"Then go with them," cried Miles. "Only you were very fain to play with me on shipboard."
Even this last thrust failed; Jack ran after the others down the hill, and Miles, feeling cross and ill-treated, was left to himself.
'Twould look too much as if he were following his ungracious friends if he went on to the landing, so he turned back to Elder Brewster's house. There Priscilla Mullins, a girl orphaned by the winter's sickness, who, because she was eighteen, was classed by Miles as a woman, was sweeping the doorstone with a broom of birch twigs. She paused in the labor teasingly to throw him a kiss, and tell him his busy sister and the lads were cooking by the brookside.
Sure enough, in the level space between the base of the bluff on which the cottage stood and the cove, Miles found Dolly, and Dolly's poppet Priscilla, and Love, and Wrestling, and Solomon, and Trug, who was not admitted to Mistress Hopkins's house because his great paws dirtied her floor,—all busied in making delectable pies of mud.
But when Miles joined them, Love withdrew from the mud-pie game, and wished to play at holding a council, such as his father and all the men were holding that morning in the Common House to regulate the military affairs of the colony. Dolly insisted that she should be allowed to come to the council too, for all Love urged that women never were invited thither, and the argument was growing bitter, when an unwonted tumult in the village street drew Miles's attention. A confused sort of calling and shrill shouting it seemed, that made his heart quicken between curiosity and alarm; so, snatching up Damaris, he scaled the bluff, while the rest of the children scrambled close behind him.
On the doorstone Mistress Brewster and Priscilla were gazing in silent wonder toward the street, and, looking thither too, Miles saw a man stalk past to the landing, very deliberately, as if he knew the place and held he had the right to come there. It was no one of the settlers, though, but a great, half-naked fellow with a coppery face—an Indian.
Dolly and Wrestling clutched Mistress Brewster's skirts, the little boy fairly crying, and Miles himself, it must be owned, held Damaris fast and drew a step nearer the doorstone. But next moment he noted the Indian carried for weapons only a bow and two arrows, with which he could not kill all the settlement, and, moreover, at his heels tagged venturously Giles Hopkins and several of the other boys, and even Goodwife Billington, very clamorous, and the Governor's serving maid.
So Miles, not to be outdone by a petticoat, swaggered into the roadway and joined himself to the little group of curious folk, who, always ready to flee if he should turn on them, followed close at the savage's heels, down the steep hill, past Peter Browne's cottage, even to the door of the Common House.
The noise in the street had already disturbed the men at their conference, and they came flocking forth at the door, the Governor, the Elder, and the Captain, with a score of other stout fighters crowding behind them. But the Indian, never a whit abashed, strode boldly up to them, would even have pressed into the house, had not their ranks barred his passage. Nothing chilled, he halted, and, stretching forth his hands, spoke in a guttural tone: "Welcome."
"Do Indians talk English?" Miles whispered to Giles, who stood beside him. "Hush, hush, Damaris! The black man won't hurt you."