For a moment Hyde remained standing with rage; then he sat down abruptly and rapped upon the table for an orderly.
“Dispatches from Boston for General Putnam,” said he shortly. “Tell him so.”
George stood back and awaited the soldier’s return; and as he waited he could not help wondering at his odd experience in New York.
“I have been on shore but a bare hour—scarcely that long—and I have met with nothing but affronts and rebuffs,” he said to the young ensign who sat in a window overlooking Broadway. “I can’t understand the attitude of the colonists here. At Boston, one has but to be a patriot to meet with consideration. But in New York, apparently, it makes little difference what your sympathies; you have but to be a stranger to be marked for insolence.”
“New York,” said the ensign, who seemed a person of some intelligence, “is very different from Boston—from my own city, Philadelphia, or from any other place in the colonies, for the matter of that. It was settled by mixed races—Dutch, Huguenots, English and Scotch. Their interests, desires and ideals have been different from the beginning. They have become so accustomed to facing each other down and sneering at each other’s social peculiarities that it has, so it seems, grown to be a part of their deportment.”
Here the speaker was about to plunge into an elaborate discourse upon this subject, but George was saved from listening by the orderly reappearing from an inner room and beckoning him forward.
“The general will see you,” said he.
In another moment the young man found himself in the presence of the stout, red-faced Putnam who sat puzzling over some intricate maps at a great table. Beside him sat another officer whom George at once recognized as General Sullivan, and standing near by was General Heath, who had done so much to train the raw levies for the fight at Breed’s Hill.
GENERAL PUTNAM GLANCED UP