Sailing in the harbor, Micah and his friend Reuben rescue a man who jumped in the sea to escape an altercation on board a Dutch ship.
The braggart and soldier of fortune Decimus Saxon, "tenth child of a worthy father," had been in a violent dispute with two of his brothers: Nonus and Quartus. Becomes apparent that all three brothers had been engaged in the slave trade.
Saxon has with him letters for several of the Independent sect, including Micah's father.
A change into dry clothing at Micah's home also seems to change Decimus' identity: "it seemed as if he had cast off his manner with his rainments," no more the flippant "bedraggled castaway who had crawled like a conger eel into our fishing-boat" but rather a demure and pious warrior for the faith.
Micah's father, utterly taken in by Decimus' manner -- "a man of parts and piety" -- outfits him as his son's companion in sending the youth off to war as part of Monmouth's forces.
As they prepare to travel across country to join Monmouth, Micah objects to the cover story Decimus proposes as dishonorable and a lie: "I should rather be hanged as a rebel than speak a falsehood."
Decimus counters that all warfare is a manner of lying: "For what are all strategems, ambuscades, and outfalls but lying on a large scale? What is an adroit commander but one who has a facility for disguising the truth?"
The freebooter casts off his piety once out of range of Micah's father: "Master Decimus Saxon had flung to the winds the precise demeanor which he had assumed in the presence of my father, and rattled away with many a jest and scrap of rhyme of song ad we galloped through the darkness."
"'Gadzooks!,' said he frankly, 'it is good to be able to speak freely without being expected to tag every sentence with a hallelujah or amen.'"
Further making his opportunism apparent, Decimus relates to the increasingly scandalized Micah the story of how, captured by the Turk, he escaped death and slavery by taking on the identity of a devout Muslim.
Micah: "'What,' I cried in horror, 'you did pretend to be a Musselman?'"
Decimus: "Nay, there was no pretence. I became a Musselman."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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