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Christopher Ferringham is a Royalist soldier by virtue that his father was a mercenary captain in the thirty years war (a second son) and joined up with the King. Christopher simply followed him. It's now the 1650s and Christopher has been hauled out of a prison by his Puritan Uncle and despatched to New England to make good and eventually to return as Heir. Instead Christopher is a scape grace, hangs out with the local trouble makers, insults his other uncle, spends his time gambling and drinking, and gets fined a lot. In one scene even funnier now than then, he obeys the instructions to get his curls cut off by having a longstrip of hair left among the super short: ie a Mohican.
Christopher has two redeeming factors: first he is generous, kind and just and rescues others from trouble often at expense to himself. Second he is in love with his cousin. She, however, won't marry him, most of all because he swears he will be good *for her*. She does not want to be his crutch and uses that phrase.
Eventually, in what is essentially a story about growing into grace, the Uncle at home disowns him as his heir (having acquired a grandson) and Christopher runs away. He accidentally takes his cousin with him, and they end up in the rapids. He rescues her but it's over night. She still won't marry him, taking a place instead as a servant girl in Boston, telling him to return only when he can take her to her home.
He ends up in various scrapes and eventually in the South where he becomes a smith. He refuses to join a friend from England on his plantation, coming to dislike the behaviour of the Cavaliers who are settling there [a link I made in an earlier post]. Eventually tho he inherits that friend's plantation, frees the slaves, rescues his cousins from the North who have been captured by Pirates, exposes his rival in love--who also usefully dies--and is able to return, redeemed, sober and conscientious, and marry his sweetheart.
