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The 6th of September, having a fair north-north-west wind, having trimmed our barque, we purposed to depart, and sent five of our sailors, young men, ashore to an island to fetch certain fish which we purposed to weather, and therefore left it all night covered upon the isle; the brutish people of this country lay secretly lurking in the wood, and upon the sudden assaulted our men, which when we perceived, we presently let slip our cables upon the halse, and under our foresail bore into the shore, and with all expedition discharged a double musket upon them twice, at the noise whereof they fled; notwithstanding, to our very great grief, two of our men were slain with their arrows, and two grievously wounded, of whom, at this present, we stand in very great doubt; only one escaped by swimming, with an arrow shot through his arm.
"Yes Halse; and I know the town well enough to conduct you, if not to the house itself, still to its immediate neighbourhood.
On these Acts being proclaimed at the Cross of Edinburgh, the ministers of the city James Lawson, Walter Balcanquhal, and Robert Pont appeared and made protest against them, when Arran was so incensed by their conduct that he at once ordered their arrest, and swore he would make Lawson's head 'leap from its halse though it was as big as a haystack. More than they were in jeopardy of their lives; every man in the country who had been a pronounced friend of liberty had cause to fear.
It did seem to be getting heavy. Halstead also got his dough dish and showed us how he fed his bird. After the second roll of dough had been shoved down his throat, the poor gobbler opened his bill and gave a queer little gasp of repletion, like Ca-r-r-r! None the less, Halstead made him swallow four rolls of dough! Addison was disgusted. "Halse, I call that nasty!" he said.
"We might as well take it easy," Addison said. "If Halse is at Boundary Camp, he will not leave in such weather as this." All that forenoon it snowed steadily, and in fact for most of the afternoon. More than a foot of snow had come. We opened the front of our snow-coated den, kindled a fire there, and after dressing our partridge broiled it over the embers.
No snow had come since Halstead and Alfred left, and we could still see along the old lumber road the faint marks of their hand-sled runners. In the hollows where the film of snow was a little deeper, two boot tracks were visible. "Halse wouldn't go off far into the woods alone, after Alf left him," said I. "No, he is too big a coward," said Addison.
One such centre is Halsetown, a mining settlement founded something less than a century ago by James Halse, of the old Cornwall Hals family; he was a solicitor and a mayor of St. Ives, intimately connected with the mines. But in this rather unattractive quarter we are less likely to think of Halse than we are of Sir Henry Irving, who spent his childhood here.
As he spake they were come into the porch, and passed into the open air, where it was still light; then the Dame turned round on Ralph and caught him by the two arms and cried out and cast her arms about his neck; and when she could sunder herself a little from him, she said: "O Ralph, I deemed that I knew thy voice, but I durst not halse thee till I knew it was mine own flesh and blood, lest I should have died for grief to think it was thee when it was not.
"They are probably heading for the Old Slave's Farm, or for Adger's lumber camp. Let them go. They'll be sick to death of it in a week." I felt much the same about it; but grandmother and Theodora were not a little disturbed. Ellen, however, sided with Addison. "Halse will be back by to-morrow night," she said. "He and Alfred will have a spat by that time."
Halse and Thomas said no; but he hung round, and teased us, while his half-starved old horse shivered in the wind; and we finally decided to oblige him, if he would take the tongs and haul out the cakes himself, as we sawed them. It would not do to stop the saws that day, even for a moment.
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