When a witch is young: a historical novel

by Philip Verrill Mighels

The more he thought upon it, then, the more impossible it seemed for him to return. Against Randolph, enthroned in power, and against all his wretched disciples, he could not expect to breathe a word which would avail to get him justice. It would be sheer madness to make the attempt. The creatures would charge him with all the crimes on the calendar, and, swearing all to one statement, would convict him of anything they chose. The whole affair had been planned to beat him, or worse, and to a galling extent it had quite succeeded. He was balked, completely and absolutely, in whatsoever direction his meditations turned. To try to see Garde would be fairly suicidal. Not to see her, especially after his promises, would be, to a man so much in love as he, a living death.

And again, the beef-eaters. What was to become of his faithful retinue? They would arrive there, only to find that he had again deserted them, leaving them wholly at the mercy of Randolph and his jackals. These demons would not be slow at recognizing who and what Pike and Halberd were, from episodes of the past. The two would go straight into the lion’s mouth, at the Crow and Arrow.

He thought at first of going to Plymouth. He could write to Garde from there, he reflected, and also to Halberd and Pike. But he soon concluded that this would be to walk merely into the other end of the enemy’s trap, for no good or comforting purpose. New York presented itself as a jurisdiction where Randolph’s arm would have no power to do him harm. But New York was a long way off. If he went there, not only would he miss seeing Garde, but he could not warn his retinue in time to keep them out of Randolph’s clutches.

The business was maddening. He began to think, as a consequence of dwelling on the hopelessness of his own situation, that Randolph would be aiming next at Garde herself, in wreaking his dastardly vengeance for his past defeats. This was intolerable. He halted, there in the dark woods, swaying between the good sense of hiding and the nonsense of going straight back to the town, to carry Garde away from the harpies, bodily.

A picture of old David Donner, stricken, helpless, a child, arose in his mind, to confront him and to mock his Quixotic scheme. He could not carry both Garde and her grandfather away to New York, nor even to the woods. He was penniless. This was not the only obstacle, even supposing Donner would consent so to flee, which was not at all likely.

It was also certain that Garde would not permit him to carry her off and leave the old man behind. But at least, he finally thought, he could go back to the town and be near, to protect her, if occasion should require a sword and a ready wit. Could he but manage to do this—to go there secretly and remain there unknown—he could gather his beef-eaters about him and together they could and would combat an army!

But how to go back and be undetected, that was the question. In the first place he despised the idea of doing anything that did not smack of absolute boldness and fearlessness. Yet Boston was a seething whirlpool of Randolph’s power, at this time. Simply to be caught like a rat and killed like a pest would add nothing of glory to his name, nor could it materially add to Garde’s happiness and safety.

Driven into a corner of his brain, as it were, by all these moves and counter-moves on the chess-board of the situation, he presently conceived a plan which made him hug himself in sheer delight.

He would simply disguise himself as an Indian and go to town to make a treaty with Randolph, the Big-man-afraid-to-be-chief.

This so tickled his fancy that, had an Indian settlement been near at hand, he would have been inside his buckskins and war-paint and back to Boston ahead of the constables themselves. In such a guise, he told himself, he could manage to see his sweetheart, he could get his beef-eaters clear of danger, baffle his foes, and arrange to carry both Garde and her grandfather away to safety.