twinkle in their soft summer radiance.

“I tell you what, it seems good to smell the garden again,” remarked Cheever, “after having tossed around in the Atlantic for the last month. What was the exact sum the old gentleman left?” he inquired, turning sharply on his heel after this slight tribute to the beauties of nature.

“His house and furniture and library. The whole was appraised at about four thousand dollars. I still hold it for the boy; he is to be educated for the ministry.”

“The hell you say,” ejaculated Cheever. “He looks much as I did when I was a boy, and the old gentleman was going to make me a parson.” He laughed a loud, discordant laugh, and the point of his cigar described wild curves in the darkness as his hand vibrated in the air.

The Captain’s heart gave a convulsive throb. Did this man read his fears? He clenched his fist, and raised his arm as if to strike him; he looked upon him as a serpent, whom he would like to grind under his heel.

“We will not discuss the boy, Cheever,” said the Captain, sternly, when he had regained that mastery over self which is so much more difficult to gain than taking a city. “Five thousand dollars is more than the whole estate is worth. I think you can trust my word.”

“You’re right, Captain,” answered Cheever, good-humoredly. “You’ve always been so devilish honest that I didn’t expect much to see you worth a penny when I returned to Oldbury. I never knew you to tell a lie.”

The Captain did not think it necessary to explain to Cheever that honest endeavor only brings lasting wealth, an opportunity, which under other circumstances he would never have let escape, for he was fond of hearing himself talk, and of dropping little conversational tracts, as he met his fellow-men; but he looked at Cheever as a mere reptile upon whom all moral truths would be wasted.

“I will give you three thousand dollars as soon as I can get the money,” continued Woodbury, “and I shall expect you on receiving this to give me, as executor of your father’s estate, a receipt in full and to leave town immediately; and you will pardon me if I say that I hope we shall never lay eyes upon you again.”

“You’re not polite, brother-in-law,” said Cheever after a pause, when it may be presumed that even his scarred and withered heart ached, for a man must get very low before he loses desire to be liked by his fellow-man. “I will agree to your proposition—but, my God, Woodbury, can’t you say a kind word to me—I’ve been pretty bad, I grant, but I’ve not had a decent word from a decent person since I left this town thirteen years ago.”

If the thought of his boy had not filled the Captain’s mind, he might have relented and have spoken some words of comfort to the wretched fellow; but the bare idea that the sins which had poisoned this man’s life might be in his lad’s blood, made him as hard as flint.

“I am not your judge, Tom Cheever; it is well I am not, for it would fare hard with you. Such men as you should be blotted from the earth. Even to the third and fourth generation you cause evil to be in the world instead of good.”

“I ought to be up there on the hill, I know,” said Cheever, pathetically. “What was it in me that made me bad from boyhood? God knows I was trained carefully enough, I was watched and prayed for as you watch and pray for your son.”

The Captain started back, and his hand sought his heart and pulled convulsively at the ruffle of his shirt. “I had brains enough,” continued Cheever, bitterly; “I could stand at the head of my class at school when I was a mind to,—Mr. Dillaway said I was the best and worst scholar he ever had,—but I had to run away to keep out of State Prison before I was twenty-one years old. It has seemed to me that I couldn’t help it; that the wickedness was born in me. It’s no excuse, I know, but, Woodbury, I have had an awful life. You remember Crœsus couldn’t touch anything without its turning to gold.”

The Captain had never heard of Crœsus, and was listening to Cheever with dull ears.

“I can’t touch gold without its turning to dross. My life never met another’s without bringing misfortune. I’ll get out of the way, Woodbury. I’ll go back to the schooner to-night. You can send any part of the money you wish to Mr. Marks—that’s me. I’ll never trouble you again.”

Saying this, Cheever held out his hand to the Captain, who did not refuse to take it.

“Good-by, Woodbury, your sister won’t have her lavendered sheets disturbed by me; say good-by to the boy for me, and have an eye on him. Remember, send the money to Mr. Marks, Schooner Tempest. I’ll not trouble you again.”

He shook the Captain’s hand, threw his cigar into the grass, where the Captain still saw it shining, as he heard the front door slam.

Miss Woodbury put her head out of the dining-room window and asked in a hoarse whisper, “Who went out then?”

“He did,” answered the Captain, “and he says he will not trouble us again.”

“Pray God he may not, but bad pennies always return,” replied the sceptical spinster.

The Captain walked slowly up to his den, and opening one of the lockers, took from a faded velvet case a miniature. He saw the face of a handsome boy, it might have been the portrait of his son. The curling hair, the eyes, the pleasant but irresolute mouth, were all his, and on the brown paper back, in the Rev. Mr. Cheever’s quaintly formed handwriting, were the words, “Thomas Cheever, 1789, ætatis suæ XIV.”

The old man groaned as he looked at the “counterfeit presentment” of the boy, who would better never been born.

III

JAMES, after having been told to leave the dining-room by his father, waited anxiously around the front doorsteps of the house, plucking the long tassels of grass, and biting off the sweet green ends. He had heard during his boyhood but little of his mother’s only brother, and when he had asked about him, had been told that he had died many years before, and that he had been very unfortunate. He was perhaps the only boy in the town who had not heard the whole story of Parson Cheever’s scapegrace son: of his idle youth and his suspected complicity in a robbery, of his escape, his adventures in the Caribbean Sea, and his murder in La Guayra.

Of such a picturesque character, especially when the son of the minister of the church, many a story was handed down, but his nephew knew only that his dead uncle was wicked, and that the least said about him the better it would be. His return to life was as exciting to James as would be the apparition of William Tell to a Swiss peasant.

As James sat wondering what his elders were saying in the dining-room, his uncle, bolting from the front hall with his gripsack, stumbled over him and fell down the granite steps, alighting in a heap upon the smooth gravel path below. James looked at the front door rather apprehensively, as if he expected to see his father’s stalwart leg reaching over the threshold as the motive power which had driven the man from the door; but he saw only blackness, and heard his father answering his aunt at the other side of the house.

Cheever picked himself up from the gravel path and tried to pull himself together after his fall.

“What in the name of all that is unholy did I fall over?” he asked, rubbing his shin, which the sharp edge of the granite step had barked.

“Over me,” replied James, he too rubbing his shoulder, where his uncle had hit him. “Where were you going so fast?”

“Down to the schooner. I’m off.”

“Your schooner isn’t to sail right away, is she?”

“No, but I’m going back on board. I am mate and have to look after her.”

“Shan’t you stay here with us?” asked the boy, who felt it to be most inhospitable that a long-lost uncle should thus be almost driven from his father’s gates.

“No, James, no. I’m not coming back here again. I don’t like to be where I am not wanted, you know.”

He smiled, as he thought that he was rather more urgently wanted at Oldbury than he could desire. Looking down the road, he saw the well-remembered elm-trees in front of Deacon Fairbank’s house, beneath which he used to meet Sally Fairbanks years ago. So Sally was a widow,—Joshua Pickering’s widow. He wondered how she could have married stupid Josh Pickering, who was the butt of all the brighter boys and girls at school.

“Do you ever see the Widow Pickering, James?” he asked, as he stood looking at the dark masses of the elm-trees.

James blushed. Was not the Widow Pickering’s daughter, Alice, the girl of his heart? The widow too, had she not always marked him out from all the other boys as her favorite? He did not think it necessary to tell his uncle of his consuming passion for Alice, and simply answered that he often saw the widow.

“Well—tell her—” stuttered Cheever. “Well, no, never mind—Don’t you tell her I’ve come back. It wouldn’t do—there mustn’t anybody know it, do you understand, or I shall get into trouble. Promise you won’t tell any one.”

“I shall not tell, sir,” promised James.

Cheever hesitated for a minute, and then, taking a small packet from an inner pocket of his waistcoat, said, “When you see the widow, boy, you might give her this box and tell her that a sailor, a rough sort of a fellow you saw on a ship in the harbor when you was knocking wind in your boat, asked you to give it to her. You can say that he said that Tom Cheever gave it to him down in La Guayra years ago when he was dying, to be given to Miss Sarah Fairbanks of Oldbury, Massachusetts, if he ever should get there. Tell her, too, that the ship has sailed and that you don’t know anything more about it than this. You’ll do this, will you, James?”

“I will if you wish me to, but it won’t be true; you’re not dead.”

“Yes, I am dead; Tom Cheever is dead. My name’s Marks,—Tom Marks. It would be hard to say which was the most worthless of the two. The thing in the box rightly belongs to the widow. And you might say to her, James, that the sailor said that Cheever wished him to ask her to forgive him and to pray for him. I guess that’s all, James. Good-by, boy. Now, I’ve got a word to say to you. You do what your father tells you to; don’t think you know it all. Be a credit to your family. You don’t want to grow up and have folks thank God when you die, and wish you dead when you are alive—and feel yourself that they are right.”

James reached out for the packet which Cheever handed to him and placed his hand upon his shoulder for a minute.

“Good-by, James, good-by,” he said, and plunged off into the darkness, and the boy saw him no more.

James stood holding the packet in his hand, confused by the remarkable events of the evening. He felt strangely drawn to the man who had just left, and at the same time an undefined instinct told him that he should shun him. What bond of any kind could there be between the Widow Pickering, with her calm face and dignified bearing, and his uncle? Could he have loved her years ago as his nephew now loved Alice? Not that it was really possible, he thought, that any one could love another as he loved Alice. To be sure, he was only fifteen years old, and of course could not marry for some years, but he felt that the world would be a cheerless place if his Alice were not in it.

We all laugh at calf-love, and smile when we see a youngster a willing slave at the beck and call of a maiden in her teens; but do you suppose that your battered old heart, under your expanding waistcoat, can leap with the fervor of a boy’s? It is pure gold, with no alloy of passion or worldliness, which a youth offers to his mistress; no depreciated currency tattered and frayed by handling.

An artist, painting Love’s Young Dream, does not show as his model a worldly pair, with thoughts of domestic economy and of marriage portions clouding their brows; nor would the poets sing the love of a middle-aged Corydon with a Phyllis who had gathered scalps in countless ballrooms and watering-places.

A young philosopher of my acquaintance of the age of nine, on being reproved by his mother for his excessive devotion to a little girl, hit upon the weak point in youthful love-affairs, when he replied, “Dear mamma, do not be at all alarmed about this; I cannot be married until I am twenty-four, and no man ever loved the same woman for fifteen years.” But when this distressful and unromantic century was in its infancy, children were not cynical philosophers, and marriages were made early. Young men boldly took the risks of life and gave hostages to fortune, and happy homes were conducted on incomes which would at the present day barely suffice for the wife’s dressmaker’s or the husband’s cigar bills. But even in that primitive state of society, I suppose that few married their first loves. James, not being versed in the fickleness of the human heart and the many obstacles which proverbially roughen the course of true love, never doubted that his love was genuine and would be lasting. Had he not for years walked home from school with Alice, carrying her books; had he not always buckled on her skates and steered her down the icy hills on his red sled, “The Flying Dutchman”? And with great pains had he not cut in two a silver six-pence, half of which each wore, tied upon a blue ribbon around the neck as near the heart as might be. It had been a great grief to him when they had been separated from each other at school; the boy, who was intended for college, going to the Latin School, while Alice had to be content with the small amount of learning which was thought necessary for our grandmothers. It is doubtful whether our modern girls really learn more from books than their ancestresses used to, and it is certain that of many other things they learn less. Yet it was clear that the girl could have done the boy’s tasks better than he. His mind was filled with thoughts of sailing down the reaches of the bay, or of playing ball with the boys on the Common, while his eyes received but a blurred impression of the page of the Latin Grammar before him; but her quick mind and retentive memory would have rapidly learned what was put before her. Indeed, she followed on in the study of Latin, unknown to him; for she did not like to think that a book which he could read should be sealed to her, and she had one day surprised James by suggesting a translation for a word in the Latin Primer, over which he had stuck for some time.

“How did you know that, Alice?” he had asked. “Pooh! you don’t know; you are making believe.”

“I do know,” said Alice. “We girls could learn ever so much quicker than you stupid boys if they would only let us.”

“Nonsense! Alice,” replied James, looking at her with all the pride of the superior sex. “Girls can’t learn Latin, and they ought to thank their stars they cannot. It’s very tiresome.”

But this superior being found in due time that one girl could learn Latin a great deal better than he could, and his wandering mind was often kept to its task by the feeling that it would be very stupid in him to be outstripped by a girl who had no masters to help her in her study of the dead tongue.

As James stood looking down the street towards the dark foliage of the Deacon’s elm-trees on the other side of the street, he felt that it would have been well to tell his sweetheart of the wonderful event of the evening, before facing her step-mother with the packet which had just been given him. Alice’s superior intelligence, he thought, would help him in the difficult task of telling a straight story. He knew, however, that she would not be satisfied with the perversion of the truth involved in saying that Tom Cheever was dead; to him it did not seem so bad. Tom Cheever really was dead, so far as Oldbury was concerned, and it certainly was right that Mrs. Pickering should get her property back. But his uncle had made him promise not to tell any one that he had come back; of course, he could not even tell Alice. His unaided intelligence must steer him through the dangerous channels by which he should convey the message and the packet to the good lady; and he must suppress the truth in the doing it.

Stopping under the trees outside the Deacon’s house, he could see into the sitting-room lighted by lamp and candles. Alice and her mother were seated near the table in the middle of the room, the elder sewing at some white garment, while Alice was reading a heavy, leather-covered book which rested on the table, being too large to be held in her hands. Her light brown hair was drawn smoothly over her well-shaped head into a little roll behind, but a stray ringlet or two told that this Puritan simplicity was not natural. Her eyes were cast down over her book, and thus the great charm of her face was for the moment lost behind the modest, long-fringed eyelids, the bright blue, laughing eyes, which changed into serious deep ones as the gay thought was succeeded by the sad one in her mind. Her cheeks were rosy with the sweet bloom of a Northern girlhood, which, alas, too soon fades away. Her mouth, though large, had full, beautiful curves, which bespoke an even temperament. Her girlish form was clad in a plain brown dress. As she read the big book on the table, her face changed with the emotions which swept through her mind; her mouth dimpled into a smile or drew down as if she were grieved; her forehead contracted with lines and grew smooth again; her color came and went. One could see that she was of an emotional, imaginative nature, one to whom the characters in romance or history seemed actually living. Her mother had once been a beautiful woman, and even at forty she was comely. A common-place face hers would have been in expression, had it not been for a settled melancholy, which gave it a character of its own.

James walked to the front door and knocked; at the first metallic ring of the brass, Alice shut her book and ran to the door to greet him. Even in little things, the quick ear of a girl can distinguish the person she cares for.

“Oh, James!” she cried, “I’m so glad you have come over. Let’s sit on the steps here, it is so much cooler than in the sitting-room. What have you been doing all day?”

James sat beside her upon the jamb of the door, and looked at her for a moment with great satisfaction. “I am glad to see you again, Alice,” he answered; “I wanted to get here before, but I have been trying to induce my father to let me go to sea.”

“Oh, James!” exclaimed Alice.

“Of course he wouldn’t hear of it! He says that I must go to college and then be a minister. I will make a queer kind of a minister, I am thinking.”

“Yes, you would now, Jamie,” laughed Alice. “But you will not be fifteen all your life.”

“But I do not believe that a halo will begin to be apparent around my head as I get older. In fact, if a vote of the neighborhood were taken, I do not think that it would be voted that I had improved since I was a little boy. I was a very good baby, and have been getting worse ever since. Ask your grandfather, the Deacon, what he thinks of me.”

“It is too early in your life to think seriously of what you are going to do,” answered the girl, in her sweet, low voice. “If you get a good education, it will not do you any harm, no matter what you do in after life.”

“Will it help me to manage a ship, to be able to read Virgil and Homer, Alice? I tried to get the old gentleman to look at the irregular verbs in the Latin Grammar when we were arguing about it, but he was much too knowing for that and pointed at the reverend grandpa as an unanswerable argument. I tell you what, Alice, the Captain has a will of his own. I’d rather be like him than like a parson. Tom Devereux is the kind of a fellow to work into a parson. I’m not and I never shall be.”

There was a moment’s pause. Alice looked sadly at the boy’s eager, passionate face. Just then the little packet which his uncle had given him fell from his hand upon the stone step.

“But, by George, Alice,” exclaimed the boy, reminded by this of the errand upon which he had come, “something happened to-night which I cannot tell you about.”

“Cannot tell me about!”

“No, I want to, but I promised not to—but I have a message to give your mother and this little box. I wish I knew what was in it.”

“So do I,” said Alice, taking the packet in her hand and shaking it. “I think it too bad that you have a secret which you will not tell me.”

“May not tell you, Alice. It is too bad, for I should like your advice about something which I must tell your mother—but I cannot. I think that I will go in to her now so to get it off my mind. Is she alone in there?”

“Grandfather is asleep in the next room.”

“Are you sure he is asleep, Alice?”

“He was when I came out. He had his red bandana over his face, and was snoring peacefully.”

James walked into the room where Mrs. Pickering was still sewing. She put her work upon the table when she saw him, and smiled at him pleasantly.

“Good evening, James,” she said, as the boy bowed to her, and shuffled his feet awkwardly. “You have something you wish to say to me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” answered James, rolling the packet around in the palm of his hand. “The fact is, it is something very odd and something I cannot understand. I was out sailing this afternoon in my boat and after I came up to the mooring and was walking up the wharf I met a sailor who spoke to me. After a little talk, he asked me if I knew a Miss Sally Fairbanks—”

“What did he look like?” asked Mrs. Pickering, turning pale.

“Just a sailor, that’s all. He had a long black beard, and he was brown, and had tar on his hands,” answered James, drawing on his imagination unsuccessfully for a vivid picture of a seaman. He felt that he was getting into deep water, and was impatient of questions.

“I said there was a widow lady living in town who had been a Miss Sally Fairbanks, but who now was Mrs. Pickering, and with that he took out this little box from his trousers’ p-p-pocket.”

The building of this picturesque circumstance was a little too much for the boy’s invention, and his stuttering was painful.

Mrs. Pickering took the box from the boy, who kept silence while she opened it. He was trying to form into an intelligent sentence the message Tom Cheever, dying in La Guayra, had sent to her; but he was so much interested to see what the box contained, that the words did not come easily to his tongue. Mrs. Pickering cut with her scissors the tarred string which bound the box, and slowly removed the cover. A small wad of cotton-wool was then removed and James saw a gold ring of an old filagree pattern. Mrs. Pickering turned pale when she saw it, and, quickly looking at the inner part, inquired in a tremulous voice of James:

“What did the man say when he gave this to you? Tell me all about it, James.”

James turned red under these questions and stammered out:

“He said that a man named Tom Cheever gave it to him years ago when he lay a-dying in a hospital in La Guayra, and told him to give it to Miss Sally Fairbanks of Oldbury, Massachusetts, if he ever should get there and see her—and the sailor said that the dying man said that he wished that she would forgive him.”

The woman sat for a moment gazing fixedly at the little ring, turning it over and over with her fingers; what remembrances it brought back to her of shame and tears. Had she entirely lost her old love for the reprobate? Who can say?

“He wished that I should forgive him,” she murmured to herself. “Poor Tom!”

A tear rolled down her cheek, and James watched it intently as it strayed down the deep line between nose and cheek, then turned away his head.

“It is odd that the sailor should have happened to ask you to bring me this,” she said, “this relic of your uncle.”

James gave a start at the word “uncle” and was at a loss for words.

“Yes, it was queer that it should happen so,” he said; “but then you know I am often round the wharves in the afternoon.”

“When you should be minding your books, naughty boy,” exclaimed Mrs. Pickering, smiling through her tears; for perhaps all love for ne’er-do-wells had not been rooted from her breast. Indeed, it is hard to shake the shiftless and reckless from their thrones in women’s hearts; the careless, amiable qualities which go to make them unsuccessful in active life, endear them the more to the gentle spirits of women.

“Yes,” answered the boy, looking down abashed upon the floor; “when I should be minding my books, I know. Do you wish to ask me anything more?”

“No, James,” she murmured; “I have nothing more to ask or to say. This ring calls back a time in my life of which I care to say little to any one, least of all to you. Good night, my boy.”

She leaned over and kissed him tenderly, as if to call blessings down upon him, and as he left the room he saw her still turning the ring over with her slim, white fingers, and murmuring to herself.

Of which of the two dead men who had been near to her, the scamp Cheever or the good Joshua Pickering, was she thinking?

IV

AT eleven o’clock in the forenoon the Oldbury post-office was always crowded. The easy-going postmaster and his assistant knew that those waiting in the antechamber were not in a hurry for their mail, and accordingly took their good time in assorting it; while on the sanded floor without, the dignitaries of the town talked business and politics, the clerks skylarked, the old women gossiped, and the young ones talked of the latest fashions, keeping a demure eye the while upon the younger men.

At such times bargains were concluded between merchants, underwriters insured vessels, and young men arranged parties of pleasure with each other. The advantages of a club, an exchange, and a reception were all had by the good people who waited for the postmaster to sort the letters.

In the days of which I write, the talk in the post-office o’ mornings was stirring enough. A town whose capital was almost exclusively centred in ship-owning and commerce could not but be excited over the constant disputes between Great Britain and the United States on the subject of the impressing of seamen.

The town was just beginning to recover from the paralyzing effects of the Embargo Act, which had sought to protect our commerce by the singular method of stopping it altogether.

It had been a hard trial for the inhabitants of the seaport towns to see their ships rotting at the wharves and their trade destroyed at one blow, although their ships were saved from the unjust seizures of the British and French.

The merchants were, as a class, notwithstanding the insolence and outrages of the British, the most Anglican of Federalists in their political sympathies; yet they found themselves enduring the loss of their ships and property through the injustice and wrong-doing of the British whose cause they had espoused.

The great national parties of that day were not divided upon American questions, but were swayed by their sympathies with one or the other of the two great nations, England and France, which had been locked in deadly conflict for so many years. The Republican party espoused the cause of France as warmly as the Federalists did that of Great Britain, and the great nations, the objects of this admiration, vied with each other to see which could do the most injury to the United States, until it was impossible for a ship to sail the seas flying the Stars and Stripes without running imminent danger of being confiscated by either England or France. And all these years the impressment of American seamen by British ships was insisted upon as a right by the aggressive monarchy, and was conducted on an enormous scale, and thousands of American citizens had been taken from our ships. Some American vessels were stripped of their seamen to such an extent that they were lost at sea for want of hands to man them. The impressment of American seamen was even a surer road to promotion in the British Navy than gallantry in a sea-fight. And this year the long dispute was coming to a head, and at the daily assemblage at the Oldbury post-office words were apt to be warm. A Federal looked upon his Republican neighbor, with French sympathies, as a red-handed incendiary, and was quite as likely to tell him so as not; while the abused supporter of Madison regarded his reviler as a sycophant to the insolent British, a craven, who cheerfully licked the boots which kicked him. Party spirit ran very high among our great grandfathers, and never higher than in the spring of 1812.

Although Captain Woodbury had been a severe loser by the long embargo, and had been a staunch Federalist, he was at this time so outraged by the insults of the British to the American flag, that he had a lively feeling of hatred towards the mother country, which led him to many hot disputes with the other merchants of the town.

On the morning after the return of the prodigal Cheever to his native town, the worthy old Captain was walking down the High Street slowly and deliberately. He was revolving in his mind the unpleasant experience of the night before, and the necessity which had arisen for the speedy raising of three thousand dollars troubled him not a little. His ships had not brought him in an income for some time, and his new house had made a great hole in his cash. In the troubled state of public affairs, when men said that war might involve the country at any moment, purchasers for vessels and real estate in a seaboard town were rare. The Captain had a horror of debt; yet he could see no way in which he could speedily raise this sum of money, save by borrowing it at the bank or of some friend. He soon dismissed the idea of borrowing from a friend, as he felt sure that no individual whom he could ask would be able in so short a time to raise for him so large an amount. The bank was his only resource, that was clear; and unfortunately he had had high words with Deacon Fairbanks, the president, at the post-office only the day before, in which neither of the fierce old gentlemen spared his adversary. It was hard to be compelled to ask the Deacon a favor after having called him a British parasite, in full hearing of the assemblage at the post-office, and yet there seemed to be no alternative. It was necessary that Cheever should be got out of the town as soon as possible, and the Captain felt an eager desire to pay him the money and get rid of him at once.

His steps had brought him to the post-office at the same moment that his thoughts had led him to this conclusion, and the first person he laid eyes upon, as he came back into the world from his brown study, was the Deacon.

A puffy and consequential-looking man was Deacon Fairbanks. The mean lines of his face were not improved by the fat which bulged his cheeks and jaw. He was smooth shaven, as was the fashion of the day, and his mouth had the tight, short look, which indicates economy of speech and closeness in money matters. His eyes were a light green in color, deep set in his head, and his colorless eyebrows were long and bushy. The Deacon inclined his head slightly when he saw Captain Woodbury, and looked at him sharply from beneath the shaggy eyebrows.

I have my doubts whether the Deacon had really been as sound asleep as his daughter supposed when James was telling the story of the mysterious sailor who had sent the ring to her from the wicked uncle. Captain Woodbury felt uneasy under the Deacon’s keen gaze, and he thought of the unfortunate quarrel with him of the day before.

“A PUFFY AND CONSEQUENTIAL-LOOKING MAN WAS DEACON FAIRBANKS.”

The Deacon, however, either from Christian charity or from policy, seemed to bear no ill-will towards his neighbor on account of the abusive language which the latter had heaped upon him, and he advanced to greet the newcomer with more than ordinary politeness.

“Good morning, Captain Woodbury,” said he in his soft, disagreeable voice. “It’s a fine June morning.”

“It is,” replied the Captain, curtly. He did not like to have a man whom he had insulted the day before speak to him so civilly. To be sure, he had intended to be polite to the Deacon, but then he had an axe to grind. It was his unpleasant necessity to borrow three thousand dollars that morning of Fairbanks’ bank, and the old fellow did not imagine for a moment that the other might have an object in being polite to him.

“Bad news from across the ocean,” observed the Deacon, pointing to his Boston Atlas, where the news from the European wars were displayed in modest type. “It looks as if they never would be at peace again.”

“I don’t care how much they fight with each other, if they only leave our ships and seamen alone,” growled the Captain, who would have plunged at once into a grand quarrel with the Federalist Deacon, if it had not been for the loan he expected to make.

“The recall of our minister looks like war with Great Britain,” observed the Deacon, shaking his head sadly.

“We must fight them, or confess ourselves a nation of slaves,” replied Woodbury, growing red in the face with his suppressed emotions.

“I fear, friend, that if we pursue the subject farther, we shall renew our heated discussion of yesterday,” remarked the Deacon, noticing the gathering wrath on his neighbor’s face. “How is your good sister, Captain? I hear from my daughter that she has been ill.”

“Elizabeth had a faint turn last night. She is subject to them, you know,” replied the other. The Captain cleared his throat, hesitated, and finally said, in a low, constrained tone:

“By the way, Deacon Fairbanks, I have a little business matter which I wish to talk over with you. Would you mind walking up to your bank with me?”

The Deacon’s green eyes flashed for a moment, and the lids, with their colorless lashes, were drawn close together, and an oily smile spread over his face.

“So, the Captain wishes to talk over some business at the bank,” he thought; “probably he wants to borrow some money. The old fool has spent a good deal on that fine house of his, but still he paid as he went. I wonder what he needs the money for?”

But the Deacon’s face gave no evidence to his companion of what he was thinking; on the contrary, his smile grew the blander, and he cheerily accepted the suggestion to go to the bank, and slipped his hand under the Captain’s arm.

The two men walked slowly down the sidewalk of the Main Street, the Captain seemingly absorbed in contemplation of the small red bricks which made up the pavement, while the Deacon talked glibly of the depressed condition of commerce.

The old book-keeper and the smart young teller of the Liberty Bank, who were hard at work on their great leather-bound ledgers behind the iron grating, looked up for a moment and bowed to the two magnates as they entered the bank, and walked into the directors’ room. The Deacon politely ushered his customer into that dark apartment and closed the door softly when he entered himself. The windows of the room looked out into a narrow alley, on the other side of which was a carpenter’s shop, built of rough, unpainted wood. There was a large mahogany table in the centre of the room, and a dozen heavily built leather-cushioned chairs of the same handsome wood. The room was carpeted with a dark Turkey carpet. The Deacon stood, from the force of an old habit, in front of the fireplace, though of course, at that season of the year, no fire was burning.

There was a silence for a minute or two, when Fairbanks coughed in an interrogative manner, and said:

“Well?”

The Captain was also standing up, with one hand behind his back, and the other tugging at the seal which hung from his watch fob. He was loath to broach the subject he had in hand, and he felt that if he had not already been brought into the spider’s parlor, he would have tried to have raised the money elsewhere. He had never before asked the Liberty Bank for accommodation, and he did not like the way in which the Deacon looked at him with his small green eyes.

“Well?” questioned the mild voice of the president, again.

“I wished to speak to you on a matter of business,” said Woodbury, thus aroused from his thoughts of escaping. “I desire to raise a sum of money to-day for immediate use, and I thought that the Liberty Bank might accommodate me.”

Fairbanks pursed up the corners of his mouth, and wrinkled his brow as if to personify cautious capital. After an appearance of thought and a mental calculation, he asked:

“How much do you wish to borrow, Captain Woodbury?”

“Three thousand dollars.”

“You say you wish it to-day?”

“Yes, I have immediate need of it.”

“For how long a time?”

“Six months, I should say,” replied Woodbury.

“What rate do you expect to pay?” asked the Deacon, again wrinkling his forehead and lifting his coat-tails with his left hand.

“Not over eight per cent.”

“That is far too low a rate,” objected Fairbanks; “in these troubled times, I expect to get at least ten per cent for the bank’s money. Why, we may have war with England any day, and then hard cash will be scarce enough, I warrant. You had better say ten per cent, Captain.”

“Can you let me have the money this morning?” asked Woodbury.

“H’m, let me see; that’s a different matter,” said Fairbanks. “Our available funds are low to-day. It will be a little difficult to let you have such an amount. Are you particular to have quite so much? Perhaps twenty-five hundred would do?”

“I need three thousand dollars to-day, Fairbanks,” said the Captain, taking up his hat and cane from the table, “and if you cannot let me have it, I must go elsewhere.” He started to open the door leading into the main room of the bank, when Fairbanks stopped him by saying:

“Well, Captain, I guess that after all I can manage it for you as quickly as anybody, that is, if you satisfy me on the matter of security. ’Tis only a matter of form, you know, with such a name as yours.” The Deacon’s voice was as silky as ever, and he stretched out his hand deprecatingly as he spoke.

“I think that there should be no trouble in my borrowing this sum upon my own bill,” said Woodbury.

“Oh, but it would not be business, my dear Captain, not business at all. Your note is as good as wheat, but times are bad, and the greatest caution must be exercised. You will pardon the suggestion, I feel sure.”

“There’s my half interest in the brig Flying Scud,” suggested Woodbury.

“The bank has decided not to loan upon shipping property,” said the Deacon, who hoped by judicious objection to get a complete inventory of his neighbor’s possessions.

“I can give you a mortgage on my new house,” said the Captain, after a few minutes’ consideration. “It cost ten times what I wish to borrow on it.”

“Oh, but you cannot expect to get back what you have put in there,” said the bank-president. “Pardon me for referring to the adage as to the class of men who build houses. But, nevertheless, your house will be a satisfactory security for the amount you wish to borrow. But it is pretty short notice you have given me if you wish to borrow the money on real estate. There’s the title to be looked into. I suppose that it will make no difference to you if you wait a few days for the money.”

“Certainly, it will make a difference!” exclaimed the Captain. “I wish the money to-day, and I have told you so. If you cannot arrange the matter for me, pray let me know at once.”

The Deacon raised his hand as if to deprecate the violence of the other’s temper. “Oh, really, Captain Woodbury, do not misunderstand me. I wish to do all in my power to assist you.”

“Assist me! I do not ask for assistance. I came here on a matter of business which will be as advantageous to your bank as it will be to me, and judging from the rate of interest which you demand, much more so.”

“Oh, really, Neighbor Woodbury, how hasty you are!” said the Deacon, in his exasperatingly sweet voice. “You pick the words out of my mouth. I did not mean to imply by the word ‘assist’ that I felt that I was doing an act of charity; far otherwise. It would be much quicker work for you if you could get an endorser on your note. I would be delighted to endorse it were it not that it would be improper for me to do so since I am president of the bank. But it will be very easy for you to get an endorser.”

“I have never asked a man to endorse a bill for my accommodation and I never mean to do so.”

“Oh, how much better it would have been here for some men I know if they had adopted that rule,” said the Deacon; “poor Isaac Wills, for instance. Oh, that was a sad case!”

“The man was a fool,” said the Captain. “I have laid down this rule that I never will endorse for another, or ask another to endorse for me. If you cannot afford to lend the money, you cannot afford to lend your name.”

The Deacon bowed his head in approbation of this proposition, and insinuatingly said, “Then we shall say a loan of three thousand dollars for two years on your house on North Main Street, interest at the rate of ten per cent per annum.”

“I will pay eight per cent,” said the Captain, obstinately.

“Oh, very well, nine it shall be.”

“I said eight, and I shall pay no more.”

“Ah, I misunderstood you then. We will call it eight per cent, though there is no one else in town to whom I would lend on such terms. I suppose that Judge Cushing looked up your title. You might instruct him to draw the mortgage deed and to send it to young Mr. Baldwin for approval. I send the bank’s business to Baldwin, as he is a clever young fellow, and I like to encourage youthful talent.”

The Deacon rubbed his hands together as he spoke, as if to excite the glow of benevolence by friction.

“And you can let me have the money to-day?” said Woodbury, smiling at the Deacon’s show of benevolence; for he knew well that the bank employed the services of young Baldwin because he did his work well and cheaply.

“I do not see how it can be arranged till to-morrow,” replied Fairbanks. “Baldwin will have to look up the title since you have been the owner, and the lawyers will have the management of the affairs now we have made our bargain, and you cannot hurry lawyers, you know.”

“No, that you cannot! Old Judge Cushing is as slow as a Dutch lugger beating to windward. But if you will send Baldwin around to his office, we will see how quickly we can arrange the matter. Good morning, Mr. Fairbanks.”

“Good morning, Neighbor Woodbury,” said Fairbanks suavely, as he opened the door for the other, “good morning. Do you desire Boston funds or cash?”

“Cash.”

“Very well; I am glad to oblige you, very glad. To-morrow at noon at Judge Cushing’s office. Very well.”

When Woodbury was well out of the bank, Fairbanks shut the door of the directors’ room again. “Ah, so you need this money as soon as you can get it, do you?” he said to himself, as he stood at one of the back windows gazing out over the alley into the carpenter’s shop, where the carpenter’s apprentice was whistling over his wood-butchery. “You want three thousand dollars, do you, Captain Woodbury? And you never borrowed a ninepence before in this town. Yes, and you come to me to borrow it, even after quarrelling with me yesterday. You evidently want it quick and for a purpose. You didn’t need the money then.”

The carpenter’s apprentice looked up just then from the board he was planing and caught sight of the Deacon’s fat face in the window, and the boy, with the frank criticism of youth, stuck his tongue out at the old gentleman; for children and animals instinctively disliked the Deacon, though his manners always appeared to be gentle and his smile was perpetual.

“Darn the old hypocrite!” exclaimed the apprentice, who wasted on the wharves too much of the time which he owed his master. “I wonder what mischief he is up to now. Going to foreclose Widow Hapgood’s mortgage, I guess. The old spider.”

The Deacon, all unconscious of the hostile presence across the alley, continued his train of reasoning.

“Let me see, last night when I was dozing after supper, that young Woodbury came in to see my daughter. I was nearly asleep, but the sound of their voices woke me up, and he told her that cock and bull story about the sailor down at the wharves who gave the lad the ring which Tom Cheever, on his death-bed, had entrusted to the sailor. The boy was not telling the truth, I could see that. It was strange that the name should have turned up again. Let me see; it was fifteen years ago last March that Cheever broke into my house, the villain. I always suspected John Woodbury of helping the rascal escape. Then they got up that story of his dying in South America. I never believed it, though the old Parson did put up that headstone in the burying-ground. The chances are that the thief has come to town again, and that he sent the boy with the message to my daughter. I have got it; that’s it; and now he is bleeding the Captain for money, and, like as not, claiming his share of the Parson’s estate; and Woodbury wants the money so quickly in order to get rid of him. That’s it.”

The Deacon’s green eyes blazed so brightly that the apprentice felt certain that the widow’s mortgage was to be foreclosed and her furniture moved into the street that very day. Fairbanks opened the door into the bank again, and said:

“Mr. Sharp, has any vessel entered the harbor within a day or two?” Mr. Sharp, the smart young teller, answered, that a schooner from Havana had entered on the day before and that she was lying in the stream off Titcomb’s wharf.

The Deacon rubbed his smooth, oily chin with his fat hand for a moment: “Mr. Sharp, go and tell Constable Hallett that I should like to see him at my house at noon. I am going out, Mr. Sharp. I shall be at lawyer Baldwin’s office for an hour.”

V

THE low stone-wall of the burying-ground on the hill back of Captain Woodbury’s house had for many years been a favorite meeting-place for young lovers. Many of the silent majority sleeping in the enclosure had plighted their troths, seated on that low stone-wall, and to this day, happy young people watch from this trysting-place the magical changes of light, as the darkness steals silently over the earth, and gaze with a romantic awe at the distant low hills, dark and impressive against the gorgeous colorings of the sky, or down upon the slumberous old town wrapped in its coverlid of leafy trees. Beyond, flows the tidal river, and far off to the east is the sea, flashing back like a mirror the last rays of the sun.

As James sauntered up the hill to meet Alice on the evening of his father’s interview with the Deacon in the bank, the western sky was aglow with orange fire, the fleecy clouds dyed with delicate pink and gray by the wonderful alchemy of the sunlight. The boy’s old hound, Major, trotted along at his master’s heels, tired with the long tramp the two had taken in the afternoon, through the woods and meadows, between Oldbury and Dummer in search of woodchucks. Alice had been seated on the wall for fully half an hour before James appeared, and as soon as she saw him she jumped down and ran to meet him.

ALICE.

“I thought that you would never come, James; where have you been all the afternoon?”

“Oh, Major and I have been over at March’s woods after woodchucks. He starts them up, and we bring them to bay in a stone-wall. How they do fight, when they are put to it.”

“What cruel sport! I do not see how you can enjoy it!”

“Well,” he answered a little shame-faced, “we didn’t find any woodchucks to-day.”

“I have been looking everywhere for you,” said Alice, in a low voice. “I am afraid that something dreadful will happen unless we can prevent it.”

“What can it be?” asked James.

“I will tell you all I know about it, but you must first answer a question. Did a strange man come to your house last night?”

The boy’s heart began to beat the quicker as he remembered his promise to his uncle; he hesitated for a moment, and then answered, “Well, yes, there did.”

“Now, I will tell you what troubles me. I was dusting china in the china-closet this noon when grandfather and Constable Hallett came into the dining-room. Grandfather closed the door leading into the front entry and parlor, but he did not shut the china-closet door. I kept on dusting and did not pay any attention to their conversation until I heard your name.”

“My name! Have they any charge to bring against me?”

“No, not against you; grandfather said that you came to our house last night to see mother, and that you gave her a small package. He said that he was just dropping off to sleep in the parlor, when he was awakened by hearing your voice; and he heard you tell her that the package had been given to you by a sailor to give to her, and that the sailor had told you to say that it had been entrusted to him by Tom Cheever, when he was dying in the hospital at La Guayra. Grandfather then went on to say that your father had just been to his bank to borrow a large sum of money in a great hurry, and that he had heard that a stranger had called at your house last night, and that a schooner, the Tempest, had just arrived in port, and that the mate was reported to stutter in a peculiar way, just as your uncle Tom Cheever used to. And—”

“Why do you stop?” asked James, thrilling with excitement.

“You have heard the stories about your uncle, haven’t you?”

“I know that he left the country suddenly, but I never heard what he did that was wrong. They never speak of him at home, I never heard his name mentioned till—”

He stopped short, fearing to betray his secret, and Alice continued: “Grandfather then said that he meant to find out whether the stranger was Tom Cheever; and if he was, he would have him locked up before to-morrow noon.”

“Locked up! What can he lock him up for?” asked James. “I wonder what he did so many years ago, which was so wicked? I must tell you, Alice, what I know, though I promised not to tell any one; for I think that I ought to. My uncle Tom Cheever did come back to life last night, and he is on board of the schooner Tempest at this moment. What could he have done to your grandfather to make him so vindictive?”

“Then I am afraid that he is in danger, James; for I heard the constable say that he would serve the warrant of arrest as soon as the man was identified. Now, we must not let him be arrested; I cannot bear to have disgrace fall upon your family.”

“What shall I do?” asked James. “I can sail out to the schooner in the Scud, but I suppose that it would not be safe for him to return to town, and, as he does not command the Tempest, he cannot order her to sail.”

“Run to the wharf as quickly as you can and warn him!” said Alice, almost pushing him in her eagerness. He jumped down from the stone-wall and stood in silence for a minute.

“Had I better tell my father?” he asked.

“No, I should waste no time; you may be too late as it is.”

Down the hill he hurried, over across High Street to the bay. He was strangely excited as he ran along under the arching elms so quickly that two old ladies, against whom he jostled, turned around, wondering what mischief the lad was up to. Never before in all his scrapes had he alighted upon a real adventure, but now there was sombre earnest in this afternoon’s work; since he should thwart the redoubtable Hallett, brown-wigged terror to the evil-doer. He made his way to the wharf, off which lay his boat, by short cuts known only to adventurous youths; climbing picket fences, stealing through gardens, and clambering over sheds.

When he reached the end of the wharf and stood by the ladder, covered with green slime, down which he was to slide into his dory, he was delighted to see that the north-west wind was growing stronger every minute, so that there was a chance of a good breeze which would sweep the cobwebs from the sky. He slipped and crept down the ladder, holding tight to the sides; for the rungs were treacherous, and wanting when most expected. He stepped cautiously into his dory and unhitched its painter. The dory, like all boats owned by boys, was leaky, so that he had to bail her some few minutes before he could put his feet in the bottom with any comfort, and during this operation he expected every minute to see Constable Hallett’s red face, peering over the edge of the wharf. Finally he bailed out enough water to satisfy himself, though there was still a good half inch swashing around in the bottom, and he sculled out to the Scud and began putting a reef in the mainsail. The Scud was a weatherly keel-boat, about eighteen feet long, broad in beam, and stoutly built, and she was the pride of her owner and the envy of every other Oldbury boy; for pleasure craft were rare in those days, and parents indulgent enough to supply them to their sons still rarer. Much of James’ time, which should have been devoted to the study of the dead languages, was expended in painting the Scud, scraping the spars, and setting up her rigging. A few stout pulls on the throat and peak halliards hauled up the reefed sail, and a moment after the Scud slipped away from her mooring towards the Tempest with started sheet, piling up the waves under her bluff bow and making a good deal of noise, as she ploughed through the water, even if she was not going very fast. Slow as she would be considered nowadays, if she was brought back to life to compete with a modern racer, there was no boat then in Oldbury harbor which would hold its own with her; and it did not take long to run alongside of the Tempest, on board of which James saw his uncle, in a rough blue coat and broad-brimmed straw hat, leaning over the rail and puffing a cheroot. The green and yellow parrot, which James had noticed the day before, was still hanging in its gilt wire cage from the main-boom just behind Cheever, and the bird gave a long whistle as if to pipe all hands to the sides, and hoarsely cried “Boat ahoy!” as the Scud shot alongside and James threw the painter to his uncle and scrambled on deck.

“So it is you, young ’un,” remarked Cheever, as James landed on deck. “What brings you out here? Has the old gentleman sent me a pressing invitation to partake of fatted calf?”

Without waiting for an answer, he proceeded to make fast the Scud’s painter to a cleat in the overhang of the schooner’s stern.

“Carramba!” shrieked the parrot, cocking his head around to look wickedly with its round eyes, which seemed filled with malicious light. “Boat ahoy! Sacré nom!”

James stood watching the noisy bird and his uncle, equally fascinated by each of the strange beings.

“Did the Captain send you with the money?” asked Cheever, arising from his task and laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“No.”

Cheever looked disappointed.

“Why did you come out here then?”

James told him in a low voice what Alice had overheard in the morning, and his uncle listened attentively.

“So the old hypocrite means mischief, does he? Well, I guess that I can outmanœuvre him and Hallett and the whole lot of them. I am sorry that you haven’t the money with you, though. Just step down below with me, will you? The captain’s ashore and I guess that he will not mind our going into the cabin, though it’s no kind of a place. We shall begin to unload to-morrow, and he is at the Custom House, I guess.”

James followed his uncle down the dark and narrow companionway into an ill-smelling box of a cabin, on each side of which was a bunk, filled with tumbled and dirty blankets. On a small table was a bottle, a couple of glasses, a greasy pack of cards, and a handful of cigars, and the odor of bilge-water pervaded the whole place.

“If you have ever felt inclined to go to sea, as I suppose you have, you may like to see the way the officers live,” said Cheever, as he sat down on the port bunk. “It’s growing dark; do you think that old Fairbanks will come out to-night, with his posse—If he’s going to, I guess I’d better be making myself scarce. There’s one comfort about not being blessed with this world’s goods, that when I want to move in a hurry, I can do it. When you are campaigning, you must carry as little baggage as possible. I packed my whole fortune into my satchel last night, and I am ready to start for China at a minute’s notice.”

“Is there any reason why you should be afraid of these men?” asked James, burning with curiosity to hear the story of his mysterious relative.

Cheever looked at him quizzically for a moment.

“Well, the truth is, James, the Deacon and I never were over-partial to each other; and while I know a thousand cussed mean things he has done, none of ’em would get him into trouble with the law, while he knows, or thinks that he knows, one thing, which I did years ago, upon which the law doesn’t smile; I will not say what it was— It’s so long ago now, that I can hardly remember myself what I did, that night— I had been drinking down at the Merrimac tavern, to be sure—but never mind what happened; I shouldn’t be talking to you about it.”

The sun had set by this time, and the cabin was almost dark, save near the companionway, which was dimly lighted by the after-glow. The gathering shadows made the cabin more mysterious and gloomy than ever, and Cheever was obscured in the darkness.

There was a silence for a moment or so, broken only by the hurtling of the rudder, as the vessel swayed with the tide, a silence which was finally ended by the shrill voice of the parrot calling: “Boat ahoy, carramba, sacré nom, boat ahoy!”

Cheever grabbed up his leather bag, jumped hastily from the bunk, and ran up the companionway. James closely followed him and, as he did so, thought that he saw something gleaming in his uncle’s hand. When he got on deck, he saw Cheever lying flat on his back by the bulwark, unfastening the painter of his boat from the cleat; while some fifty feet from the schooner a large boat was being rowed by two men towards them. In the stern of the dory sat Constable Hallett and Deacon Fairbanks. The after-glow of the sun was full in the faces of the men in the dory, and James stood silhouetted against it.

“It’s the old snake in the grass, James,” hoarsely whispered Cheever. “Hold them for a minute.”

He was slowly pulling the Scud alongside as he spoke and the dory was getting nearer.

“Schooner ahoy!” shouted the constable.

James was silent, and the dory came nearer, as the oarsmen were pulling in good earnest.

“Boat ahoy!” cried out Cheever from the deck, as the row-boat came alongside and the hands of the crew clutched the side of the schooner.

“Now’s my chance,” he whispered to James; “the schooner is between us. Don’t let them up yet. I’ll take your boat; tell your father to get you a new one out of the money and to send the rest of it to Mr. Marks, Bell-in-Hand Tavern, Boston. Good-by, boy.”

Like a cat he slipped over the rail into the Scud and in a second had the tiller and sheet in hand and the boat was flying down the harbor. The men in the dory had by this time scrambled aboard the schooner and the big hat and red-brown wig of the constable soon followed over the rail.

“Hi, there!” cried the constable, as he saw the sail-boat running away before the breeze. “Who are you? Come back here! Come back, I say, you are wanted.”

“Polly wants a cracker!” observed the parrot, in a hoarse chuckle.

“Guess you’ll have to do without me!” called back Cheever, with a broad grin. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

By this time Deacon Fairbanks had been hoisted on deck by the two oarsmen, while one of the crew of the Tempest, who had been asleep under a boat on deck, aroused by the noise, had come aft.

“I say there, stop!” called out the Deacon, as he saw the sail-boat slipping away. “Mr. Hallett, shoot the man if he doesn’t come back!”

“I don’t think I care about shooting, until you identify him!” said Hallett, dryly. “After fifteen years, I couldn’t swear that was Tom Cheever, and if I could, I wouldn’t shoot him.”

“THE BOAT WAS FLYING DOWN THE HARBOR.”

“What’s all this row about?” asked the Tempest’s seaman. “That man there is Mr. Marks, our first mate, and I don’t see what call you have to be talking of shooting him, old man. If you come to that, there are three or four of the boys asleep down in the forecastle, who will join in the sport.”

“The man is a burglar under indictment!” cried out Fairbanks, pale with rage. “He broke into and entered my house and stole my silverware, in ’96.”

“Sixteen years ago!” observed the sailor, rolling his quid around in his mouth. “I should think you might have forgotten it by this time.”

James stood trembling with excitement, as he watched his boat and his uncle disappearing down the bay. His emotions were mixed; he was astounded at hearing the accusation which the Deacon made against his uncle, pleased at the latter’s escape, mournful over the loss of his boat, and terrified by the fact that he was mixed up in the escape. There was the Scud, verifying her name by the rate she was travelling down the bay, and it would doubtless appear to the officer that he was an accomplice in the escape.

“Whose boat is that?” asked the Deacon, and as he spoke he noticed James for the first time. “Is it yours, boy?”

James turned crimson and looked down at the deck. The constable, provoked at being thwarted by the escape of such an important criminal, interrupted the Deacon.

“Say, men, there’s a spritsail in our boat; can’t you catch that fellow?”

“A hundred dollars reward to the man who arrests him!” exclaimed the Deacon, frowning angrily.

“We couldn’t no more catch the Scud in our boat than we could catch a streak of greased lightning,” replied one of the men. “There ain’t no faster boat in the bay than her.”

She was out of range of the voice now, and Cheever was sitting quietly in the stern sheets, heading her for the island, threading the channel with the skill of a man who knew every mud-flat, sand-bank, and rock in the harbor.

“I don’t know whether yon is Tom Cheever,” said one of Hallett’s men, “but I’ll bet that he is an Oldbury boy from the way that he is handling the boat.”

“But the harbor has changed since ’96,” said Hallett, who was anxious to retrieve his official reputation by capturing the fugitive. “The sand-bar by Mark Island has almost filled up the old channel; he may run ashore there. I guess that we had better follow him on the chance. Here, tumble into the boat, men! Hurry up! Deacon. Come along with us, young Woodbury; I don’t like the looks of your performance to-day. I guess that I must take you in charge.”

The two oarsmen tumbled over the side into the row-boat and the Deacon followed them more cautiously; then came Hallett, with a grip on James’ shoulder. The men bungled over setting the spritsail, but finally succeeded in getting it up, and pushed off and set to rowing with all their might, splashing the water and nearly catching crabs at every stroke; for the waves were now running high.

James noticed that the Scud was drawing away from them every minute, despite their violent exertions, and the satisfaction which this gave him was added to by his noticing that the tail of the Deacon’s coat, unknown to its eager owner, was soaking in the water, over the stern of the boat.

“He’s coming near Mark Island bar!” called out the bow-oar, who was turning his head as he rowed to keep his eye on the chase, “and he’s headed straight for the shallowest spot.”

“Gosh! I guess that we have got him now!” observed the stroke.

James saw the Scud about half a mile ahead flying before the wind, headed for the bar. It was a moonless night; the twilight had died away, and the waves, which had been rosy with the sunset when he had left the wharf, were now leaden and angry as they swept, crested with foam, after the overloaded boat; the wind was too strong to carry the spritsail, so that James thought that it was far more likely to come to grief than the Scud, especially as he remembered that the tide was only half-ebb, and that there would be enough water in bar for the Scud to bump over it.

“He’s over the bar,” called out the bow-oar. “’Tain’t no use following him any more, and I guess that we are in more danger than he is; it’s blowing harder every minute, the tide’s running out, and we are overloaded.”

The Deacon saw the white sail of the Scud as she crossed the bar and came about to make for the mouth of the bay, and he slapped his knee with anger.

“Well, I guess that we had better put about,” said Hallett. “We have done all we can, and there’s no need of imperilling our lives.”

There was nothing for the Deacon to say, and as the boat was being put about and the spritsail taken in he perceived, for the first time, that his coat-tail had been soaking in the water. For a moment it seemed as if this partial wetting would soon be made unimportant by the total immersion of the whole party; for it was no easy task to get the boat around against the rising waves. As it was, a wave broke over the side, and when the boat was headed towards the town there were several inches of water in the bottom, and every wave which she butted into cast a spray over the whole party. Wet and discomfited and cheated of his prey, the Deacon’s mind turned towards James, who was seated opposite to him.

“James Woodbury!” said the Deacon, sternly, “you have behaved in a most shameful manner! What do you mean by assisting a criminal to escape. Don’t you know that it makes you an accomplice, an accessory after the fact? There’s been disgrace enough on your family in the past, without you adding to it.”

“I never heard of any disgrace to my family in the past, till you made the charge put now,” stoutly insisted James.

“It looks pretty black for you, that your uncle should escape in your boat, and that you should be found on board the schooner,” said the constable. “I am sorry for you, James, but it does look pretty black.”

“There’s bad blood in that Cheever family,” said the Deacon, “and this boy is the living image of his uncle twenty-five years ago.”

“It seems to me I can see Tom Cheever now,” said the constable, “squirming around in the minister’s pew during one of his father’s long sermons. I never thought that he would come to good, remembering the proverb about ministers’ sons, but he turned out a good deal worse than I supposed he would. Let’s see, Deacon, you had a pretty clear case against him, the time he left the town for good, didn’t you?”

“Enough to swear out this warrant on,” answered the Deacon. “That was the last I ever saw of the silver; I never knew what he did with it. I couldn’t trace it anywhere. He was seen around town early the morning after. It wasn’t till late that day I suspected him.”

The two men were then silent for some minutes and nothing was heard but the rhythmic working of the oars in thwarts, and sousing of the bow into the waves. The wind was increasing and was blowing the clouds into long black shreds, which scurried over the sky seawards.

“I wonder where that fellow will fetch up to-night,” said the bow-oar. “He will not strike a harbor till Rockport, and it’s a long stretch over there. I shouldn’t care to be in his shoes.”

“You’ll never see the Scud again, James,” said the stroke, “or your uncle either, if that was him.”

“He will wish that he had never come back to Oldbury, I guess. When a man who is wanted for burglary is so fortunate as to have a gravestone over him, he is a fool to come to life again. Yes?”

It was quite late in the evening when the boat, carrying the Deacon and his fortunes, bumped against the slimy ladder, down which James had slid in his haste to warn his uncle, when the strong hand of one of the oarsmen assisted the boy rather roughly up from the boat. The Deacon and the constable had climbed up before him and were talking together in whispers, when he had landed on the wharf. He was anxious to know what they were saying, feeling sure that his fate was under discussion. Was he to be sent to the lock-up that night, or would gentler counsels prevail?

He felt sure that the constable was on his side. His reddish-brown wig with its respectable curls, twining over his neck, had a benevolent aspect, and it was impossible to associate truculence with the curving lines of his rotund figure, while the Deacon’s bowed shoulders and angular frame armed suspicion in the boy’s breast. As the two men became more interested in their talk, the whispers grew into loud conversation.

“I tell you what, Deacon, the boy is a good boy, and there isn’t a finer man in town than Captain Woodbury, and I’ll be jiggered if I see what charge you have to bring against him. He couldn’t help the man’s going off with his boat, and it’s no crime to be found aboard a schooner, doing nothing.”

“It’s perfectly clear to me that he was aiding in the escape,” insisted Deacon Fairbanks. “I insist that it is your duty to arrest him.”

“Now, look here; Deacon Fairbanks, I do not propose to have you or any other man tell me what my duty is. As you cannot prove that the man who just sailed away from us is Tom Cheever, the evidence that the boy helped him to escape, is of no account. If you can get the judge to issue a warrant for James’ arrest, I shall serve it, but I shall not do anything now. Run off to your home, James.”

The boy did not wait for a second invitation, but walked off, slowly at first that he might not seem over-glad to be out of their clutches, but, once around the corner, he took to his heels and made very good time up High Street. He did not think it safe to stop at the Deacon’s to see Alice, and he was very anxious to tell his father what had occurred in the afternoon. As he walked up from the street to the house, he saw a dark figure standing on the front steps.

His father’s voice called:

“Is that you, James?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where have you been?”

“I will tell you as soon as I get to you, sir.”

Then the two walked together in silence to the Captain’s study and James told all that happened. The Captain listened with his chin resting upon his hand; and when James had finished, he said slowly:

“You did right, James, quite right. You have never heard, I believe, the story of your uncle’s life, but, richly as he deserved punishment, it was right for a nephew to warn him of his danger. I shall protect you from the Deacon’s anger. And so he sailed away on your boat, boy; I do not suppose that you will ever see it again. Well, never mind, you will not need it in Cambridge. Run down-stairs; your aunt will give you some supper. She has been saying that probably you were drowned, until I grew foolishly nervous about you.”

“Shall I tell her about it?” asked James.

“No; ask her to be kind enough to come up here.”

Aunt Elizabeth was seated at the head of her table when her nephew entered the dining-room. Her thin white hands were laid solemnly on her lap, and her eyes followed the boy with a silent protest as he walked to his seat.

“Where have you been all the afternoon?”

“Father will tell you, Aunt Elizabeth; he wishes to see you in his room.”

“If I had not felt sure that you were not destined to be drowned, I should have felt very anxious about you. I shall go to your father. Do not scratch the table legs with your boots, and do not spill anything upon the floor. If you had been my boy, I should not have saved you any supper, but your father seemed bent upon spoiling you.”

Thus she spoke and walked primly from the room, though, if it had not been for her Puritan conscience, she would have fallen upon the boy’s shoulders and wept with joy at his reappearance; she had felt sure that he had been drowned, and, indeed, she was in the habit of giving him up for lost whenever he was late to supper.

Safe in his father’s home, with the bulwark of his father’s love to protect him from the world, the boy felt secure and happy, and he laughed as he thought of his uncle, disappearing beyond Mark Island, leaving the Deacon to impotent wrath.

Many a time in life the man looks back, with a fond regret, upon the days spent in his father’s home, and longs for a caress of the strong hand which sheltered and protected him, and to gaze in the kind eyes which used to dwell so lovingly upon him, and when that hand is stilled and those eyes closed forever, the son for the first time feels the difficulties of the world pressing in upon him; for a good father is a shield to a son, even when the son is a father himself.

The old minister, who owed his immortality to the brush of Copley, looked gravely down at his grandson, seated at the shining mahogany table, and seemed to thank him for saving, from a new shame, the son he had loved and mourned over. The boy happened to look up at the portrait and was struck by the resemblance to his uncle, and he fell to thinking of the lives of the Parson and his son: the one the honored minister and leading gentleman of his town and the other flying before the constables,—an outcast from his family; and he wondered where the wonderful journey, through the world, would lead his heedless feet.

Behind the thickets would lurk the tempters: the greenest, most seductive meadows would conceal the most dangerous pitfalls; and the towers of Capua, gleaming in the distance, would invite him to repose, when he should be hewing his way through the ranks of the enemy to new victories.

VI

CHEEVER’S pursuers had forgotten that the fugitive had brought the Tempest up the harbor, a few days before; so that the latest changes of the bar were known to him. He chuckled, as he perceived that the voices of the men in the boat behind him were growing fainter, as the Scud swept past the light on Mark Island, so close that he could hear the breakers comb over on the beach.

With the wind from the north-west, the waves were swept along in easy curves, and the small boat behaved well under her reefed sail, with her bow pointed for the twin lights of Thatcher’s Island, glimmering faintly in the south-east, about fifteen miles away.

“I guess that I have outwitted the Deacon this time,” he said to himself, as he cut off a quid of tobacco and put it in his mouth. “They can’t reach me now, and in the morning, if I have luck, I shall be off Marblehead, where I shall be safe enough. I wonder what makes the old man keep his revenge so warm for all these years. Perhaps it’s because he has had to use pewter, instead of the silver which I buried that night under the lilac-bush in his back yard. I don’t see how I ever mustered up courage to break in. I remember I had been sitting with his daughter one evening on the front porch, when I heard the old man putting the silver away in the closet in the dining-room. The tavern-keeper was pressing me for my score. I owed Jim Noyes for a horse, and the thought entered my head that those spoons, the tea-service, and tankard would pay up my debts.

“Once in my head, the thought would not depart, and every day it took new shape.

“It must have been the ‘original Adam’ my father used to preach about. I certainly was not one of the ‘elect.’ I always felt sure of that. They used to make me pray that ‘I should be born again and have a change of heart.’ A change of luck might have been worth praying for. Fate brought that thought into my head; it was fore-ordained that I should break into that house and throw up all my chances of being a decent man. The Deacon believes that he was predestined to go to heaven and to lie in Abraham’s bosom, no matter how sneaking and mean he may be; and I suppose that I was cut out for the other place.

“Well, I don’t care; needs must, when the devil drives. It was easy for me, who knew the place since a boy, to get into the house and get the silver, but as soon as I got outside with the stuff, I didn’t know what to do with it.

“When the idea came into my head of stealing it, I meant to melt it down and sell it somewhere, but once it was on my hands, I saw that I could not dispose of it without being detected. It was a rainy night, I remember, and it didn’t take me long to bury the plunder under the lilac-bush and sneak home to bed. Father was awakened by my step on the stairs, and he called out my name.

“When I heard his voice, I was reminded of that verse in the Scriptures about ‘bringing thy father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave,’ and I did not answer him. I kicked off my muddy boots and crept into bed—and next morning I got the ring from Sally, and that was the end of Tom Cheever in Oldbury.”

As he pondered, the boat tore ahead, with gunwales under. Over to the west was the dim coast-line, with here and there a light shining from some lonely farmhouse; looking seaward, black wave followed black wave, crested with foam, dimly reflecting on their upward curves the stars in the wind-swept heavens. The water was full of phosphorescent gleams and now and then schools of fish, startled by the boat, shot in squib-like spirals of fire through the water under and away from the keel. Cheever shivered in the cold wind and buttoned his pea-jacket tightly around him. He was hungry too; for the Deacon had come on board of the Tempest before he had eaten his supper, but he was used to cold and hunger and the quid of tobacco was a comfort to him.

“I will have to put in another reef if it breezes any more,” he thought. “Why couldn’t the old man have left me alone? It’s hard luck to be in this cockle-shell of a boat running down the coast in a stiff breeze, cold and hungry, when I ought to be comfortably rolled up in my bunk on board the schooner. I’ve lost my pay too for deserting the ship; and if the revengeful old fellow had left me alone, I should have left Oldbury in the stage for Boston, with three thousand dollars in my pocket, enough to start me respectably in business. And it’s all owing to that silverware under the lilac-bush, which has done nobody any good since ’96. If I had steered clear of the tavern, I might have married Sally Fairbanks and have been a decent man,—almost as good, perhaps, as Captain Woodbury, who wouldn’t let me spoil the air in his house any longer than he could help. I wonder if Sally suspected that I was alive and in town, when the boy gave her that ring? It didn’t take the Deacon, her father, long to find it out. I wonder what she would have said to me, if I had gone to see her myself—she used to have enough to say to me. And so—she married Josh, the gawkiest lout in town; I remember that his fingers were all thumbs, and that he was generally as clumsy as a cow with a musket. How Sally used to laugh at him, when she set him fetching and carrying for her at the parties down the river—and he grinning all the time, happy over having the chance to serve her in any way. And yet he got her finally; though, seeing that his father was a ship-chandler in a small way of business, it was a bad match for a girl who might have had Parson Cheever’s son, if he hadn’t been rotten before he was ripe, like a summer apple. I used to think that Josh Pickering was fair game to be plucked, and many’s the time I have slipped my arm in ahead of him and squired Sally Fairbanks home, while he was edging around as red as a lobster, with ‘one foot afraid and t’other darsent.’ And he married her; and while I was rotting in that damned prison, her child used to climb over his knee and thrust her fingers into his red hair.”

The wind was lighter; a north-wester on the north Atlantic coast is a blustering wind, which cannot be depended upon in the summer, unless it has the sweep of the continent to give it vigor. Cheever kept his mind upon the boat all the time. He might have been in the middle of the Atlantic and not have seemed lonelier. The circle of waters in which he sailed seemed contracted, yet, looking seaward, his mental vision extended beyond the ever-changing curve of the dark horizon, over the ocean rolling without a break for thousands of miles.

Ahead were the Thatcher’s Island lights, off Cape Ann, the strong buttress of the Massachusetts coast; before long he heard the breakers thundering against the Dry Salvages, and he ran in between Londoner rock and the island. It was nearly ten o’clock he saw by his copper repeater. He changed his course, and all through the night the boat sailed along the coast and the outcast held the tiller with a firm grasp, keeping his eyes upon the stars and watching the coast-line. At sunrise, he was off the shores of Beverly and Manchester, the wooded hills sloping to the sea-washed rocks. Beyond, at the other side of the bay, was Marblehead, its gray houses growing out of the cliff like barnacles. He decided to run into this harbor for food and water; and the breeze, starting up from the sea at sunrise, soon brought him alongside of a wharf, and he began to furl his sail.

He climbed the street which winds up the hill from the wharf, past the weather-beaten houses of the fishermen,—quaint houses with gambrel roofs, huddled together like a flock of sheep, as if for protection against the keen Atlantic breezes. At that time, the whole village was astir; the women busy at household tasks in kitchen and yards, and the men and boys lounging beside fences, or on doorsteps. The fishing-vessels at anchor in the harbor explained this idleness on the part of the male population.

The Embargo Act and the disputes with England had put a stop to the fishing, at one time the main-stay of the town. During the embargo, the Marbleheaders had on hand two years’ catchings of fish, and no vent for them; and the fishermen ate out their hearts in enforced idleness, but retained through it all their loyalty to the government and applauded the law, which shut them out from the chances of getting bread, with a patriotism which should have put to the blush the citizens of the richer towns of Boston and Newburyport. The Marbleheaders have always been fervid in their patriotism. The first cruiser which bore the Stars and Stripes, the schooner Hancock, was commanded by a Marblehead man, Captain Manly, whose deeds of bravery even a Drake would not have disdained to claim as his own. A strange people are the Marbleheaders; to this day keeping their corners, their individualities, prejudices, and dislikes intact. In every war, the hardy fishermen, to whom the ocean was the field, which they tilled as other men tilled the earth, have been the first to respond to the call of their country.

That bright June morning, a messenger was riding post-haste along the coach road to Boston bearing the news of the declaration of war between the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America,”—a message which was to bring consternation to the merchants of State Street and the Federalist politicians, but which was to start out the idle fishing-schooners of Marblehead into privateers, to prey upon the commerce of the ruler of the seas.

Cheever was looked at with some suspicion, as he walked by the groups of men, who were eagerly talking politics. Marbleheaders are and were ever hostile to strangers,—an unpleasant trait, which they doubtless inherit from their ancestors, who came from the Guernsey and Jersey islands, where they had long been exposed to the frequent incursions of the French. But the suspicious natives soon recognized him to be a seafaring man and let him pass unmolested by questions; perhaps they were too much engrossed in discussing “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” to be as vigilant as usual in the inspection of strangers.

At the corner of one of the narrow elm-shaded streets, Cheever saw the welcome sign of a tavern.

A stout man, with the air of proprietor, was seated on the front piazza of the hotel in a wooden chair. He seemed to be unconscious of the stranger’s approach, and to care little whether trade came to the hostelry or not. The indifference to custom of the genuine Yankee tavern-keeper is striking. He will not stir an inch to greet the people whom he calls his guests. Ease and an inn are not concurrent terms in New England, even at the present day.

Cheever put his valise down upon the floor of the piazza, and received the placid stare which the landlord transferred from a hound, who was licking his paws in the sun by the stone step.

“Good morning, Squire,” said Cheever, after waiting a moment for the landlord to make the first advance.

“Mornin’,” was the calm reply.

“Can you give me some breakfast?”

“Well, I guess so. I’ve eaten mine, but there may be some left. Just in, Captain?”

“I came in a small boat just now.”

“Where did you come from?”

“From Ipswich.”

“Any news?”

“No; I haven’t heard any.”

“The times are pretty hard here. ’Tisn’t really any use keepin’ tavern. I am about the only guest I have to entertain. It’s not good business to be eating and drinking your own stock in trade.”

The landlord, after placing his pipe carefully on a window-sill, got up slowly from his chair, and Cheever followed him into the bar,—a dingy room, with a sanded floor and rough plastered walls, painted gray. A large Franklin stove was at one end of the room, and around it were several wooden chairs, browned as to their arms, by much contact with the damp hands of the tavern frequenters. A colored print of George Washington and a copy of the Declaration of Independence broke the dull gray of the walls.

“I think that you had better break up your custom of drinking alone and have a horn with me, Landlord,” said Cheever, nodding his head significantly towards the bar. “I think that a little good old Medford would do neither of us any harm.”

“I will tell them dish you up some breakfast and be right back,” said the landlord, warming up towards the stranger.

Cheever, left alone, began to ponder over his plan of campaign. Marblehead was a good place to wait in until the storm blew over, and if he could get the boat out of the way, no one would trace him. Meanwhile, he would write to his brother-in-law, asking to have the money sent to him. With the money in his pocket, the world would be his oyster. With three thousand dollars cash in hand, a man may do anything; he may even live like a nabob, provided he is content to measure his life in days rather than in years. The landlord interrupted his golden dreams by opening the door through which he had disappeared to order breakfast, and in the twinkling of an eye he had produced a jug and two thick glasses from behind the bar. As he poured out the rum, he eyed Cheever.

“Step up, Captain,” he called out, when the glasses were half full of the Yankee toper’s nectar. “Back up your cart.”

“Here’s your good health, Landlord,” said Cheever, taking up the glass and looking placidly at the liquor. “By the way, Landlord, what’s your name?”

“You might have seen it on the sign-post, if you’d been as sharp as you look, Captain; but to save you the trouble of going out in the yard to read it, my name’s Noyes, James M. Noyes, and I’ve known you since you was knee-high to a grasshopper, Tom Cheever, and you haven’t paid me for that colt you bought of me in ’96! Tom Cheever!”

Cheever turned pale and started, but he was too cool a hand to betray emotion at being recognized. He drank his rum coolly, put the empty glass upon the bar, and stretched out his hand to the landlord.

“Why, bless my soul, so it is you, Jim Noyes. I’m glad to see you, Jim; I never should have known you. You’ve gained fifty pounds since I saw you last. You used to be as spry as a monkey, but I guess that it would be pretty hard for you to shin around the way you used to.”

“You look as if you could climb as actively as you did sixteen years ago,” said Noyes, with a meaning inflection in his voice. “Into dining-room windows at night, for instance.”

Cheever looked the man straight in the eye without changing color.

“CHEEVER LOOKED THE MAN STRAIGHT IN THE EYE.”

“Yes; I am as active as ever, Noyes; I haven’t spent my life seated upon a chair doing nothing harder than smoking a pipe and drinking rum. I have been at sea almost all these years. I refused to die, though I am buried at the cemetery up at Oldbury. Indeed, I’ve had knocks hard enough to kill a dozen such soft-muscled fellows as you; but this talking adds to my appetite, Jim, and I was as hungry as a chained wolf when you did me the honor to recognize me. Is breakfast ready, do you suppose?”

“I set Hannah pounding the beefsteak when I went to the kitchen, and I guess that it must be fried by this time. You may as well come into the dining-room.” He opened the door into that room as he spoke. It turned out to be more dismal than the bar-room, but more attractive to the flies, which swarmed over a long table, at one end of which a place was set. A tall, angular woman, with a sallow face, entered the room, bearing the viands from the kitchen,—doughnuts, pie, saleratus biscuit, fried beefsteak and coffee; the food upon which our imperial nation has fed and grown so great. Cheever did not need any urging to attack these comestibles.

“How long is it since you have been to Oldbury?” asked Noyes, as Cheever dropped his knife and fork to gain strength for a fresh attack upon the beefsteak. The landlord was consumed with an ardent curiosity to hear the tale of the adventures of his long-lost townsman, and he was especially anxious to know whether he had brought back money from his wild adventures.

His own sluggish spirit had impelled his body but a few miles from its birthplace during these sixteen years, so that in his whole experience of life there was no memory more exciting than that of stuttering Tom Cheever, the wild son of the Parson, who had left town charged with burglary and owing him one hundred dollars for a chestnut mare. Now here was the scapegrace returned to life, eating Noyes’ meat. This lost hundred dollars had been sincerely mourned over by the unfortunate vender of the chestnut mare, which had been lamed by the reckless purchaser soon after it came into his possession. Would the meat and drink be as cheaply purchased as the horseflesh? A puzzling question to the landlord.

“How long are you going to stay in our town?” was the question born of Noyes’ thoughts.

“A few days, if you’ll give me house-room. Don’t be alarmed, Jim. I’ll pay you in advance, if you wish; and if I am not disappointed I’ll settle with you for that chestnut mare. Damn it, she’s cost me dear enough.”

Noyes’ fat face lighted up. A hundred dollars, a shower of gold from the last century, a debt long since given up by him as utterly worthless! The sea had given up its dead and its treasures.

“You don’t mean it! Tom Cheever!” he cried out.

“Yes, I do. I always meant to pay you that, but I think you got the best of me in that trade, Jim; the nag wasn’t worth the money.”

“She had as pretty a gait as any animal I ever saw on the road, Tom Cheever,” said Noyes, indignantly; “I refused one hundred and twenty-five dollars for her the year before I sold her to you.”

“It seems to me that we had a talk pretty much like this just before I left Oldbury,” replied Cheever, with a queer laugh. “Tell me about your life since then, Jim.”

“I married old Isaac Dizmore’s daughter in ’97. He owned this tavern, and he died in ’02. I came here then with my wife to keep tavern, and she died five years ago.”

“Any children?”

“No; I have not been blessed with offspring.”

“Have you made money?”

Noyes’ eyes suddenly grew suspicious; it would never do to admit that he had any money to this dare-devil.

“No; I’ve grown poorer every year.”

“I don’t believe you, Jim; you’d make money if you were on a desert island. I believe that you are as rich as a Jew. You needn’t be afraid to tell me; I shan’t rob you. I have plenty of honest money of my own.”

Noyes still looked suspiciously at his guest.

“I have no money,” he insisted. “I own this house, my wife left it to me in her will, but the longer I own it the poorer I am.”

“I shall need some writing materials. Have you any?”

“I guess that I can find some in my desk. You’re welcome to them.”

“All right; I’ll write a letter when I get through breakfast.”

The fat landlord walked out of the room to get the paper, leaving Cheever to a further inroad against the breakfast.

VII

THE morning after Cheever’s arrival at the tavern he was awakened at sunrise by the bells, jangling exultantly, as if the men at the ropes were imparting their own wild feelings to the metal.

He looked out into the street and at another window saw the landlord’s imperturbable face, surmounted by a red cotton night-cap, and below in Glover Street several excited men were standing in a group around a man on horseback by the tavern door.

Wilder grew the bells, so that it seemed to Cheever that the whole town was afire, but he looked in vain for the conflagration. He could only see the sun was rising to brighten the world during another fair June day.

“What is the matter, Noyes?” asked Cheever.

“Congress has declared war against the Britishers,” answered the landlord. “The news was just brought in from Boston by the courier, the man on the black horse. It’s about time, I should think. There’ll be some lively days for the boys in privateering. There’s Captain Vickery of the Lion out there now; he’ll know what to do with his schooner, I guess.”

With this the red night-cap disappeared within the room, and Cheever began to put on his clothes as quickly as he could.

“War!” that was his chance; a privateersman with the rich commerce of England to prey upon had a rich preserve to poach, and could lead the reckless life of a pirate without the yard-arm or gibbet in the vista of the future.

His three thousand dollars would come in handy now; he could buy an interest in a privateer and be one of its officers, and with a smart boat and a Yankee crew a few lucky strokes would make his fortune. He soon joined the group of men in the street; a short, thick-set man, with a long blond beard, frank light blue eyes, wearing a blue coat and buff small-clothes, he took to be Captain Vickery; the other men were common fishermen—great, strapping fellows, who showed from their lounging, uncomfortable attitudes on land that their natural element was the sea.

The stirring news made it seem quite natural for a stranger to join in their conversation, and it was evident that the war-bells had roused the same thoughts in their breasts that they had in Cheever’s.

“It’s high time the President declared war!” Captain Vickery was saying, as Cheever joined the men. “High time; we have stood their British insolence long enough. It’s five years since the Leopard fired into the Chesapeake, and we have been submitting to their outrages ever since.”

“We can make up some of our losses during the Embargo,” spoke up one of the men.

“Yes; we can, and we will, Hiram Wooldredge,” returned Vickery, slapping Hiram upon the shoulder as he spoke. “This old town will be as full of life as a bee-hive before the sun’s an hour higher. We must get to work on the old Lion, and sharpen up her claws. It will be hard luck if we don’t sail into harbor with a prize before many days.”

“You are Captain Vickery, of the Lion?” asked Cheever.

“I am; and what’s your name, sir?”

“Thomas Marks, at your service. This is great news, Captain Vickery, and hits me just right. I have seen a good deal of service at sea, and should like to ship with you on the Lion.”

“But I know nothing about you,” remarked Vickery, sharply, for he did not like the man’s face.

“Well, Noyes in the tavern there knows me,” replied Cheever, trusting in his ability to make the landlord say a good word for him. “You may be in need of funds for your armament; and dollars do not need any letter of introduction; I am in funds, and can help out in that way, if, you give me an interest in the vessel.”

“Now you are talking, Mr. Marks,” replied Vickery, looking sharply at the stranger. “If you will walk along with me to my house, we will discuss the matter.”

“I think we would better go first, and have a look at the Lion,” said Cheever.

“Come to my house after breakfast; we will look the vessel over. Where do you live, Mr. Marks?”

“I have been at sea for the last sixteen years. I was brought up down East. I cannot say that I live anywhere; I have never been married.”

“That is, you have a wife in every port, eh?” asked Captain Vickery with a chuckle, as he walked away. The other men followed him, and Cheever went into the tavern, where he found Noyes seated in the bar-room, lethargic, even now that the dogs of war were let loose.

Cheever drew a chair up to the friend of his youth, intent upon influencing him to keep his mouth closed about that turbulent period of his life. Noyes gazed mournfully at the stove; for the reaction after the excitement was setting in.

“What kind of a man is Captain Vickery?” asked Cheever.

“Well, some folks say he is a pretty good kind of a man, and others say he isn’t. He’s a human sort of a fellow, I guess, and people like him according as how he treats them. If he treats them fust-rate, they like him fust-rate. I haven’t a word to say against him myself.”

“He’s a man of some property, I suppose?”

“Well, I guess he’s comfortably well off, considerin’ the hard times. He owns his house and the Lion, and he’s a smart, drivin’ sort of a man. Is he talkin’ of fittin’ up his vessel as a privateer?”

“Yes; he said something about it. He seemed to want to have me ship with him. Is he as likely a man to ship with as the other captains of the town?”

Noyes was silent for a few minutes. The one thought which had weighed on his mind since he had found his long-lost acquaintance, was the expected recovery of the price of a horse, long since given up by him as a bad debt. He preferred to roll this delightful anticipation over in his brain, rather than to talk upon any other subject.

“I don’t see that I have much to say against Captain Vickery as a master of a vessel. He’s been sailing a ship now for twenty year, and he ain’t drowned. It seems to me that is a pretty good recommendation. You expect to hear from Oldbury pretty soon about that money of yourn, don’t you, Cheever?”

“You are anxious to see the color of your money, Jim; I should think that as you had waited for it sixteen years, you might hold on a day or two longer without frettin’. You shall have it all, and fifty dollars more for interest if you keep your mouth shut about me. I only want a chance, that’s all; I have been steering straight now for some time, and I see plain sailing ahead, and I don’t want you to block up the passage for me, that’s all. I’ll keep the fifty dollars in reserve, and I shall not pay you a cent of it until I find that you know how to keep your mouth shut. Do you agree?”

Noyes wagged his head slowly in assent, and his eye lighted up for a moment, in anticipation of the extra fifty dollars, which he was to receive for his silence. As it was a great effort for him to speak at all, it seemed to him that his silence was cheaply purchased for fifty dollars.

“I will keep silent,” he answered.

“It will be money in your pocket if you do. Now, after breakfast, you must come with me to the Captain’s and I will try to see what I can do with him.”

Cheever calculated that he would receive the money from Newburyport within a few days, in time enough to buy a share in the Lion, and a leather belt which he carried around his waist contained enough gold and silver coin to make a show with until the three thousand dollars came to him. Meanwhile, he judged it to be prudent to get still further into Noyes’ good graces by offering him some money.

“I can give you something on account, Jim; to settle up that old horse trade. Here’s twenty-five dollars.” He handed the landlord the money in “pillar” dollars, and they were soon pouched in the pockets of Jim’s capacious trousers.

“There’s nothing like hard money,” remarked Jim, as he clinked the coins in his pockets. “A man feels as if he were fortified against the world, when he rubs it in his pocket.”

When Cheever reached the wharf with Captain Vickery an hour later, he found that the news of war had awakened the town as the kiss of the Prince awakened the sleeping Beauty and her court; the rusty sides of the vessels were being painted; the spars and wood-works were being scraped; the long disused vessels were being got ready for service under letters of marque and reprisal.

“Which one is the Lion?” asked Cheever, as they reached the wharf.

“She is lying out in the harbor,” said Vickery. “I haven’t begun work on her yet, to speak of. There will not be a great deal to do to her. She has been kept up well; her rigging is sound, and she has a new set of sails. The great work will be for the armament, and when I get a crew shipped, I shall sail for Boston and get it aboard. We shall need a Long Tom, some carronades, and ammunition, as well as muskets, sabres, and boarding-pikes. It will be no holiday cruise.”

“No; the men who expect to get ahead of John Bull on the sea must get up early in the morning.”

“I should like to row out with you and inspect the schooner!”

“I guess that we can take this dory.”

Cheever was pleased with the Lion. She was about two hundred tons in burden, strongly built of oak, and in good condition, and her lines were so good that he thought that she must be a fast sailer.

“When was she built, Captain Vickery?” he asked, as they went on deck from the cabin.

“She’s only four years old, Mr. Marks, and she’s as good a schooner as ever sailed from Marblehead, and we flatter ourselves that we know what a ship is in this old town. What was your last voyage, Mr. Marks?”

“I sailed from Havana to Boston. I am familiar with all the West India Islands and with the Caribbean Sea. I am sure that I shall be a useful man on a privateer, and I wish some stirring occupation. You know how it is, when a man has a pinch of salt in his blood, he cannot grow fat in a chair and be happy over it, like our friend Noyes at the tavern.”

“The lazy fellow,” said Vickery. “He’d rather ride in a hearse than walk, and he is scared to death when he trusts his unwieldy carcass upon the water. I suppose that he can vouch for you, Mr. Marks?”

“I rather think that he’ll be willing to tell you that I am all right. But after all, ready cash will be my best voucher. I will put in one thousand dollars toward fitting up the vessel and buying the armament, if you will make me your first mate and give me one-half the share which you have in the schooner’s earnings.”

“Have you the money on hand?” asked Vickery.

“No; I shall not get it for three or four days, but I am sure to then. I am expecting that a legacy from my father will be paid to me. You know I have been away from home many years, and when I came home the old gentleman was dead, and I was not with him to close his eyes. He was a good old man, Captain, and I brought him little but sorrow. He had thought me dead for years, but the family are to send me my share of the money. How many shall we carry in the crew, Captain?”

Vickery was gazing intently on the dark-haired stranger, wondering what manner of man he might be. He felt a natural distrust of this fellow, dropped from nobody knows where into the middle of the quiet fishing village, and he was loath to enter into a venture with a man who was only faintly recommended by Jim Noyes, the tavern-keeper; but, on the other hand, men with ready cash to invest in privateering enterprises were likely to be rare birds, and it was all-important that the Lion should be ammunitioned and furnished with her armament in time to capture the British merchantmen before the war had made them shy and scarce.

“Well, Mr. Marks,” he finally said, “I want some man with ready cash to come with me, but I don’t wish to buy a pig in a poke or to waste my time with a man who hasn’t the money he pretends to have. Still, it will be some days before this vessel will be ready to sail for Boston with her armament, and I shall not make any arrangement with another fellow-adventurer until I get to Boston.”

“My money will be in Boston in a few days,” interrupted Cheever. “I don’t expect you to close with me until I have the cash on hand. I’ll stay here and help get the schooner in shape, and perhaps I can show you a thing or two about fitting her for a war cruise, if you have only been on fishing-craft. I’ve sailed on many a queerish sort of vessel in my day, Captain, and while I am no saint, I am not the worst sinner in the world; and, whatever happens, if I don’t get the money, I am content to ship as one of your crew, and if we do not capture a rich prize before many weeks are past, my name’s not Tom Marks.”

“Quite likely that it is not,” remarked Vickery, with a grim smile. “You are a queer customer, Marks; and, to be quite frank, I do not altogether like your looks. You speak like a man who was brought up among decent people; you seem to have had an experience which may have made you a good privateersman, but I don’t know that you will turn out a desirable ship-mate; still, if you can do me a good turn, I am willing to take some risk and take a good deal for granted about you, into the bargain.”

VIII

THE rooms in the top story of Hollis Hall are not considered very desirable by the young Harvard men of the present day. But there is a charm, a delightful Harvard flavor, about these low-studded collegiate chambers, which the rooms in the modern dormitories sadly lack. It is pleasant to sink deep into an arm-chair and to think that in that room generations of students have sat like yourself in a reverie over the fire. You find yourself conjuring up the images of these former occupants of the room, and as dreamers have as wide a license as poets, you may place all the distinguished students of the last one hundred and fifty years in your arm-chair and feel the most intimate personal connection with them. The room has never been vacant in term-time since those red bricks were laid. The solemn young men in small-clothes moved out for Washington’s army, to be sure; but the human continuity remains unbroken.

It is in such reveries that the Harvard man has learned to love his college and to feel an intimate kinship to her and to her sons. The step worn by our ancestors’ nimble feet is a memorial more stirring than many a tablet; the elms are our friends and did not our grandfathers love them too? Who was the bold youth who, surprised at some mischief with the college-bell, leaped from Harvard Hall to Hollis, over the yawning chasm? I wonder whether he ever sprang thus from one treacherous gutter to another, as was related to us; but whether he did or not, he is a figure in the past, whom we cannot lose.

Years ago, one autumn day, a Freshman looked out of the small-paned window of one of these lofty chambers; out at the branches of the elms, denuded of their leaves. The chamber was bare enough, with its whitewashed ceiling of knobby plaster, its white paint and striped wall-paper. A wood fire played in the open fireplace; and there were two beds, two wash-stands, a table, a rack for books, and four mahogany chairs to furnish the room.

The Freshman was James Woodbury, who had been led, all unwilling, by his father to drink of the Puritan fount of learning a few weeks beforehand. He had been provided with the academic costume of sober black, then prescribed by the makers of the college regulations; and his father had returned to Oldbury after giving him a blessing, secure in the belief that four years of academic life would transmute the careless boy into a man, ready to become a fit descendant of a Puritan divine.

One other boy had entered college from Oldbury that year,—Thomas Devereux, a paragon of decorum and scholarship. It seemed natural that the two boys should become room-mates, as they came from the same town, yet it is certain that geographical origin was all that the two boys had in common. They certainly did not like each other, that was apparent, and though they slept side by side in the bare college chamber and daily studied the same tasks, they were each day growing more and more apart. Thomas shone in the class-room, James among the contestants in the football field. Thomas was as regular and precise as James was procrastinating and careless. The social boy, who loved sailors and longshore-men, knew already almost all the seventy Freshmen whom the college had gathered under her wing that year, while the scholar knew only a chosen few, who met together for prayer on every Friday evening, and those of his chum’s friends who had disturbed his studies in their quest for his more jovial room-mate. Still the ill-assorted pair did not quarrel; each took his path in life and saw but little of his mate.

This afternoon Thomas was out taking his “constitutional” walk,—to Fresh Pond and back in the company of an improving companion; and James was trying to prepare his Horace for the morrow’s recitation. He had just received a letter from his father full of improving advice, and inspired by the words of the kindly old man, he had betaken himself to his books. The Horatian ode was half translated and he had arisen to look out of the window in the vague hope that something would happen in the yard which would justify his leaving the genial poet, who seemed to him so dull, though his verses were crisp with the condensed wit of the great Roman world. But there was nothing stirring outside save a few brown leaves which the wind whirled along the brown sward. The Dictionary and the Horace were upon the window-seat, inviting him to work; there was no reason why he should not set about it. But it seemed so distasteful to him. He began to think about Oldbury, of Alice, whom the old Deacon, her grandfather, had forbidden to speak to him since the night of his uncle’s escape from tardy justice; of his father, solitary in his grand new house; of his aunt, with her shrewd tongue and set ways; and of the wicked uncle, speeding down the bay in the Scud. What had become of the boat and its freight? His father had never spoken to him of them again; but he was sure that he had heard from him; for, three days after the exciting day of the foiled arrest, the Captain had received a letter and had taken the stage to Boston the next morning. On his return to Oldbury he had said nothing to any one about his journey.

What had become of Uncle Tom?

Was he on one of the privateersmen of which there was so much talk, now that there was war? What joy it must be to tread the deck of one of those adventurous craft, to sight a rich merchantman flying the Union Jack, and to haul up on her weather-gauge, and fire a gun across her bow!

That was life! but this round of distasteful studies; these hours spent in chapel and the recitation-room while his country was beset by enemies; was this an existence which a proud-spirited lad would lead?

These reveries were interrupted by a knock at the door. James hastily picked up his Horace and called to the visitor to enter. And in came the lost uncle, with a queer smile on his grim face.

“Uncle Tom,” cried out James, dropping again his task-book. “Uncle Tom! I was just wondering where you were.”

“The Scud’s lying in Marblehead harbor,” remarked Cheever, as he slung himself into a chair. “Studying, James?”

“Trying to,” replied James, who was burning with curiosity to find out about this uncle’s doings.

“Do you like your school?” asked the other, looking around at the apartment. “It seems a quiet spot, to me; a good shelter—I suppose that you are straining at your cable, though? That’s the way—boys will be boys, and that means, bad boys. They never know what’s good for them. My father meant me to come here. But, Lord love you, James, I couldn’t any more have stuck to my books when I was your age than a sailor can stick to a ship where he is well treated.”

“What have you been doing? What happened to you that night?” questioned James.

“I told you that the Scud was at Marblehead. I made that port in the morning after our parting. ’Twas the day that war was declared, and before night fell I had shipped as first mate on the privateer Lion, of Marblehead.”

“What, uncle, are you on a privateer?” asked James.

“I am not only first mate but part owner of the schooner Lion, my boy, and we were one of the first to get afloat. Why, they had begun to caulk the old tub for service before the messenger who announced the declaration of war to the Marblehead people had time to wet his whistle. I knew that I could count on your father’s word, and I engaged with Captain Vickery to supply the armament. We put into Boston after our first cruise a day or two ago, and I pushed my way out here to Cambridge to see you. It’s the first time I have ever been in the old town, though my father was a Harvard graduate and meant me to go through the college. It’s many a start parents would get if they could look up from the red-cheeked baby in the cradle, spewing up curdled milk, and see its future; but I am moralizing again. You can’t get this old Puritan taint out of the blood. I take to sermons as naturally as I do to mischief.”

The privateersman, after this unusually long speech, swung himself into a chair by the fire, and was silent. After a few minutes he looked up and asked: “Was the old Deacon mad when I gave him the slip? It was a close shave, and if he had caught me it would have gone hard with me. I owe you a debt of gratitude, my boy, and it’s a debt of honor, the only kind of debt I like to pay.”

Just then the college-bell rang out, and James looked regretfully at his Horace.

“It’s recitation time, Uncle Tom,” he said.

“And you ain’t learned your lesson? What will the master do to you? You can tell him that an extinguished divine turned up to call on you.”

“I do not suppose that I shall suffer very severely, though I cannot say that it is my first offence. I shall be back in an hour. Will you be here when I return?”

“Yes; I will sit here by your fire and see how it feels to be at college. My early opportunities I neglected, and it would not have been possible to keep me four years in the same place. There’s quicksilver in my blood and in my pocket, too, for that matter. Quick to burn a hole there, anyway. But run along to your recitation. I shall enjoy myself here if I am allowed to smoke. Is it against the rules?”

“You will enjoy smoking the more, if it is,” answered James, as he ran away to his recitation.

Cheever heaped some logs on the fire, filled his pipe with tobacco, and lighted it from an ember. Like most men who have knocked about the world and have seen “all sorts and conditions of men,” he was a solitary; happy enough to be left alone with a good pipe of tobacco, and yet ready for a carousal or a fight at a moment’s notice.

There was a charm to the world-weary man in the stillness of this college chamber. It seemed to him, as he had said to his nephew, a good shelter, grateful to a storm-tossed waif.

He picked up a Latin dictionary and turned the leaves at random. It had been years since he had looked into so serious a volume, and yet it was not a sealed book to him; for he had been well grounded in the classics during the futile attempt to make a parson out of a ne’er-do-well.

He smiled when he saw the irregular verbs, and the nouns, puzzling as to gender, which had been his tormentors when a boy, and he mumbled to himself over a list of prepositions and a rule from a grammar.

These useful bits of knowledge cannot be dislodged from the mind which received them when it was young and plastic. They remain forever embedded like the pebbles in a conglomerate stone. The beautiful lines of Shakespeare, learned with enthusiasm, are forgotten; the music of the exquisite lyrics of Shelley dies away, but the rules of the Latin Grammar are too firmly rooted to be lost.

Cheever was repeating to himself rapidly “Hic, hæc, hoc, hujus—” when the door opened and another young man entered,—Thomas Devereux, James’ ill-matched “chum,” a lank, pale lad, with a high forehead and small features. He paused at the threshold when he saw the stranger taking his ease before the fire.

“Come in,” said Cheever. “James has gone to recite, and has left me on watch.”

Devereux entered, eying the stranger with suspicion. The tobacco smoke which filled the room from Cheever’s pipe was not a pleasing perfume to the nostrils of the prim young scholar. He stood at the threshold a moment.

“I am an old friend of James’ father,” explained Cheever.

“I am Woodbury’s chum, Thomas Devereux.”

“Devereux? That’s an Oldbury name.”

“Yes; and I am an Oldbury boy,” replied Devereux, as he took off his overcoat, keeping a watchful eye all the time on the suspicious-looking stranger.

“So you are an Oldbury boy, and James’ chum! I am glad to make your acquaintance. My name is Marks, and I am first mate of the Lion, privateer, of Marblehead; and as I take an interest in James through long knowledge of his father, Captain Woodbury, I have come out here to Cambridge to see him. I chartered a chaise, and worked my course out. I suppose that you boys have a devil of a time here, don’t you?”

Devereux’s pale, girlish face flushed, and he shifted uneasily in his chair; but Cheever did not notice the effect of his remark upon the young Puritan. The college presented itself to his lawless mind as a conglomeration of young men, and therefore as a place for roystering and deviltry. He could not for a moment imagine that a boy in whose veins ran young blood could think and act as did young Thomas Devereux, who could be guilty of a meanness, perhaps, but could never let slip an oath. “Of course you do,” he continued. “Boys will be boys! With such a lot of you together, away from home, things must be lively here.”

“I regret to say that there are many who are heedless enough to neglect their opportunities and indulge in wickedness,” said Devereux, with a solemnity beyond his years.

Cheever looked at him sharply, and smiled. A glance at the bloodless cheek, beardless as a woman’s, the thin-lipped, solemn mouth, made him remember that there were some boys who never were boys.

“SOME BOYS WHO NEVER WERE BOYS.”

“You never neglect your opportunities, I hope,” said Cheever, in a graver tone. “There is no one so much to be blamed as a young man who is careless of his advantages. I hope that James is studious and well-behaved.” There was a twinkle in the old reprobate’s eye as he spoke.

“I fear that James is neglectful of his studies, and truly too ready to seek wild company,” replied Devereux. “I have tried by precept and example to lead him to better ways, but it has been of no avail. But if you will excuse me, sir, I must be settling to my task. I have a recitation the next hour, and I have not fully prepared myself for it.”

“If that’s the case,” said Cheever, “I shall not stay here to disturb you; but I shall take a turn over the grounds until James is through his recitation.”

As soon as the elder man had shut the door, Devereux opened the windows to rid the atmosphere of the room from the dreadful odor of his pipe-smoke and of iniquity.

James, coming out from Harvard Hall, saw his uncle sitting on the fence by the Massachusetts Hall.

“Young Squaretoes was too much for me, James, and I came out here by preference. It’s a little cold, though; but it’s nothing to the young ice-berg you bunk with. We had better go to the tavern, James.”

Over across the square they went.

“We must go into the back room, uncle,” said James. “The rules of the College are very strict against the frequenting of taverns.”

“Rules, my boy, were made to be broken,” observed Cheever.

They soon found themselves in a bare room, where a wood fire smouldered in a Franklin stove. Cheever ordered his glass of “flip,” a blend of hot iron and alcohol, and then lighted his pipe with due deliberation.

“I was looking over your Latin Grammar while you were away, James,” he said, while the landlord was absent to get the “flip.” “It’s many a day since I have seen one, though Mr. Livermore’s switch beat some of the rules into me so that I have never forgotten them. I was to have been a parson, you know.”

“I’m to be one, too,” said James, smiling.

“Yes? Well, if they hadn’t tried to make a saint out of me, perhaps I’d have been less of a sinner. ’Twas only last month, when we sighted a British brig, that I was thinking about the old gentleman—whose life I shortened, James, my boy—and I said to myself: ‘Now, Tom Cheever, you have a good deal on your soul, but the old man used to say:

“While the lamp holds out to burn,

The vilest sinner may return.”

You’ve got to capture that brig, Tom, and your share of the prize-money, added to the sum you’ve tucked away in the bank, will make you independent. You’ve acted on the square for two years, and you may be a decent man yet. You can leave all your old self buried in that empty grave at Oldbury and start with a clean bill of health, just as if you had received absolution from the Pope of Rome.’ That’s a handy belief, James, that Roman Catholic. We haven’t any method of casting off old sins. Why, they stick around our necks all our lives like a dead hen tied around the setter dog who killed it—”

“How many vessels has the Lion taken?” asked James, who did not fancy his uncle’s moralizing so much as the imperfectly repentant sinner liked the sound of his own voice.

“The brig Dreadnaught I was speaking of, was the biggest one, three hundred tons, but besides her we carried into port three other brigs and four schooners, in the last year. We found the Dreadnaught a hard nut to crack, and if it hadn’t turned out that we could out-weather her and were better gunners, she would have taken us. As it was, we lost three of our crew before we boarded her, and we had the toughest kind of a hand-to-hand fight before we got them under hatches. Those Marblehead men can fight, James! They’re true grit. The Englishmen were as good, but we outnumbered them, and they had to give in; that is, all that were left of them.”

“When was this fight?”

“Last month, in the Old Bahama channel, off Cuba. We left the prize at Baltimore on our way to Boston.”

“Oh, I wish I had gone on the Scud with you, Uncle Tom,” cried James, “and I should have been one of the crew of the Lion.”

“I would rather cut off my right hand, my boy, than take you away from the course of life which your father has laid out for you. I’ve finished my seafaring, James, and I’ll settle down in Boston and lead a decent life, if that old rascal in Oldbury will let me alone. The silver’s under the lilac-bush, James, in his back yard. That’s what I have come out here to tell you about.”

“What silver?”

“What! don’t you know?” groaned Cheever. “Haven’t they told you? The silver I took from Deacon Fairbanks the night before I left Oldbury. You know now why I had to run from the office. I’ve got a map here of the place where I buried it, and that’s why I’ve come out to see you. I want you to dig it up when you go to Oldbury and put it back into the old man’s sideboard without his knowing it.”

He took out a worn leather pocket-book and extracted from its heterogeneous contents a piece of paper, dirty from much handling and broken in the creases. James watched him intently, much shocked at this avowal of crime; he had never imagined that his uncle had added house-breaking to his other youthful follies.

“There, James,” explained Cheever, as he smoothed out the ragged plan, “that represents the Deacon’s house, the side next your father’s new house, you know, and the X is the dining-room window. Ten paces straight out from the window stands the lilac-bush. It’s there still. I looked for it when I came to the house that night, and two feet to the south of it, if you dig down a foot, you’ll come to the silver. It was in a basket when I buried it, but I guess that there’s little left of the wickerwork by this time. You go there some night and dig the stuff up, then polish it up, and see that it’s conveyed into the Deacon’s sideboard—but don’t you let him know that you did it. It will be a weight off my mind if you do it, James. Let’s see, you should find, if I remember right, two dozen spoons, big and little, a silver tea-service, and two tankards. It wasn’t much to lose your life for, James, but you’ll find that men swap off their honor and their reputation for very little, very little, my boy. You’ll do this for me? That’s right. Now, here comes the ‘flip,’ and we’ll drink to the old Captain’s health. He wouldn’t drink mine, I will bet; but then he’s no kin of mine and you are, my boy. Your mother was my only sister, James, and even a blackguard loves his sister.”

IX

JAMES was called home to Oldbury by the news that his father was ill. The fickle New England spring had succeeded the rigorous winter, and the Captain had been wooed out of doors without his great-coat on a fine May morning. A sudden change of the wind to the eastward had chilled him through before he could get back to his house. As a result of this exposure, he was taken down with a severe attack of congestion of the lungs, and Miss Woodbury, being much alarmed at his condition, sent at once for his son. It was a journey of fear and sickening anticipation for the poor lad, but before he reached Oldbury his father’s condition had changed for the better, and when James came to the old man’s bedside the disease was spent. The boy was allowed to see his father for a moment, and then hurried from the room by the doctor. He was not to see that kind old face for many a day.

Aunt Elizabeth accepted her brother’s illness as a special mark of Divine displeasure at the manifold shortcomings of the family, the State, and the Nation, but she bore up wonderfully under the affliction. Now that the danger was over, she was secretly delighted in the chance given her to wear herself out in nursing and watching.

Our New England women are always at their best when Fate has pulled the man of the house down by the heels and he lies propped up in bed, a meek receptacle for gruels and doses.

“Your father was very ill indeed, James,” she said to her nephew when he came out of the sick-room; “I thought that he was going off in the same way his great-uncle Abraham did. He was very feverish, and he complained of a weight upon his chest. Before the doctor came I gave him some whiskey and water and put him to bed. I saved his life, I think.”

“I’ve no doubt you did, Aunt Elizabeth. You are a wonderful nurse!”

“The nurses save more lives than the doctors destroy, James,” rejoined his aunt, in a triumphant tone. “Now come to tea; I have some Sally Lund cake. But now that you are a man at college I suppose that you despise such things.”

James’ anxiety about his father had driven from his mind the promise which he had made to his uncle to restore the buried silver; but now that he was relieved from the weight of apprehension, the responsibility of his foolish promise began to weigh upon him.

All through tea he was laying out his plan of campaign. Under cover of the night he could dig up the silver, and then take it to his room and polish it up. The next night he could return it to the Deacon’s sideboard.

After the evening meal was over he went into the sitting-room which commanded a view of the Deacon’s lilac-bush and dining-room window. He took out the dirty plan which his uncle had given him and looked up on it the probable burial-place of the silver.

There was a dash of romance in the adventure which stirred his blood mightily. The digging up of buried treasure suggested tales of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, and a dirty map, indicating the burial-place, was always bequeathed by dying pirates to their favorites.

It was not at all unlikely that his uncle had seen as stirring things as had ever Captain Kidd. Was he not a licensed corsair? At that moment he might be capturing some rich argosy on the high seas.

But after the treasure was dug up, the romance seemed to evaporate from the prospective adventure.

It was no easy matter to restore the tankards and spoons to their old places on the sideboard—and they must be cleaned too.

After sixteen years’ burial, much elbow-grease and white powder would be needed.

Oldbury people went to bed early—modern life has taken all the witchery out of midnight, and the ghosts of to-day have no unmolested hours for exercise; but our grandfathers believed in Poor Richard’s maxims, and were all snugly in bed by nine o’clock.

James, at that hour, was stealing from the woodshed back of his house, with a pickaxe and spade. There was no light in the Deacon’s house, and the night was dark enough for any evil deed.

He began digging at a short distance from the lilac-bush, keeping a shrewd watch all the time. The soft loam yielded readily to the spade, and it soon struck against a hard substance. It proved to be a solid tankard encrusted with soil. He dug rapidly, unearthing at nearly every spadeful some piece of the stolen plate, until he had completed his uncle’s list given him with the map. And sorry enough looking was the treasure after its long hiding.

The boy whipped off his coat and tied the silver up in it. Then he shovelled back the dirt, placing the turf over the gash in the lawn.

His uncle’s secret had descended to him, and he had the weight of this old sin upon him.

He sped over to the woodshed with it, put away his tools, then up to his room with the silver. He threw this bundle upon the bed and lit his candle. It was quick work to scrape the dirt from the silver and wash it. The tankards were heavy and fine, one with a cipher and the other with some coat-of-arms, and the silver service and spoons bore the crest of the same heraldic device. The silver was tarnished, of course, but the white powder, abstracted from his aunt’s pantry, soon made it look respectable enough. Then he wrapped each article up in a piece of paper and stored the whole away in a carpet-bag, which he put upon a shelf in his closet.

“The old family skeleton is in its right place,” he thought, as he locked the door. Then he went to his chamber window and looked out into the night. All was still save for the wind sighing through the pine-trees back of the house. He must enter the Deacon’s home on the next night and restore the skeleton. How was it to be done?

The door into the Deacon’s back kitchen was fastened with a bolt. Hannah, the maid of all work, went to prayer-meeting in the afternoon and the kitchen was easy of access. Could he not in her absence unscrew the washer and file off the screws, so that it would be easy to open the door by lifting the latch and shoving hard?

In a few minutes he could creep into the dining-room, place the silver upon the buffet, and retire, as innocent a house-breaker as ever lived. It was an adventure not without risk, but it was a duty he owed his family, he thought, to make this restitution, and then too, he had promised his uncle that he would do it.

Now that he had the silver actually in hand, the risk seemed to him to be great. How could he account for having possession of it should it be found upon him? And, oh, awful thought! what if he should be caught with it after he had broken into the house!

He undressed slowly as he pondered this problem, and he went to bed to dream that the tankards were upon his heart, slowly growing in weight until they bade fair to crush out his life. He awoke with a start from this nightmare to greet a new dawn of a day which he wished would be forty-eight hours long. How quickly the sun seemed to him to speed over the heavens, to bring all too soon the darkness under which he and other thieves must work!

In the afternoon he saw Hannah Lang, the maid of all work, leave the Deacon’s kitchen, decorously attired for the Thursday prayer-meeting. She would be absent an hour. As she passed from his vision, he took out a file and screw-driver from his pocket. The kitchen door was shut, but not locked, and the coast was clear. It did not take long to remove the screws, take out their fangs, if I may be allowed the expression, and replace them, so that the washer hung by a thread or two.

A breach was ready in the enemy’s wall when he chose to enter by it. There was nothing for him to do, except to wait until dark. So far, all had gone well, and well begun was half done. His reflections were interrupted by his aunt’s voice.

“Your father is sleeping,” she said in the whisper adopted by women in houses where some one is ill. “Sleeping like a child. Dear me! what an anxious time I have had. Poor John, he never could take any care of himself. At his age too,—why he is ten years older than my father was when he died and every one called him ‘Old Squire Woodbury.’ Perhaps they call me an old woman too.”

“I never heard any one say anything so impolite,” said James.

“I am old, my dear boy, and that is a fault that time does not cure. Life slips away. Yes, I am an old woman, James. You know that I was in Boston making a visit, a young girl of seventeen, when the city was seized by General Washington’s army. I was staying with old Aunt Barrett. She went with the other Tories to Halifax when the British evacuated the town. I was caught by the siege and stayed with her till she went on board the king’s ship, and then Brother John, who was in one of the regiments outside, took care of me when the Americans took the town.”

“Then you remember the battle of Bunker Hill, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Remember it, James; it is a day I never shall forget in this world.”

The days of the siege in Boston had been the happiest of her life. A patriot maid she was, in the midst of the enemies of her country, but love laughs at political opinions as well as at locksmiths. In the merry-makings and theatricals with which the British garrison whiled away the long winter, Aunt Elizabeth’s love-story began, and it ended on the 17th of June. Lieutenant Pennington was leading his men up Breed’s Hill as carelessly as if he were walking down Bond Street, twirling the tassel of his sword as he marched. The raw American Militia were despised by the trained soldiers. He fell at the first volley, and love was done for Elizabeth Woodbury. The poor old maid’s withered face lighted up at the memory of those halcyon days. The tragic ending made the romance the dearer and more sacred to her. She quietly left the room; and if her secret were told, who knows but that the miniature was taken from its resting-place, amid the faded finery of her girlhood?

X

JAMES had been forbidden the Fairbanks’ house by the Deacon ever since the night of his uncle’s escape. Captain Woodbury saw the Deacon only when he went to pay the interest upon the mortgage on his house. The money was passed and a receipt given in return for it. Neither spoke to the other.

The Deacon had published far and wide through the town the news of Cheever’s return, and he had not forgotten to mention the crowning misdeed of the reprobate’s Oldbury career,—the theft of the plate. He was loud in his abuse of James for aiding in the escape, and it was his wont to declare that the boy was a chip off the old block.

The towns-people had pretty well forgotten the black sheep; but now his tombstone became the Mecca of mischievous pilgrims; and its blue slate was often marred by derisive scrawls.

The Captain refused to remove the stone, and had it carefully restored whenever the mischief-makers marred it.

He hoped by this passive resistance to combat the reports that Cheever was not dead—but the towns-people believed in the return of the escaped burglar, and tongues wagged hourly over the stories of the minister’s son. The many good deeds of the father, his forty years of Christian ministry, had been forgotten long ago, except by a few survivors of his congregation, but the evil-doings of the son were now green in the memories of all.

He had as completely verified the New England prophecies that a minister’s son will turn out badly as did the second Increase Mather, who nearly broke his excellent father’s heart.

James’ part in the escape had connected him in the public mind with the robber uncle, and when he went away to Cambridge, heads were wagged at church and prayer-meeting over the danger which the Captain ran in letting his son go out of his control. Young Devereux’s accounts of his room-mate’s idle life had not benefited the boy’s reputation; and now he was considered by all in town to be a very bad young man. His nine months at college had been spent harmlessly, if idly, but the Oldbury people looked upon him as a kind of a Sardanapalus. It was known that his father intended him for the ministry, and it seemed to the straight-laced almost a blasphemy to connect James Cheever with the Congregational Church.

James was unaware of his bad reputation, and of the malicious tongues which were every day adding to it; for he had not been in Oldbury since he had first left the town to go to college and he had not seen Alice and her mother during this period. He felt little like meeting them, while their ancestral silver was concealed in his chamber; for the innocent possession of the plate made him feel guilty. From the repository of the stolen goods, he watched the Deacon’s home through the afternoon, and he was finally rewarded by seeing Alice trip down the front path to High Street. A year had made her a young woman. There is a great difference between sixteen and seventeen. James fancied that she shot a demure glance at his window, for she certainly knew he had come back from college.

James had written to her after his departure to college, and she had answered telling him of her grandfather’s order that she should have nothing to do with him, and had expressed her regrets. Then came the stories of his wild life at the college, stories which she did not believe; but which every one in the town seemed to credit.

The Deacon, who was intimate with Dr. Devereux, the good boy’s father, had the stories fresh and fresh every week; and duly, in his morning prayers, he requested that the youth of Oldbury should be kept clear from the contamination involved in association with this black sheep. He was not so urgent in his prayers that the wicked should be brought back to repentance; for that would interfere with his idea of the fitness of things, and after all, terrible examples were as necessary for the young strugglers over the straight path as were sign-posts to travellers.

Each one of James’ sins was incorporated into the family devotions, catalogued like obstructions to navigation, and marked to be avoided. Slothfulness, drunkenness, gambling, were the least of these.

But still the young sinner was right when he imagined that the girl looked up at his window as she walked down the path, and she was rewarded by a glimpse of his face. His heart gave a great bound and he started to run down the stairs to join her. But he stopped himself. It would be better to wait until the silver had been returned. Then for the first time it occurred to him that its return might be associated in the Deacon’s mind with his coming back to the town. That would be awkward, but what if it was? He had promised his uncle, and he might as well carry out the promise now. He could not leave the silver in his room and return to Cambridge. He was in for the adventure and must see it through.

And so he seated himself by the window and watched until Alice returned from her walk. She did not look up at the window this time. Was she provoked because he had not joined her? How could she be, when she had written him that she could not see him? Still, he would have followed her, if it had not been for the silver in the closet. But Alice, of course, knew nothing of that; and like any true woman, she had not expected her sweetheart to be so little adventurous. She was forbidden to meet him, but he was not forbidden to meet her, and if he sought her company, how could she run away from him as if he were a pestilence? His conduct, she thought, was worse than any of the gossips had made it out. He was inconstant and cowardly, and he ought to have known that it was her pen only that wrote the letter to him—not her heart. “Boys are so stupid,” she thought, as she opened the front door. “If I were a man and a girl had a thousand grandfathers, and each one of them forbade my seeing her, I should not mind.”

Ah, Uncle Tom, your fatal booty did not finish its evil work when it forced you from your father’s home and from the only woman who ever loved you.

The sun coursed over the heavens; the shadows began to fall. James ate his supper with his aunt in silence, and again sought his chamber. Indeed, he dreaded lest, during his absence from it, some one should find the silver.

He watched the light in the Deacon’s sitting-room, and it seemed an age before it went out and the bedroom lights were lighted and darkened in their turn. The church bells tolled the hours, at the infinite spaces of time apart at which they reverberate to a man tossing in a sleepless bed.

He had chosen midnight as the best hour for house-breaking, and finally the cracked bell of the meeting-house, where his grandfather had preached all his life, reluctantly struck out the hour. At the last stroke, he put on a broad-brimmed hat, wound a tippet several times around the lower part of his face, so that he could not be recognized,—and took up his heavy carpet-bag.

The house was still, but his father might be awake in his sick-room. He crawled down-stairs stealthily. It seemed to him that he did not make a sound, and that he was a clever apprentice at the black art of burglary. The back door of the Deacon’s house opened readily as he leaned against it, but he was startled at the noise which the washer made as it fell upon the floor. He waited for some minutes to discover whether the noise of this accident had started any of the sleepers in the house, but there was not a sound to be heard—except the loud ticking of the kitchen clock. It was not a dark night, although it was moonless, and he could see well enough to pick his way through the kitchen through the entry to the dining-room. Over this same path had his uncle gone when he went to steal the silver.

The dining-room was soon gained. It was a solemn place at that hour of the night. The Deacon’s great arm-chair at the head of the table seemed a personification of the stern old man who occupied it three times every day. High-backed and grim it stood at the head of the dark dining-table, like a cheerless host presiding at funeral baked meats.

“JAMES TURNED AS HE HEARD THE NOISE.”

After his first tremor at this whimsical resemblance, James proceeded to his work. He opened the carpet-bag, and was hurriedly placing the silver piece by piece upon the sideboard, when the door opened, and there stood the Deacon, a candle in one hand, a pistol in the other—a more grim-looking figure than the old man, in his long white night-gown and high night-cap, cannot be imagined. James turned as he heard the noise, and stood still for a moment in terror at the dreadful apparition.

The Deacon said never a word, but, raising his pistol, fired—and James, not knowing whether he was hit or not, hurled the heavy tankard which he held in his hand straight at the old man’s head.

The boy’s aim was truer than the man’s; for the bullet crashed harmlessly into the sideboard, while the tankard struck the Deacon upon the forehead and he fell heavily upon the floor, the pistol and candlestick dropping from his grasp as he fell.

There was the sound of hurrying feet in the chambers overhead, and James, not stopping to see what had happened, fled like a deer to the kitchen, out the door into the yard, and over the hill towards the Boston road.

As James rushed from the dining-room, Alice and her mother ran down the stair-way. By the time they reached the bottom, all was quiet in the dark room beyond.

They heard the rush of hurrying feet in the passageway leading to the kitchen. The two women stood clutching each other, not daring to enter the room. Then they heard an uneasy stir and a heavy groan from the dining-room. Mrs. Pickering, forgetting the darkness and the danger, ran into the room and her feet stumbled over her father’s prostrate form.

“Father! father! They have killed him—You have killed him, whoever you are!” she cried to the thief, whom she imagined to be hiding in the corner.

Alice hastened to her mother. “Where is he, mother?”

“Strike at light, child. They will not murder two women, the cowards.”

Alice ran back to the hall table where the bedroom candles were kept, and lighted one. The old man stirred again and tried to raise himself from the floor.

“He’s not dead, mother!” said Alice. “Was he shot?”

“I cannot tell; he has a cut on his forehead.” Alice caught sight of the pistol and picked it up. “We heard only one shot and grandfather’s pistol was fired. He must have been struck by the burglar—”

Her eye caught sight of the tankard, which had rolled under the table.

“By this tankard,” she exclaimed.

“Where did it come from? We have none like it, and see, the sideboard is covered with silver that doesn’t belong to us.”

Mrs. Pickering glanced quickly at the tankard and recognized it at once. She had her father’s head on her knee and was wiping the blood from his forehead.

“Get some water, Alice,” she said. “He’s not dead. He will come to in a minute.”

“But the burglars?” inquired Alice.

“They will not harm us. They are far away by this time.”

Alice brought the water and a napkin, and her mother bathed the contusion. The old man presently opened his eyes and called out: “Stop there, you thief—Is he dead? Did I kill him? What’s the matter, Mary? Why am I here? Oh, I remember the burglar. He stood there by the sideboard robbing the silver. I never expected to get a shot at him. It was he. I recognized him, your old lover, Mary, that wretched Tom Cheever. You start, eh! ’Twas he, girl, I swear; I shall follow him till he is in jail, in spite of his father, the minister. I don’t care for him, not I.”

He was quiet after this outbreak and seemed to grow unconscious again.

“Can we two women get him to his bed? Call to the maid, Alice.”

“She will never come, mother; she’s such a coward, and her head must be deep under the bedclothes.”

“Perhaps I can arouse him—put his great-coat around him, dear, and I will bathe his head—poor father! it was a cruel blow. Go up-stairs, Alice, and send the maid down.”

“I shall go and arouse James Woodbury, mamma. He’s at home.”

“Yes, I know that he’s at home,” said Mrs. Pickering, shortly. “Call to him.”

“It will disturb his father,” said Alice, remembering for the first time her scanty costume. “I shall go and wake up Hannah.” Lighting another candle, she sped up to the maid’s room and tried the knob. The door was locked; there was not a sound heard from within.

“Hannah!” she called.

Still there was no sound.

“Hannah!” she called again, “there have been thieves in the house!”

“Lord a-massy me!” came in a feeble treble from within. The voice was muffled as if from under many blankets.

“They have half killed poor grandfather.”

“Land sakes alive!”

“But they have gone now, and you must come down and help us to get him back to bed, and go with me for the doctor.”

“I never could do such a thing and thieves in the house.”

“They are not in the house, Hannah, I tell you! You must come—I do not see how you can be such a coward.”

Alice went to her bedroom and put on her wrapper, and brought her mother’s down-stairs to her.

And soon Hannah came down the stairs, jumping at every shadow, and almost sick with terror. When she saw the Deacon lying upon the floor, with a bleeding wound upon his forehead, she gave a loud scream, and sank upon the stair-way in a swoon.

The Deacon happened at that minute to come to, and he immediately jumped to his feet; for, after all, his wounds, like Jack’s, gained in his tumble with Gill, were of the kind which could be mended with “vinegar and brown paper.” The concussion had deprived him of his senses for a few minutes, and he had now only a bruise and a headache. He looked for a while at the two women, then over to the sideboard.

“The silver! all the stolen silver returned! what does it mean?”

“You had better come up to bed; you will catch cold, father,” urged his daughter, pulling at his sleeve.

He broke away from her, and he saw the tankard which had broken his head.

“Uncle Dudley’s tankard! Why, Tom Cheever stole it—I fired at the burglar to-night—Yes, there is the bullet-hole in the sideboard, and all of the silver returned, every bit of it; the two tankards, the bowl, the forks and spoons. This is a great mystery, a special providence.”

“Come to bed, father,” urged Mrs. Pickering.

“I feel a draught from the passage,” he replied; “the thief must have entered and escaped by that way.” Taking up a candle, he went upon the trail through the open doors. “He made his entrance through the kitchen door,” he announced. “Hannah must have left it unlocked. No; he forced his entrance—I do not see how he could have done it without making a noise which would wake the dead.”

The Deacon pulled a dresser against the disabled door and returned to the dining-room. Hannah by this time had recovered from her swoon, and partially recovered from her terror. The difference between having a live protector in the house and the body of a murdered man, restored her to her senses.

“Now, all you women, go up to bed,” said the Deacon, when he had barricaded his castle. “There’s some way of explaining this night’s work, and I think that if anybody can see through a millstone when there’s a hole in it, I can.”

The women did as they were bid, and the Deacon packed the newly recovered treasures into a basket and brought it to his room and put it in the closet.

But the Deacon’s wounded head was aching so shrewdly that he was not in a benign frame of mind. The silver had come back, but the man who had brought it had done its owner evil.

“It must be some of that Cheever brood,” ejaculated the old man, as he blew out the candle and laid his aching head upon the pillow. “Nephew or uncle, I don’t know which—Satan’s brood, in either event. The boy is in town to see his sick father, so he had the opportunity.” And he lay through the watches of the night puzzling over the mystery and making plans for the righteous punishment of poor James.

XI

THE Bell-in-Hand Tavern in Boston was never a cheerful place. It was on a dark, narrow alley and the sunlight never peeped into its dingy tap-room. But when the lamps were lighted at night, its customers, used to its twilight atmosphere, blinked in the unusual glare, and called for some liquids to brighten themselves up so that they might be in more harmony with the new state of things. There were very few of these melancholy loungers seated about the dingy bar on the evening of May 27, 1813; for the town was agog with the preparations for the fitting out of the frigate Chesapeake to fight H. M. S. Shannon.

The British ship had been standing on and off outside the harbor mouth for some days, and it was known that Captain James Lawrence of the Chesapeake meant to give him battle. The usual customers of the Bell-in-Hand were down at the wharves, grave with the responsibility so willingly adopted by self-constituted sidewalk committees of inspection; and only one applied for a mug of ale when the landlord had finished the illumination of his dingy hostelry.

“In a moment, Mr. Marks,” said the landlord. “The usual, I suppose?”

“No, I shall have some Medford to-night; I wish to drink good luck to the Chesapeake in right Yankee liquor.”

“Surely, Mr. Marks, and I will join you in that. In fact, I don’t mind standing the drinks myself, considering the subject of the toast.”

“Don’t ruin yourself, Tenney,” said Marks, with a smile; for the landlord was celebrated for his close-fistedness.

“Help yourself, Captain Marks,” was the reply; “drink hearty. Here’s to brave Lawrence and his crew.”

“And a precious mixed lot they are, Isaac; forty British sailors and a gang of Portuguese, though, to be sure, there are some of the Constitution’s old crew, and some of the men who were on the Chesapeake on her last voyage. Four of the officers are sick ashore, and young Ludlow is first lieutenant.”

“But they’ll give a good account of themselves, don’t you fear,” answered Isaac, draining his glass of rum.

“Lawrence is as brave a man as ever trod a deck,” said Marks. “My bargain’s off with Vickery and I settled up accounts with him to-day. I’ve a mind to ship on the Chesapeake and have a crack against John Bull on a man-of-war.”

“Settled up with Vickery, have you?” inquired the landlord. “You must have made a good thing out of your year’s work.”

“’Tisn’t as good a trade as selling rum, Isaac, I’ll bet a dollar! The ocean is not as easy to navigate as Pie Alley, and your customers come in and beg to be robbed, and at times mine make a hard fight before they give up their cash. I cleaned up a good sum for the year and sold out my interest in the privateer, and the whole sum is deposited to my name in the Suffolk Bank. Now, you keep the bank-book for me, will you?” He produced the pass-book from his inner pocket, and at the same time took out a sealed envelope.

“There’s the book and there’s an envelope in which I sealed up my own will. I went to a lawyer Mason to-day and had it drawn. It’s short, but I guess it’s good, like your rum, Isaac.”

The publican took the book and envelope.

“Why, this says Thomas Cheever?” he said, as he examined them.

“I’m Tom Marks on the privateer, and Tom Cheever on shore. It suits me. When you go to your home up at the North End, you read prayers and go to church o’ Sundays, though you are destroying human beings with rum all the week. Take good care of these papers, Isaac, and if anything happens to me, you must write to my sole heir, Mr. James Woodbury, Hollis Hall, Harvard College, Cambridge, and tell him that if he comes to the Bell-in-Hand he will hear of something to his advantage. I’ve made you executor, and if anything happens to me on shore, where folks leave their bodies to be an expense to all hands, don’t you forget that I have a lot and a ready-carved gravestone in the burying-ground at Oldbury. Don’t stare, old fellow, I was killed in Venezuela years ago. That is, Tom Cheever was, and Tom Marks arose from his ashes like the fabled Phœnix. But when it comes to making wills or putting money in the bank, it saves a lot of trouble to do it in your right name. D’ye see?”

Marks, after this long address, settled in a chair and looked vacantly in the corner. The landlord put the book and envelope in his strong box and came back to the bar.

“What on earth, Mr. Cheever, do you want to go to risk your life fighting with that madcap Lawrence, when you are so well off?”

“The world is divided, my dear Isaac, into two classes; the first, a very large part of the human race, those who would rather eat than fight; the saving minority, of which I am one, would rather fight than eat. You see how sparely built I am? I never have had an ounce of superfluous flesh. Then, too, it’s like the days of chivalry. The Shannon hovers outside the port. Broke is spoiling for a fight. Lawrence is not half ready, worse luck, but he is not the man to baulk a gentleman of an affair of honor because he is not prepared to the last cartridge. It’s grand, my good Isaac; it stirs one’s blood, and it would be better to fall on the bloody deck than to keep out of such a noble contest when you have a chance. What does it matter whether I have the opportunity of coming in to drink rum in your dirty old tap-room for twenty years more, or whether I pass in my prize checks to-morrow or the day after? Take the chances of war, Isaac, that’s my motto.”

Isaac gave no enthusiastic assent to this view of life. The Falstaffian theory of honor is one much approved by most citizens who have never ventured from their shops. The greasy publican was quite willing to await his appointed time, in a daily round of drawing ale and measuring out spirits, as was the court jester, who, when allowed to choose his form of execution, chose a natural death.

“Well, Captain,” drawled Isaac, “I’ll give up all my share of the fighting to you. I have no fancy for a cutlass-slash on the head, or the gripe of a boarding-pike in my insides. This quarrelsome world doesn’t seem to get tired of fighting. Boney keeps them all at it in Europe, and even we Yankees can’t keep out of the squabble, and precious little good it will do us, that I can see. Of course, if a man isn’t happy unless he leaves a comfortable house ashore to go out to plunge about in a sea-fight, there’s no holding him.”

“You are right, Isaac,” said Cheever. “There’s as much difference between you and me as there is between the moon and green cheese, and each of us must go his own way. Maybe there’s a cutlass in some English boatswain’s scabbard which will cleave my cocoanut before the week’s out. But, on the other hand, it may be fated that my cutlass shall do the cleaving. In either event, friend Isaac, I drink your health and prosperity to you; may your pew in church not lack your bodily presence for many a year, and may the trade in rum be good. By the way, have you done anything in the black ivory business of late?”

Isaac’s solemn face grew graver still. “I have long since given up that business,” he replied.

“You made a good thing out of the triangular trade while it lasted, old weasel,” said Cheever. “Niggers from Africa, bought with molasses and rum, sold for sugar in Cuba, the return cargo distilled into raw liquid salvation for the Africans. ’Twas a good trade while it lasted—Lord, the money we made! but the ‘middle passage’ was hard for any man to run who had any milk of human kindness in his blood.”

“But the Africans are brought out of savagery to civilization and religion,” said Isaac.

“You are right, Isaac,” replied Cheever. “We all went into the business for its civilizing effects upon the niggers! But it’s a heavy load on my soul, Friend Isaac, and not all your long prayers will wipe out your black score up above, I reckon.”

With this Parthian shot at the publican, Cheever sallied out of the dingy tap-room into Pie Alley, a narrow, ill-smelling way leading into Washington Street; and down that street to the Exchange Coffee House in State Street, where Captain James Lawrence of the United States Navy had his headquarters.

He had been ordered in from New York, where he had expected to be put into command of the frigate Constitution, and had much against his will been given the command of the Chesapeake.

That frigate, ever since the insult which she had received from the British frigate Leopard, had been regarded by sailors as an unlucky ship—a cruise which she had just completed had been barren of prizes and thus added to her unpopularity, so that it was very hard to recruit a crew for her.

Lawrence was a gallant officer, who had felt that he had been somewhat badly treated by the Navy department; for he had claimed the command of the Constitution almost as a right and had been refused. When he reached Boston to take his new command, he found everything at sixes and sevens.

It was very hard to get sailors; most of the seafaring men preferring to ship in some of the numerous privateers, where the discipline was less strict and the chance of prize-money much greater. It was necessary to ship many foreigners in the Chesapeake, and forty British sailors were on the ship’s books, engaged to fight their own flag; besides these, a number of Portuguese seamen had been shipped. These last were very troublesome. But a few of the Constitution’s old crew came aboard, and these, together with some of the men who had been on the Chesapeake during her former voyage, made an excellent nucleus.

Captain Lawrence and his first officer, Mr. Ludlow, were in consultation in the Captain’s quarters at the Exchange Coffee House. The Captain was thirty-two years old, a remarkably tall and handsome man, distinguished for his charming manners and great gallantry. He was by no means serene in mind as he talked with his subordinate, and he brought his hand down rather sharply on the table as he said:

“Commodore Bainbridge doesn’t wish me to engage the Shannon. He says that is a rash and unnecessary risk. But hang it, man, I can’t avoid a fight, after having challenged the Bonne Citoyenne last year and having waited for her as Broke is waiting for me now in the Shannon off Boston harbor. How can I decline the fight? It would be to show that I was a vain braggart before.”

“If we only had had time to train our crew,” replied Ludlow, “I should not fear but that we should give a good account of ourselves. But the new hands are green at their work, and it is hard to make a crew work together, when most of them have just put their hammocks aboard.”

“Oh, well, Ludlow,” said Lawrence, “we might have a better crew, but we’ve a lot of good men aboard. The officers are mostly new to the ship, a gallant lot of youngsters; I’m as new to the ship as any of them, and I have no doubt that every green hand means to do his best, just as I do. I have been here a fortnight trying to get the old sailors to re-enlist. It’s a shame there should be all this row about the prize-money.”

“It’s most unfortunate that their two years’ term was up before we reached Boston last April,” said Ludlow. “Then Uncle Sam made such a mess of our past allowance of prize-money that we couldn’t induce the men to ship in the unlucky old frigate.”

“Unlucky frigate! Never say that, Mr. Ludlow. It’s ill to give a dog a bad name; the animal never has a pleasant ending. We shall do Broke up as easily as the Constitution did the Guerrière, I have no doubt. The Chesapeake is a good ship and a good name.”

“Yes, as good as any. But we had such bad luck with prizes on our last cruise, and sailors are the most superstitious of men.” Lawrence rose from his chair and walked up and down the room; his thoughts were with his young wife in New York, whom he was never to see again. There was a knock at the door and a servant announced that a man waited outside to see Captain Lawrence.

“Show him in,” said Ludlow, noticing that his chief was lost in his reverie. In a few minutes Cheever entered the room, bowing to the gentleman rather obsequiously.

“What is your business, sir?” asked Ludlow.

“I have come to volunteer as one of the crew of the Chesapeake,” replied Cheever. “I have lately served as mate and part owner of the privateer Lion of Marblehead.”

“You are welcome, sir,” said Mr. Ludlow. “Have you served on a man-of-war before?”

“Once, on board of His Majesty’s Ship Tenedos. I was taken off a Yankee ship as a British subject. So I have a few private scores to pay off.”

“We should have little trouble in filling our ship’s company if every man with such a grudge should come with us.”

“So you wish to ship on the Chesapeake,” said Captain Lawrence, coming out of his reverie.

“As an A. B., if you please, sir,” replied Cheever. “I’m qualified for that. Where shall I report for duty?”

“At Battery Wharf,” replied Mr. Ludlow. “What’s your name?”

“Thomas Marks.”

“Report to-morrow morning, and if you can get any of your old ship-mates on the Lion to join with you, why, so much the better. Good night, Marks.”

Cheever left the two officers, and went below to the large coffee room, which he found full of loungers, and all, whatever their condition in life, were eagerly discussing the approaching sea-fight.

The eager crowds in a New York hotel on the eve of a yacht race for the “America’s” cup would be more excited still if the morrow’s contest were to be a duel between a British and a Yankee ship.

The dogs of war had not troubled the good old town of Boston since Washington’s guns on Dorchester Heights had forced the evacuation of the town. The sons of Massachusetts had fought on many a field, but no enemy had menaced the Bay State. It may be in that group of steady old merchants there were some of the famous tea-party; or others who had held their fire at Bunker Hill until they saw the whites of the enemy’s eye. Certainly there were seafaring men enough, and some of these clinked about their money and stood treat, like the genuine article of buccaneer. One of a group of these gentry hailed Marks.

“Come over here, ‘Stuttering Tom,’” he cried; “I was telling these fellows that Captain Broke’s men on the Shannon have been taking a leaf out of our Yankee men-of-war’s books; and that they have been practising gunnery during all this year. It will be a pretty fight between the two frigates. I should like to see it.”

“Why don’t you come along in the Chesapeake? Her deck will be the best point of view. You are not afraid of British guns, are you? Unless you are up aloft, their shot would never reach you.”

“I like British gold better than British iron and lead, Tom. There are more kicks than half-pence in the government service.”

“But, man, think of the sport of a square stand-up fight!”

“And the surgeon waiting for you below the cock-pit, with his knife. No, Friend Marks, have a drink with us to the success of the Chesapeake, but you and I get in our best work under a ‘letter of marque.’”

“It’s a service that pays,” replied Cheever, “but has something of the smack of robbing sleek merchants in an alleyway. Now, under the ‘Jolly Roger’ there are agreeable diversions between man and man, when they make the division of the spoils that kept one’s muscle firm and one’s nerves in condition.”

“You are speaking out of a larger experience than most of us have had, Marks,” said another of the privateersmen.

“Yes, and it will be larger before the week is out, my friend.”

“What are you going to do, Marks, turn parson?”

“I came very near being a sky-pilot once, but I was not built that way. Now I have run down hill until I find myself consorting with roystering sailors in a tavern.”

XII

WHEN James did not appear at seven o’clock breakfast the next morning, his aunt, after waiting some ten minutes for him, went to his chamber. Her repeated knocks at the door brought no response; and after some delay caused by the reserve of an old maid, she opened the door of the room. There was the bed undisturbed by any sleeper, and in the corner a portmanteau, and on the bureau toilet articles. James had not occupied the room and he was not in the house, although his baggage was. Surely, with his father lying ill in bed, he would be up to no evil prank,—even he, the wicked young collegian.

What could it all mean? The poor old lady returned to her breakfast, and sipped her tea, and munched a tiny bit of toast. The boy would be back soon, she said to herself, though all the time she felt within her that he would not.

All through his life she had worried over him so much; he had died a thousand deaths in her mind’s eye; but this time it was no cry of wolf; something was not well with the lad; and she loved him so much, and yet she had shown him little love. Her nature was not expansive, and she could not make others appreciate her real kindliness. This boy she had cared for since his mother’s death; he was her only brother’s only child, and his father lay ill up-stairs.

The evidence of the unused bed was strong that he had been out all the night before, and it was most strange that he should go away at a time when there was illness in the house, so that his presence might be required at any moment. He might have gone down the river, of course, but he could hardly think of doing that at such a time.

The poor old lady was almost choked by her dry toast, and her tea was no comfort to her; and when that cheering beverage failed Miss Woodbury, matters were becoming serious. How could she explain matters to her brother? He was fretful in his convalescence and he expected his son to be with him. All through his illness, his mind had dwelt upon the boy; and she had heard him praying for him in the still watches of the night, that his feet might be kept from straying and that he be delivered from temptation; and she had heard the sick man call out in his troubled sleep, “The miniature! How like! How like!”

And now the boy had disappeared. He had seemed preoccupied, she remembered, during the last few days; something was in his mind. What could he have done? It was not possible that he should do anything wrong—and yet something must have happened to him.

Her painful conjectures were interrupted by three sharp knocks at the front door; and the poor old lady sprang from her chair and faltered to the drawing-room. “News from James,” she whispered to herself, “news from James.” She sat bolt upright in her chair awaiting the maid’s entrance.

In a moment the Deacon came into the drawing-room. Miss Woodbury rose and curtsied primly, and as she did so noticed a black plaster cross on his forehead and a great welt on his nose. These unexpected marks of conflict were instantly connected in her mind, by some instinctive process of the brain, with James’ disappearance. She was to hear something; and it was important that she should have all her wits about her.

“‘WE CANNOT BE TOO CAREFUL AT OUR AGE, MISS WOODBURY.’”

The Deacon had driven the uncle from town; could it be that the nephew was caught in his toils?

“Miss Woodbury,” said the Deacon, bowing, “how is your brother this morning?”

“Very weak, but out of danger for the present,” she replied. “Will you not be seated, sir?”

“I thank you, madam. I am pleased to hear that he is improving in health. Sixty-five, is he not? Just five years younger than I. We cannot be too careful at our age, Miss Woodbury.”

She was on pins and needles as to what she should say about the extraordinary plasters and swellings which disfigured his ordinarily smooth face. It was, of course, etiquette that she should inquire into the cause of such a blow as the Deacon had received, and yet she felt that in asking any question she would be treading upon delicate ground.

“You do not seem to have been as careful of yourself as usual, Deacon Fairbanks?” she finally said, her eyes twinkling a little; for we are all delighted by plasters on the faces of others, and even acquire a certain pride in those on our own visages.

He hurriedly put his hand to his forehead and frowned, but the last instinctive movement was painful.

“I have had a blow,” he remarked with a hard voice.—“Is your nephew James in the house?”

The question came like an arrow from the bow.

“No; he is not,” answered Miss Woodbury, without a moment’s hesitation.

“Where is he?”

“He has gone down the river in his boat, shooting,” replied the old lady, with calm deliberation. “He went yesterday afternoon.”

“How do you know that he went then?” asked the Deacon, still rubbing his forehead.

“Because I saw him sailing down the bay when I was down at the fish-monger’s on Lunt’s Wharf,” she replied.

“He must have returned before you knew it, then,” said Fairbanks, harshly; “for he broke into my house like a common burglar last night and I owe this blow to him.”

The old lady rose solemnly from her chair, and said slowly, “Deacon Fairbanks, you have no right to come into a gentleman’s house and make such an accusation against his son!”

“I know whereof I speak, woman,” insisted the Deacon. “I was waked by the noise of some one moving in the dining-room. I went down-stairs with a pistol, and when I entered the dining-room I saw James standing by my sideboard removing my silver. I fired—”

“Fired at my boy!” exclaimed the wretched old lady.

“Ah, you admit that it was he,” exclaimed the Deacon, triumphantly.

“Nothing of the kind, sir—nothing of the kind; did you hit the burglar?”

“I do not know, for the next moment I was struck a terrific blow, and fell senseless.”

“And what evidence have you that the boy was entering your house to steal your silver, I should like to know, Deacon Fairbanks? I know, he knows, and all Oldbury knows that you have had nothing better than Sheffield ware in your house since you were robbed in ’96.”

“Yes, robbed by the boy’s uncle; of the same old breed,” he interrupted.

“Why should the boy enter your house when he knows that there’s nothing there to steal?”

“He might have supposed there was money.”

“He never went there at all,” said Miss Woodbury, quietly. “You have always hated my brother, Elisha Fairbanks, because everybody respected and loved him, and it is needless to say in what esteem you are held in a community where you have devoured widows’ houses for forty years. I tell you that, bad and worthless as Tom Cheever was, whose foolish vices drew him to ruin, he is as an angel from heaven in comparison with you; and when you tell me that James Woodbury, my boy James, is a thief, you lie wickedly, you wretched old man.”

No living soul had ever seen the slender old lady aroused to such a frenzy. She was fighting out the battle for the two human beings who made up her world, for the sick man up-stairs and for her boy, and gain it she would.

“You have fallen and hurt yourself and have invented this to ruin my boy and to bring your neighbor’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.”

“I am very sorry to see you so angry,” he replied in his softest tones, “very sorry, indeed; and I pardon you for your violent language. I shall now bid you a very good morning, madam. When your nephew returns from his delightful excursion down the river, I hope that I shall have the pleasure of seeing him.”

Miss Woodbury did not reply. She looked at the man with absolute contempt, and his retreat from the room was far from dignified. She stood rigid until she heard the front door slam, and then slipped upon her poor old knees and buried her head in a sofa pillow and wept; she who could have faced an army but a minute before.

The Deacon stalked down the long passage between the great elms, revolving black thoughts in his heart. The bruises on his forehead and nose were very painful and the incident had thrown together all his old enmities against these his neighbors into a crystallized hate.

XIII

THE Chesapeake lay in the upper harbor in the still June twilight, her lofty spars and rigging traced against the sky. The unlucky frigate was all bustle and confusion.

Even at this late hour, with her antagonist cruising in the lower harbor, fresh levies were being put aboard of her, and the old Constitution’s men shook their heads as they saw the dark-browed, scowling Portuguese and the raw youths picked up at random to piece out the crew.

But Lawrence had sent a taunting challenge to the Bonne Citoyenne, and he could not afford to baulk a British ship of a fight at the very gates of the Puritan mother-town. Down this harbor, in 1776, the British fleet had sailed, bearing the last evidence of King George’s power over the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It should never be said that a Yankee ship had faltered when the meteor flag of Britain waved defiance at the very mouth of the famous “tea-pot.”

“Then all cavaliers who love honor and me,” was the burden of the gallant Lawrence’s song. Honor it was indeed to win; honor even to lose in this duel on the sea.

Everywhere the officers were busy assigning men to the guns and appointing temporary warrant officers. Cheever, an old hand, if somewhat of a free lance, had been assigned to the mizzen-top under Midshipman Berry, a handsome young fellow who would in less stirring times have been playing “rounders” in the school-yard; but was now set to command grown men in a desperate contest.

Before the fair-haired youngster were standing the foretop men, going through a hurried setting-up drill and instruction in the use of the musket. A lieutenant came up, followed by a young sailor.

“Mr. Berry,” said the officer, “here is a greenhorn to complete your squad.”

The sailor saluted and took his place in the squad. As Berry handed him a musket, Cheever looked at the newcomer from the corner of his eye, and recognized his nephew. The boy looked up and caught his eye and started as he saw who was looking at him.

“What has brought him here?” Cheever asked himself as he mechanically obeyed the orders of the midshipman.

Presently the squad was dismissed and Cheever drew his nephew aside out of the hurly-burly of warlike preparation.

“How now, lad!” he asked, “what does this mean? How come you here?”

The words came out with difficulty from his convulsed throat.

“I have been walking from Oldbury for the last two days. I—”

“You’re in trouble on my account. The silver,—tell me.”

“I returned it as I promised you.”

“You found it then under the lilac-bush?” asked Cheever.

James nodded assent.

“While I was putting it back upon the sideboard, the old man came down from his chamber and fired at me with a pistol.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I don’t know. As he fired, I heaved the heavy tankard at him, and it hit him and he fell like a log.”

“Ay, that’s the ticket, lad,” said Cheever. “I have always said that. I wouldn’t give a red cent for pistol in a fight. There’s not one chance in five of hitting your man. Your hand will shake when you are excited unless a cooler head than mine is on your shoulders. The slightest tremor will make you lose your aim. But for accidental killing, recommend me to the pistol. ’Twill always fail to meet your expectation. If you think it is not loaded, it will be, and while it will not protect you from your enemy, it will be sure to hit your friend.”

“I ran out of the house as fast as I could and made right over the hill, back of his house to the Boston turnpike.”

“You don’t know whether you really hurt him, then?”

“I think now that I could only have knocked him senseless. At the time, though, I was chased by fears and walked all the rest of the night as fast as I could. I had no idea except to escape from Oldbury—and my father is lying there ill,” exclaimed the boy, with a sudden twinge of conscience. “I have been on the road ever since, sleeping in haymows; and I have eaten what the farmers’ wives would give me; but the weather was fine, and if I could have shut out recollection, I should have enjoyed it.”

“However did the whim to have the silver returned come into my head?” said Cheever. “I would not have had this happen for the world, boy. I seem to bring misfortune on all I touch—and your father ill. He will have a big tally to put on my old score. But it may not be as black as it looks. Perhaps the old Deacon’s crown is not cracked and he will rejoice more over the return of his silver than he will grieve over his bruises. But you shouldn’t have run away. That will arouse their suspicions. They know that you have been at home, that you are not there now, and that you have taken no place on any coach leaving Oldbury. Hence, they will conclude that you have taken French leave, and that, too, on the night of the breaking and entering of the Deacon’s house.”

“I know all that,” replied James. “I have thought it over a thousand times as I walked along the turnpike and keeping my eyes well out for the Oldbury coach. But it is too late to turn back now. I am an apprentice on a Yankee frigate and it’s the day before an action.”

“How came you to ship?”

“I had hardly been in Boston five minutes before my eye fell upon one of the posters calling for sailors for the Chesapeake. I found the officer willing enough to take me. Indeed, I was put on board within an hour of my going into the shipping office.”

“And a bad lookout it is for us both. A half of the crew are good hands, but there are mutinous Dagoes aboard, who care no more for the Stars and Stripes than they do for an old sail, and the rest are a pack of youngsters like you, full of pluck and anxious to fight, but too green for much use. But the old man has his dander up, and by to-morrow night there may be such happenings that I may as well arrange my affairs decently and in good order to-night. We may both get out of this alive or one of us may be killed. If it’s I, I wish to tell you what to do. I have made a will which will give you all I have left. Isaac Tenney, who keeps the Bell-in-Hand tavern in Boston, has all the papers.

“I had rare luck in the privateering, James. Dame Fortune seems to have wearied of turning the cold shoulder upon me, and during the last year the sum which your father sent me has waxed as fast as a sailor’s wages wane when he first strikes a port. It’s all deposited in the bank, and that’s all for you if I don’t come out of the fight. If I do, you’ll never be the better for it. Good luck won’t stick to me long, I fear. I don’t know whether it would be good or ill fortune to be knocked on the head to-morrow. The money might give me a chance again. Nearly ten thousand dollars! What do you think of that for a man who had only a slim leather bag a year ago when he came up from the brig Tempest to your father’s house?”

James was not listening to his uncle’s monologue. He was by his father’s bedside and he was saying to himself, “I have brought his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.”

“The Deacon has started the hue and cry before this,” said James.

“When it is known that you were returning the silver, the charge will drop to the ground,” replied Cheever.

“And the blow with the tankard!”

“That would never kill him, and, by the same token, he shot at you first. You have, after all, done well in shipping on this frigate. If we take the Shannon, we shall be the heroes of the day, and any little faults will be forgiven.”

“And if they take us?” said James.

“Then most of us will be summoned before a Higher Court, my boy, and will at least die fighting for our country. You’ve not forgotten where to go if you come out alive? The tavern Bell-in-Hand.”

“For your money, uncle? I don’t want it.”

“It’s yours, my boy, whether I live or die. You have earned all you wish to take of it. I have brought you into these toils and perhaps ruined your life, and have exposed you to awful danger, and you a minister to be. I was once to be a parson, too, and your grandfather was proud of me. I was quick at my books, too. He kept a tight hand on me, did your grandfather. On the surface I was pious; and I learned my catechism and went to Sabbath-school and to prayer-meetings and to church. They did everything for me that they could to make the holiest of ministers, and I—”

He laughed a little bitter laugh.

“I was not all bad, though, my boy; nobody is. There are oases in every desert, fresh, cool places where seeds grow to be plants and the birds sing. I have a natural taste for making sermons, you see. I have heard enough in my day. But the discipline was too rigid, and no allowance was made for the devil in me.”

For human nature did not change when it crossed the Atlantic with our Puritan forefathers, and it crops out even in ministers’ sons. “They brought me up piously,” continued Cheever, “but they did not cast the devil out. I went to church with due regularity, but the chances were that I had been cock-fighting on the Saturday night before, and I went to the tavern far oftener than I went to prayer-meetings. I was daft when I took that silver. I was not naturally a thief, but I was weak and owing money, and gave way to the temptation. I might as well have stolen an old Revolutionary cannon. I could not dispose of the stuff after I had possession of it. And I fled and lost everything.”

“As I have,” said James.

“No, you only run the risk of the fight. If you come out unhurt, you will go back crowned with glory, and tell the town just what happened. It’s not a serious crime to return a man’s property. You did it in an odd way, and at a late hour, but you had no evil intent, and if you did keel the old man over with the tankard, he had fired upon you first. Oh, you will get into no trouble on that account. We will show the British what a Yankee ship and a Yankee crew can do to-morrow, and you will go home with your pockets full of prize-money.”

“Or not at all,” said James.

Cheever looked grave.

“We have opened the wine, James,” he replied; “it must be drunk. Write your aunt now, tell her the whole story. Don’t mention that I am on board here. Tell the truth; for that will hold together against the world, and a lie is like a rat dead in a wall, sure to be found out before long.”

XIV

THE two ships of war were manœuvring that June afternoon in awful silence, on the blue waters of Massachusetts Bay. Each crew stood at quarters ready to send the deadly broadsides at the rival frigate when the word was given. No land was in sight, Boston Light being six leagues away, and the two ships in the centre of the circle of rippling water were watched only by the sea-gulls and the broad eye of the sun. The Chesapeake was coming down very fast on the Shannon, under top-sails and jib, and the British ship was lying to under top-sail, top-gallant sails, jib, and spanker. Cheever and James, high perched in the mizzen-top, clutched their muskets tightly as they watched the great white ensign of the ship float on the breeze, bearing the legend “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.”

The ill-assorted crew of the Chesapeake had taken their stations and every man was ready for the fight, which must be sharp and murderous, whether the meteor flag of England or the starry banner was to be struck. It was late in the afternoon now, and the hours which had passed since the Chesapeake weighed anchor at noon, seemed like ages to the boy in the mizzen-top.

Midshipman Randolph, in command, was cheery enough, and had told James, as they sailed down Boston Bay, of his service on the Constitution, of her victory over the Guerrière, and her marvellous escape from the British fleet in the Sound.

“The Shannon is keeping a close luff,” cried Randolph. “See her maintop-sail shiver. We can get the weather-gauge on her easy enough. Look, now we are getting up our foresail and going straight for her starboard quarter; Lawrence will go under her stern, rake her, and engage her in the quarter. In a quarter of an hour you’ll see the splinters fly, my boys.”

On the Yankee ship tore before the fresh breeze, with the great ensign flying, while the Shannon waited doggedly the attack. Even the midshipman stopped his chatter as the moment of the first broadside approached.

The Chesapeake, when within fifty yards of her opponent’s starboard quarter, luffed up and squared her main-yard, and now the two rivals were almost alongside. A few minutes more of awful silence, while the two ships forged ahead together, and then James saw a flame shoot out from the starboard side of the Shannon, and at once the broadsides of both ships roared at each other. The boy felt every nerve in his body tingle, as the storm broke the awful calm.

Below him was a cloud of smoke and splinters, and as the smoke cleared away he saw the men working their guns, and dark forms lying by the wheel in ghastly pools of blood. And so the cannons thundered at each other gloriously for five minutes, “hot gun-lip kissing gun,” when the damage to the Chesapeake’s rigging caused her to come up into the wind somewhat, so as to expose her quarter to a terrible broadside, which beat in her stern posts and swept the men away like flies from the after guns. Then came a loud explosion on the American ship’s quarter-deck, and the flames swept along the deck from the foremast to the mizzen-mast. The dense smoke blinded and choked the men in the tops.

Meanwhile the crippled ship had stern-way on and began to pay off, and the two frigates fell aboard of each other, the Chesapeake’s quarter pressing on the Shannon’s side just forward the starboard main chains, and the ships were kept in this position by the Shannon’s anchor catching in the Chesapeake’s quarter-post.

“We are going to board them,” cried Randolph.

“Most likely they will us,” said a surly seaman; “we have had the worst of it so far.”

“Silence!” shouted Randolph.

The seaman was right; Captain Broke, when the Shannon exposed her quarter, ran forward, and seeing his foes flinching from the quarter-deck guns, ordered the ships to be linked together, the firing to cease, and the boarders to be called.

His boatswain set about fastening the vessels together, though his right arm was hacked off by a blow from a Yankee cutlass.

Just then Lieutenant Ludlow fell mortally wounded on the Chesapeake, and Lawrence himself on the quarter-deck, fatally conspicuous in his full-dress uniform and commanding stature, was shot down. He fell down and was carried below, exclaiming, “Don’t give up the ship!”

Now from the tops of both vessels the fire became hot, and as the smoke blew away from the two linked ships, James saw the British Captain Broke at the head of his men, stepping from the Shannon’s gangway rail on to the muzzle of the Chesapeake’s after carronade. The boy aimed at the British captain and fired; but missed. In a second Captain Broke, followed by about twenty men, jumped on the Chesapeake’s quarter-deck, and some of the crew of the American vessel, the foreign mercenaries and some of the raw natives, deserted their quarters. The Portuguese boatswain’s mate removed the gratings of the berth-deck and ran below, followed by many of the crew.

The loss of Lawrence and Ludlow deprived the deck of leaders at the critical moment of the fight, and the mixed elements in the crew could not stand up without a leader, against the élan of the enemy’s boarders.

At this despairing juncture, the church militant came to the front. The chaplain, Mr. Livermore, stood alone on the quarter-deck, in front of the boarders, and advancing, the parson fired his pistol into the boarding crew and in return nearly had his arm hewed off by a sword-stroke.

“My God, look at Livermore!” cried Berry. “Lawrence and Ludlow must be dead. Where’s the bugler, the coward? Is there no one to rally the men?”

The boarders, after the chaplain’s noble resistance, stopped for a moment until they were joined by the rest of the Shannon’s boarders. “Now, let them have it,” cried Berry, “a volley!—are you ready,—fire!”

The volley told on the huddled mass of boarders and two officers fell. “That’s right,” cried the midshipman, “but it will be our turn next. Load your guns, my men, and give it to them before we are blown to bits. They are pointing a Long Tom at us from the Shannon. Pick off all you can before they fire it.”

As he spoke, the gallant officer, pierced by a bullet from the Shannon’s maintop, plunged from the top and fell heavily over on the deck below. James instinctively assumed the command of the top. “Now, boys,” he cried, “the marines are making a stand in the upper deck.”

The next instant a shot from the Shannon’s Long Tom crashed through the mizzen-top, and James and the survivors made for the shrouds, to descend to the upper deck. As they descended, several muskets were discharged at them, but without effect.

Below, Lieutenant Budd now for the first time learned that the English had boarded; from the upper deck men came crowding down.

“Chesapeake’s men, follow me!” cried the gallant officer.

But, shame to say, the foreigners and the green hands held back, though a dozen brave fellows jumped to follow him. Up they rushed after the Lieutenant to the spar-deck, and fell, with the fury of brave men who break away from coward associates, upon the British as they came along the gangway.

This brave handful, reinforced by Cheever, James, and other mizzen-top men, held in check the victorious Shannons, killing two of them; and Cheever saw the Lieutenant pierced by a boarding-pike and thrown down the main hatchway. As the Chesapeake’s survivors stood battling for their lives with the desperation of animals at bay, Lieutenant Ludlow, stricken to death, struggled upon deck, followed by three seamen.

“We shall not give up the ship,” cried the dying man.

A sabre descended upon his head and he spoke no more.

Hardly fifteen minutes had elapsed since the two gallant frigates had begun action, and the Chesapeake was almost in the complete possession of the enemy. In the forecastle, a few seamen and marines stood fighting on the upper deck; the few survivors stood together, firm in their determination not to give up the ship before their lives.

In this desperate struggle, Tom Cheever, brandishing a pike, stood shoulder to shoulder with James. Next him, a marine with a clubbed musket in air, and on the other side James, with his midshipman’s cutlass, while behind stood eight seamen armed with pikes and cutlasses. After their slight repulse of the Shannon’s boarding crew they fell back, and for a moment the fighting ceased as the determined little body of Americans stood closer together. Men there were among them who had helped to doff the Guerrière’s royal ensign, and they were desperate at this awful disaster to their flag.

“Better to die with the ‘old man,’” they thought.

“It’s good-by, James, my boy,” hoarsely whispered Cheever. “I’ve dragged you down with me.”

Through the boy’s head the hot blood jumped bearing the joy of the fight. He grasped his dirk the firmer. “We shall die for our country’s honor,” he cried.

Then the overpowering force of the boarding crew, led by Broke, closed in about the devoted remnant of the Americans. With brilliant personal courage the Captain led his men; and James rushed to meet him. Behind Cheever followed close, thrusting himself in front of the boy to shield him as best he might.

“Surrender!” cried Broke.

“Never!” cried Cheever, thrusting at him with his pike.

Captain Broke parried the blow with his sword and cut at his opponent, laying open his head. James, seeing that his uncle was blinded by the blood, rushed in to save him, but Cheever thrust the boy back of him and stood in front of him as a lioness might do to save her whelp.

The little group of Americans were resisting stubbornly the attack; a tall marine crashed his musket’s butt upon a burly seaman who had rushed to Broke’s side, and at the same moment Cheever cut down the British captain, and would have killed him had not another cutlass pierced the American’s breast. He fell heavily backwards, and as he did so a heavy stroke of a British cutlass felled James to the deck.

The assailing party fell back for an instant before the wild courage of the Americans, and then closed in upon them. The twelve men lay in each other’s blood on the spot where they had rallied. A couple of shots were fired up from below, and the British fired a volley or two down the hatchway. All resistance was then at an end and the colors of the Chesapeake were struck.

When James came to his senses, he found himself crowded with a dozen prisoners in a small dark hole between decks. They were lying on an old sail, and outside the door a sentry was pacing. The boy’s head ached wofully from the cutlass wound, but fortunately the blow had been a glancing one. The great flow of blood had saved the boy’s life; for in the mad rush of the British, he would have certainly been despatched had not his wound been so severe that he passed for dead. He was, though he did not then know it, the only survivor of the gallant little band who, driven to bay, had held the Shannon’s boarding party.

His companions in this dismal captivity were perfectly quiet, depressed by defeat, and some of them seemed to be asleep.

“ANOTHER CUTLASS PIERCED THE AMERICAN’S BREAST.”

“The ship is taken?” asked James, to whom the brief quarter of an hour of carnage seemed like a nightmare.

“Ay, it is,” replied the midshipman next him, “and we are bound on her to Halifax, prisoners of war.”

“Is Lawrence dead?”

“No; but fatally wounded; and so is Lieutenant Ludlow, and poor Bullard and White. The decks are like shambles.”

“And my uncle?”

“I don’t know your uncle, my lad.”

“He was in the mizzen-top’s crew. We made the last stand.”

“Then he has passed in the number of his mess. You are the only one left of those brave men. I saw them pull you out from under the bodies, and they chucked you in here when we were put in. I did not know that you were alive till you spoke just then. I thought that you might be so lucky as to be dead. Oh, if our fore-rigging had not been shot away, we should have given a better account of ourselves. Poor Lawrence!”

Then there was silence again in the strait, dark hole; but the creaking of the ship and the hurrying feet on deck told that the proud frigate was on her way to the enemy’s strong-hold at Halifax.

And James lay, with confused thoughts of the strange man, his uncle, dying like a hero for his country’s honor,—the weak, perverse man who had so ill guarded his own.

XV

THE summer had run along into August. Captain Woodbury’s illness had been so severe that his sister had allowed him to believe that his son was still at Cambridge. But now Commencement Day had come, and his son was due at home for his brief summer vacation, and Miss Elizabeth could not longer put off telling her brother the story.

The Boston coach was due at noon, and before that hour she must break the news which would crush his heart; for he had in his slow convalescence been counting the hours which would bring his boy back to him.

The Captain was sitting in his bedroom in his big chair, while down-stairs his sister was mustering up her courage to tell her story. As there was nobody watching him, what was to prevent him from slipping down to State Street? It was a fine warm day; and Captain Woodbury, looking out at the blue sky and the great leafy elms, felt a longing to walk down to meet at the post-office the Boston coach upon which his son was expected. Certainly it was absurd that he should be kept in the house any longer. He had not spoken to any one save the doctor and his sister for weeks, and all the war news had been kept from him. There must have been more glorious victories over the proud ruler of the ocean. And James,—he had really heard nothing from the boy, and he was coming home to-day.

“Once you have fallen ill,” he said to himself, “these women will never admit that you are strong enough to escape from their clutches. She will never let me go if I tell her. I must steal away without her knowing it.”

And while Miss Woodbury sat trying to shape into words the story to her brother, he was tottering with the weak knees of a convalescent down the path to the street. His wits were for the nonce almost as weak as his knees, yet he was filled with delight at escaping from the stifled atmosphere of his sick chamber into the fresh open air.

“And James is coming in the coach,” he said to himself, “and maybe there has been a victory. I shall see all the neighbors. I must keep out of Dr. Parsons’ sight,” he thought; “a terrible martinet is Parsons. He wished me not to go out for a week, but these doctors do not know everything. Bless my heart, no!”

It took the feeble man a long while to get to the post-office, where the accustomed group of merchants, clerks, and other busy men were awaiting the arrival of the mail, and exchanging news and making trades while they waited.

Captain Woodbury slowly approached them, the unwonted exertion making him lean heavily on his cane. He was soon recognized by a group of the older merchants, his old associates. Among them were Deacon Fairbanks and Mr. Devereux, the shipbuilder. As the erring young Woodbury had been the subject of their conversation, the approach of his father caused a painful silence, and to relieve it, Mr. Devereux politely said:

“Ah, Neighbor Woodbury, I am glad to see you out again; though, to tell you the truth, you look very pale and weak, and little fit for such exertion.”

“She doesn’t know of it,—Elizabeth, I mean—” slyly replied Captain Woodbury; “I have slipped off all unbeknown to her. I expect James on the coach, you see, and couldn’t wait. I have been confined in the house so long that I grew impatient.”

Deacon Fairbanks had been the most silent of the group; for he had just been narrating, for the hundredth time, the story of the burglarious entry of his house, and had been declaring that he had no doubt whatever but that the thief had been James; but when the Captain had finished, he inquired:

“From where do you expect your son, Captain Woodbury?”

“From Cambridge, sir; ’tis the end of the year. You are waiting for your son, Mr. Devereux, are you not?”

“Yes, Captain Woodbury, but—why, sir, have you not heard?”

“Heard what, Mr. Devereux? I have heard nothing from James for some weeks, excepting the messages which he has sent to me in his letters to my sister.”

He grasped heavily at Mr. Devereux’s shoulder. He would have fallen to the ground had he not done so. “My boy is ill; my boy is dead, and they have not told me. My son, my son!”

Mr. Devereux passed his arm about his friend.

“Your son is not dead, Captain Woodbury; bear up.”

“Where is he, then? Has any ill befallen him?”

“Captain Woodbury,” replied Mr. Devereux, “you are too weak now; later.”

“Heaven! man, speak out;” said the Captain; “tell me your worst. I am weak, but I am over my illness. I can bear anything better than suspense.”

“Well, Captain Woodbury,” interrupted the Deacon, feeling that the moment had come to deal the shrewd blow to the man whom he had so long secretly hated. “If you must know the truth, your son James disappeared some weeks ago. He has not been at Cambridge and he has not been seen in Oldbury since the night my house was robbed.”

Captain Woodbury drew himself up.

“Fairbanks, what do you, mean? My boy not been seen since the night your house was robbed? Your house has not been robbed for years.”

“Oh,” interrupted the Deacon, “that was the first robbery by the uncle,—the nephew—”

“You lie, you miserable scoundrel!” cried Captain Woodbury, lifting his cane as if to strike the accuser of his son.

“I know whereof I speak, John Woodbury. On the night of May 28th I was waked up by a noise in my dining-room. I went down with a candle, and kneeling before my sideboard, a midnight robber, was your son. I recognized him clearly and had reason to remember him.”

He pointed as he spoke at the scar on his forehead left by the heavy tankard.

“He threw the old Pepperell tankard at me and nearly brained me.”

“The old Pepperell tankard!” exclaimed Mr. Devereux. “Tom Cheever stole that from you years ago. I have heard you tell the story hundreds of times. How could the boy throw that at you? How do you explain that?”

“Ay, sir, how do you explain that?” sneered Captain Woodbury. “You called my boy a robber just now. How could he have thrown that old tankard at you, which hasn’t been in your possession since the last century?”

The Deacon hesitated and looked confused, and the men about him, who had believed thoroughly in James’ guilt, began to doubt the word of his accuser.

At this juncture the Boston coach came rattling down over the cobble-stones of State Street and drew up at the post-office door. From the seat beside the driver a young man jumped to the sidewalk and rushed to embrace Captain Woodbury. It was James, thin and pale.

“Father! father!” he cried, as the old man hugged him.

“My son James, gentlemen, just returned from college,” said the old man. “Deacon Fairbanks, what have you to say now? Did that young man enter your house?”

The Deacon was silent.

“Father,” said James, “I am not returned from college, but from Halifax. I have just been exchanged as a prisoner of war. I was one of the crew of the Chesapeake.”

There was a crowd around the boy by this time.

“Yes; I shipped the day before the fight. I did enter the Deacon’s house, but to return property—not to rob.”

“Yes, and I owe this to you,” shouted the Deacon, pointing at his forehead.

“I threw the tankard to save my life,” replied James. “You were shooting at me. I don’t blame you for that. It’s no wonder that you took me for a burglar, but I was returning, as you know, your lost silver.”

“What did you mean, Fairbanks,” asked Mr. Devereux, “by telling us all these weeks that the boy was a thief?”

“I call him a midnight marauder and assassin,” sneered the Deacon, angry and confused. “Like uncle, like nephew,” and he turned to go.

“My uncle died on the Chesapeake on the 1st of June, fighting for his country’s honor. His injury to you has been repaired. If you have any complaint to make against me to the authorities, I shall be found, if wanted, at my father’s house.”

And James, passing his arm around his father’s waist, walked up the street with him. What reception Aunt Elizabeth gave the two on their return, you may imagine.

That evening at sunset James and Alice were seated side by side on the low stone-wall of the burying-yard.

“The life of a prisoner is a wearisome thing, Alice; and one day is so like another that I shall not tire you with a long story. We reached Halifax five days after the fight, and a dreary voyage it was to us youngsters crowded in that black pen, and my wound, though not dangerous, was painful.”

“Ah, you poor lad,” said Alice, touching his bandages lightly with one of her fingers.

“Yet the wound made my imprisonment the easier to bear; for I was light-headed or drowsy most of the time. At Halifax I was sent to the hospital, and sent back to Boston to be exchanged with the first cartel of prisoners. There are nearly fifteen hundred poor fellows left at Halifax now. I am very fortunate to get back so soon; and no one knew where I was, for I did not write my father. I went on board the Chesapeake almost as soon as I reached Boston, and went into action the next day. I was wretched enough through it all, and felt that I had disgraced myself forever, and had lost father, and you, and all happiness, my dearest girl.”

“I should have been true to you had you really come to steal,” she replied. “Grandfather never said to me that he thought that you were the one who came that night; but when I knew that the old silver had been returned and that you were not in town, I guessed the whole story. I did not know that any one else suspected you, and I kept silent. I heard that you had come back; and I knew that you would be here this evening. Grandfather will never let you come to our house.”

“My dearest girl, you and your mother shall leave him alone in his glory. I can get along without the old man’s forgiveness or his countenance. My poor uncle gave up his life to shield me when it came to that last rally on the Chesapeake, and he left me his heir. We shall not let our happiness be spoiled by any old man’s spite. I shall not go back to college. I am no scholar; the broad world is the only book from which I can learn. I have made up my mind to ask Mr. Devereux to take me into his ship-yard.”

“And your clippers shall carry the Stars and Stripes to every ocean, James,” she said.

“And the first shall be named after my own true love.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

On page 115, the sentence "It was known that his father intended him for the ministry, and it seemed to the straight-laced almost a blasphemy to connect James Cheever with the Congregational Church." The transcriber believes that the name should be James Woodbury, but has retained the text as printed.

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Table of Contents

A Bad Penny

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