Standish of Standish Part 36

"And ask who was The-White-Fool, and what his story," demanded Standish as Squanto finished rendering the governor's message.

"Squanto know that in himself. Every Pokanoket know that," replied Squanto, while Janno muttered gloomily in his own tongue,--

"All red men know The-White-Fool's curse. All feel it." So Squanto in his broken yet picturesque phrases told how "many snows ago" a large French ship was wrecked farther down the Cape and nearly everything aboard was lost. Several of her crew, however, came safely ash.o.r.e and made a sort of camp with some earthwork defenses on the mouth of the Pamet River.

"Why men, we saw it, and mused upon the marks of European skill and training," exclaimed Standish.

"Ay, and the house hard by, and the marvelous grave with the fair-haired man and infant so curiously embalmed," added Fuller.

"Truly, this is pa.s.sing strange!" murmured Bradford. "But get on with thy story, Tisquantum."

The Frenchmen were quiet and peaceable enough, Tisquantum could not but allow, and yet his people would not permit them to dwell unmolested, perhaps from some vague fear of ancient prophecy that a pale-faced race should come from the rising sun and drive the red men into the western seas; perhaps from some race-hatred lying below the savage's power of expression; at any rate, as Tisquantum finally declared with a significant gesture,--

"Sagamore, powahs, pnieses, braves, all men say, It is not good for pale men with hair like the sunrise to live among the red men whose hair is like the night. Let them be gone!"

"And what did the red men do about it, Squanto?" asked Standish sternly, while in his eyes kindled the danger light before which Squanto quailed, yet sullenly replied,--

"Red man find what you call wolf around his wigwam, red man send arrow through his head."

"Do you mean, you heathen, that you murdered these helpless, shipwrecked white men? Murdered them in cold blood?" demanded Standish, seizing Gideon's hilt and half drawing him from his scabbard.

"Tisquantum not here. Tisquantum not Mattakee, not Nauset; Tisquantum Patuxet, where white men live," hastily replied Squanto; while Bradford suggested in a rapid aside, "Best leave go thy sword and restrain thy wrath, Captain, or we be but dead men. Look at the faces of those men behind the sachem. Already they finger their tomahawks."

"More like, thy timidity will give the savages courage to fall upon us, and we shall share the fate of these, who though naught but Frenchmen were at least white, and wore breeches," retorted Standish angrily. The color flashed into Bradford's cheek, but after an instant's silence he quietly replied,--

"Thou knowest well enow, Standish, that my timidity is not for myself but for these, and yet more for the helpless ones we have left behind. I trust when it comes to blows, the Governor of Plymouth will be found where he belongs, next to her fiery Captain."

"Be content, Will, be content. Once more thou 'rt right and I all wrong.

'T is not the first time nor the last, but let us ask in all patience what these fellows mean with their White-Fool. Sure they have not made me out so suddenly as this, have they?"

"Nay, Myles, I trow no man but thyself will ever call thee fool, nay, nor overly white, either!" and glancing at the Captain's bronzed face lighted once more by its smile of grim humor, Bradford turned to Squanto and bade him explain in the hearing of both savages and white men the meaning of this reference, and also the fate of the French mariners cast ash.o.r.e at Eastham.

Squanto nothing loth to display his oratory struck an att.i.tude, and with native eloquence and much gesticulation described, first, the storm which four years ago had driven the French brig upon the sands; then the efforts of the mariners to launch their boats, their defeat, and the breaking up both of boats and brig; then the arrival upon sh.o.r.e of thirteen men, two of whom died of wounds and exhaustion. The eleven survivors finding some wreckage upon the beach proceeded the next morning to build themselves a shelter, and finally erected the cabin and threw up the earthwork discovered by the Pilgrims in their second exploration.

Up to this point the Indians had been content to curiously watch the proceedings of these interlopers, but finding that they were establishing themselves permanently, they held a council and resolved that they should die, partly in atonement for the outrage done to the red men some two years before by Hunt the kidnapper, and partly from some vague fear lest the strangers with their superior knowledge and appliances should conquer and injure the proper owners of the soil.

Not choosing to a.s.sault them openly, for the men were brave, alert, and well armed, the Indians laid in wait around the spring where they must daily go for water, watched them as they went afield in pursuit of game, in fact hara.s.sed them at every turn, until of the eleven but three were left alive, and they, so broken in strength, courage, and hope, that they were easily captured and reduced to slavery. One remained here at Nauset, and the other two were sent, one to the Ma.s.sachusetts, the other to the Namasket tribes, where they were kept as the mock and victims of the brutal sport of the savages. The one who remained at Nauset was the best looking, and evidently the most attractive of the three, and from Squanto's description seemed to have been an officer, and a very attractive young man. The-White-Birch, sister of Aspinet, chief of the Nausets, having fixed her regards upon the prisoner, discovered these peculiarities, and one day when the boys of the village were amusing themselves with seeing how near they could shoot their blunted arrows to the prisoner's eyes without putting them out, she stepped forward, and, Pocahontas-like, announced that she took this man for her husband, and as such claimed his release from torture. Her demand was complied with, and the half dead victim unbound and informed of his new honors; but it was too late--want, misery, and cruelty had done their work, and the poor fellow's wits had fled. He accepted the tender care and affection of The-White-Birch as a child might have done, but the joyous gallantry of the debonair young French officer was a thing of the past, and the bridegroom had become as completely the child of nature as his bride. He was adopted into the tribe, and the Indian name given him, in no spirit of taunt or contempt, but simply as a descriptive appellation, meant The-White-Fool.

They were married, these two strange lovers, and lived in the cabin built of ship's planks by The-White-Fool's dead comrades. In due time a son was born to them, the idol of his mother's heart, and the constant companion of the father, who seemed to find in the child some link with his own stray wits; but when the boy was about three years old the poor exile was seized with a fever, and in his delirium escaping from his tender nurse stalked naked through the village proclaiming in the native tongue that the wrath of G.o.d hung over this people and this land, because of the cruel wrong they had done to him and to his comrades; and he foretold that before seven snows had covered his grave, white men from over the sea should come like the wildfowl in the spring and settle down upon the creeks and ponds, and fill the forest with their cry, and the red men should melt away as the snow melts and their place be no more seen.

It was really worth something to hear Squanto declaim this wild prophecy with the shrill voice and fevered gestures of the delirious captive; and as they caught his meaning the pnieses around Janno stirred in their places, laid hand upon the tomahawk at each man's girdle, and cast menacing looks upon the strangers.

"Have a care, Squanto! Say no more on that head, or thou 'lt stir up strife afresh," muttered Bradford in the interpreter's ear, while Standish fixed his eyes upon Janno ready to sacrifice him at the first hostile movement. But the young chief casting a meaning glance around the circle said quietly,--

"The-White-Birch was of the blood of Aspinet my brother, and The-White-Fool was her husband."

"Well said, Chief!" exclaimed Standish who had already mastered much of the Indian language, and in accordance with his late resolve soon became the most expert interpreter in the colony, while Bradford nodding said, "Go on, Squanto!"

Little however remained to tell. The ill-starred Frenchman died within a few hours of his prophecy, and hardly had The-White-Birch laid him in his honored grave when she was called to bury her little boy, whom the father had named Louis, along with him. Then she set off alone to find the comrades of her lost love at Namasket, and Shawmut, that they might with her lament his death; but whether illness came upon her and she crept aside to die, or haply some wild creature slew and devoured her, or in her maze of grief she strayed away and starved in the limitless woods, none ever knew; she never was heard of again.

"And the other two captives?" inquired Standish.

"The Feast-of-Green-Corn before the last one, Captain Dermer carried them away in his ship," replied Squanto proud of his English and his information.

"Ay, ay, and now we understand why these Nauset Indians attacked us at the First Encounter," said Standish.

"Especially as they had probably watched us stealing their corn," added Fuller dryly.

"Borrowing, not stealing, Surgeon," retorted Bradford briskly. "And a part of our errand to the First Encounter is to satisfy our creditor for the debt. Let us be going."

An hour later the shallop, now riding gayly upon the flood tide, put forth from Barnstable Harbor, carrying not only its own crew, but Janno with several of his followers, he having volunteered as guide and negotiator with Aspinet for the restoration of little Billington.

The voyage prospered, and before night the boy, decked with strings of beads and various savage ornaments, was restored to his guardians by Aspinet himself; while the first red man allowed to come on board the shallop was the owner of the corn "borrowed" by the Pilgrims, who now repaid its value twofold by an order for goods to be delivered at Plymouth. But more important than boy or corn, at any rate to the ears of Standish, was a report here received that the Narragansetts, their friend Ma.s.sasoit's neighbors and deadly foes, had made a raid upon his domains and carried him away prisoner. Also that one of Ma.s.sasoit's pnieses called Corbitant had become an ally of the Narragansetts, and was now at Namasket, only fourteen miles from Plymouth, trying to raise a revolt against both his chief and the white men their allies. He was also fiercely denouncing Squanto, Hobomok, and Tockamahamon as renegades and traitors to their own people, who should be at once put to death.

This news was so alarming that without waiting for trade, or for the feast offered to them, the Pilgrims at once set sail, and after stormy weather and sundry adventures arrived safely at home toward night of the third day from their departure. John Billington was received with vociferous joy by his mother, treated to a lithe bundle of birch rods by his father, and a.s.saulted by his brother, who at once fought him for the possession of the bead necklaces and other gauds he had brought home.

The men of the colony were meantime hearing the report brought in by Nepeof, a sachem just from Namasket, of the treacherous proceedings there, and before they had been three hours at home Squanto and Hobomok were dispatched to discover the truth of the matter, while Nepeof was held as a hostage.

CHAPTER XXV.

A LITTLE DISCIPLINE.

"And how sped you in your errand, Master Envoy?" inquired Standish as, lighted pipe in hand, he once more seated himself upon the bench outside his cabin door to enjoy the sunset hour.

But at the sudden question John Alden's face flushed deeper than the sunset, and he stammered, "I am so blundering, Master--I told the maiden all you bade me, but--but"--

"But what, thou stammering idiot!" roared the captain, his serene brow suddenly overcast, and the red surging up to his own brow. "Dost mean to say the girl flouted the suit of--nay, then, what dost thou mean? Speak out, man, and be not so timorous!"

"Here is Giles Hopkins!" exclaimed John, as feet were heard running up the hill, and the captain angrily turned to meet the new-comer, shouting,--

"Well, what dost thou want, youngster? Is a man never to be rid of half-wit boys in this place!"

"Please, Captain, the governor desires you to come in haste to a sudden Council. The Indians are come in, and methinks"--

"And who in Beelzebub's name cares what thou thinkst!" shouted the captain. "Begone before I box thy malapert ears." And driving the lad before him he strode down the hill without another word or look at John, who grinding his heel into the turf muttered,--

"And now he's angered, and beshrew me if I could not find it in my heart to wish Priscilla had said him yea, rather than nay. It were easier to bear her scorn of me if I knew that he was content. 'T is not so hard to suffer loss if a dear friend gains by that same loss."

Meantime Standish striding wrathfully down the hill met Priscilla as she darted out of the door of the elder's house. At sight of him she stopped short, coloring scarlet, and yet her whole face gleaming with a wicked inclination to laugh.

The captain also hesitated a moment, and then removing his barret cap with a bow whose stately courtesy recalled his lineage he said,--

"Pardon me, Mistress Molines, for what it seems was undue presumption.

May I ask if the Council is convened here or at the Common house?"