The man swiveled, glared at Joseph, then dropped to the ground. “You talking to me?”

“I’m talking to you and anyone else who decides to speak so obscenely about the women.”

The man was short but swarthy. He quickly shed his coat, revealing thickly muscled arms. “Who woke up and made you king today?”

Joseph wasn’t a man given to brawls, but he’d had to learn how to hold his own during his times at sea. After facing down mutineers, drunken sailors, and irate passengers, he wasn’t afraid of an insolent miner.

“I wouldn’t need to act like a king if you weren’t behaving like a donkey.” Joseph’s comment brought several snickers. Part of him warned he should turn and walk away, that he was in no frame of mind to deal with this particular man. But another part of him churned with the strange need to fight.

“I heard you talking to that bluejacket and tellin’ him you’re a lord or baron or something and trying to push your way around.” The man started rolling up his shirtsleeves. “If you think you can come here with all your highfalutin ways and start ordering us about, well, you got another thing comin’. We’re not bowing and yes-sir-ing and as-you-pleasing no more to no one. Not here in this new land. Here we’re free.”

Before the man could swing the first punch, Joseph lunged for him, grabbed the front of his shirt, and lifted him off the ground. He leaned his face into the man’s and glared. “If you treat the women with respect, I shan’t need to push you around.”

“Once I got me the woman, I can treat her any way I want,” the man rasped, struggling to free himself from Joseph’s grasp.

Joseph tightened his grip on the man’s shirt so that it began to choke him. “She’ll never be yours. Never.”

The anger inside him built up like steam in a ship’s boilers. The pressure hurt and needed release. But even as he brought his fist up, he shoved the miner, causing the man to stumble backward and fall to the ground, gasping for breath.

Without another word, Joseph spun and stalked away. Several of the others shouted after him, called him a coward for not finishing the fight. But Joseph kept on walking. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that he had to get away.

Minutes later, he found himself back on the wharf, the one they’d used when first coming ashore. Now that the women had left and were at the legislative building, the waterfront was deserted, the longboat gone. Even the HMS Forward had moved on.