King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the tribe, had thereafter been as a foster-father to the boy. For more than two years the Red-man had believed John Rust to have found his final lodge, and this was the truth. And perhaps he had also found his holy grail. He perished alone in the trackless forest. Adam had learned his wood-lore of his red brothers. He was stout, lithe, wiry and nimble. He rode a horse like the torso of a centaur. He was a bit of a boaster, in a frank and healthy way.
King Philip’s war, ascribed, as to causes, to “the passion of the English for territory; their confidence that God had opened up America for their exclusive occupancy; their contempt for the Indians and their utter disregard for their rights,” had come inexorably upon the Wampanoags. In its vortex of action, movement, success and failure at last for the Indians, Adam Rust had been whirled along with Metacomet. He had never been permitted by King Philip to fight against his “white brothers,” but he had assisted to plan for the safety of the old men, women and children, in procuring game and in constructing shelters. He had learned to love these silently suffering people with all his heart. The fights, the hardships, the doom, coming inevitably upon the hopeless Wampanoags, had made the boy a man, in some of the innermost recesses of a heart’s suffering. He had seen the last sad remnants of the Wampanoags, the Pocassets and the Narragansetts scatter, to perish in the dismal swamps. He had witnessed the death of King Philip, brought upon him by a treacherous fellow Red-man. And then he had marched in that grim procession.
Adam made no attempt to convey an idea of the magnitude of his loss. It would not have been possible. There is something in human nature which can never be convinced that death has utterly stilled a beloved voice and quenched the fire of the soul showing through a pair of eyes endeared by companionship. This in Adam made him feel, even as he told his tale to William Phipps, that he was somehow deserting his faithful friends.
Bareheaded on the sun-lit deck as he told his story, lithe in his gestures, splendidly scornful when he imitated the great chieftains of the tribes, and then like a young Viking as at last he finished his narrative and looked far and wide on the sparkling sea, in joyousness at the newer chapter which seemed to open to the very horizons themselves before him, Adam awakened the lusty youth and daring in William Phipps and the dreams of a world’s career always present in his brain.
The man’s eyes sparkled, as he spun the wheel that guided the brig, bounding beneath their feet. A restlessness seized upon the spirit in his breast.
“Adam,” he said, “do you like this ship?”
“Yes!—oh, it makes me feel like shouting!” the boy exclaimed. “I wish I could straddle it, like a horse, and make it go faster and wilder, ’way off there—and everywhere! Oh, don’t it make you breathe!”
“Then,” said Phipps, repressing his own love of such a madness as Adam had voiced, “let us go for a long sail together. I have long had in mind a voyage for trading to Hispaniola. If you would like to go with me, I will get the brig ready in a week.”
For his answer young Adam leaped as if he would spur the ship in the ribs and ride her to the end of the earth forthwith.