"Hasten!" shouted Master Herries, roaring like a bull at the men, and we saw a boat pulling out from shore. It reached us just as our anchor lifted, and over the rail scrambled a stout man waving a parchment with dangling seals.
"Halt, in the Royal name!" he squeaked, and my father stepped out to him.
"What's a' the steer aboot?" asked my father quietly. At this I looked for trouble, for it was in my mind that whenever Fergus MacDonald had come to using the Scots dialect, there had been doings afterward.
"Ha' ye permission to gan awa' frae Scotland?" cried the stout man, puffing and blowing as he glared around. "Well ye ken ye hae nane, Fergus MacDonald, an' since I hae coom in siccan a de'il's hurry—"
"Be off," broke in my father sternly, pointing to the shore. For answer the fellow waved out his parchment spluttering something about the "Royal commeesioner" that I did not fully catch. But my father caught it well enough, and his face went black as he strode forward and lifted the stout man in both hands, easily.
"Say to him it wad fit him better to look to his ain life than ours," he roared, and therewith heaved up the man and sent him overside into the bay. Wat Herries cried out sharply to duck behind the bulwarks lest shot be flying, but there was none of that. I saw the stout man picked up by his boat and return to shore, shaking his fist vainly at the laughter which met and followed him; then the wind bellied out our sails and the voyage was begun. A little later it came out that news had spread abroad of our purpose and that the commissioner had wished to stop us, but for what reason I never knew.
My father conjectured shrewdly enough that we would have been sent elsewhere than to New York. However, we soon forgot that, for the whole party was clustered on the poop watching the purple hills behind us. The little port faded ere long into a solid background, for the breeze was a stiff one, and that afternoon we looked our last on Scotland. This was the occasion for another address and prayer from Alec Gordon, and this time I joined in right willingly. I had never been so far from land before, and the tossing of the ship made me no wee bit uneasy.
Nor was this lessened during the following days. Five in all I suffered, together with all the moor-folk, as I never want to suffer more. Ruth was free from the sickness, as was my father, but Maisie Graham, poor soul, came near dying with it. After the fifth day, however, I crawled out on deck a new man, albeit weak in the legs, and never knew that the sun could feel so good.
The next day thereafter I was almost myself again, and paid back the jests of Ruth with interest. She had great sport of my sickness, although to tell the truth she tended me with unremitting care and kindness, when my father would have let me be to get over it as best I could.
To confess it straightway, I gained greater respect for Alec Gordon in those days, and in those to come, than I had ever felt before. The sight of the great ocean around us and the feel of the tossing deck that alone kept us from harm, put the fear of God into my heart in good surety, so that I entered into the morning and evening meetings with new earnestness. Nor was it only while the danger lasted that I felt thus. I had seen the ocean full often, but I had never so much as gone out with a fishing-boat, and those first few days were full of grim earnestness that proved their worth in the end.