Soldier Rigdale: How He Sailed in the Mayflower and How He Served Miles Standish

by Beulah Marie Dix

The men on the bluff, too, looked grave and anxious, and the Captain's voice was sharp and stern. But the boys who were allowed muskets, albeit their faces were decorously sober, looked very happy, and handled their weapons with such pride that Miles grew ashamed of his paltry fowling piece.

"You might let me have the musket a little time, Giles," he murmured to young Hopkins, who stood beside him on the northern slope of the bluff, where they were watching the horizon. "Surely, I could manage it, and 'tis Ned's, anyway, and he is my friend."

Giles preserved an elderly, careworn silence, and puckered his brows upon the ominous east, when suddenly from behind them shrilled a whistle. Miles guessed who it was before he turned, so, though Giles and some of the others cried out in surprise, he thought it quite a matter of course when he saw Ned Lister coming across the fields to the bluff.

Ned walked at a leisurely limp, with his fowling piece over his shoulder, and his cap on one side; it was not till he came nearer that Miles saw, too, that his clothes were muddied and stuck with briers and leaves, and his face was white to his lips, that were set in a hard line. "Well," he greeted his fellow-colonists civilly, "did you think I meant to sit there in the bushes till you chose to come seek me?"

There he staggered a little, so Dotey caught hold of him, and just then Standish, striding through the thin ranks of his company, came up. "How did you get hither, Lister?" he asked, with whatever surprise may have been his well in check.

"I walked," Ned answered, and then, as he saw the Captain's eyes upon his muddied jacket, he began to laugh oddly. "That is, sir, sometimes I rolled and otherwhiles I crawled. For I did not wish to be gulled of the fight. And—Giles Hopkins, you thief! give me my musket."

"My father said I might—" Giles began, unruly for once, but there a sudden sound of cheering on the hilltop cut short the dispute. A man—Gilbert Winslow, they saw—came running break-neck down the steep street, and, so far as he could be heard, called to them, "English, an English ship!" and then those on the bluff, too, took up the cheering.

It was the sailor Trevor, who, from the Fort Hill, had watched the ship grow larger till he vowed that he could make out that she was rigged in the English fashion. Still the Captain held his force together on the bluff till the stranger's nationality should be assured past doubt, and, meantime, he bade Dotey and Giles help Ned Lister to the house. "And see that he stays there," the Captain added dryly.

So Ned, turned limp and unresisting of a sudden, staggered away between the two, and Miles, though he would fain have watched till the ship should loom up round the beach point, thought friendship required that he should follow after with the musket.

When he returned to the landing place, many minutes later, there was no longer a doubt or a fear, for the flag of England fluttered from the vessel's mast. The ship Fortune, with the reënforcements for the colony, that was not expected for a month more, was casting anchor in Plymouth Harbor.