Having spoken, he shouldered his axe and trudged sturdily away, followed by his companion, neither of them regarding the heated remonstrances of Sergeant Branderby.
“A pest on you all,” he shouted. “A Spanish mule is not more stubborn than a New Englander. But think not your tree is to be spared. I will even hew it down myself.”
For that purpose the good Sergeant required an axe which he procured easily enough by riding after the departing workmen and presenting one of his great horse-pistols to the younger man’s head.
“Let him have the axe, Jonas,” said the elder. “If he tries to hew down the tree on this hot day he will burst a blood-vessel, and Heaven be praised if he does.”
Leading his horse and holding the tool in plainly unaccustomed hands, the Sergeant came back to the foot of the pine. Here, however, a new complication had presented itself, one that made Branderby’s face flush a deeper red with helpless fury.
“Come down, you wicked lad,” he roared. “Come down this moment or harm will come to you, I vow.”
But Stephen, who had scrambled up among the lower branches, looked down at him in mocking defiance. There was a certain kindliness in Branderby’s weatherbeaten face that made him almost certain that the soldier, angry as he was, would not cut down a tree with a boy clinging among its boughs.
“If the tree falls, I fall with it,” he called, “so ply your axe if you dare.”
Up he went, higher and higher. He passed the branch where he had so often sat to listen to the wind roaring like the sea through the great, swaying branches, he passed the place where he had carved his name to mark the highest point that any boy had ever reached, yet still he went on, up and up. His brown head came out at last amid the thinner green at the very top, where he could feel the sun hot upon his neck and where he could look out across meadow and hillside, past the harbour and the headlands to the wide, blue, open sea. He could see, too, like a picture spread below him, Master Simon’s garden with its square flowerbeds, its green hedges and its winding paths. He saw the door of the house fly open and his mother, with flying skirts and ruffled hair, come running across the lawn. Somehow she had got wind of the trouble and was hastening to interfere.
“Come down, you treacherous boy,” shouted Sergeant Branderby again, “or I have that here which will make you.”