He laughed, and I stared at him that he should stoop to jest, yet having a ready leap of comradeship toward him for it; then suddenly his mood changed.  Close to me he edged, and began talking with a serious shrewdness which showed his mind brought fully to bear upon the situation.  “You say, sir,” said he, “that Mistress Mary Cavendish, in a spirit of youthful daring and levity, gave her grandmother a list of the goods which my Lady Culpeper ordered from England, and which even now is due?” I nodded.

“Know you by what ship?”

“The Earl of Fairfax,” I replied, and recalled as I spoke a rumour that my Lord Culpeper designed his daughter Cate for the eldest son of the earl, and had so named his ship in honour of him.

“You say that the Earl of Fairfax is even now due?” said Captain Tabor.

I replied that she was hourly expected by what I had learned; then Captain Tabor, sitting loosely hunched with that utter abandon of all the muscles which one sees in some when they are undergoing a fierce strain of thought, remained silent for a space, his brows knitted.  Then suddenly my shoulder tingled with the clap which he gave it, and the cabin rang and rang again with a laugh so loud and gay that it seemed a very note of the May day.  “You are merry,” I said, but I laughed myself, though somewhat doubtfully, when he unfolded his scheme to me, which was indeed both bold and humorous.  He knew well the captain of the Earl of Fairfax, who had been shipmate with him.

“Many a lark ashore have we had together,” said Calvin Tabor, “and, faith, but I know things about him now which compel him to my turn; the devil’s mess have we both been in, but I need not use such means of persuasion, if I know honest Dick Watson.”  The scheme of which Captain Tabor delivered himself, with bursts of laughter enough to wake the ship, was, to speak briefly, that he should go with a boat, rowing against the current, by keeping close to bank and taking advantage of eddies, and meet the Earl of Fairfax before she reached Jamestown, board her, and persuade her captain to send the cases of my Lady Culpeper’s goods under cover of night to the Golden Horn, whence he would unload them next morning, and Mistress Mary could show them to her grandmother, and then they were to be reshipped with all possible speed and secrecy, the Earl of Fairfax meanwhile laying at anchor at the mouth of the river, and then delivered to my Lady Culpeper.

There was but one doubt as to the success of this curious scheme in my mind, and that was that Mistress Mary might not easily lend herself to such deception.  However, Captain Tabor, with a skill of devising concerning which I have often wondered whether it may be more common in the descendants of those who settled in New England, who were in such sore straits to get their own wills, than with us of Virginia, provided a way through that difficulty.

“’Tis full easy,” said he.  “You say that the maid’s sister will say naught against it—­and you?”