“I think, sir, ’tis Master Maverick’s boat from Noddle’s Island, and there are four men in her whose faces I cannot yet make out.”
“A friendly visit, belike. Stay you here, Bart, until you can determine the craft, and then carry the news to the governor. I am going down to the Rock on mine own occasions.”
Bowling merrily along before an easterly breeze, the ketch soon rounded Beach Point, and dropped her anchor opposite the village, but in midstream, and so soon as the sails were snugged, and all made ready for some possible change of weather, the four visitors stepped into a skiff and were sculled ashore by a tall, fine-looking young fellow, whose bronzed face and lithe figure were well set off by the buckskin hunting-shirt and red cap worn with a jaunty air not inharmonious with the young man’s roving black eyes and flashing smile.
“Master Maverick and his son, Master Blackstone from Shawmut, and Master Bursley and Master Jeffries from Wessagussett,” reported Bart Allerton, hat in hand, at the governor’s door, and Bradford, laying down his book, replied with a grave smile,—
“I will go to meet them.”
Half an hour later the three elder visitors with the governor, the captain, Allerton, Doctor Fuller, and one or two more, were closeted in the new room recently added to the governor’s house, and used by him as a council chamber and court room.
Moses Maverick, the handsome young boatman, had meanwhile somewhat pointedly sought out Bart Allerton, and almost invited himself to accompany him home.
“Go you into the front room and entertain him, Remember,” directed the young step-mother with a mischievous smile. “I am too busy with little Isaac to leave him just now.”
And Maverick received the apologies of his hostess with an air so strangely contented that Remember paused half way in making them, and faltered and blushed and laughed, very much as a modest but open-eyed girl would do to-day.
“I told you last Lady Day that I should soon be here again, Remember,” murmured the youth rather irrelevantly.