Two days later, going down the street of James Town, I met one of the English skippers, a redfaced, bottle-nosed old ruffian called Bullivant.  He was full of apple-jack, and strutted across the way to accost me.

“What’s this I hear, Sawney?” he cried.  “You’re setting up as a pedlar, and trying to cut in on our trade.  Od twist me, but we’ll put an end to that, my bully-boy.  D’you think the King, God bless him, made the laws for a red-haired, flea-bitten Sawney to diddle true-born Englishmen?  What’ll the King’s Bench say to that, think ye?”

He was very abusive, but very uncertain on his legs.  I said good-humouredly that I welcomed process of law, and would defend my action.  He shook his head, and said something about law not being everything, and England being a long road off.  He had clearly some great threat to be delivered of, but just then he sat down so heavily that he had no breath for anything but curses.

But the drunkard had given me a notion.  I hurried home and gave instructions to my men to keep a special guard on the store.  Then I set off in a pinnace to find my three ships, which were now lading up and down among the creeks.

That was the beginning of a fortnight’s struggle, when every man’s hand was against me, and I enjoyed myself surprisingly.  I was never at rest by land or water.  The ships were the least of the business, for the dour Scots seamen were a match for all comers.  I made them anchor at twilight in mid-stream for safety’s sake, for in that drouthy clime a firebrand might play havoc with them.  The worst that happened was that one moonless night a band of rascals, rigged out as Indian braves, came yelling down to the quay where some tobacco was waiting to be shipped, and before my men were warned had tipped a couple of hogsheads into the water.  They got no further, for we fell upon them with marling-spikes and hatchets, stripped them of their feathers, and sent them to cool their heads in the muddy river.  The ring-leader I haled to James Town, and had the pleasure of seeing him grinning through a collar in the common stocks.

Then I hied me back to my store, which was my worst anxiety, I was followed by ill names as I went down the street, and one day in a tavern, a young fool drew his shabble on me.  But I would quarrel with no man, for that was a luxury beyond a trader.  There had been an attack on my tobacco shed by some of the English seamen, and in the mellay one of my blacks got an ugly wound from a cutlass.  It was only a foretaste, and I set my house in order.

One afternoon John Faulkner brought me word that mischief would be afoot at the darkening.  I put each man to his station, and I had the sense to picket them a little distance from the house.  The Englishmen were clumsy conspirators.  We watched them arrive, let them pass, and followed silently on their heels.  Their business was wreckage, and they fixed a charge of powder by the tobacco shed, laid and lit a fuse, and retired discreetly into the bushes to watch their handiwork.