wk.
It seemed he knew me, for as I approached he stood up to his full
height and put his hands on his forehead. "Brother," he said, and his
grave eyes looked steadily into mine.
Then I remembered. Some months before I had been riding back the road
from Green Springs, and in a dark, woody place had come across an
Indian sore beset by three of the white scum which infested the
river-side. What the quarrel was I know not, but I liked little the
villainous look of the three, and I liked much the clean, lithe figure
of their opponent. So I rode my horse among them, and laid on to them
with the butt of my whip. They had their knives out, but I managed to
disarm the one who attacked me, and my horse upset a second, while the
Indian, who had no weapon but a stave, cracked the head of the last. I
got nothing worse than a black eye, but the man I had rescued bled from
some ugly cuts which I had much ado stanching. He shook hands with me
gravely when I had done, and vanished into the thicket. He was a Seneca
Indian, and I wondered what one of that house was doing in the
Tidewater.
Mercer told me his name. "Shalah will take you to the man you ken. Do
whatever he tells you, Mr. Garvald, for this is a job in which you're
nothing but a bairn." We pushed off, the Indian taking the oars, and in
five minutes James Town was lost in the haze.
On the Surrey shore we picked up a breeze, and with the ebbing tide
made good speed down the estuary. Shalah the Indian had the tiller, and
I sat luxuriously in the bows, smoking my cob pipe, and wondering what
the next week held in store for me. The night before I had had qualms
about the whole business, but the air of morning has a trick of firing
my blood, and I believe I had forgotten the errand which was taking me
to the Carolina shores. It was enough that I was going into a new land
and new company. Last night I had thought with disfavour of Red Ringan
the buccaneer; that morning I thought only of Ninian Campbell, with
whom I had forgathered on a Glasgow landing.
My own thoughts kept me silent, and the Indian never opened his mouth.
Like a statue he crouched by the tiller, with his sombre eyes looking
to the sea. That night, when we had rounded Cape Henry in fine weather,
we ran the sloop into a little bay below a headland, and made camp for
the night beside a stream of cold water. Next morning it blew hard from
the north, and in a driving rain we crept down the Carolina coast. One
inci
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