“Lose not your courage, my men!” pleaded Chaplain Hunt. “God has not deserted us. It is but a testing sent to purify our hearts. Go to work and rebuild your cabins immediately and He will yet smile upon your efforts.”
What a noble heart lay enshrined in the body of this Ambassador of God. With nothing left but the clothes he wore, and his dearly loved books but blackened ashes, he could yet trust his Maker, and await with loving faith the fulfilment of His promises.
His words of encouragement found no responsive echo in their hearts. They gave themselves up to despair, and their utmost efforts resulted only in the digging of holes in the ground and covering them with pine boughs as a sleeping-place.
A year has passed by, and here they are in the bleak month of January without food or shelter. Nothing gained and all lost since they set sail from England.
The food brought over by Newport’s ships, together with two hundred bushels of corn which he and Captain Smith had gotten from Powhatan, have all gone to feed the flames. A little meal doled out from the ship’s store is all they have.
CHAPTER X
A white, silent world, shimmering under the brilliance of a full moon riding high in the lighted heavens. The gnarled boughs of twisted trees cast their inky shadows in fantastic tracery over its glistening surface.
Seated around a roaring fire were some ten or twelve men, wrapped in their long cloaks and vainly endeavoring to warm their aching limbs. Among them was a newcomer, Adam Clotworthy, a rollicking blade whom no misfortune seemed to chill. His great round body, covered with a quilted doublet of scarlet cloth, rocked from side to side on legs so short there seemed no room for joints at the knees. Stubby black hair shot out around a face in which sly humor and common sense were blended together by an expression of human kindness. A brown eye and a blue eye, never looking in the same direction, stood sentinel on either side of a huge nose that had a trick of working at the end when he talked.
Coming now to the side of Kendall, he poked him in the ribs with his elbow.