Cool, ironical eyes looked into mine.

“You’re very free with your little gun, my lad.  Let me give you a word in season.  Never hold a pistol to a man unless you mean to shoot.  If your eyes waver you had better had a porridge stick.”

He pressed my wrist back till my fingers relaxed, and he caught my pistol in his teeth.  With a quick movement of the head he dropped it inside his shirt.

“There’s some would have killed you for that trick, young sir,” he said.  “It’s trying to the temper to have gunpowder so near a man’s brain.  But you’re young, and, by your speech, a new-comer.  So instead I’ll offer you a drink.”

He dropped my wrists, and motioned me to follow him.  Very crestfallen and ashamed, I walked in his wake to a little shanty almost on the wateredge.  The place was some kind of inn, for a negro brought us two tankards of apple-jack, and tobacco pipes, and lit a foul-smelling lantern, which he set between us.

“First,” says the man, “let me tell you that I never before clapped eyes on the long piece of rascality you were seeking.  He looked like one that had cheated the gallows.”

“He was a man I knew in Scotland,” I said grumpily.

“Likely enough.  There’s a heap of Scots redemptioners hereaways.  I’m out of Scotland myself, or my forbears were, but my father was settled in the Antrim Glens.  There’s wild devils among them, and your friend looked as if he had given the slip to the hounds in the marshes.  There was little left of his breeches....  Drink, man, or you’ll get fever from your wet duds.”

I drank, and the strong stuff mounted to my unaccustomed brain; my tongue was loosened, my ill-temper mellowed, and I found myself telling this grim fellow much that was in my heart.

“So you’re a merchant,” he said.  “It’s not for me to call down an honest trade, but we could be doing with fewer merchants in these parts.  They’re so many leeches that suck our blood.  Are you here to make siller?”

I said I was, and he laughed.  “I never heard of your uncle’s business, Mr. Garvald, but you’ll find it a stiff task to compete with the lads from Bristol and London.  They’ve got the whole dominion by the scruff of the neck.”

I replied that I was not in awe of them, and that I could hold my own with anybody in a fair trade.

“Fair trade!” he cried scornfully.  “That’s just what you won’t get.  That’s a thing unkenned in Virginia.  Look you here, my lad.  The Parliament in London treats us Virginians like so many puling bairns.  We cannot sell our tobacco except to English merchants, and we cannot buy a horn spoon except it comes in an English ship.  What’s the result of that?  You, as a merchant, can tell me fine.  The English fix what price they like for our goods, and it’s the lowest conceivable, and they make their own price for what they sell us, and that’s as high as a Jew’s.  There’s a fine profit there for the gentlemen-venturers of Bristol, but it’s starvation and damnation for us poor Virginians.”