Arundel by Kenneth Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

strange Indians from the north.” With that she halted in the very face of Ivory Fish and declared I had not meant what I said if Indians could stop me. I said hastily I would come and had meant everything, which I had.
    There was no pleasing her. She must needs imagine impossibilities and ask if I would come to see her even though her father moved far away, to Portsmouth or Boston, or even to Mt. Desert. I said “Yes” to all her questions, caring not how much Ivory Fish might suspect of our affairs. I think she might have made me promise to follow her to the Sugar Islands or to London; but before she could think of these places, her father emerged from the kitchen and beckoned to her. At the same time my mother came out and called to me that I should ferry them across the creek because my father was busy on the river; and I could tell by the way she flapped her apron toward Mallinson that she was eager for his departure.
    As I went down to launch the skiff I saw the Abenakis on the far side of the creek had taken down their wigwams, so I knew most of the women and many of the fighting men had already set off for their winter town. Before the day was done, they would all be gone. This added to my sadness, for the Abenakis had always been kind to me, and I could ask no merrier companions than young Mogg Chabonoke and Fala Ramanascho, nor kinder ones.
    They often brought me gifts: an arrow, or a medicine stone against drowning, or a bracelet of horsehair to keep aches from the shoulders in wet weather. They had taught me how to make a fire from a bow and rawhide; how to speak in the Abenaki tongue; how to turn my feet back under me in paddling a canoe so that the posture could be endured for hour on hour.
    In return I could give them next to nothing: a pinch of salt or sugar; a bead; a piece of calico; a little powder and ball; yet they would have been my friends if I could have given them nothing at all, and I was loath to see them go.
    Mallinson came pompously to the bank, followed by Mary, and stared at me out of eyes like those of a dead shark, but redder, and suspended in pouches of flesh that seemed to hang from the ends of his eyebrows.
    “Don’t rock the boat, little boy,” he said, with his weighty frown. “What I ate last night sits discomfortably within me.” Lowering himself stiffly into the bow, he clambered around me where I stood holding to the bank with the oar.
    If he had not been Mary’s father I might have been tempted to jab him with the butt of the oar for calling me a little boy, or for blaming the effects of his rum-guzzling on my mother’s cooking; but I lost my spite at him when Mary jumped into the skiff and as she slipped past me, pressed my arm.
    So powerfully did she affect me that I felt no pain when Mallinson observed that we would probably have more bad weather, and that because of the departure of the Abenakis from the creek we would have no further troubles with Indians until spring. The poor man should have known that the east wind was passing around to the south, which means fair weather always, and that with the departure of the friendly Abenakis there would be more opportunity for the hostile Indians from St. Francis and the French settlements to fall upon us without warning.
    Yet I gave no thought to these matters, what with staring at Mary and waiting for her to lift her eyes, which she did from time to time. Once, indeed, when her father was peering over his shoulder at the Abenaki camp, she wrinkled her nose at me so pleasantly that my strength failed and my oar turned sidewise in the water, so I was near to pitching in the river.
    It was well I stared at Mary while I could; for no sooner had the skiff touched the shore than Mallinson clambered out without a word of thanks, took Mary by the hand, and hurried her up the bank and into the narrow path that led through the high pines. Twice she looked back and smiled: then the brush hid her. Never, I thought, had the pines seemed