"Fight 'em, sir."
Captain Standish chuckled softly in his beard. "You'll fight 'em, eh? 'Tis a great pity, in truth, no one has told you what name you bear. You should know that Miles in the Latin tongue signifies 'a soldier.'"
Miles forgot that his cheeks were tear-stained and his eyes swollen, and looked up happily into the speaker's face. "I am right glad of that," he announced. "'Tis a good enough name, after all." He was sorely tempted to ask the Captain if he had been named that after he proved himself a soldier in the wars, or if they named him first and he grew to it afterward, but he concluded that would be over-bold.
Though, after all, he began to doubt if Captain Standish were such a terrible body. He looked pleasant enough now, as he stood in the lantern light,—a stocky, square-shouldered man of some six and thirty years, with yellow-brown hair and beard, and eyes so deep set under his brows Miles could not tell their color. The linen bands at his neck and wrists were small and plain, and along the sides of his doublet of dark maroon kersey the rubbing of armor had worn down the cloth. He was not so fine a gentleman, doubtless, as young Master Edward Winslow, but he looked the man of war, through and through, and, moreover, he neither scolded nor preached at a small sinner; Miles began to be glad in his heart that he bore the same name as the Captain.
"So, after all, you're content to be named 'Soldier' Rigdale?" Standish suddenly read the expression of his face.
"'Tis a soldier that I mean to be," Miles confessed. "I like the smell of powder."
"So it seems," the Captain answered, in the dryest possible tone, and then, as Miles's cheeks began to burn, went on hastily: "Which was it, you or the Billington lad, put out the fire? We found the blanket on the floor of the cabin."
"Mayhap 'twas I. I do not recall it clearly."
The Captain reached out his hand, and, taking Miles by a fold of the doublet-sleeve, lifted his arm. "No doubt 'twas you," he said; "you've blistered your hand here."