“It is exceedingly kind of you, Master Stedman, to agree upon holding your peace if we set you ashore,” Abel Grant said with a laugh of derision. “I should be ashamed of these lads if they allowed such as you to frighten them with threatenin’ words. So far as my part of the debt is concerned, I will willingly pay it when you an’ hundreds of your kidney put me in such a position that it is impossible to help myself.” If a look could have killed, then of a verity would Abel Grant have died at that moment, for Luther shot at him a glance such as I have never seen equaled for venom or hatred. Abel had already turned the sloop’s bow shoreward, evidently counting on striking the bulkhead at the foot of Market Street, and while one might have counted twenty no member of our party spoke. Then it was the big fellow who took it upon himself to conduct the conversation, and he was more wise than Luther had been inasmuch as he began to cajole instead of threaten us. “It is easy to see that you four be lads of spirit; in fact, it would seem much as if you had writ proof of it on my head. Now because we would have used your sloop to our advantage, and not only failed in the effort, but have been decidedly worsted, I am asking if it is the part of brave fellows to carry the job so far as to deliver us to those who, because we are in a different way of thinking, might so twist that which has happened this afternoon as to make it much to our disadvantage?” “Do you count it as a joke to steal a boat in order to save from arrest a man who had been plotting murder that he might deliver the town up to the Britishers?” I asked sternly, and he, with such a show of friendliness as would have deceived me had I not received good proof of his enmity, said quietly: “Because of the turmoil in the streets this day, you have come to fancy that everything which takes place has some connection with what you have heard about the pretended plot. In this case, however, are you wronging a friend of yours and a friend of his country.” “We are not minded to count Luther Stedman as a friend,” Abe interrupted savagely, and the big Tory went on with a smile: “Be that as it may; I will change the offending words so that they shall stand ‘a neighbor of yours and his friend,’ and whatever there may be of personal grievances between you and my comrade here, you surely at such a time as this, when an innocent man may easily be credited with doing wrong, would not work a wilful injury, else am I mistaken in your faces. We who have been worsted in what I claim to have been a fair fight, accepting the defeat in manly fashion, ask that the matter may come to an end by our going quietly away whithersoever we may.” “But what about that debt Luther Stedman has spoken of?” Abel asked fiercely. “Merely idle words; he has not gotten over being hot because we were worsted, and spoke without due heed.”