The Windy Hill

by Cornelia Meigs

"It is a glorious day, so cold and the roads so deep in snow. The horses are like wild things, and will give us a famous gallop up the valley. Oh, do come, Cicely."

But no, she must stay in the big gloomy countinghouse, to finish the letters that she had promised to copy for her father, while Alan had flung off, saying over his shoulder, as he departed to take his ride alone:

"It is very wrong to miss fun and adventure by toiling and moiling here. Think how the sea will look and how the blasts will be blowing over our Windy Hill!"

The place seemed very cheerless and empty after he had gone. The long windows gave little light on that gray winter afternoon, and the big fireplace with its glowing logs was at the far end of the room. There were shadows already on the shelves of heavy ledgers lining the walls, and on the rows of ship's models all up and down the sides of the big countingroom. Those lines of dusty volumes held records that Alan was forever reading, tales of wonderful voyages, of spices and gold dust and jewels brought home from the Orient, of famines in far lands broken by the coming of American grain ships, of profits reckoned in ducats and doubloons and Spanish pieces of eight. Cicely was fond of drawing and loved, far more than copying dull letters, to make sketches of those miniature vessels in the glass cases that stood for the Hallowell ships that had scoured the oceans of the world. They had been wrecked on coral reefs in hot, distant seas, they had lain becalmed with priceless cargoes in pirate-infested waters, their crews were as skillful with the long guns as they were at handling the sails, their captains were as at home in Shanghai or Calcutta as they were in the streets of the little seaport town where they had been born. Cicely could remember when the big countingroom had been crowded with clerks and had hummed like a beehive with the myriad activities of the Hallowell trade. It was a dull and empty place now, and the fleet of Hallowell ships was scattered, some lying at anchor, some dismantled and sold, some fallen into the hands of the enemy. For this was the third year of that struggle with England that the histories were to call the War of 1812.

Cicely, for all her thirteen years, looked very small, sitting there at the end of the long table, in her "sprigged" high-waisted gown, her feet in their strapped slippers perched on the rung of the high office stool. She had just taken up her pen to begin writing again when the voices of the two men by the fire rose so suddenly that she dropped it, startled. Her father's tone fell almost immediately to strained quiet, but Martin Hallowell, his partner, went on with angry insistence. She knew him to be hot-headed and impetuous, but she had never heard such words from him before.

With a quick, eager motion that was the embodiment of impatient greed, Martin was running his finger down the columns of the ledger before him.

"There is no ship like a privateer, and no privateer like the Huntress," he was saying. "Send her on one more voyage and we shall be rich men."

There was an ugly tremor in his voice, that quavered and broke in spite of his attempts to keep it calm.

"I do not care to be one of those who gathers riches from a war," returned Reuben Hallowell, Cicely's father. There was something in the dry calm of his answer that seemed to stir Martin to uncontrollable anger.

"It is like you, Reuben Hallowell," he said, "to be willing to ruin my plans by your foolish scruples just when a real prize is within reach. But I vow you shall not do it. You shall be a wealthy man in spite of yourself, and let me remind you that, two years ago, before we built the Huntress, you were a precious poor one."