Little by little, broken bits of uncomprehended conversation among his elders recurred to the little fellow's mind and pieced themselves together. In the Colony there were certain men who were never named and only referred to in undertones accompanied by backward glances to make sure that no one listened. Certain other men, looking for those unnamed, had been sent to search for them by the King at Home. Of course the King must be obeyed. Sammy did not know why, but he believed this to be the case. He supposed it was all men's duty to do this. His father had never said so that he could remember, yet Sammy supposed that he thought so. Come to think of it, perhaps he didn't. He had heard his father praise Mr. John Davenport of New Haven (and yet he did not think that his father liked Mr. Davenport over well), for having helped somebody escape from the King's searchers. It was very mysterious, but Sammy would do the honest straightforward thing; he would relate to his father what he had seen and heard, and do as his father should tell him to do.
Plainly Sammy had not the fear of the rod before his eyes, so he told his little tale, in all simplicity, and in return his father told him the whole story of the revolt of the people of England under the leadership of Parliament and Cromwell; of the execution of Charles the First by the decree of men who believed that he had deserved beheading for his acts of unlawful tyranny; of the revulsion of feeling on the part of the people who had brought Charles the Second back to his father's throne; how the son had pardoned the most of those who decreed the death of his father, but had exempted from the pardon seven whom he deemed to be the most guilty; that some of these had been already executed, but that teo, having escaped to New England, were now here and in hiding in the spare room of the parsonage house, where only himself, and his wife, and two other gentlemen and their wives knew of the strangers' presence in Hadley; that, so important was it to prevent the secret from becoming known, the bread for the men in hiding was baked in turn in the houses of the three families that knew. Other things, being old campaigners, the men in hiding could cook for themselves by the fire in the spare room fireplace, which, opening into a flue of the kitchen chimney, would not betray them by a separate plume of smoke. These precautions prevented servants from forming suspicions which the large reward offered for the Regicides might induce them to make known. Their bread and undercooked food and their fire wood formed the contents of the big basket, which was hauled up many times each night from the cellar through the closet which had been built expressly for that use. (This was probably the first form of a dumb waiter or a freight elevator employed in this country.)
Sammy, honored by his father's confidence, became his loyal helper, often spending hours in attendance upon the forlorn old men in their darkened room, from which the light of day was almost excluded by the gloomy and heavy interior shutters of thick planks, with heart-shaped openings cut near their tops, as one may still see them in some very old houses. These shutters were never opened save at night, and then only when there was no light within.
The little boy greatly pitied the
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