At first the thickly wooded beach point screened the shore, but, as the little craft rounded it, the dim hills across the harbor were visible, and there, on the greatest hill, too low for stars, Miles saw sparks of light twinkle.
It was as if the men in the shallop all drew breath again, and Miles himself, forgetting his guilt and the punishment in store for him, cried joyfully: "They're safe!"
But in a moment half the joy went from him, for, when Alden, in the bow, fired his musket thrice, with startling reëchoes, Master Hopkins told him grimly that the signal was to let the people yonder know he had destroyed neither himself nor his sister by his sinful foolhardiness. Miles hung his head sorrily, and, for all Captain Standish presently clapped him on the shoulder and bade him look how the people flocked to the landing, did not glance up till, with a splash of oars in the quiet water, the shallop lay to, by the dark rock.
In the thick twilight the faces of the people gathered thither could not be made out, but all the colony was there, Miles guessed by the babel of voices, and, after they had lifted him ashore, he knew it was Priscilla Mullins who hugged him undignifiedly, and he thought it was Mistress Brewster who cried when she spoke to him. But he had no time to make certain, for just then Master Hopkins grasped him by the arm and led him away up the hill to his house.
Within the familiar living room a candle was alight, that set Miles blinking as he was brought in from the darkness, but he made out Mistress Hopkins, with an anxious scowl on her brows, though, for all Miles's torn shirt, she did not scold one word, and he saw Constance, with her eyes red, and Giles, who had tramped in after him, and Dotey and Lister. "Then they didn't hang you?" Miles cried to the latter, too weary to be civil.
"Hang who?" asked Ned, pretty sheepishly, as his master's eyes were upon him.
"You said they were going to hang you—"
"Not I, never," vowed Ned, with his face flushing, and, slouching off into the bedroom, rattled the door to behind him.
Miles followed him thither speedily,—he was not to be coddled by two soft-hearted women, Master Hopkins said,—and Giles and Dotey came too. They questioned him eagerly of his adventures, but Miles, unflattered even by such attention, would not speak of Indians or of birch canoes, just poured forth his woes in a weary voice upon the verge of tears: he would surely be soundly whipped, and Ned had said they would be hanged and they hadn't been, and if Ned hadn't said it, he wouldn't 'a' run away.