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

by Beulah Marie Dix

Miles stopped short five paces behind his comrades. He looked to the hills ahead, where the bare branches of oak trees stood out clearly against the afternoon sky. It was a lowering sky, and night was coming. He glanced behind him, and saw only the barren wall of hills, no sign of the harbor or of the Mayflower. Ned and Giles were looking at each other with a something so dubious in their faces that Miles felt a griping sensation in his throat. He wondered if he could find his way back as he had come, and, doubting it, drew close to Ned, who had the fowling piece.

Ned was fiddling with the lock of the piece and he spoke rather sheepishly: "I'm not afraid. But I'm not going to run into Heaven knows what with two younkers like you on my shoulders."

"Say we march home, then?" Giles suggested, and straightway, facing round, they retraced their steps pretty smartly.

Miles was still in the rear, and, as he went, he studied the long legs of his companions and thought how much more swiftly they could run for it, if anything came up behind them. Thinking so, he forgot to look to his feet, and, as they descended a gully, fell headlong with a great clattering of stones. "Wait for me!" he cried, in a sharp, high voice that did not sound natural.

Ned glanced back, with his face tenser than its wont. "Here, take the fowling piece, Giles," he said curtly; then, returning to Miles, he lifted him to his feet, and, keeping one hand beneath his arm, helped him to hurry along.

Thus they scurried down the hillside to the swamp, and, catching up their sickles and the thatch, pressed on toward the settlement. Not till they were panting up the landward side of the great hill and caught the faint sound of hammers in the street of the half-built town, did Ned suffer the speed to slacken. "You'll make a gallant soldier one day, Miley," he said then, and began laughing. "Though I take it no one of us was afraid; eh, boys?"

They all agreed they were not in the least frightened, and some such version Ned must have reported to Captain Standish, when he told how they had seen Indian fires. For next day Miles found himself quite a hero in the sight of the other lads, because he had gone far into the woods and walked boldly right into an encampment of the savages. But Goodman Rigdale chided his son sternly for such a harebrained prank, and after that made the boy stay within his sight while he was on shore.

Miles did not greatly mind, for his father and Francis Cooke, the father of his playmate Jack, were now engaged in a delightful work in which he liked to help. Lately the whole company of the Mayflower had been divided into nineteen families, and these two men, who had been placed in one household, were building together a cottage, high up on the hillside. His father's house, Miles insisted upon calling it, though Goodman Rigdale was at pains to explain to him that the cottage belonged not to any one man, but to the whole company; the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the merchants at London, who had advanced the money for the voyage, were to hold everything in common till seven years were up and then divide all equally, and till then no man could call a house his own.

Still, Miles knew that by and by his mother and Dolly and Jack Cooke would come ashore, as other families were coming, and they would live together in that house, so it seemed the same as if it belonged to his father. He looked forward to the time when they would all be under one roof, and he would be suffered to sleep ashore, for, though his father passed his nights at the Common House, there was no room for Miles, who at twilight had to journey off to the ship. But that arrangement drew speedily to an end, for the walls of the house, built of squared logs, soon rose to a good height; the chimney of sticks and clay was finished; and at last it was but a question of thatching the roof.

Of a dull afternoon in mid-January Goodman Rigdale set out to cut swamp grass for the thatch, and took with him Miles, who had not been so far afield since his exploit with Ned Lister. They went steadily up the slope on the shoulder of the great hill, and there Miles, who had run a little ahead with Trug, paused to look back proudly at the stanch, new cottage below. "Those are brave big logs in our house, are they not, sir?" he broke out. "'Twill last us a many years."