Before I could answer, his head and shoulders were withdrawn from the window even more suddenly than they had been inserted. Beyond him I saw Steven Nason, his hand still clutching the bawler’s shoulder. “Cap,” Nason said, “you got to be more careful around here! I know these people. They’re from Arundel.”

“Where they been?” Cap demanded belligerently.

Nason ignored him, gave a glance to sleepy-looking Mr. Leonard, and shook hands with Nathaniel and me. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said. “We need people like you. These people around here, they won’t fight unless you guarantee ’em half a dozen cows bounty, and sometimes not even then.” He smiled at us apologetically. “It’s made Cap Huff kind of fretty. He’s peaceable enough when he’s marching or fighting.”

He eyed Cap benevolently and added, “Or when he’s drunk. Once you get to know him better, these little ways of his won’t mean a thing to you! Not a thing!”

He stepped back, motioned our driver onward, and said, “We’ll be over to see you later!”

So the last five miles of our travels were thoughtful ones, and we were happy indeed when our coach rolled along the edge of the plateau that lies above the marshy, winding valley of the Arundel River, and we caught once more the smell of oak chips and marsh mud that rises from the shipyards at the river’s edge.

From the look on Mr. Leonard’s face, when we bumped to a stop before our front gate and the door flew open to reveal my sister Jane, saucer-eyed with amazement, I could see he had expected no such house as ours.

That’s the way of it with Englishmen and Frenchmen, I’ve found, to say nothing of people from Virginia, New York and Boston. They think we’re savages in our Province of Maine, living in log huts with dirt floors, dipping our fingers into one iron pot at meal-time, and talking a strange and unrecognizable language; whereas the truth is that most of us learn our English out of the Bible through being made to read it aloud when young; and we live about as well as anyone anywhere—some poorly, and some in style, but for the most part sensibly and quietly.

… It is for the sake of folk who know nothing of us that I tell here a few things about the howling wilderness in which Maine men live. Half the wars that are made would never be fought if those who have the directing of affairs, like George Germain, should know the truth about the people and the country where the fighting must be done.