Country of the Bad Wolfes

MARY MARGARET

AND THE GEMINI

The twin sons of Roger Blake Wolfe were born in late May under the apt sign of Gemini. Mary Margaret named them Samuel Thomas—the elder by three minutes—and John Roger. She and the boys lived with her widower father, John Thomas Parham, in a flat above his Portsmouth tavern, where she tended tables every night. It was a waterfront pub catering to a seaman trade, Mr Parham himself having been thirteen years a merchant officer before a shipboard mishap left him crippled of foot and permanently dependent on a crutch. Except for the first six weeks of her marriage, during which she and Captain Wolfe lived in a rented cottage, the tavern was the only home Mary Margaret had ever known or would. Only nineteen years old when widowed, she would afterward not lack for suitors but she would not marry again. As in the case of Roger Blake Wolfe, no picture of her would pass down through the generations, but her sons would describe her to their children as blue-eyed and slender, with pale brown hair she liked to wear in a braid down her back.

From the time of their early childhood the twins were curious about their father and now and again questioned Mary Margaret about him. Beyond telling them he had been a merchant ship captain and was lost at sea, she was disinclined to discuss him and was skilled at changing the subject. Both her reticence and her falsehoods were rooted in a sense of disgrace. She had not been able to surmount her angry shame over his desertion of her and their unborn children. A shame made all the worse after he had been gone for a year and a half and she received a letter from the British Embassy apprising her that her husband and British subject Roger Blake Wolfe, a captain of pirates and fugitive from justice, had been convicted of murder by the Mexican government and duly executed in the city of Veracruz. The letter did not relate the particulars of his crime or the means of his execution nor disclose the disposition of his remains, but she did not care to know any of those details. She wept for days in sorrowful and furious mortification. How could the man she loved so dearly have done such dreadful things? How was it possible she had loved a man so different in truth from what he had seemed to her? What other lies had he told her? The more she pondered these questions the more the very notion of love did baffle her.

She demanded her father’s promise not to tell her sons of Roger’s criminal occupation and ignoble death, and because he was sympathetic to her sentiments Mr Parham so promised. But although he did not say so, he believed she was in error to keep the truth from the twins. He was not so shocked as his daughter by the news about Captain Wolfe. He’d had his hunch about the man from the start, having been acquainted with a number of men disposed to outlawry and having at times even conspired in a bit of furtive business with some of them. This minor criminality was but one secret Mr Parham had kept from his wife and daughter. Another was that his father had been Red Ned Kennedy, the notorious mankiller and highwayman. Mr Parham himself had been unaware of his true paternity until after his mother died of the consumption when he was twelve and he was taken in by her old-maid sister. One day in a fit of meanness the aunt told him all about his nefarious father. “Hanged your pa was,” she told him, “in the public square at Kittery in the glorious year of ‘76, not six months after your birth. Your poor mam so wanting to spare ye the dishonor of him, God pity her, that she quit his name and took back our own. Oh, she thought she had herself a prize, she did, when she married that one with his easy smile and blarney and his promises to be a lawful man. And just look what came of it. Heartbreak and shame and an early widowhood. I’d a thousand times choose to have no man a-tall than be wed to a blackguard like him.” Young Mr Parham had affected a woeful disillusionment in his father in order to satisfy his aunt’s righteousness and thereby ease the temper of his stay with her until he was of age to go to sea. But he would all his life harbor a secret pride in a sire who had been so feared in his time, and the only regret he’d ever had in being son to Red Ned Kennedy was that he himself was not more like him. He thought his grandsons might feel the same way to know their own pa had been a “gentleman of fortune,” as the phrase of the day had it. Still, he knew better than to say so to Mary Margaret, who would certainly not agree nor even care to hear it.

But as the twins grew older their entreaties about their father became more insistent and difficult for Mary Margaret to deflect. She knew she could not go on refusing them but her heart remained a divided country in its feelings for her husband and she was uncertain of what to tell them. The boys were eleven when she at last capitulated to their appeals—and little by little, over the months, she acquainted them with Roger Blake Wolfe as she had known him. And in the process of so doing, she discovered that he yet held a greater claim on the sunny south of her heart than on its frosty north. Still, she never spoke of him to her sons by any name other than “your father,” “Captain Wolfe,” or simply “the captain.” Nor did she soon recant her falsehoods about his true vocation and manner of demise. And her accounts to them omitted of course many private particulars.

She met Roger Blake Wolfe on a summer eve when he came into the tavern for a mug of ale and dish of sausage. Dozens of sailors had wooed Mary Margaret in vain but with Captain Wolfe’s first smile she was smitten. He was not tall but carried himself as a tall man. He wore a close pointed beard and his black hair and hazel eyes would be replicated in his sons. So too his cocky grin. He began showing up at the tavern every night and each time she caught sight of him her breath deepened. He gladdened her. Made her laugh. Made her blush and feel warm with his compliments. His speech was tinged with the brogue of his Irish da. He was the only one she ever permitted to call her Maggie. She had known him barely two weeks the first time she sneaked out her window late one night to rendezvous in a moonlit copse above the harbor. She was seventeen. He was her first lover and her last.

Mr Parham too had taken a shine to the captain and when Mary Margaret, after barely two months’ society with the man, told her father they were in love and wanted to marry right away, he did not object. The next day he received Captain Wolfe at home and granted his request for his daughter’s hand. Mary Margaret was pleased but had expected resistance. Ever since her childhood both her father and her mother, a comely and lettered woman who died when Mary Margaret was twelve, had many times warned her about sailors as a breed not prone to cleave close to the hearth. Her father’s ready acceptance of the marriage convinced her he knew the real reason for her haste.

Her conviction was correct. Mr Parham had easily intuited Mary Margaret’s compelling condition and knew it was not the less compelling for being as old as morality and as common as cliché. Given that the usual course of sailors in such a state of affairs was to abandon the girl to her shameful fate, the real surprise to Mr Parham was Captain Wolfe’s willingness to marry Mary Margaret. It was testimony to the man’s honor that he would not forsake mother and child to the disrepute of bastardy. But while Mr Parham had no doubt of his daughter’s unreserved love for the captain, he knew the captain’s love for her was of a different kind and that probably sooner rather than later the man could not help but break her heart.

On a crisp afternoon in early October they were wed in a maritime chapel overlooking Portsmouth Bay. The next six weeks were the happiest of Mary Margaret’s life. The captain was only twice absent from home and for only a few days each time, once to Gloucester and once to Portland, on business which he did not confide and about which she did not inquire. He had told her little of his past, saying there was little enough to tell. His Irish father a boat builder by trade, his English mother a beauty with a hearty laugh, both of them killed in a house fire when he was a child, and then a London orphanage until he ran away to sea. This bare synopsis was ample to her, as the man himself was her absorption. She liked to watch the play of his form as he axed cordwood, to see his enjoyment in meals of her making, to feel his fingers loosing her hair from its braid, to wake before him early of a morning and watch him still at sleep. To share in his love of dancing. Among her most joyful memories were those of high-stepping with him to the fiddles and pipes on a dancehall Saturday night. Sometimes when he was full of drink he would sing humorous bawdy songs and she would laugh even as she admonished him to mind his manners. He was a man of wit and easy laughter, she told her sons, and had a gift for telling a tale.

“Was he a good fighter?” Samuel Thomas once asked, his eyes avid. And was puzzled by the melancholic look his mother fixed upon him. Then she sighed and said yes, the captain could surely fight. She had witnessed the proof of it one busy evening in the tavern. There was a sudden commotion at the rear of the room and she looked over there to see a large man speaking angrily and pointing a finger in the captain’s face, but she could not hear his words for the clamor of the crowd forming about them. Then she had to stand on a chair to see—and she nearly cried out at the sight of the man brandishing a long-bladed knife such as the shark-fishers used, and the captain barehanded. The circle of spectators moved across the floor with the two men as the sharker advanced on the captain with vicious swipes of the knife. She mimicked the sharker’s action—swish swish swish—and how the captain hopped rearward with his arms outflinging at each pass of the blade. Her eyes were brighter than she knew as she reenacted the fight for her sons, who were spellbound. Then a heavy tankard came to the captain’s hand, and in his next sidestep of the knife he struck the sharker a terrific blow to the head, staggering him. Then hit him again and knocked him stunned and bloody-faced to the floor. He kicked away the knife and stood over him with an easy smile and the room thundered with bellows to finish him, finish him! The man was on all fours when the captain clubbed him on the crown with the tankard and he buckled like a hammered beef. The walls shook with cheering. The unconscious sharker was dragged away by the heels to be deposited in the alley. The captain grinned whitely in the blackness of his beard and fired a cigar. Then his eyes found her still atop the chair and her hand to her mouth. And he winked.

“Yowwww. . . .” the twins said.

The more Mary Margaret told of him, the more vivid became her recollections—and more than once, as she described the captain’s mischievous laugh or the cant of his sailor’s walk or the distant cast of his eyes when he spoke of the open sea, she would be weeping before she was aware of it.

Came a cold November morning he told her he had been commissioned to transport a cargo out of Gloucester to Savannah and would be gone for perhaps three months. And that afternoon, carpetbag in hand, he kissed her goodbye and patted her haunch, said, “Fare ye well, Maggie darlin,” and left her forever.

She of course did not divulge to her sons that she was already carrying them when she had stood at the altar with their father. She believed it was none of their affair and felt no qualm about keeping the secret. But her deliberate lies to them about the captain’s true profession and mode of death troubled her and became ever harder to bear. They were nearly thirteen when she told them the truth. Indeed, let them read it for themselves, handing them the British Embassy’s letter in evidence of the shameful facts. She was prepared for their shock and humiliation. Was prepared to tell them they had no call to feel disgrace, that their father’s criminality was his own dishonor and in no way reflected on them. Their response was not what she was prepared for.

“A pirate!” Samuel Thomas said, turning to his brother. “A pirate captain!”

“Executed for murder!”“

“I’ll wager it wasn’t murder! I’ll wager it was self-defense but he couldn’t prove it!”

“I’ll wager that even if it was murder he had good cause and whoever the fella was had it coming.”

Mr Parham, whom Mary Margaret had permitted to be present, chuckled at their exchange—then swallowed his smile and went mute under his daughter’s furious scowl.

They begged to know more and were disappointed when she said she knew no more to tell. Did she at least know how he had been executed? Had he been hanged? Shot? Buried to his neck in the beach at low tide? She was appalled by their macabre questions and gesticulated in exasperation as she said she didn’t know how he had met his end and didn’t care, that it hardly mattered, after all.

The boys stared at her in wonder. How could such a thing not matter? They looked at each other and shrugged. They could not get enough of reading the letter and would henceforth handle it with the care of surgeons, lest it tear at the folds. Each wanted to be its keeper, so they tossed a coin that put it in John Roger’s custody.

In days to follow, Mary Margaret would sometimes overhear them conversing about their father, speculating on his piratical prowess in comparison to the likes of William Kidd and Edward Teach the Blackbeard and other infamous sea raiders of the past, villains she’d many times heard mentioned in tavern discourse among grown men no less awed by them than were her sons. The twins wondered about his adventures, about duels he’d fought and ships he’d plundered and hapless captives he’d made to walk the plank. Mary Margaret rubbed her temples and sighed to hear them holding forth on keelhauling and how you had to be able to hold your breath a long time and be tough enough to endure the barnacle cuts and be lucky enough that the sharks didn’t get you before you were hauled back out. And because there was no telling what trials their own fortunes held in store and keelhauling might be among them, they thought it wise to take turns timing each other in the practice of holding their breath.

They were keenly intelligent boys and under Mary Margaret’s tutelage had learned to read and write and cipher even before she hired the best teachers in town for them. She instructed them too in basic etiquette and social decorum. They had a liking for music of various sorts but the only instrument to catch their fancy was the hornpipe their Grandfather John had given them on their tenth birthday. He taught them to play that simple flute and a patron showed them how to dance the sailor’s jig its music had been made for. They composed a ditty they entitled “Good Jolly Roger” and Mary Margaret sometimes heard one or the other of them piping it in the late evening behind the closed door of their room. It would always make her want to cry but she never asked them to cease.

Through their early childhood they were so nearly identical in appearance that, except for their mother and grandfather, few could distinguish between them. But around age twelve Samuel Thomas became the slightly huskier, John Roger the slightly taller and more perceptibly serious of mien. They were strong and nimble athletes, especially fond of swimming and wrestling and footracing. When they could find no other competitors, they contended with each other, and sometimes one of them won and sometimes the other, but as they grew older Samuel Thomas more and more often prevailed.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother’s knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying—then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn’t have sense enough to get out of the rain.

When they turned thirteen, Mary Margaret enrolled them in the Madison School—a local day institution that claimed itself the academic equal of Philips Exeter—paying for their tuition with money she’d saved over the years. And now a signal difference formed between them. John Roger grew to love academics above all else and gained recognition as the best student in the school. He read with omnivorous rapacity and phenomenal retention. He developed the habit of writing a critical summary of every book as soon as he finished reading it. He could with speed and accuracy solve arithmetic problems in his head. He had a natural aptitude for languages and by the age of fifteen was translating Cicero and could read French passably well. He developed an ardent interest in the law and hoped to matriculate at Dartmouth. Samuel Thomas, on the other hand, had become bored with schoolwork, though he continued to earn fair marks by dint of native intellect. The only books that still held his interest were atlases. He spent hours admiring the ships in the harbor. His main pleasures were now in prowling the waterfront alleys, in dicing, in fighting with his fists. Delivering fresh bedclothes to the boys’ room one day while they were at school, Mary Margaret saw an atlas on Samuel Thomas’s desk lying open to a map of the Gulf of Mexico. He had inked a circle around Veracruz and alongside it drawn a skull-and-crossbones with the notation, “Here lies Father.”

On the threshold of young manhood, the brothers were beardless duplicates of their sire, but Mary Margaret could see that Samuel Thomas had inherited the larger measure of his father’s soul, and he was hence her greater worry. She at times wondered if religion might have served to temper his wilder nature and fretted that she’d been wrong to deny such moral instruction to her children. But even in girlhood she had spurned the prevalent Christian view of carnal pleasure as a Deadly Sin, an irreverence that had incited many a loud row with her mother, a devout Catholic.

The boys were sixteen when their Grandfather John made a misstep with his crutch near the top of the stairs and broke his neck in the tumble. Mary Margaret inherited the tavern and conscripted the twins as potboys. Each day after school they waited tables and swept the floor, washed mugs and rinsed out cuspidors and reset rat traps in the storeroom. She hired a girl to assist her in the later evenings so the boys could attend to their studies upstairs. But while John Roger was assiduous in his nightly schoolwork, Samuel Thomas more and more frequently slipped out their window to the sublunary enticements of the streets, particularly those at a quayside cathouse called the Blue Mermaid. It was there he had his first coitus, the news of which he gave to his brother with an affected casualness.

John Roger was enthralled. “What’s it like?” he asked.

“Can’t be described,” Samuel Thomas said. “Go with me next time and find out.”

John Roger said he would. But he did not own his brother’s daring or disregard for the proprieties, and when the next time came he begged off, saying he had to study.

“Suit yourself. But if you ever change your mind, you’re welcome to come along.”

Samuel Thomas’s evening rambles always lasted till the wee hours, and on each of his stealthy re-entries through their window, exuding the mingled odors of perfume and ale and sexual residue, he would find John Roger awake and waiting for him, insistent on hearing the details of his escapade before letting him go to sleep.

The vicarious excitement John Roger derived from his brother’s exploits made the fact of his own inexperience increasingly intolerable, and one night he finally accompanied Samuel Thomas out the window and down the drainpipe and along the shadowed streets to the Blue Mermaid. He there drank his first full mug of ale and had the first dance of his life with a woman not his mother. When a sailor tripped him for a prank, his brother lashed into the man with a flurry of wicked punches that sent him crashing over a table and streaming blood from his broken nose. The girls cheered the entertainment and John Roger was agawk with admiration. “God almighty, Sammy! You settled his hash!” The bouncer decreed the sailor at fault and booted him from the premises. The girls had been tickled to learn Samuel Thomas had a twin, and when they learned he was virgin they squabbled over which of them would be his initiator. They each enticed John Roger to pick her over the others and he blushed furiously and could not decide until Sammy said, “Just pick one, for Christ’s sake!” John Roger pointed at the youngest-looking, a plump genial girl named Megan who looked innocent as a choir girl and, as he soon discovered, had a spider tattoo on her tummy.

They sang on their way home and laughed at the imprecations from the windows of roused sleepers. When they drew near to home they shushed each other with warnings not to wake their mother, and they were furtive as burglars in climbing the pipe back up to their window. Samuel Thomas was asleep as soon as he put head to pillow but John Roger struggled to stay awake, to savor a while longer the heady feeling of having crossed over to the world of men.

The following morning his pleasure gave way to a chill anxiety that he might have contracted a horrid disease. He had read about venereal corruptions in a medical text and the symptomatic descriptions had induced a palpable cringing of his privates. He dared not mention his misgivings to Samuel Thomas who no doubt disdained such fears and would likely laugh at him. He berated himself for a reckless fool and cursed the erotic compulsion that had overwhelmed his good sense. For weeks afterward his every visit to the privy included a meticulous scrutiny of his member for some sign of encroaching infection. When he was finally sure he had come through unscathed, his relief was profound. He never again went on such a frisk with his brother and never told him why not. And swore to himself never again to engage with a whore.

On those occasions when Samuel Thomas came back from a night’s cavort with facial bruises, he would explain them to his mother as a consequence of roughhouse with his brother, whom he accused of not knowing his own strength, and John Roger never failed to provide loyal perjuries of corroboration. But Mary Margaret knew a few things about sneaking through windows and was well aware of Samuel Thomas’s nocturnal excursions. She feared his fondness for hazardous entertainments and gave him a warning lecture against them. He listened with due respect and said he would bear her counsel in mind. And then once again, in a pre-dawn hour of a subsequent morning, she woke to faint scrapings as he shinnied up the pipe at the far end of the roof overhang and stole back into his room. It was little consolation to remind herself it would have been as futile for her father to try keeping her from Captain Wolfe. She sensed Samuel Thomas’s impatience to be out in the world, and though she could do nothing to dissuade him from his ramblings—she would not stoop to haranguing nor to weeping in plea—she implored him to at least complete his studies at the Madison School and receive his diploma. And he promised her he would.

Two months before her sons’ graduations Mary Margaret got sick for the first time in her life. She went to bed with a fever one night and in the morning was sheened with sweat and aching to the bone and too weak to rouse herself. She refused to send for a doctor, saying she would recover soon enough after a cup of broth and bit of rest. The next day she was worse. John Roger fetched a doctor who prescribed a physic and cold compresses and said he would return in the morning. That evening she was delirious. The twins sat at her bedside in the amber light of an oil lamp and took turns mopping her brow and neck. She tossed through the night, her eyes dark hollows, her nightdress pasted to her skin, the shadowed room malodorous with her sickly swelter. Just before dawn she startled them when she suddenly sat up and stared unblinking into a shadowy corner of the room. Then lay back and fixed Samuel Thomas with a stare that glowed like blown embers and said, “Do not be him or ye are damned.” Then said “The light is too bright.” And closed her eyes and died. John Roger wept while Samuel Thomas straightened her nightdress and arranged the bedclothes and washed her face and brushed her hair and then sent for the doctor. For lack of a better guess the medico cited brain fever on the death certificate.

A number of longtime patrons of the pub attended the funeral, and flowers were heaped about the headstone.

Mary Parham Wolfe

1810 - 1845

Beloved Mother

of John and Samuel

In sorting through her belongings they found a loaded derringer in a drawer of her vanity. The handlegrips were of ivory and engraved with RBW. Both of them wanted the gun and again resorted to the spin of a coin. And that antique agent of fate conferred the pistol on Samuel Thomas.

They received their diplomas in June and that same day posed together in a Market Street studio for a pair of daguerreotype photographs, one for each of them. Standing side by side in their formal graduation dress they presented a double image of a single and somberly handsome seventeen-year-old self. Some weeks later they sold the tavern and took lodging at a sailors’ hostel called the Yardarm Inn, where they would reside through the rest of the summer before taking leave of Portsmouth. John Roger was bound for Hanover and the freshman class at Dartmouth, having earned a scholarship by means of his superior academic record, a host of glowing letters of recommendation, and a fine application essay expounding on the nobility of the legal profession. Samuel Thomas had signed as a deck hand with a cargo ship scheduled to set sail five days after his brother left town. The Atropos would make several ports of call along the seaboard down to Jacksonville before reversing course back to Portsmouth.

John Roger had favored an equal division of the proceeds from the tavern sale but Samuel Thomas would accept only enough money to see him through until he shipped out. “You’ll be needing a fat purse for college a lot more than I’ll be needing one at sea.”

They had never before been separated, and during the last hours before his departure for Hanover on the evening coach, John Roger’s glumness was plain to see. Over a café supper, Samuel Thomas reminded him that the Atropos would be gone for only six months. He promised to go see him at Dartmouth as soon as he returned.

At the coach station, they embraced and wished each other well. Samuel Thomas said he would post a letter from every port of call. “Plan on me being back around the middle of winter,” he said with a grin. “Whether you like it or not.”

It is an ancient joke that to make God laugh you need only tell Him your plans.

After seeing his brother off, Samuel Thomas returned to the Yardarm, but he was not sleepy and tried to pass the time with a small atlas. It was the only book he had packed in his carpetbag together with some clothes and toiletries, the graduation daguerreotype, his grandfather’s hornpipe—which he had won by yet another coin toss—and the derringer. But he felt John Roger’s absence like a great gap in his chest and the atlas could not hold his attention. He wished the Atropos were weighing anchor in the morning rather than in five days. Near midnight he was yet wide awake and decided a long walk and a pint might be of help. He was almost out the door when he remembered that some of the inn’s rooms had been robbed the night before while their residents were away. The only thing in his bag of value to a thief was the derringer, so he retrieved it and put it in his jacket pocket.

He walked a long way down the waterfront with his collar turned up against a chill breeze. He did not desire conversation and so chose a saloon he had not patronized before and where no one knew him. He drank by himself at the end of the bar, downing three slow mugs of ale before taking his leave at just after two o’clock, a pleasant tingle on his lips. The wind had come up and carried a heavy smell of impending rain. The misty lamp-lit streets lay deserted to the late hour and the coming storm.

He had his head down against the wind as he turned a corner—and collided with a large man coming from the other direction, his forehead striking the man in the face, jarring him rearward and bringing blood from his nose. The man’s instant reaction was to yell “Bastard!” and lash out with the truncheon in his hand, striking Samuel Thomas on the ear and knocking off his hat. Samuel Thomas yelped and punched at the man in reflex but missed, and the man rushed at him, flailing in a fury, driving him back against a wall. Then the derringer was in Samuel Thomas’s hand and the pistol cracked with a yellow flash—the first time he’d fired a gun in his life—and the half-inch ball punched through the man’s neck and rang off a lamppost. The man’s head slumped like a puppet’s snipped of its string and his hat rolled off and his body raced it to the ground. Staring at the sprawled figure and the black ribbons of blood unspooling along the cobblestone seams, Samuel Thomas knew the man was dead, and a chaos of sensations coursed through him. Then he saw the watchman brassard on the man’s arm and was jolted with cold dread. He looked all about and saw no one. Then snatched up his hat and ran.

He’d gone two blocks before realizing he still had the gun in his hand and he flung it high onto a rooftop. His ear throbbed and felt to his fingers like a chunk of peeled fruit. He kept to the shadows as he hurried through the empty streets and without destination other than away from the harbor. He held his hat to his head against the strengthening wind and felt the first pricks of rain on his face—and then it was slapping into him in gusting swirls.

His thoughts were a turmoil. What if there were a witness, someone who had been looking on from the shadows? What if there were inquiries at the sailors’ inns and it was learned at the Yardarm of a guest of his description, Samuel Wolfe by name, who had gone out and not returned even to retrieve his carpetbag? He remembered now that his carpetbag still held the photograph of himself and his brother and he had a moment’s frantic impulse to return for it—then cursed himself for a fool and hastened on. To report to the Atropos was out of the question. Someone might check the crew rosters of all ships in harbor. The more he pondered his plight the worse it seemed. Homicide was in any instance a grave matter but the killing of a watchman always roused an outrage. He had once read a newspaper account of a Boston sailor who killed a watchman in a fight and then fled, fearing no one would believe his claim of self-defense. He was shortly run to ground by manhunters seeking the posted reward and his fear was borne out. Although none of the witnesses could say how the fight had started, and though he swore before God and jurymen that he had only been defending himself against a severe and unjustified attack, he was judged guilty of murder and hanged.

Samuel Thomas was sure the bountymen would soon be on his track. He thought to keep walking until he was clear of Portsmouth and into the woods. But then what? He turned at the next corner for no reason other than a fugitive’s instinct to vary his course. And saw up ahead and across the street a handful of men huddled in their coats and standing against the wall in front of an office with a sign identifying it as a recruiting post for the Army of the United States.

It was still raining hard when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the office, giving merry praise to such patriotism as would abide a drenching in order to serve its country. They all went inside and formed a line in front of the sergeant’s desk. When it was Samuel Thomas’s turn before the sergeant and he was asked his name, he said, “Thomas, Samuel Thomas,” believing the alias a clever one, false only in its lack of complete truth. The recruiter began to write it down. “And what’s the middle initial, Mr Thomas?”

He was unprepared for that. “It’s, ah . . . H.” The first letter that came to mind.

The sergeant smiled and entered it. Then looked up again and studied Samuel Thomas’s battered ear. “What was it she hit you with, lad, a fry pan? Well, it’s off to a better mistress now, you can be sure. She’ll clothe ye and feed ye and give ye a rifle. A goodly more than most will do, now aint it?”

Before noon he and seven other enlistees were on a recruiting wagon bound for Fort Hamilton in New York. He had decided he would not write to John Roger for a long while. He could not trust anyone to carry a letter to him without reading it—or worse, permitting it to fall into the wrong hands and be of help to manhunters.

His plan was to hide in the army for a year or so, long enough for the bountymen to give up their search. Then he would desert. He would go to the nearest port and under another name sign on with a ship for New England. He would seek out John Roger in Hanover and apologize for his long silence and explain everything to him.

Such, in any case, was his plan.