They went into a great drawing-room, the barred windows of which looked out upon a busy street, warehouses and counting houses and passing sailors. Robert was conscious all the while that the brilliant blue eyes were examining him minutely. His old wonder about his parentage, lost for a while in the press of war and exciting events, returned. He felt intuitively that Master Hardy, like Willet, knew who and what he was, and he also felt with the same force that neither would reply to any question of his on the subject. So he kept his peace and by and by his curiosity, as it always did, disappeared before immediate affairs. The drawing-room was a noble apartment, with dark oaken beams, a polished oaken floor, upon which eastern rugs were spread, and heavy tables of foreign woods. A small model of a sloop rested upon one table and a model of a schooner on another. Here and there were great curving shells with interiors of pink and white, and upon the walls were curious long, crooked knives of the Malay Islands. Everything savored of the sea. Again Robert's imagination leaped up. The blazing hues of distant tropic lands were in his eyes, and the odors of strange fruits and flowers were in his nostrils. "Sit down, Dave," said Master Benjamin, "and you, too, Robert and Tayoga. I suppose you did not come to New Amsterdam--how the name clings!--merely to see me." "That was one purpose, Benjamin," replied Willet, "but we had others in mind too." "To join the war, I surmise, and to get yourselves killed?" "The first part of your reckoning is true, Benjamin, but not the second. We would go to the war, in which we have had some part already, but not in order that we may be killed." "You suffer from the common weakness. One entering war always thinks that it's the other man and not he who will be killed. You're too old for that, David." Willet laughed. "No, Benjamin," he said, "I'm not too old for it, and I never will be. It's the belief that carries us all through danger." "Which way did you think of going in these warlike operations?" "We shall join the force that comes out from England." "The one that will march against Fort Duquesne?" "Undoubtedly." "I hear that it's to be commanded by a general named Braddock, Edward Braddock. What do you know of him?" "Nothing." "But you do know, David, that regular army officers fare ill in the woods as a rule. You've told me often that the savages are a tricky lot, and, fighting in the forest in their own way, are hard to beat." "You speak truth, Benjamin, and I'll not deny it, but there are many of our men in the woods who know the ways of the Indians and of the French foresters. They should be the eyes and ears of General Braddock's army."