But his contentment speedily had an end, for, not halfway to the landing, he was overtaken by Francis Billington, Jack Cooke, and Joe Rogers, who at once addressed him in disrespectful wise. "Ho, Miles, that's brave work, tending a baby," jeered Francis.
"You meddle with your own matters," Miles replied sulkily.
"Come with us, Miles," Jack put in pacifically. "We're going along shore to the first brook--"
"We do not want a baby with us," Joe interrupted.
"_You_ might stay with me, Jack," Miles pleaded, as the others turned away.
Jack, a freckled little fellow with merry eyes, dug the heel of his shoe into the dirt. "The other lads will be having sport," he said half-heartedly.
"Then go with them," cried Miles. "Only you were very fain to play with me on shipboard."
Even this last thrust failed; Jack ran after the others down the hill, and Miles, feeling cross and ill-treated, was left to himself.
'Twould look too much as if he were following his ungracious friends if he went on to the landing, so he turned back to Elder Brewster's house. There Priscilla Mullins, a girl orphaned by the winter's sickness, who, because she was eighteen, was classed by Miles as a woman, was sweeping the doorstone with a broom of birch twigs. She paused in the labor teasingly to throw him a kiss, and tell him his busy sister and the lads were cooking by the brookside.
Sure enough, in the level space between the base of the bluff on which the cottage stood and the cove, Miles found Dolly, and Dolly's poppet Priscilla, and Love, and Wrestling, and Solomon, and Trug, who was not admitted to Mistress Hopkins's house because his great paws dirtied her floor,--all busied in making delectable pies of mud.
But when Miles joined them, Love withdrew from the mud-pie game, and wished to play at holding a council, such as his father and all the men were holding that morning in the Common House to regulate the military affairs of the colony. Dolly insisted that she should be allowed to come to the council too, for all Love urged that women never were invited thither, and the argument was growing bitter, when an unwonted tumult in the village street drew Miles's attention. A confused sort of calling and shrill shouting it seemed, that made his heart quicken between curiosity and alarm; so, snatching up Damaris, he scaled the bluff, while the rest of the children scrambled close behind him.