She looked at him somewhat hard when he said that. But he paid no mind. “Consider,” he says, “when Stuyvesant told me the English had come, I had no means of knowing how matters stood here. For all I knew, they had already entered the town, seized all our goods and driven you out of house and home. Was I to see our cargo—a rich one, by the way—stolen by the English too? It might be all the fortune we had left. So I thought to take it to a place of safe keeping. It is lodged with the Indian chief in the village to which Stuyvesant saw me going. I have known this Indian many years, Greet. He’s one of the few I can trust. And there it should remain, I think you’ll agree, until this business is over.”

Well, the Mistress didn’t say a word more, but it showed me plainly the good character of the Boss, to be thinking always of his family.

All that day New Amsterdam was in much confusion. There were boats taking messages from the English commander, Colonel Nicolls, to Governor Stuyvesant, and back; but no one knew what was in those messages, and the governor, he said nothing. But the English gunships stayed down by the narrows.

The next day, when I went down to the waterfront with the Boss and Jan, we came upon a crowd of people. They were pointing across to Brooklyn, on our left. And sure enough, you could see the glint of weapons where English troops were gathering by the ferry. And somebody pointed down toward the narrows, and said that to the west of them, on the big hump of land the Dutch call Staten Island, the English had landed more troops.

Meinheer Springsteen was there.

“We’ve a hundred and fifty men in the fort,” he said to the Boss, “and we can muster maybe two hundred and fifty capable of fighting in the town. Even with some slaves, that’s five hundred, maximum. The English colonel has twice that number of trained troops. And they say the English settlers on the long island have mustered troops as well.”

“We’ve cannon in the fort,” said the Boss.

“Short of powder. And ammunition,” he says. “If the English gunships come close, they’ll blast us to bits.” He took the Boss by the arm. “The word is, they’ve demanded we give them the town, and that Stuyvesant won’t budge.”

After Meinheer Springsteen moved on, Jan asked the Boss if the English would destroy us.

“I doubt it, my son,” he said. “We’re worth far more to them alive.” Then he laughed. “But you never know.” Then he went to talk to some of the other merchants.

When we got home, he told the Mistress that none of the merchants wanted to make a fight of it, and she was angry and said that they were cowards.