After Anne had gone up to the loft to bed Captain Stoddard said slowly: “She seems a good child.”
“That she does, Enos. Good and careful of her clothes, and eager to be of help to me. She saves me many a step.”
“’Tis John Nelson, they say, who has brought the Britishers into harbor,” responded Captain Enos slowly. “Joseph Starkweather swears that one of the sailors told him so when he bargained for the calves.”
“Anne’s not to blame!” declared Mrs. Stoddard loyally, but there was a note of anxiety in her voice; “as you said yourself, Enos, she’s a good child.”
“I’ll not be keeping her if it proves true,” declared the man stubbornly. “True it is that they ask no military duty of any man in Province Town, but we’re loyal folk just the same. We may have to barter with the British to save our poor lives, instead of turning guns on them as we should; but no man shall say that I took in a British spy’s child and cared for it.”
“They’d but say you did a Christian deed at the most,” said his wife. “You’re not a hard man, Enos.”
“I’ll not harbor a traitor’s child,” he insisted, and Mrs. Stoddard went sorrowfully to bed and lay sleepless through the long night, trying to think of some plan to keep Anne Nelson safe and well cared for until peaceful days should come again.
And Anne, too, lay long awake, wondering what she could do to protect the little brown cow which now rested so securely on the further side of the hill.