"Why, yes; I have been ready and waiting this long while. To tell the truth, I have had enough of Philadelphia and its Quaker-ridden Assembly. Why, when once the war had broken out and was raging in good earnest, I longed for nothing so much as my own youth back again, that I might fight with the best of them. And the peace palaver of the Quakers sickened me. I came near to quarrelling with some of my old friends, and I grew eager to see fresh places, fresh faces. I turned it over in my mind, and I thought that if Quebec fell into our hands, English-speaking citizens would surely be wanted to leaven the French and Canadians who would remain. And if so, why should not I be one to take up my abode?"
"Why not, indeed?" cried Fritz, whose eyes were eagerly straying round the room in search of somebody he had not seen as yet. "It was a happy thought, as our Commander has just told you, I doubt not."
"He has been a capital friend--he has put me in possession of this place; and I can see that there will be the making of a fine business here. And I have not come empty-handed. I sold the old tavern over yonder, and I have a fine store of wine and ale and salted provisions stored away on board, enough to set me up for the winter.
"I must have that old sign down," added Ashley, stepping into the street and looking up at the battered board crazily hanging from the beam above; "we must have another one up instead. I'll set up a wolf's head in its place, in memory of the gallant soldier who fell on the Plains of Abraham. And I will call my inn the Wolfe of Quebec."
Fritz laughed, still looking round him with quick glances.
"And what said your wife and daughter to such a move?"
"Oh, the wife is a good wife, and follows her husband; though I won't say she did not feel the wrench of parting a good bit. As for the maid, she was wild to come! She has done nothing but think of the war ever since it began. She is half a soldier already, I tell her, and is making herself only fit to be a soldier's wife. She might have had the pick of all the young Quakers in Philadelphia; but you should have seen her turn up her pretty nose at them. "'A Quaker indeed!' quoth the little puss; 'I'd as lief marry a broomstick with a turnip for a head! Give me a man who is a man, not a puling woman in breeches!'
"The sauciness of the little puss!"
But Ashley's jolly laugh showed that he encouraged the maid in her "sauciness," and Fritz and Humphrey laughed in sympathy.
"Where are Mrs. Ashley and Susanna to be found?" asked Fritz when the laugh had subsided.