Wheeling his horse quickly, he rode toward it; and what he now saw was a tall, blonde girl of eighteen or thereabouts, who arose slowly from where she had been hiding, and came forward with a dignity that savored of defiance, although there seemed to be a smile lurking in the corners of her mouth.
Her gypsy hat hung by its blue ribbons on one white rounded arm, bared to the elbow, as the fashion of her sleeve left it. The neck of her pale blue gown was low cut; but a small cape of the same material was over it, crossed, fichu-wise, on her bosom, and then carried under the arms, to be knotted at the back.
Her round white throat rose out of the sheer blue drapery in fine, strong lines, to support a regal head, crowned with a glory of pale brown hair, now bared to the sun, and glinting as though golden sparkles were caught in its silky meshes.
As she approached, the rider held up his horse, and sat motionless, staring at her, while a merry peal of laughter, silvery as chiming bells, broke from sixteen-year-old Dorothy.
"Mary Broughton!" the young man exclaimed at length, as he looked wonderingly at the fair-haired girl.
She paused a yard away and swept him a mocking courtesy as she said, and her musical voice was of the quality we are told is "good in woman," "Aye; at your service, Master John Devereux."
"Then you have been with our madcap here?" he asked, now finding his tongue more readily.
"All the afternoon an it please you, sir," she replied in the same tone of playful irony.
"It does please me," he said, now with a smile, "for it was much better than had Dot been alone, as I supposed at first. But think you it is safe for you two girls to come wandering over here by yourselves?" And in the look of his dark eyes, in the very tone of his voice, there was something different, more caressing than had been found even for his small sister, who had now drawn close to them.
Mary Broughton slipped her arm through Dorothy's, and the mockery left her face.
"I suppose not," she answered frankly. "But, to tell the truth, I had not thought of such a thing until you mentioned it. We've not met a soul, save Hugh Knollys, who was riding into the inn yard as we came from Moll Pitcher's."
"And so you have been to consult Moll's oracle?" the young man said banteringly.
The white lids fell over the honest blue eyes that had been looking straight up into his own. The girl seemed greatly embarrassed, and her color deepened, while Dorothy only giggled, and slyly pinched the arm upon which her slender fingers were resting.
Mary gave her a quick glance of reproof. Then she raised her eyes and said hesitatingly, "We heard she was down from Lynn, on a visit to her father."
"You girls are bewitched with Moll Pitcher and her prophecies," he exclaimed with a laugh.
"Ah but she tells such wonderful things," began Dorothy, impetuously. But Mary Broughton laid a small white hand over the red lips and glanced warningly at her companion.
"What did she tell?" the young man asked. But now Dorothy only smiled, and shook her head.
"Come, Dorothy," Mary said, "we had best get back to the boat." And she turned to go; but the younger girl hung back.
"Are you going to a meeting at the inn, Jack?" she inquired, looking at her brother.
"Little girls must not ask questions," he answered, yet smiling at her lovingly. "But do you hasten to the boat, and get home, Dot, you and Mary. It troubles me that you should be about here. Hurry home, now, there's a good little girl." But he looked at both of them as he spoke.
"Shall you be home by evening?" his sister asked, keeping her face toward him as she backed away, obliged to move in the direction of the beach; for Mary, still holding her arm, was walking along.
He nodded and smiled; then riding back to the highway, wheeled his horse and stopped to watch the two figures making their hurried way across the marsh. But his eyes rested longest upon one of them, tall and regal, her blonde head showing golden in the waning light, the vivid green of the marshes and the deep purple of the sea making a defining background for the beauty of the woman to whom John Devereux had given his lifelong love.
CHAPTER III
"Oh, Mary, there is Johnnie Strings!" exclaimed Dorothy, as they drew near shore, where lay the rowboat, beached on the sand, with Leet, the faithful old darkey, sitting close by, awaiting the pleasure of his adored young mistress.
Near him a little girl of seven was gathering pebbles, her heavy blonde braids touching the tawny sand whenever she stooped in her search. And crouched by his grandfather Leet was the boy Pashar, looking like an animated inkspot upon the brightness all about. His white eyeballs and teeth showed sharply by contrast with their onyx-like settings, as he sat with his thick lips agape, literally drinking in the words of the redoubtable Johnnie Strings, a wiry, sharp-faced little man, whose garments resembled the dry, faded tints of the autumn woods.
Johnnie, with his pedler's pack, stored with a seemingly unlimited variety of wares, was a well-known and welcome visitor to every housewife in town. He lived when at home (which was rarely) in a hut-like abode up among the rocks of Skinner's Head; and the highway between Boston and Gloucester was tramped by him many times during the year.
He owned a raw-boned nag of milk-white hue, and rejoicing in the name of Lavinia Amelia; and these two, with a yellow cur, constituted the entire ménage of the Strings household.
Johnnie, like Topsy, must have "just growed," for aught anyone ever knew of a parent Strings. The one item of information possessed by his acquaintances was that his name was not Johnnie Strings at all, but "Stand-fast-on-high Stringer," an indication that he must have received his baptism at Puritanical hands.
Either "Stand-fast-on-high" became more unregenerate as his infancy was left behind, or else his associates had no great taste for Biblical terms as applied to every-day use; for his real name had long since become vulgarized to the common earthiness of "Johnnie," and "Stringer" had been reduced to "Strings."
He now sat upon his pack a smaller one than he usually carried and was saying to Leet, "Now that there be so cantankerous a lot o' them pesky King's soldiers 'bout us, there's no sayin' what day or night they won't overrun the hull country, from the Governor's house at Salem, clean over here to the sea; an' every man will be wise, that owns cattle, to sleep with one eye an' ear open, an' a gun within reach."
"What are you saying, Johnnie Strings?" called out Dorothy, as she and Mary came up. "Are you trying to frighten old Leet into fits?"
The little pedler sprang to his feet and snatched off his battered wreck of a hat, showing a scant lot of carroty hair, gathered tightly into a rusty black ribbon at the nape of his weather-beaten neck.
"Only sayin' God's truth, sweet mistress," he answered, bowing and scraping with elaborate politeness. "I've just come from over Salem way; an' yesterday evenin' ye could scarcely see the ground for the red spots that covered it. There were three ship-loads came in yesterday, to add to the ungodly lot o' soldiers already there."
Mary looked troubled, but Dorothy only laughed. And little 'Bitha, abandoning her search for shells and pebbles, pressed closely against her cousin, looking up out of a pair of frightened eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, as she asked, "Does Johnnie say the soldiers are coming after us, Dot?"
Dorothy checked herself in what she was about to say, and bent to reassure the little one, putting an arm about her neck to draw the golden head still closer to her.
"What are they come down from Boston for, Johnnie?" Mary asked; "do you know?"
"What are they come down from Boston for, Johnnie?" Mary asked; "do you know?"
He cocked his head aslant, and resumed his hat, screwing up one eye in a fashion most impudent in any man but himself, as he looked at her with a cunning leer. Then he said: "There's no harm to come from 'em yet. But soldiers be a lawless lot, if they get turned loose to look after we folk 'bout the coast here, as is like to be the case now. An' so I was just meanin' to hint to ye that 'twould be as well to stop nigher home, after this day."
Old Leet, who had listened with a stolid face to all this, was now pushing the boat into the water, while Pashar stood gaping at the pedler, until ordered gruffly by his grandsire to stand ready to hold the craft.
"Have you knowledge that they are coming down here?" inquired Mary, speaking more insistently than before.
"We-l-l, yes, I have," he admitted with a drawl, and was about to add something more, when Dorothy, who had deposited 'Bitha in the boat, and was now getting in to take her own place in the stern, said to him, "Come with us, Johnnie, and we'll take you home, as we pass quite close to your" hesitating a second "your house."
"No, thank ye, mistress," he replied, grinning proudly at the dignity she had bestowed upon his humble abode. "I've that will take me up to Dame Chine, at the Fountain Inn, an' I should be there this very minute, an' not chatterin' here. But I was tired, an' when I came along an' saw old Leet, sat down to rest a bit."
"When are you intending to fetch that pink ribbon you promised me weeks ago, and the lace for Aunt Lettice?" demanded Dorothy, as Mary Broughton stepped over the intervening seats, past Leet, at the oars, with small 'Bitha alongside him, and took her place beside her friend.
"I've both in my pack, up at the hut; I'll bring 'em to the house this week, ye may depend on it," answered Johnnie, as Pashar pushed off the boat, springing nimbly in as the keel left the sand.
"If you do not, I'll never buy another thing from you so long as I live," the girl called back, with a wilful toss of her head, as Leet pulled away with strong, rapid strokes.
"'T is all wrong for two pretty ones like them to be roamin' 'round in such fashion," said Johnnie to himself, as he stooped to take up his pack. Then suddenly, as if remembering something, he turned to the shore and called out, "Shall ye find Master John at home, think ye, Mistress Dorothy?"
Her voice came back silvery clear over the distance of water lying between them. "No; he is up at the Fountain Inn."
"Ah, as I thought," the pedler muttered, with a meaning smile. "I'll just be in the nick o' time."
"What think you it all means, Mary?" Dorothy asked, the two sitting close together in the boat.
"What all means?" echoed Mary, in an absent-minded way, her head turned toward the shore they were leaving, where on the higher land the far-away windows of the Fountain Inn were showing like glimmering stars in the light of the setting sun.
"Why," Dorothy explained, smiling at Mary's abstraction, "all these soldiers coming down here? And Johnnie acts and talks as if he could tell something important, if he chose."
"You know, Dot, we are like to have serious trouble, perhaps a war with the mother country."
"And all because of a parcel of old tea!" exclaimed Dorothy, with great scorn.
Mary now turned her face in the direction the boat was going, and smiled faintly. "The tea is really what has brought matters to a head," she said. "But there is more in it than that alone, from what I've heard my father say. And there is much about it that we girls cannot rightly understand, or talk about very wisely. Only, I hope there will be no war. War is such a terrible thing," she added with a shudder, "and you know what Moll told us. I almost wish we had not gone to see her to-day."
"I am not a bit sorry we went," said Dorothy, stoutly. "I am glad. What did she say, something about a big black cloud full of lightnings and muttering thunder, coming from across the sea, to spread over the land and darken it? Was n't that it?"
"Yes, and much more. Do you think she was asleep as she talked to us, Dot? She looked so strangely, and yet her eyes were wide open all the time."
"Tyntie does the same thing at times. She says it's 'trance.' But Aunt Penine always puts me out of the kitchen when Tyntie gets that way, and so I don't know whether she talks or not. I mean to try and find out, if I can, the next time Tyntie gets into such a state."
"Nothing seems strange for Indians to do or to be," Mary said musingly; "but I never heard of such things amongst white people."
"Oh, yes, you did," Dorothy answered quickly. "Whatever are you thinking of, not to remember about the witches? 'T is said they could foretell to a certainty of future happenings. I wish I'd lived in those days, although it could not have been pleasant to see folks hanged for such knowledge. As for Moll Pitcher, I guess she might have been treated as was old Mammie Redd."
CHAPTER IV
There was a long silence, broken at last by Mary saying, "Perhaps what some folk say of Moll is true, that it is an evil gift she has. And yet she has a sweet face and gentle manner."
"I wonder if 't is truth, what they say of old Dimond, her father," said Dorothy, her chin supported in one soft palm, while her eyes looked off over the water, motionless almost as the seaweed growing on the scarred rocks along the shore, left bare by the low tide.
"What is that?" Mary asked.
"Why, that whenever there was a dark, stormy night, with a gale threatening the ships at sea, he would go up on Burial Hill, and beat about amongst the grass, to save the crews from shipwreck."
Mary laughed. "What an idea!" she exclaimed. "How could beating the ground about the dead benefit or protect the living, who are surely in the keeping of Him who makes the tempests?"
"I don't know," was Dorothy's simple answer. "Only that is what I've heard, ever since I was a child. And such talk always took my fancy."
"Well, old Dimond doesn't look now as if he could have strength to beat the ground, or anything else. Poor old man, he is very feeble, and I should say 't is a happy thing for him that Moll can come down from Lynn now and then, to attend him."
"Yes," Dorothy assented. Then, with a lively change of tone and manner, "'T was odd, Mary, for her to say that when you left her door you were to see your true-love riding to meet you on horseback."
Mary started, and without answering, turned her head away, while the blood rushed to her lovely face.
"Which was he, sweetheart?" Dorothy persisted teasingly, bending her head so as to bring her smiling face directly under the down-dropped blue eyes, and then laughing outright at the confusion she saw there.
"Which one was it?" she repeated. "You know Hugh Knollys rode down the road directly toward you, and then "
But Mary's white hand was over the laughing lips and silenced them.
"If your father should hear you talking in such fashion, Dot, I feel sure he would be displeased with me for having gone with you to see Moll." Mary made an effort to look and speak naturally, but her eyes were very bright and her face was still deeply flushed.
Dorothy smiled, and shook her curly head wilfully. "Not he," she said with decision; "leastway, not for long. He is stern enough, at times, to others; but he can never be severe with me."
"Ah, Dot, but you are surely a spoiled child," said Mary, with a fond glance at the winsome face.
Dorothy shrugged her small shoulders. "So Aunt Penine is always saying; but all the aunts in the world could never come 'twixt my father and me."
Little 'Bitha, who had been crooning softly to herself, and improvising, after a fashion of her own,