Free Arundel by Kenneth Roberts

One goes across Casco Bay into Maquoit Bay in two hours if the wind’s right. You walk up to Brunswick over the Twelve Rod Road in an hour.”
    Grateful for this information, which would save us a day’s tramp over the evil trails northward from Falmouth, we bade farewell to Mistress Woodbury, who waved aside my father’s demand for a reckoning, declaring she would seek payment in kind at our inn when she traveled to Boston for fripperies.
    I was bemazed by the size and activity of Falmouth, and by the wealth of the place. Men went freely about the streets, wearing embroidered waistcoats, lace cuffs, silver shoe buckles. From the stores on King Street came odors of all sorts of foods and drinks and merchandise; and the street itself was five rods wide. So great was the traffic that the whole road was churned into mud or dust and scarce a blade of grass grew anywhere.
    There were houses of three stories, meeting houses, public buildings, all built of boards, with no logs showing, some painted red, though mostly unpainted. I wondered how the people of Falmouth could spend their days amid such noise and excitement without losing their minds; and I resolved then, nor have I ever changed, that I would hold to the peace of the country and leave the tumult of cities to folk of stronger nerves.
    Never had I seen such hustling and bustling as surrounded the wharves of Fore Street—wharves so large that the largest whaleboats seemed small beside them; and even brigs of a hundred tons burthen, that would have crowded the eels and pollocks out of our Arundel River, were nothing to waste time over.
    The whaleboats lay at the pier-end, one loading supplies and parcels for the Brunswick fort, and the other taking on goods for forts and settlers along the Kennebec. There were four men to row, two on each side, and a helmsman with a musket beside him, and a boat captain in the bow with a musket and a fish spear, prepared for any sort of encounter.
    At seven, after a deal of shouting and swearing, the tarpaulins were stretched over the packages, and our boat pushed out, her passengers besides ourselves being a trader and a young militiaman from the Brunswick fort, who had been home to visit his parents. For the first time since the afternoon of the preceding day my gloom fell from me at the thought we were about to enter the wild Indian country, and that somewhere within it—anywhere within it—we might find Mary and snatch her from her captors and carry her back to Arundel to be my love forever.
    My father, too, I thought, seemed better pleased than I had seen him in some time; and he looked approvingly at the green islands in the bay and the high Yarmouth shore on our left as the whaleboat edged out into deeper water and pointed her bow a little to the north of east.
    “To-night,” he said, “we’ll sleep with friends on Swan Island, if we can find two Assagunticooks to carry us into the Norridgewock country.” With that he asked the young militiaman where in Brunswick the Assagunticooks could be found.
    “God’s truth,” the boy said helplessly, “I know none of these red devils by name. They all look alike! If left to me, I’d have ’em wiped out, so to stop ’em yowling how we stole their lands, and put an end to their thieving and rum-guzzling!”
    And this, indeed, is the manner in which the great Abenaki people are regarded by those who have had no means of knowing them, as well as by many who have had opportunities to know them but cannot, through bigotry or prejudice, see beyond the ends of their noses. Since I must frequently speak of my dealings with Abenakis during the course of this tale, it is fitting I should write down the facts that I and my father before me gathered from them and concerning them.
    Little enough is known of them now, God knows, and most of that erroneous; and I fear that in another hundred years the only memory of them will be the names they gave to ten thousand hills and headlands and bays