s with
his boisterous laugh. "Mine was quite another office, for I was
lay-reader to Parson Buck, and he was chaplain to Gates who was to be
governor of a Virginia colony an' he could have reached it. But like our
own adventure it miscarried, and we were wrecked on the Bermoothes. We
abode there six months, and the Indians showed us how to trap deer just
as Bradford was trapped but now, ho, ho!"

"Lay-reader wast thou?" asked Standish surveying the burly veteran with
whimsical interest. "Well, now, I'd never take thee for a parson's
lieutenant, Hopkins! I can hardly fancy thee meek and mild with bands
under that unkempt beard, and a gown over thy buff jacket. Wert meek and
mild in those days, Hopkins, and thy tongue, was 't innocent of strange
oaths?"

"A truce to thy jibes, master Captain," retorted Hopkins not half
pleased at receiving the jests he so freely offered. "If thou didst but
know, my voice was more for war than peace, sith it seemed to me then
even as it did before we landed here, that an expedition gone astray is
an expedition ended, and that all compacts cease when their conditions
cannot be fulfilled. We shipped to go to Virginia, and Gates was to be
our governor; well and good, but here we were wrecked on Bermuda, and my
rede was that every man was thus released from his promises and free to
set forth anew for himself."

"So! Yonder threatening on the Mayflower was not thy first experience in
raising sedition and discontent, and trying to turn a God-fearing
community into a nest of pirates!" exclaimed Standish scornfully.
"Well, what came of it in that instance?"

"Why, Gates called a court-martial, tried me for treason by an authority
I denied, and sentenced me to death."

"Ay, and what then?"

"Then Parson Buck who could ill spare me, since I writ half his
discourses, and the admiral who would not see murder done under cloak of
law, they went to Gates and so wrought upon his temper that he set me
free and bade me begone, and I went right merrily."

"Thou mindst me of an officer under me, down there by Utrecht," said
Standish meditatively. "He, too, was for setting up every man for
himself in the plunder of a village we had taken, and I had given orders
about."

"And what became of him?" asked Hopkins, as the captain seemed to have
finished.

"Oh, there was no parson just there to make use of him, and no admiral
to judge about my authority, and he was shot," replied Standish quietly.
Hopki