e big
countingroom. Those lines of dusty volumes held records that Alan was
forever reading, tales of wonderful voyages, of spices and gold dust
and jewels brought home from the Orient, of famines in far lands
broken by the coming of American grain ships, of profits reckoned in
ducats and doubloons and Spanish pieces of eight. Cicely was fond of
drawing and loved, far more than copying dull letters, to make
sketches of those miniature vessels in the glass cases that stood for
the Hallowell ships that had scoured the oceans of the world. They had
been wrecked on coral reefs in hot, distant seas, they had lain
becalmed with priceless cargoes in pirate-infested waters, their crews
were as skillful with the long guns as they were at handling the
sails, their captains were as at home in Shanghai or Calcutta as they
were in the streets of the little seaport town where they had been
born. Cicely could remember when the big countingroom had been
crowded with clerks and had hummed like a beehive with the myriad
activities of the Hallowell trade. It was a dull and empty place now,
and the fleet of Hallowell ships was scattered, some lying at anchor,
some dismantled and sold, some fallen into the hands of the enemy. For
this was the third year of that struggle with England that the
histories were to call the War of 1812.

Cicely, for all her thirteen years, looked very small, sitting there
at the end of the long table, in her "sprigged" high-waisted gown, her
feet in their strapped slippers perched on the rung of the high office
stool. She had just taken up her pen to begin writing again when the
voices of the two men by the fire rose so suddenly that she dropped
it, startled. Her father's tone fell almost immediately to strained
quiet, but Martin Hallowell, his partner, went on with angry
insistence. She knew him to be hot-headed and impetuous, but she had
never heard such words from him before.

With a quick, eager motion that was the embodiment of impatient greed,
Martin was running his finger down the columns of the ledger before
him.

"There is no ship like a privateer, and no privateer like the
_Huntress_," he was saying. "Send her on one more voyage and we shall
be rich men."

There was an ugly tremor in his voice, that quavered and broke in
spite of his attempts to keep it calm.

"I do not care to be one of those who gathers riches from a war,"
returned Reuben Hallowell, Cicely's father. There was something in the