"Very well. Then get you into the store-room and sort over the pelts Peter fetched in. Even a pirate must work."
He flung off with a scowl as I turned to Peter.
"My father will wish to know the packet has arrived," I said. "Will you go with me to the Governor's? The Council must be on the point of breaking up, for they have been sitting since noon."
Peter heaved his enormous body erect. And I marveled, as always after a period of absence, at his proportions. To one who did not know him he seemed a butter-tub of a man, as Darby had called him—a mass of tallow, fat limbs, a pork-barrel of a trunk, a fat slab of a face upon which showed tiny, insignificant features grotesquely at variance with the rest of his bulk. His little eyes peered innocently between rolls of fat which all but masked them. His nose was a miniature dab, above a mouth a child might have owned.
But under his layers of blubber were concealed muscles of forged steel, and he was capable of the agility of a catamount. The man had not lived on the frontier who could face him bare-handed and escape.
"Ja," he said simply. "We go."
He stood his musket in a corner and slipped off powder-horn and shot-pouch the while I donned hat and greatcoat, for the air was still chilly and there was a scum of snow on the ground. We passed out into Pearl Street and walked westward to Hanover Square, and there on the farther side of the Square I spied my father, with Governor Clinton and Lieutenant-Governor Colden.
And it made my heart warm to see how these and several other gentlemen hung upon his words. There had been those who slandered him during the uproar over the '45, for he was known to have been a Jacobite in his youth; but his friends were more powerful than his enemies, and I joy to think that he was not the least influential of those of our leaders who held New York loyal to King George when many were for casting in our fortunes with the Pretender.
He saw Peter and me as we approached and waved us to him, but at the same moment there was a slight disturbance on the eastward side of the Square, and another little group of men came into view surrounding a grizzled, ruddy-cheeked old fellow, whose salt-stained blue coat spoke as eloquently of the sea as did his rolling gait. I could hear his hoarse, roaring voice clear across the Square—
"—ran him tops'ls down; —— my eyes, I did; and when I get to port what do I find, but not a King's ship within——"