"Take your guns with you," continued Zeb. "We shall not want them any more. When we board the next Britisher you will have a cutlass or pike in your hands."
The boys clambered down into the boat with Zeb Short and were slowly sculled toward the shore. It looked to them as if they were in for fighting and nothing else. They did not stop to speak to the captain or any of the other men standing around but went straight for home as fast as they could go. There was one place where they were tempted to stop and exchange a few words with the inmates, and that was at James Howard's house. The boys were sitting on the porch and were talking about what they had seen at the wharf.
"There go a couple of those rebels now," said James, as Enoch and Caleb hurried by. "I hope I will be here to see them hung up."
"Enoch, I have the best notion to go back and whip him in his own dooryard," said Caleb, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. "If you will keep the other off me, I can punish James in two whacks."
"Come on, now, and don't mind them," said Enoch, taking Caleb by the arm. "You may have some other fellows to fight some day, some that have weapons in their hands, and you can take revenge upon James in that way. Come along."
Caleb reluctantly allowed himself to be led away, and presently he was dropped at his own gate. Enoch broke into a run and entered the kitchen where his mother was busy with her usual vocations. He seized a chair, moved it up under the hooks on which his flint-lock belonged, placed it there with his bullet-pouch and powder-horn, and Mrs. Crosby looked at him with surprise.
"What's to do, Enoch?" she said at length.
"Mother, I want my bedclothes and a change of underwear to go out to sea," said Enoch. "You see——"
Here the boy began and told his story in as few words as possible, and to his joy his mother did not say one word to oppose him.
"There is one thing that does not look exactly right," he continued, "and that is I don't know what I am going to get for my trouble. I do not know that I am going to get a cent."