“Here, Pike and Halberd,” he said, “you must meet my third father, Captain William Phipps, a noble man to whom you will owe allegiance all your miserable lives. William, these are my beef-eaters. Don’t ask me where I got them. They are neither out of jail nor heaven. But they have let me save their lives and feed them and clothe them, and they are valiant, faithful rascals. To know them is to love them, and not to know them is to be snubbed by Satan. They have been my double shadow for a year, sharing my prosperous condition like two peers of the realm.”
The beef-eaters grinned as they exchanged salutations with Phipps. Pike was a short individual, inclined to be fat, even when on the slimmest of rations. The pupils of his eyes were like two suns that had risen above the horizon of his lower lids, only to obscure themselves under the cloud-like lids above. Their expression, especially when he gazed upward into Adam’s face, was something too appealingly saint-like and beseeching for anything mortal to possess. Halberd was a ladder of a man up which everything, save success, had clambered to paint expressions on his face, which was grave and melancholy to the verge of the ludicrous. He had two little bunches of muscle, each of which stuck out like half a walnut, at the corners of his jaws, where they had grown and developed as a result of his clamping his molars together, in a determination to do or to be something which had, apparently, never as yet transpired.
The two looked about as much like beef-eaters as a mouse looks like a man-eater. They were ragged, where not fantastic, in their apparel; they were obviously fitter for a feast than a fight, for the sea had depleted both of their hoardings of vigor and courage.
“Sire,” said Halberd, theatrically, “we have had nothing but good reports of you for a year.” Whether he placed his hand on his heart or his stomach, as he said this, and what he meant to convey as his meaning, could never be wholly clear.
“We shall be honored to fight for you, if need arise,” said Pike, who panted somewhat, on all occasions, “while there is a breath in our bodies.”
“It is a privilege to know you both,” said Phipps, whose gravity was as dry as tinder.
“Any friend of the Sachem’s is a friend of ours,” responded Halberd. He said this grandly and made a profound bow.
“The ‘Sachem’?” repeated Phipps, and he looked at Adam, inquiringly.
Adam had the grace to blush a trifle, thus to be caught in one of the harmless little boasts in which he had indulged himself, over sea. “Just a foolish habit the two have gotten into,” he murmured.
“Ah,” said William Phipps. “Well, then, Sachem, it will soon be growing dark, you had best come home with me to dinner.”