The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure
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Title: The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure
Author: Robert Neilson Stephens
Illustrator: H. C. Edwards
Release date: March 5, 2011 [eBook #35488]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35488
Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROAD TO PARIS: A STORY OF ADVENTURE ***
Produced by David Edwards, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
THE ROAD TO PARIS
BY
R. N. STEPHENS
[Illustration]
Works of
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
An Enemy to the King
(Sixth Thousand)
The Continental Dragoon
(Fifth Thousand)
The Road to Paris
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY, Publishers
(Incorporated)
196 Summer St., Boston, Mass.
THE ROAD TO PARIS
[Illustration: "A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO
LONGER TRUE."
(_See page 536._)]
THE ROAD TO PARIS
A Story of Adventure
BY
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
AUTHOR OF
"AN ENEMY TO THE KING"
"THE CONTINENTAL DRAGOON," ETC.
Illustrated by
H. C. EDWARDS
"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."
--_Old Song._
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
1898
_Copyright, 1898_
By L. C. Page and Company
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.
"_D'Artagnan ... touched the earth, moistened with the evening
dew, with the ends of his fingers, crossed himself as if at the
holy-water vessel of a church, and retook alone--ever alone--the
road to Paris._"
--THE VISCOUNT OF BRAGELONNE.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I. A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS 1
II. "OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY" 21
III. AT THE SIGN OF THE GEORGE 50
IV. OF A BROKEN SABBATH AND BROKEN
HEADS 72
V. FROM BROADWAY TO BUNKER HILL 92
VI. THE WIND OF CIRCUMSTANCE 118
VII. THE MARCH THROUGH MAINE 150
VIII. WITHIN THE WALLS OF QUEBEC 175
IX. THE INCIDENTS OF A SNOWY NIGHT 201
X. "BY FLOOD AND FIELD" 227
XI. THREE WHIMSICAL GENTLEMEN AND A
BEAUTIFUL LADY 257
XII. THE DEVIL TO PAY AT THE PELICAN INN 288
XIII. "UP AND DOWN IN LONDON TOWN" 323
XIV. "FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE" 352
XV. AN ELOPEMENT FROM A DILIGENCE 376
XVI. PASTORAL AND TRAGEDY 401
XVII. "STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON
MAKE" 426
XVIII. DICK GIVES A SPECIMEN OF AMERICAN
SHOOTING 452
XIX. THE FAVOR OF A PRINCE 474
XX. THE HONOR OF A LADY-IN-WAITING 499
XXI. "THE ROAD TO PARIS" 524
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
"A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO
LONGER TRUE" _Frontispiece_
"THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY
YEARS OLD" 36
"IT WAS THE MAN SENT BY ARNOLD" 223
"BEARING THE SWOONING FORM OF AMABEL" 294
"'OH, YOU HAVE A VISITOR! MON DIEU, SILVIUS!'" 431
"FREDERICK II. RECOILED A STEP OR TWO" 518
INTRODUCTION.
"With our company of riflemen that marched in Arnold's army through the
Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, there was a sergeant's wife, a large
and sturdy woman, no common camp-follower, but decent and respected, who
one day, when the troops started to wade through a freezing pond, of
which they broke the thin ice coating with the butts of their guns,
calmly lifted her skirts above her waist and strode in, and so kept the
greater part of her clothes dry in crossing. Not a man of us made a
jest, or even grinned, so natural was her action in the circumstances. I
have often used this instance to show that what the world calls modesty
is a matter of time and place, and I now hold that too much modesty is
out of time and place when a man who has had more than a fair share of
remarkable experiences undertakes a true relation of the extraordinary
adventures that have befallen him. So, if the narrative on which I am
setting out be marred by any affectation, it will not be the affectation
of modesty.
"When I was a boy in our valley behind the Blue Mountains of
Pennsylvania, I used to read the 'True Travels, Adventures, and
Observations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America, from 1593 to 1629,' and wonder whether I should ever have any
travels or adventures of my own to make a book of. When, afterwards, I
did go a travelling, and adventures did come thick and fast upon me, I
was too much engrossed in the travels and adventures themselves to give
a thought as to what matter they might be for narration. Not till this
breathing-place came in my life, did my boyhood dreams return to my
mind, and did I realize that my part in battle and imprisonment, danger
and escape, love and intrigue, would make a book that might be worth
fireside reading. That book I now begin, and shall probably finish it if
I be not interrupted by untimely death or by some new call to scenes of
enterprise and turmoil,--for it is no retired veteran, but a man early
in his twenties, that here tries whether with pen and ink he can make as
fair a show as he has already made with implements less peaceful."
The foregoing lines constitute the first two paragraphs of a book
entitled "The Travels and Adventures of Richard Wetheral, in America,
England, France, and Germany, in the years 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1778,"
of which it happens, by strange circumstance, that I possess the only
copy. The title-page shows that it was published by (or "printed for")
J. Robson, Bookseller, in New Bond Street, London, in 1785. The three
brown 16mo volumes first caught my glance when they lay with a heap of
ragged books on a board before a second-hand shop in Twenty-sixth
Street, there being attached to the board a weather-beaten square of
pasteboard, bearing the legend, "Your choice for ten cents." Not until I
had paid the dealer thirty cents and separated the three volumes forever
from their musty companions, which were mostly of a theological
character, did I discover, by parting a blank leaf from the adjacent
cover, to which it had long been sticking, that the book was a treasure,
for which the dealer would have charged me as many dollars as I had paid
cents, had he anticipated my discovery. The long-concealed page bore on
its brown-spotted surface an inscription, in eighteenth century
handwriting, turned yellow by age, signed by the author of the book, and
to the effect that he had caused his true narrative to be published
without his wife's knowledge, thinking this book might afford her a
pleasant surprise, but that the surprise with which she first perused it
was so far from pleasant, she had forthwith, in the name of modesty,
demanded its immediate suppression, which was at once accomplished by
her indulgent husband, who had preserved only this one copy for the
benefit of posterity. When I asked the bookseller how he had come by
the copy, he told me, after an investigation, that he had bought it with
a lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recently
deceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came,
that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of a
hundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumes
among the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.
In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes to
the world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and not
presenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforward
English. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recently
with novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuine
autobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with some
nausea. The second reason is that the hero, writing only of his own
doings and his own witnessings and in his own day, necessarily omitted
many details, obtainable by me from other sources, and useful not only
for filling in the background of his narrative, but also that they throw
light on some points that were not quite clear to himself.
THE ROAD TO PARIS.
CHAPTER I.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.
In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with
him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or
elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the
water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of
Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees,
tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic
coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh
Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American
general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few
Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling.
From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had
brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across
the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the
privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of
wilderness life.
They arrived one evening at the wigwams of a Shawnee village on the
verge of a beaver pond, and were received in so friendly a manner by the
Indians that Wetheral decided to live for a time among them. Mercer,
joined by some other enterprising newcomers from the old country, went
farther westward; but the two friends were destined to meet often again.
Wetheral built himself a hut near the Indian village and indulged to the
full his love of hunting, fishing, and roaming the silent forest. Often
he saw other white men, for already the Scotch and Irish and English had
begun to build their cabins and to clear small fields on both sides of
the Susquehanna, across which river there were ferries at a few
infantile settlements. By 1750 so many other English and Scotch, some of
the men having their wives with them, had put up log cabins near
Wetheral's, and had cleared ground for farming all around, that the
settlement merited a name, and took that of Carlisle. The Indians,
succumbing to the inevitable, betook themselves elsewhere.
Wetheral, with all his love for the free life of the woods, welcomed
civilization, for he was of gentle birth and of what passed in those
days as good education, and had a taste for learning. His life was now
more diversified. He not only hunted and fished, but also cultivated a
few acres, and during a part of each year he did the duties of
schoolmaster to the settlement,--for the Scotch-Irish, like the Puritans
of New England, went in for book-learning. He sent the skins obtained by
him in the chase to Philadelphia by pack-horse, and sometimes, for the
sake of variety, accompanied them, passing, on the way, through the belt
of country industriously tilled by the growing German Protestant
population, and through that occupied by Quakers and other English, in
the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. In his own neighborhood the
people of the best manners and information were Presbyterians, and in
course of time he came to count himself as one of them, less from
religious ideas than from a natural wish to associate himself with the
respectable and lettered element; for, much as he loved the roaming life
of the hunter, he was repelled by the coarseness and violence and ill
living of a certain class of nomadic frontiersmen who doubtless had good
reason to keep their distance from politer communities.
He was one of the Pennsylvanians who went as pioneers in Braddock's
fatal expedition, and on that he saw Colonel Washington. He marched with
his old friend, Hugh Mercer, in the battalion of three hundred men
under Col. John Armstrong, of Carlisle, in 1756, from Fort Shirley to
the Indian town of Kittanning, which the troops destroyed after killing
most of its hostile inhabitants. During a part of that year and of the
next, he served in the provincial garrison at Fort Augusta, far north
from Carlisle, and east of the Susquehanna.
Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the
large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine
island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's
daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the
daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently
rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather
paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an
Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John
Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder.
As the young wife, who was kind of heart and wise of head, desired to be
near the roof whence she had fled, that a reconciliation might be the
more easily attempted, Wetheral traded off his field and cabin at
Carlisle, returned northward across the Kitocktinning mountains to the
neighborhood of his wife's former home, built a log house of two rooms
and a loft, near the left bank of the Juniata, a few miles above that
river's junction with the Susquehanna, and there, in the month of
April, 1758, he became the father of Richard Wetheral, the hero of this
book.
The child's arrival was aided by his maternal grandmother, who had
already melted towards the young couple, although her husband still held
out against them. The surgeon whom Mr. Wetheral had summoned from Fort
Hunter, which the settlers were garrisoning because of signs of an
Indian outbreak, arrived too late to do more than pronounce the boy a
healthy specimen and predict the speedy recovery of the mother, who was
indeed of sturdy stock. The household whose different members the
observant infant soon began to discriminate consisted of the father,
whose dauntless and hearty character has already been slightly
indicated; the mother, who was comely and strong in nature as in face
and form; a younger sister of the mother's, and a raw but ready youth
hired by the father to aid in working the little rude farm and in
protecting the family from any of the now rampant Indians who might
threaten it. For Mr. Wetheral's house was so near Fort Hunter that he
chose to stay and occupy it rather than to take refuge within the
stockade of the fort, which latter course was followed by many settlers
of the near-by valleys when the Indian alarm came in the month of our
hero's birth.
But the Wetherals were not molested by any of the Indians that roamed
the woods in small parties, in quest of the scalps of palefaces, during
the spring and summer of 1758. Often, though, there came news by horse
and canoe, and carried from settlement to settlement, from farm-cabin to
farm-cabin, of frequent depredations: how in York County Robert Buck was
killed and scalped at Jamieson's house and all the rest of its dwellers
were carried away; how, near at home, in Sherman's Valley, a woman was
horribly killed and scalped; how, in July, Captain Craig, riding about
seven miles from Harris's Ferry, was suddenly struck in the face by a
tomahawk thrown from ambush, put spurs to his horse and fled from his
yelling savage assailants, escaping by sheer speed of his animal, the
blood flowing from the huge gash cut in his cheek by the well-aimed
hatchet; how fared the soldiers who set off in search and pursuit of the
red-faced enemy, and who were none other than the hardiest of the
settlers themselves, accustomed to shoot Indians or bear, to burn out
rattlesnake nests, or to farm the ill-cleared land, as occasion might
require.
Thus the talk to which Dick Wetheral (for it was early settled that he
should be called Richard, a favorite name in his mother's family) became
accustomed, as soon as he knew what any talk meant, was of frightful
perils and daring achievements. Such talk continued throughout all his
childhood, though after 1758 the Indians were peaceful towards central
Pennsylvania until 1763.
The boy early showed an adventurous disposition. His first explorations,
conducted on all-fours, were confined to the two rooms on the ground
floor of the house, but at that stage of his career a journey to the end
of the kitchen from the extremity of the other apartment, which served
as parlor and principal bedroom, was one of length and incident. New
territory was opened to him to roam, on that eventful day when his aunt
carried him up the ladder to the loft, which was divided by a partition
into two rude sleeping-chambers, and in which he derived as great joy
from being set at large as Alexander would have drawn from the discovery
of a new world to conquer.
When the boy was in his second year, his world underwent a vast
enlargement. This came about through his father's building a house to
which the original log cabin of his birth became merely the rear wing.
The new structure, made of logs covered with rough-sawn planks, destined
to be annually whitewashed, provided two rooms on the ground floor, and
two bed-chambers overhead. One of these lower rooms communicated by a
door with the original log building, of which the ground floor was
transformed, by the removal of the partition, into one large kitchen.
From the new parlor a flight of stairs led to the room above, whence a
low door and a few descending steps gave entrance to the old loft, so
that the young explorer, by dint of long exertion, could reach the
second story unaided. And now his days were full of experiences. From
his favorite spot near the kitchen fireplace, to the farthest corner of
the spare bedroom down-stairs, by way of the parlor (which was
invariably called "the room"), was a trip sufficient for ordinary days.
But in times of extraordinary energy and ambition, the crawling Dick
would make the grand tour up the stairs and through the four
second-story apartments, which seemed countless in number, and each a
whole province in itself. So long ago was yesterday from to-day, at that
time of his life, that this immense journey was full of novelty to him
at each repetition, the adventures of one journey having been forgotten
before another could be undertaken. And these adventures were as
numerous as befell Christian in his Pilgrim's Progress. There were dark
corners, queer-looking articles of furniture seemingly with life and
expression, shadows of strange shapes, that made the young traveller
pause and hold his breath and half turn back, until reassured by the
sound of his aunt's voice calling to the chickens in the kitchen yard,
his father or the hired man sharpening his sickle or calling to the
plow-horse in the field beyond, or--most welcome and reassuring of
all--his mother singing at her work in the rooms below.
What a great evening was that when the little indoor explorer found a
fellow traveller! Dick was already in bed and asleep, having retired
somewhat against his will, as he would have preferred to remain up until
his father's return from a horseback journey on business down the river.
When he was awakened by his mother, on whose face he saw a smile that
promised something pleasant, he blinked once or twice in the
candle-light, and looked eagerly around. He saw his father standing near
his mother, and between the two a great black head whose long jaws were
open in a kind of merry grin of good-fellowship, and from between whose
white teeth protruded a red tongue that evinced an impulse to meet the
wondering Dickie's face half way. The boy gazed for a moment, then threw
out his hands towards the beaming face of the newcomer, and screamed
with gleeful laughter. A moment later the dog was licking the
youngster's face, while Dick, still laughing, was burying his fingers in
the animal's shaggy black coat. Thereafter, the boy Dick was attended on
all his expeditions by the dog Rover, and never were two more devoted
comrades. The dog was a mixture of Scotch collie and black spaniel, and,
though in size between those two breeds, looked a huge animal from the
view-point of two years. If Dick required less than the usual grown-up
assistance in learning to walk, it was because Rover was of just the
size to serve as a support.
Dick now began to make excursions outdoors. Of course he had already
spent much time in the open air, but always under the eye of some member
of the household. His previous travels from the house had, by this
guardianship, been robbed of the zest of adventure. The first trips
abroad that he made independently were clandestine. Thus, one afternoon
when the men were in the fields, and his aunt was busy tracing figures
in the fresh sand that had been laid on the parlor floor, he availed
himself of his mother's preoccupation over her spinning-wheel to sally
forth from the kitchen door with no other company than Rover. His
mother, humming a tune while she span, did not at first notice the
silence in that part of the kitchen where Dick's presence was usually
manifest to the ear. At last, the bark of Rover, coming with a note of
alarm from a distance of several rods beyond the kitchen door, roused
her to a sense of the boy's absence. With wildly beating heart she ran
out, and towards the sound, which came from beyond the fruit-trees and
wild grapevines that bounded the kitchen yard. She soon saw that Rover's
call for help had reason. Little Dick was leaning over the edge of a
deep spring, staring with amusement at his own image in the clear
shaded water. Who knows but the nymphs of the spring would have drawn
him in, as Hylas was drawn, had not the mother arrived at that moment,
for the boy was reaching out to grasp the face in the water when she
caught him by the waist?
Another time, it was not the warning bark of Rover, but the merest
accident, that rescued the boy from a situation as perilous. His aunt,
going into the little barn near the house, to look for eggs, saw him
sitting directly under one of the plow-horses in a stall, watching with
interest the movements of the animal's fore-feet, as they regularly
pawed the ground. On being taken back to the house, little Dick was made
to understand that solitary expeditions were forbidden, and in so sharp
a manner that thereafter he rarely violated orders. He was carefully
watched against the recurrence of temptation to travel. A constant
source of terror to the mother, on Dick's account, was the nearness of
the river, whose bed lay a few rods to the south, not far from the foot
of a steep bank which fell from the piece of ground on which the house
stood. This piece of ground was surrounded by a rude fence, and the boy
spent many a longing quarter of an hour in looking through the rails at
the river that flowed gently, with constant murmur, below. Between the
river and the bank ran what some called a road, what may have formerly
been an Indian trail, and what in Dick's time was really but a rough
path for horses. It led from the farms farther back up the river, behind
the azure mountains at the west, down to the more thickly settled
country beyond the mountains at the east, and afar it joined the road to
Lancaster and Philadelphia.
The boy's parents early taught him his letters, for the elder Wetheral
had brought a few books with his meagre baggage from the old country,
and had since acquired, from some of the settlers of the best class, a
few more, two by dying bequest, two by gift, and four or five by
purchase and trade. With the contents of some of these, Dick first
became acquainted through his father's reading aloud on Sundays and
rainy days, before the kitchen fire. One of these was Capt. John Smith's
account of his marvellous achievements. Strangely enough, or rather
naturally enough, the parts of this book that most interested Dick were
not where Smith told of his adventures with Indians in America, but
where he related his doings in Europe; for Indians and primitive
surroundings were familiar matters to Dick, whereas accounts of the old
world had for him all that charm which a boy reared in the midst of
civilization finds in pictures of wilderness life. A few of the books
were illustrated with prints, which the boy studied by the hour. One of
these books was an odd volume of a history of the world, and contained
mainly that part which related to France. It had crude engravings of two
or three palaces, a few kings, three or four queens, a Catholic killing
a Huguenot in front of the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, a royal
hunt, and the Pont Neuf, backed by the towers of Notre Dame and flanked
by buildings along the Seine. These rough pictures, thanks to some
mysterious cause or other, exercised on little Dick a potent
fascination.
"Who is that?" he asked his mother one day, pointing to a wood-cut that
purported to portray a human being, as he lay sprawling on the floor,
his favorite book opened out before him.
"That is a king," replied his mother, looking down from her sewing. The
mother and the boy were alone in the kitchen.
"King David?"
"No; a king of France."
"King George?"
"No; King George is king of England, where your father came from, and
your grandfather, and of America, where we are. France is another
country."
"Where does this king live?" pointing to the wood-cut.
"He is dead now. He died long ago. He lived in a city called Paris, in
the country called France."
"Is that a house?" The boy had turned to a supposed picture of the
Louvre.
"Yes, a great, big house, a palace they call it, because it belongs to
the king."
"Did it belong to that king?"
"Yes, I think so. It is in the city where I told you that king lived,
Paris."
"Is this house in that city, too?" He indicated a building in the
picture that showed the Pont Neuf.
"Yes." The mother laid down her sewing and stooped beside the boy. "And
so is this house in Paris. And this. And this, too. All these houses are
in Paris."
"Do all these people live there, the pretty ladies and soldiers?"
"They all did, I suppose."
"How many houses are there in Paris?"
"Oh, a great many thousand."
"More than there are in Carlisle?"
"Oh, yes! A hundred times more."
"Where is Paris?"
"Oh, very, very far away."
"Which way?"
"Why, that way, I think." She pointed towards the east. "Your father can
tell you exactly, when he comes in."
"How far away is it? As far as Carlisle?"
"Much farther than that. Your father can tell you."
"As far as Lancaster?"
"Oh, farther. Farther than Philadelphia. Away across land and water."
"As far away as the farthest mountains yonder, the blue ones against the
sky?" He had risen from the floor, and he pointed eastward through the
open kitchen doorway.
"Oh, yes. If you went clear across those mountains, you wouldn't be near
Paris yet."
"But if I went on and on, far enough, I'd get to Paris at last, wouldn't
I?"
"Yes, at last," said the mother, smiling, and drawing the boy to her and
kissing him, impelled by the mere thought of the separation his query
suggested to the fancy.
When she returned to her sewing, he continued looking for awhile towards
the distant east, then resumed his study of the pictures. At supper that
evening he made his father laugh by asking which way a body should go,
to get to Paris. His mother explained how his curiosity had been
aroused. His father, laughing again, and winking at the mother, said:
"Why, boy, a body would have to start by the road that goes down the
river to your grandfather's, that's certain. And if a body travelled
long enough, and never lost his way, yes, he would surely get to Paris
at the end."
"Would he be very tired when he got there?"
"Very tired, indeed, if he didn't rest several times on the way,"
replied Wetheral, Senior, keeping up the joke.
The next afternoon Dick's mother, having baked some cakes of a kind that
she knew her husband liked hot, sent some of them by the boy to the two
men in the field, which was not far from the house but was partly hidden
therefrom by the barn and out-buildings and some fruit-trees. Dick,
being now four years old, had often gone to the fields with his aunt or
mother when water or food had been carried out to the men at work, and
as the way did not lie near the river, there seemed no risk in sending
him now alone. When, after due time, he did not return to the house, the
two women supposed the men had kept him with them in the field. But this
was not the case. Mr. Wetheral and the hired man, having seen little
Dick tripping back towards the house, ate the cakes in the shade of a
tree and returned with sickles to their attack on the wheat, with no
thought of the boy but that he was now safe home. When they returned in
the evening for supper, their surprise in not finding him there was
reciprocated by that of the women at his not coming back with the men.
The dog, which had accompanied him to the field and from it, also was
missing. The men immediately started in search.
The boy by this time was some distance away. He had crawled through the
fence, near the barn, descended the declivity to the horse-path by the
river, turned his face eastward, and trudged resolutely on with Rover at
his heels. It was some time before he would admit to himself that he was
becoming a little tired, and that the stones and twigs in the way were
bruising his bare feet perceptibly. At last he conceded himself a short
rest, and, following Rover's example, leaned over where the bank was low
and the river shallow, and drank. He was soon up again and going
forward, forgetful of his former fatigue, and heedless that the sun
behind him was nearing the horizon. So long a time is a day to a child!
In the afternoon the doings of the morning are of the dim past, or are
forgotten, while the evening is yet far away, and countless things may
be done before the night comes. He could surely reach those farthest
blue mountains in an hour or so, and a little walking thereafter must
bring him to this strange, wonderful Paris, so entirely different from
his own home and from his grandfather's place down the river. He would
have to pass his grandfather's place, by the way, on his walk, and it
never occurred to him how long a time it would take him to reach merely
his grandfather's, so vague was his recollection of his former visits
there. He could see Paris, the king and the palaces and the soldiers and
the beautiful ladies and the great bridge, and return home by
supper-time; and he would have so many things to tell that his father
and mother would make his punishment a light one, or might even forget
to punish him at all.
He came to a place where the path divided. After a moment's hesitation,
he took the wider branch, which carried him from the riverside, straight
into the unbroken woods. Presently this path ended abruptly, so that
there was nothing before him but thick undergrowth. Rather than retrace
his steps to reach the branch that he had rejected, which must be the
one he ought to have taken, he started to reach it directly through the
woods, moving towards where he thought it should be. He made his way
cautiously, lest he might tread on some rattlesnake or other serpent,
which could not be as easily seen in the dimness of the forest as in the
path by the river. That dimness increased apace, and still he had not
found the path. At last the boy paused, perplexed and a little appalled.
The chill of evening came on. He was very tired now. He began to think
of Indians, bears, and other savage things with whose existence in the
neighborhood he was well acquainted, and of monsters of which he had
heard from his parents, such as giants, lions, and other horrible
things. Wherever his view lost itself in the dark arches of the trees,
he imagined mysterious and frightful creatures were concealed, ready to
appear at any moment. He summoned heart, and trudged on again. Finally
it became so dark that he feared to proceed lest he might, at any step,
land in a nest of snakes. Rover stopped close beside him, and looked in
his face, as if for counsel. He put his arm around the dog's neck, and
the two together sank down on some mossy turf at the foot of a tree.
Rover curled up with his chin on the boy's shoulder, and Dick lay with
his head on the dog's shaggy side. Dick would have cried, had his
impulse ruled, but he was already too proud to make such an exhibition
of weakness in the presence of Rover. Thus they lay while night fell.
Now and then Rover raised his head a little and listened. The boy was
too much overcome by his situation to think of what might ultimately
befall. He could only wish, with an intensity as keen as could be
endured, that he was home by his mother's side in the candle-lit
kitchen, and nestle closer to the dog. The insects of the forest kept up
an ear-piercing chorus of chirps, whirrs, and calls. At last reality
melted imperceptibly into dreams, in which the boy was again toiling
forward on the road to Paris. A terrible noise broke in upon his dream.
Starting up, he found it was only the barking of Rover, a bark of
eagerness and joy rather than of alarm or threat. A faint light
approached slowly through the trees. It resolved itself at last into a
lantern, and the huge dark object beside it became a man, who called
out, as he came rapidly nearer:
"Dick, lad, are you there with the dog?"
A minute later the boy was in the arms of his father, who was striding
back towards the path, while Rover ran yelping gleefully before and
behind and on every side.
How short was the journey back to the house, compared with that which
Dick had made from it in the afternoon! Almost before Dick had finished
his explanation to his father, in somewhat incoherent speeches and a
rather unsteady voice, they beheld the kitchen's open door, in which the
mother stood waiting. She caught the boy in her arms, covered his face
with kisses and tears, and declared he should never go out of her sight
again.
"But I'll go some day, when I'm grown up," said little Dick, as he sat
filling himself with supper a half-hour later. "I didn't know the road
to Paris was so long."
And he didn't know his road to Paris should one day be taken with no
thought of its leading him there, and how very roundabout that road
should be.
CHAPTER II.
"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."
The next time Dick went far from home was when the hired man, John
Campbell, took him past his grandfather's island, and thence on down the
Susquehanna and into Sherman's Valley, whither Campbell was bent on a
courting expedition. During his visit at the house of Campbell's
friends, Dick attended the burning out of a snake-nest, an occasion that
was participated in by settlers from all the country round. The nest was
in a pile of rocks in some woods that a farmer intended to transform
into a field for cultivation. Here rattlesnakes and copperheads throve
and multiplied. Men with axes and sickles cleared a circle around the
rock-pile, at some distance from it, and then set fire to the wood
within. When the flame reached the snakes, for which there was no
escape, their writhing was a novel sight. Dick, who at first enjoyed the
spectacle as only a young boy can enjoy scenes of wholesale slaughter,
at last came to being sorry for the victims, because they had no fair
fighting chance. The loathsome odor that soon arose drove him away, so
that he lost most of the rum-drinking and other jollification that
followed the snake-burning.
Snakes, though he could pity those attacked with fire and at a
disadvantage, were Dick's abomination. Their abundance was a chief
reason why he dared not gratify his taste for roaming far from the
house. As yet, when he came on one suddenly, he would act the
woman,--that is to say, he would run in great fright, or sometimes stand
still in greater, till help came or the snake fled of its own accord. It
was several years before he had the courage, on hearing the shriek of
some snake-affrighted harvesting woman in the fields, to vie with the
men in running to her rescue. For a long time he envied the readiness
with which his father, if confronted by a snake while reaping, would
club it to death and then, sticking the point of the sickle through its
head, hold it up for the other harvesters to see.
But there was a long season when the settlers need have no fear of
rattlers and copperheads, nor of Indians, either; that was the winter.
Dick was allowed to walk abroad a little more freely then, for the very
reason that the cold was sure to bring him soon back again to the vast
fireplace. There were other reasons than those of weather, why that
fireplace was a magnet to Dick. There, in the time of little work, when
the world outside was white and wind-swept, Dick's father would sit and
read to the household, or tell of his fights and dangers on both sides
of the ocean. There, when the cider went round, was great flow of joke
and story and song. For Dick's father, though a man of strict standards
of behavior, and outwardly stanch to his adopted sect, which in his
neighborhood stood for decency and education, was a man of lively wit
and of jocular turn of mind. Dick's mother, though of a severely
Presbyterian family, and humbly religious, was of too kindly and
cheerful a nature to be soured by piety, and too rich with the health of
this pleasant earth to be constantly thinking of another world. She had
sensibility and emotion, with the common sense and strength to control
them. Her younger sister partook of the prevalent lightness of heart.
Campbell, the hired man, whose raw stolidity was tempered by a certain
taciturn jocoseness, contributed to the household mirth by the stupid
wonder with which he listened to the others, the queer comments he
sometimes made, and the snores with which he often punctuated the
general conversation when he slumbered in his seat in the fireplace.
Dick's place was opposite Campbell's, and when he sat there in the
evening he could look up and see the stars through the top of the
chimney. Rover's spot was at Dick's feet, whence in his dreams he would
echo the snores of Campbell.
The father would tell of his share in Prince Charlie's defeat at
Culloden, of his own escape and Dr. Hugh Mercer's to the Scottish port
whence they had sailed; of that fatal march of Braddock's army towards
Fort Duquesne, and the fearful death that blazed out from the seemingly
empty woods around, and the conduct of the young Virginia colonel,
Washington, and the night burial of the mistaken English general by
torchlight in the dismal forest; of the march of resolute John
Armstrong, the Scottish Covenanter, of Carlisle, to Kittanning, in 1756;
the destruction of the Indian town, the slaughter of the Indian chiefs,
and the wounding of nearly all Armstrong's officers; how Wetheral's
friend, Mercer, a captain in the expedition, wounded and separated from
his men, wandering for weeks alone in the forest, living on roots and
berries, once repulsing starvation by eating a rattlesnake, at last came
upon waters that led to the Potomac, and so reached Fort Cumberland.
Wetheral told of George Croghan, the Indian trader, who had figured in
Braddock's campaign; and of Captain Jack, called also the Black Hunter,
the Black Rifle, and the Wild Hunter of Juniata, who with his band of
hunters scourged the Indians in revenge for his wife and children slain
and his cabin burnt while he was away hunting; and of other border
heroes, whose names have not lived as long.
In Wetheral's earlier reminiscences, the name that oftenest reached
Dick's ears, and most agreeably impressed them, was that of Tom
MacAlister, a former fellow Jacobite, whom Wetheral had thought killed
at Culloden, but who had turned up, to his great surprise and joy, a
sergeant in Braddock's army in America, in 1755. Surviving Braddock's
defeat, he had retreated with the remnant of the British army, and since
then Wetheral had neither seen nor heard of him. Of all the characters
that figured in his father's stories, Dick made MacAlister his favorite.
This was not only on account of the warlike deeds he had done, or the
jests he had perpetrated, or the comical scrapes he had figured in, or
the pithy sayings that Wetheral quoted from him, or the fact that he had
served as a soldier in many lands, but also for a circumstance connected
with Dick's early acquired love of song. When Dick would express a
liking for some particular one of the many tunes his father whistled or
sang, the father would say to the mother:
"You ought to hear Tom MacAlister play that on his fiddle or pipe,
Betty!"
And when the boy, pleased with the words of some ballad of which his
father had remembered but a part, would eagerly demand the rest, the
father would usually say:
"I don't know it, Dickie, lad. If Tom MacAlister were here, he could
sing it all for you."
Thus Dick came to think of this Tom MacAlister, whom he had never seen,
and could with little reason expect ever to see, as the source, of at
least the repository, of all the songs that ever were written, and all
the tunes that ever were composed. Dick dearly loved the sound of a
fiddle, and whenever there was a wedding anywhere in the sparsely
settled neighborhood he would beg his parents to take him behind one of
them on horseback, or to let him go with John Campbell, that he might
enjoy the scraping of the fiddles, while the rustic guests danced, and
made merry with rum, hard cider, and peach brandy.
If he could only hear Tom MacAlister play the pipe or fiddle! If he
could but once see that hero in the flesh, touch the hands that had
performed so many acts of valor, behold the face that had been turned
towards so many foes, hear the voice that had uttered so much wisdom,
sung so many ballads, and could tell so many true tales of marvellous
experience! To Dick, this much-talked-of Tom, who might no longer be
among the living, was as a hero of legend, a Jack the Giant Killer, a
Mr. Greatheart, a Robinson Crusoe.
Some of the songs sung by Dick's father, and by his mother, too, who had
picked up most of her tunes from her husband, were Jacobite ballads.
One snowy day, in Dick's fifth winter, his father, mending a bridle
beside the fire, was heard by Dick to sing in a low voice:
"'There was a wind, it cam to me,
Over the south, an' over the sea,
An' it has blawn my corn and hay,
Over the hills an' far away.'"
Dick looked up from where he was sitting, by the legs of a skillet under
which some brands were burning.
"Is that the tune it means when it says about Tom that was a piper's
son, all the tune that he could play was 'Over the hills and far away?'"
he asked.
"I don't know, son. There are a great many songs of 'Over the hills and
far away.' Tom MacAlister used to sing them all."
Dick studied a moment, then asked:
"Who was Tom MacAlister's father?"
"A Highland man, and I've heard Tom say he was a great player on the
bagpipe."
"Why, then," cried Dick, "maybe he was the Tom that was a piper's son!"
"I shouldn't doubt it in the least," replied Wetheral, with a wink and a
smile at his wife.
But Dick's face, after glowing for a moment with the exultation of so
great a literary discovery, soon fell.
"No," he said; "because Tom MacAlister could play hundreds and hundreds
of other tunes, and Tom that was a piper's son could play only 'Over the
hills and far away.'"
"Ay," said the father, "but then, you see, that song might have been
about Tom MacAlister before he had learned any other tune than the one.
I think he told me once that for a very long time he couldn't play any
other."
Mrs. Wetheral smilingly shook her head in hopeless disapproval of the
jocular deceit practised by her husband on little Dick; but the boy was
too taken up with his discovery to observe her movement, and so from
that day, to him, Tom MacAlister and Tom who was a piper's son were one
and the same Tom.
But there came a time when neither singing nor fiddling was in season,
and when reminiscences of past dangers in foreign lands gave way to
fears of imminent dangers at home. This was in the spring of 1763, when
Dick was five years old, but possessed of such strength and endurance as
would be marvellous in a boy of that age nowadays. Almost as soon as the
woods and fields were green again, and the orchards white and pink with
fruit-blossoms, came news, from every side, of Indian surprises and
alarms. The Pennsylvania tribes, such as the Delawares and Shawnees,
once friendly to the English settlers, but rendered contemptuous of them
by Braddock's defeat, had not ceased ravages against them, even after
Wolfe's victory at Quebec in 1759 had made the English masters of the
continent. It seemed now, in 1763, as if the redskins had mustered their
strength for a decisive series of revengeful blows against the
colonists. In from the west and down from the north they came, unseen,
unheard, penetrating the whole frontier in small parties, striking
without warning, often where least expected, destroying by rifle-ball,
knife, tomahawk, and fire. No one knew when a painted band, armed for
slaughter, might not suddenly appear as if by magic from the apparently
solitary wilderness around. No settler's family could go to bed at night
with the assurance that they might not be aroused before dawn by smoke
and flames or by the unearthly shrieks of savages. Most of the settlers
in the valleys south of the Juniata fled across the mountains to
Carlisle. Some from the vicinity of the Wetherals took refuge in Fort
Hunter, which consisted of a rectangular stockade, with a log blockhouse
rising from the corner, and with cabins inside to serve indifferently as
barracks for the Provincial soldiers and as temporary lodgings for the
people of both sexes and every age who took refuge there.
Dick's grandfather, deciding to remain in his large and strong house on
his island in the Susquehanna, invited the Wetherals thither, actuated
in part, perhaps, by the consideration that his son-in-law would prove a
notable addition to the home garrison. Wetheral accepted, for the sake
of his family, although the reconciliation between himself and his
stiff-necked father-in-law had never been more than merely formal. The
Wetherals had no sooner joined the large family in the island mansion
than there came word, by terrified refugees, of killings and burnings on
the Juniata, quite near, as distances between neighbors then went, to
Wetheral's house. Later came similar tidings up from Sherman's Valley.
Houses of those who had fled were burnt, and, as summer advanced, a
great deal of their grain was destroyed. When harvest-time came, several
of the men who had fled returned in parties, well armed, to get in their
crops. A party, strong in numbers, would go from farm to farm, taking in
each harvest as rapidly, and bestowing it as securely, as possible.
At a certain time in July, one such party of reapers was working on the
farm of William White, who lived not far from Dick's grandfather. This
party had been reinforced by some of the men now at the latter's place,
one of whom was John Campbell. The nearness of White's house, the large
force of men there, and the fact that the Indians were thought to have
gone out of the neighborhood, had enabled Dick to get permission to go
with Campbell to this reaping, at which there was a famous fiddler from
Tuscarora, of whom the boy had often heard. On Saturday evening, after
the work was done, Dick revelled to his heart's content in the scraping
of this frontier virtuoso. The reapers made merry so late that night,
that they were quite willing to observe the ensuing Sabbath by resting
most vigorously.
All the warm sunny morning, they lay on the floor of the principal room.
Dick alone showed any disposition towards activity. While the men
slumbered, or turned heavily over on the floor, or stared drowsily at
the wooden ceiling, or stretched and yawned, Dick amused himself by
climbing up the ladder to the loft overhead.
He had reached the round next to the top one, and was about to thrust
his head up through the opening into the loft, when he heard a slight
creak from the door of the room below. He looked in time to see it swing
open, and three painted, naked, feather-crowned bodies appear in the
doorway, each one behind a rifle whose muzzle was instantly turned
towards some sleeper on the floor. Terrified into dumbness, Dick's gaze
involuntarily turned towards the window opposite the door. The oiled
paper that had served instead of glass had been swiftly and silently
cut away with a knife, and three savage heads appeared above the window
base, each shining eye directed along a different rifle-barrel towards
one of the prostrate reapers.
Dick opened his mouth to cry out, but he could emit no sound. Before he
could form a thought, the six rifles blazed forth in concert, and an
instant later the room below was filled with smoke, shouts of pain, and
furious curses. A terrible chorus of piercing war-screams from outside
the house showed that the redskins who had crept up so silently were in
large number. Dick tarried no longer, but sprang up into the loft and
ran wildly to a little window at the end of it. He supposed that he had
been seen and would be followed up the ladder.
He thrust out his head and looked down. This little window was over the
one through which three of the savages had fired into the room
down-stairs. He saw three other Indians aiming in through the lower
window, while the first three were reloading their rifles. Others were
shrieking their war-whoop and brandishing the knives and tomahawks with
which they were to complete the work begun with the rifles. Up from the
ladder hatchway, amidst the noise of heavy bodies falling and of the men
rushing to their arms and yelling and swearing, came the sound of
another volley, fired probably through the doorway. Dick drew his head
in and waited with wildly beating heart, wondering what to do, and
fearing to look back towards the hatchway lest he might see savages
rushing up after him, with gleaming knives and upraised tomahawks. But
none came. The noise from the room below indicated that knives,
tomahawks, and guns had business enough down there.
After what seemed a space of several minutes, Dick cautiously looked
again out of the window. He saw now but one savage, and that one soon
disappeared through the lower window, into the room where his fellows
were completing the slaughter of the unprepared reapers. The hideous
shrieks of triumph that came up through the hatchway told clearly enough
that victory was with the attacking party, and that the scalping-knife
was already in use.
Suddenly Dick's blood turned cold. A sound of sharp, eager grunting,
detached from the general hubbub below, arose immediately beneath the
hatchway. A red hand appeared through the opening, grasping the loft
floor against which the ladder rested.
The little window at which Dick stood was neither glazed nor papered. He
went out through it, feet first; hung for a moment by his fingers to the
ledge, then dropped to the ground below, fell on his side, scrambled to
his feet, turned his back to the house of shrieking slaughter, and ran
across the field towards the nearest woods. Though the direction in
which he went took him farther from his grandfather's, he nevertheless
did not stop or turn, on reaching the woods, but ran straight on, as
fast as the irregularities of the ground would let him, and for once
with reckless disregard of possible snakes, his only thought being to
put the greatest distance between himself and the yelling murderers
behind him.
After a long run, he stopped for lack of breath, and began to consider
his situation, as well as the rapid beating of his heart would allow him
to do. He regretted that he had not taken Rover with him to White's,--if
he had done so, he might now have at least the comfort of the dog's
society. At last he decided to make for his grandfather's, by a detour
which would take him far from the house where the savages were now
holding their carnival of blood. This detour required several hours, as
his bare feet suffered from contact with stones, thorns roots, and the
rough bark of fallen branches. Finally, on hearing a sound as of a
horse's foot crunching into stony soil, a little to the left and ahead,
he stopped and stood still. The sound continued. Could it be that he was
near a bridle-path and that this sound indicated some solitary
traveller? As yet he could see nothing moving through the thick forest.
While he waited, a slighter sound close at hand, that of an instant's
movement among bushes, suddenly drew his glance. From a mass of laurel
near the ground, gleamed a pair of eyes directly at him, on a level with
his own. He started back, thinking they might belong to a wildcat or
some other crouching animal.
Instantly the owner of the eyes swiftly rose, and stood erect from the
bush,--a naked Shawnee, daubed yellow, and carrying knife and tomahawk.
Dick turned and ran, casting back one look, in which he saw the Indian
hurl the tomahawk after him. The boy fell forward on his face just in
time to feel the wind of the hatchet instead of the hatchet itself,
which cleft the air directly over his head and lodged in a tree-trunk in
front of him. The Indian, abandoning his intention of remaining in the
bush, for which he had doubtless had his own reason, now glided after
Dick, who had not half risen when he felt the Shawnee's fingers grasp
his long hair, and saw the knife describe a rapid circle in the air in
preparation for its descent upon his scalp. The boy cast one despairing
look up towards the Indian's implacable face.
The stillness of the woods was suddenly broken by a loud detonation.
Something dug into the Indian's breast, a horrible grimace distorted his
face, a fearful cry came from his throat, his knife-blow went wide, and
he leaped clear over Dick, retaining some of the boy's hair in his
clutch as he went. The next moment he lay sprawling, face downward,
some feet away. He stiffened convulsively, and never moved again.
Dick looked towards the direction whence the shot had come. In a little
opening among the trees he saw a horse standing; on its back a tall,
gaunt, brown-faced stranger, from whose rifle-muzzle a little smoke was
still curling. The newcomer was apparently about forty years old; wore
an old cocked hat, a time-worn blue coat, whose long skirts spread out
over the horse's rump, a red waistcoat, patched green breeches, and
great jack-boots that had known much service. His long brown hair was
tied in a queue, and, besides his rifle, he carried before him an
immense pistol. A long, projecting chin gave a grotesque turn to his
features, whose grimness was otherwise modified by amiable gray eyes.
"Sure, sonny," he called out to the astonished and staring Dick, "it's
the part of Providence I played towards ye that time; in return for
whilk favor, tell me now the way to one Alexander Wetheral's house, if
ye ken it."
Not sufficiently learned in dialects to note the stranger's mixture of
Scotch and Irish with the King's English, Dick eagerly proffered his
services and said that Alexander Wetheral was his father.
"What, lad! Gie's your hand, then, and it's in front of me ye shall ride
hame this day. It's a glad man your father 'ull be, when he sees ye
bringing in Tom MacAlister as a recruit, and no such raw one, neither!"
[Illustration: "THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY YEARS OLD."]
Dick almost fell off the horse, to whose shoulders the stranger had
lifted him.
Such was his first meeting with Tom that was a piper's son.
The two reached Dick's grandfather's without molestation, and the
newcomer was duly welcomed. Lack of occupation in Europe, and the desire
to be always enlarging his experiences, had brought him again to the New
World, and in search of his early friend.
He had immediate opportunity to employ his courage and prowess. A few
days after Dick's adventure, there came to his grandfather's house a
settler named Dodds, with an account of how the same Indians who had
shot the reapers at White's had thereupon gone to Robert Campbell's on
the Tuscarora Creek, found Dodds and other reapers there resting
themselves, and first made their presence known by a sudden deadly
volley of rifle-balls. In the smoke and confusion, Dodds had made,
unseen, for the chimney, which he had ascended by great muscular
exertion while the massacre was proceeding in the room below. He had
dropped from the roof and fled to Sherman's Valley, where he had given
the alarm, which he was now engaged in spreading.
Dick's father and grandfather, with all the aroused settlers who could
be summoned, speedily organized a party to make war on the savage
invaders. In the expedition this force made, MacAlister was in his
element. He was one of the detachment of twelve who overtook twenty-five
Indians at Nicholson's house and killed several, at the cost of five of
the white men. The chasing of Indians, and the fleeing from them,
continued all summer. William Anderson was killed at his own house,
depredations were committed at Collins's, Graham's house was burnt, and
in September five white men were killed in a battle at Buffalo Creek.
Finally a hundred volunteers, including Wetheral and MacAlister, went up
the Susquehanna to Muncy, encountered two companies of Indians that were
coming down the river, killed their chief, Snake, and drove the others
back from the frontier. In the fall, the Wetherals, with their guest,
went back to their own house, but not at the first waning of summer. Too
many settlers, deceived by the earliest signs of winter, had in times
past returned to their houses, thinking themselves safe from further
Indian ravage; but, with the brief later season of warm weather, the
Indians had reappeared for final strokes, and hence that fatal season
received the name of Indian summer.
Tom MacAlister, impelled by his friendship for Wetheral, and by the
charm that he found in the still wilderness, took the place formerly
occupied in the household by John Campbell, who had been killed at
White's. If not in the field, at least at the fireside and in the
dooryard, he was a vast improvement upon his heavy-witted predecessor.
With a fiddle, bought from a settler, Tom soon verified all the
assertions Wetheral had made about his musical ability.
As 1763 was the last year of general Indian outbreaks in the
neighborhood, the arts of peace thereafter had full opportunity to
thrive in the Wetheral household. From childhood to pronounced boyhood,
and then to sturdy youth, Dick Wetheral grew, to the constant
accompaniment of Tom MacAlister's fiddle. Dick became, in time, a fairly
capable tiller of the soil, an excellent horseman, a good hunter, a
comparatively lucky fisherman. He was a straight shot at a distant wild
turkey, a quick one at a running deer, and a cool one at a threatening
bear. He was a great reader, not for improvement, but for amusement and
because books gave him other worlds to contemplate. When he had read and
re-read all the volumes of his father's little stock, he took means to
learn who else owned books in the neighborhood. The owners were few and
far between, and fewer still were the books possessed by any one of
them. But what books there were, Dick hunted down, taking many a long
ride in the quest, buying a volume when he could, or trading for it, or
borrowing it.
Thus he made the acquaintance of Fielding's novels, and one or two of
Smollett's, and of Shakespeare's plays, and from all these he acquired
standards of gentlemanly conduct and manners, and ideals of feminine
beauty and charm, which standards and ideals kept him alike from close
association with the raw youths of the neighborhood, and from succumbing
to the primitive attractions of any of the farmers' daughters. Slowly
and imperceptibly, by his reading and his thoughts, he was, if not
fitting himself for a vastly different world from the one about him, at
least unfitting himself for the latter. One cause of his strong
attachment to Tom MacAlister, after he had come to regard that worthy in
a more accurate light, and no longer idealized him as the half mythical
hero of his childhood, was that Tom represented the great world of
cities and courts.
Tom was the son of a Scotch father and an Irish mother, and one of the
two had a sufficient streak of English blood to account for Tom's length
of chin. To his mixed ancestry was due his unique intermingling of
brogues and accents. It was a question which was the greater, the
severity of his visage or the drollery of his disposition. It was looked
upon as a caprice of nature that a man of so sanctimonious an aspect
should on occasion swear so hard, and that he who could drink so
enormously of liquor should retain such meagreness of body. He advocated
strict morality, though he admitted having himself been a sad lapser
from virtue. He testified frankly to having broken "all the ten
commandments and half a dozen more." He had been a great patron of the
playhouses, could perform conjuring tricks, and was able to oppose a
card-cheat with the latter's own weapons. As for religion, wherever he
was, he took that, as he took the staple drink, "of the country," a
practice which, he said, gave him in turn the benefit of all faiths, and
saved him from a deal of inconvenience where piety ran strong. He had
fought in 1743 with George II. against the French at Dettingen; "been
out" with the Young Chevalier in 1745; followed Braddock to defeat in
1755; served under Frederick of Prussia, at Prague, Rossbach, and
elsewhere; and had been under Prince Ferdinand, at Minden, in 1759. The
disbandment of his regiment at the end of the Seven Years' War had put
his services out of demand.
In winter evenings, before the flaming logs in the great chimney-place,
when Tom was not recounting adventures he had experienced, or some he
had imagined, or playing the fiddle, or taking huge gulps of hard cider
or hot "kill-devil," he was singing songs; and of these the favorite in
his list was one or other of the versions of "Over the hills and far
away." First, there was the song with which Dick had been familiar since
his infancy, and which for a long time he thought alluded to MacAlister
himself, beginning thus:
"Tom he was a piper's son,
He learnt to play when he was young,
And all the tune that he could play
Was 'Over the hills and far away,'
Over the hills and a great way off,
And the wind will blow my top-knot off."
Then there was the one which, when it was sung by Tom, Dick took to be a
bit of veritable autobiography:
"When I was young and had no sense,
I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence,
And the only tune that it would play
Was 'Over the hills and far away.'"
But what was the song itself to which these verses alluded? Tom knew and
sang several, but was cloudy as to which was the particular one. That
mattered little, however, as all went to the same tune. There was one
artfully contrived to lure recruits to the king's service, thus:
"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."
Then there was one that Tom had heard at the play, sung by a gay captain
and a dare-devil recruiting sergeant, and of which the latter half would
fill Dick's head with longings and visions:
"Our 'prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel master's shoes,
For now he's free to sing and play,
Over the hills and far away.
"We shall lead more happy lives
By getting rid of brats and wives
That scold and brawl both night and day,
Over the hills and far away.
"Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.
"Courage, boys, it is one to ten,
But we return all gentlemen;
While conq'ring colors we display,
Over the hills and far away."
And there was a duet, which Tom had heard at the opera in London, and
which he sang, imitating the respective voices of the highwayman and the
adoring Polly.
The tune took a lasting possession of Dick, and the sweet-sounding
recurrent line exercised upon him a witchery that increased as he grew.
He chose for his bedroom the rear apartment of the loft over the
kitchen, because its window looked towards the east, and his first
glance at dawn, his latest at night, was towards the farthest hill-tops.
There were hills to the west, too, a great many more of them; mountain
ranges, from the straight ridge of the Tuscaroras, to the farthest
Alleghanies; but Dick's heart looked not in that direction, where he
knew there was but savage wilderness all the thousands of miles to the
Pacific Ocean. Towards the east, where the live world was, he longed to
wing. Strangely enough, so had circumstance directed, he never, till he
was seventeen years old, travelled as far as to the farthest mountains
in sight southward or eastward. His father had turned his back on the
Old World, thrown his interests heart and soul with those of the new
land, built up a well-provided home on the outer verge of civilization,
joined irrevocably the advance guard of the westward march of men. What
little business he had with towns could be done through the pack-horse
men and wagoners. So Dick had only his imagination on which to call for
an idea of the level country towards the sea. What was behind the hills?
How he envied the birds he saw flying towards that distant azure band
that backed the green hills nearer! Should it ever be his lot to follow
them?
At seventeen Dick was a strong, lithe youth, five feet eleven inches
tall, and destined to grow no taller; with a thoughtful, somewhat eager
face, whose sharpness of feature and alertness of expression had some
suggestion of the fox, but with no indication of that animal's vices;
brown hair that fell back to its queue from a wide and open brow; and
blue eyes both steady and keen. Such was his appearance one sunny spring
morning when he started from the house to join the men in the field,
from which the sound of his father's "whoa," and of Tom MacAlister's
chirping to the plow-horses, could be heard through the blossoming
fruit-trees in which the birds were twittering. He returned his mother's
smile through the open kitchen window, at which she stood kneading the
dough for the week's baking. As he went towards the lane which ran up in
front of the house from the so-called road, he could hear her voice
while she half unconsciously sang at her work:
"'Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.'"
He took up the tune and hummed it, and, though the cheerful solitude
around him seemed ineffably sweet, he sighed as he followed with his
eyes the course of a tiny white cloud towards the high blue eastern
horizon. It was Saturday, next to the last day of April, 1775.
As he leaped over the rail fence, from the houseyard to the lane, he saw
a horse turn into the latter from the road. He recognized the rider, a
good-looking young man, one of the few in the neighborhood with whom
Dick was intimate.
"Good morning, M'Cleland," said Dick, heartily. "Where from?"
"From Hunter's Mill, and I can stay only a moment to give you the news,
if you haven't heard it." He stopped his horse.
"What news?" queried Dick, wondering whether it might be of another
Indian war, like that of Lord Dunmore's in Western Virginia the
preceding year; or whether there had been a renewal of the old feud
between the Pennsylvanians and the Connecticut settlers up in the
Wyoming Valley; or whether the English government had repealed or
reinforced the Boston Port Bill. These were matters in which Dick and
M'Cleland had both taken interest,--especially the last one, for nowhere
had the difference between King and colonies, which quarrel had been
growing ever since the passage of the Stamp Act ten years before, been
more thoroughly discussed than in the Wetheral household, and nowhere
was the feeling for resistance to the King more ardent.
"Great news," said M'Cleland, controlling his voice with difficulty,
while his eyes sparkled with excitement. "On the nineteenth the King's
troops marched out from Boston to take some ammunition the people had
stored at Concord. At Lexington they met a company of minutemen, and
there were shots and bloodshed. The whole country around rose and killed
God knows how many of the regulars on their way back to Boston. When the
messengers left Cambridge, there was an army of Massachusetts men
besieging the King's soldiers in Boston. There's no doubt about it. At
Hunter's Mill I saw the man who met at Paxton the rider that talked in
Philadelphia with the messenger from Cambridge, who had affidavits from
Massachusetts citizens. Tell your people. I'm off up the river. Get up!"
Dick never went any farther towards the field. He called in his father
and Tom, and there was a long discussion of the situation. Wetheral said
that Pennsylvania would be organizing troops, in due time, to back up
Massachusetts, and that the only course was to wait and join such a
force. But Dick would not hear of waiting. "Now is the time men are
needed!" was his answer to every counsel. First make for the scene of
war; it would be time to join the Pennsylvania forces when these should
arrive there. The father gave in, at last, and the mother had nothing to
oppose to the inevitable but the protest of silent tears. To her, the
whole matter was as lightning from a clear sky. It was settled; the boy
should go, the father should stay. The mother had a day in which to get
Dick's things ready. As for Tom MacAlister, who was subject to no man's
will but his own, his first hearing of the news had set him preparing
for departure. As he tied his own horse to the fence rail the next day,
to wait for Dick, he bethought him how of old his motto had been always
"up and away again," and he marvelled that he had remained twelve years
contented in one place.
It was not yet Sunday noon when Dick, who it was decided should share
with Tom the use of the latter's horse on the journey to Cambridge,
according to the custom known as "riding and tying," mounted for the
first stage. He wore a cocked hat, a blue cloth coat altered from one
his father had brought from England, a linsey shirt, an old figured
waistcoat, gray breeches, worsted stockings, home-made shoes, and
buckskin leggings; carried a rifle, a blanket, and a change of shirts;
and had two gold pieces, long saved by his mother against the time of
his setting up for himself. Tom MacAlister was dressed and armed exactly
as at Dick's first meeting with him, his clothes having been temporarily
supplanted by homespun during his years of farm service.
There was a lump in Dick's throat when he put his arms around his
mother's neck, and felt against his cheek the tear she had striven to
hold back. The last embrace taken, he gave his horse the word rather
huskily, and followed Tom MacAlister, who was already striding down the
lane. Turning into the road, Dick looked back, and saw his father, his
mother, his aunt, and Rover, the last-named now feeble and far beyond
the age ordinarily attained by dogkind, standing together by the fence.
His father waved an awkward military salute, his mother forced a smile
into her face, and the old dog made two or three steps to follow, as in
the past, then stopped and looked somewhat surprised and hurt that Dick
did not call him. One swift glance from the puzzled dog to his mother's
wistful face, and Dick's home in the Pennsylvania valley passed from his
sight forever. He cleared his throat, swallowed down the lump in it, and
turned his eyes forward towards the east. Tom MacAlister's grim face
wore a look of quiet elation, and he could be heard softly whistling, as
he trudged on, the tune of "Over the hills and far away."
CHAPTER III.
AT THE SIGN OF THE GEORGE.
As they proceeded, Dick laughingly alluded to the time when, at the age
of four, he had started out on this same road, thinking it would take
him to Paris in a few hours.
"And wha kens," said MacAlister, in all seriousness, "but this same road
may yet lead ye there, or to Chiney, for that matter? Him that sets out
on a journey knowing where 'twill land him is a wiser man nor you and
me, my son!"
Presently MacAlister fell behind, and was soon lost to sight as Dick
rode on. By and by Dick dismounted, tied the horse to a tree by the
path, and went on afoot. When he had walked about an hour, he was
overtaken and passed by MacAlister, on the horse, which Tom, on coming
up to it, had untied and mounted. Walking on alone, Dick in due time
found the horse tied at the path's side, and mounted to overtake and
pass Tom in turn. He caught up to his comrade at the place where, it had
been decided, they should cross the Juniata, which they did on
horseback together, partly by fording and partly by swimming the horse.
Proceeding as before, and not losing the time to cross to the island for
a visit to Dick's grandfather when they reached the Susquehanna, they
came at nightfall to the house of a farmer on the west bank of that
river, and lodged there. At early dawn they were on their way again, and
just as the sun rose Dick reached the crest of the farthest mountains
southeast of his home. Who could describe his feelings as he looked for
the first time over the fair wooded country that rolled afar towards the
purple and golden east? Did his mother, at this moment, looking towards
the farthest azure line, know he was there at last, and that he saw what
the birds had seen that he had so often envied when they flew eastward?
"Get up!" he cried, and urged his horse down the eastern mountainside
towards his future.
Riding and tying, the two comrades came to Harris's ferry-house, whence
they crossed the Susquehanna in a scow, to the small collection of low
buildings--stone residence, old storehouse for skins, blockhouse for
defence, and others--which then constituted Harrisburg. While they were
crossing, the ferryman at the pole entertained them with anecdotes of
the parents of the John Harris of that day,--how they were sturdy
Yorkshire people; how the wife Esther once in time of necessity rode all
the way to Philadelphia in one day on the same horse; how she was once
up the river on a trading trip to Big Island, and heard of her husband's
illness and came down in a bark canoe in a day and a night; how she was
a good trader, and could write, and had boxed the ears of many an Indian
chief when he was drunk; how she could swim as well as a man and handle
firearms as well as any hunter; how she worked at the building of her
brick house five miles up the Susquehanna; how she once ran up-stairs
and took from a cask of powder a lighted candle that her maid had
mistakenly stuck in the bung-hole; how the then present John Harris was
the first white child born thereabouts and was taken to Philadelphia to
be baptized in Christ's Church. Dick would have liked to see the inside
of the church at Paxton, three miles from Harrisburg, because one of his
acquaintances, having got a girl into trouble, had made public
confession before the congregation there, praying in the usual formula:
"For my own game,
Have done this shame,
Pray restore me to my lands again."
He would have liked, also, to seek out some member of the gang of
"Paxton Boys" that had killed the Conestogo Indians in Lancaster County,
in 1764, and get the other side of that story, which was generally
accepted as one of unwarranted massacre of friendly natives. But the
impulse to press forward overcame the other, and the travellers, having
followed the left bank of the Susquehanna, by the road which had been in
existence from Harris's since 1736, lodged on the second night of their
journey at a wooden tavern in the village of Middletown. The next
morning they turned directly eastward, their backs towards the
Susquehanna, and proceeded on the road to Lancaster. They now entered
the band of country settled by German Protestants, whose fertile farms
gave the slightly undulating land a soft and smiling appearance.
At noon, dining at a rude log hostelry, more farmhouse than tavern, they
were invited to drink by two thin, middle-aged, merry fellows, in brown
cloth coats and cocked hats, who said they were Philadelphia merchants
returning from a view of some interior land which they intended to
purchase for the purpose of developing trade. They invited Tom and Dick
to drink with them, laughed so boisterously at Tom's sage jokes, and
expressed so much admiration of Dick's intelligence and book-learning,
that when all four left the tavern to proceed eastward, Dick and Tom,
seeing that the two jolly merchants were afoot, took counsel together
and agreed to share with them the use of the horse. This generous idea
was engendered by a hint that one of the merchants made in jest. The
horse was a huge animal and could easily bear any two of four such thin
men as were those concerned. Lots were cast to determine which two
should be the pair to mount first. One of the two merchants held the
straws, and as a result of the drawing he and his companion got on the
horse together and started. A turn in the road hid them from view in
half a minute. Dick and MacAlister were about to follow afoot, when they
were reminded by the tavern-keeper that the drinks taken at the
merchants' invitation were yet to be paid for.
"Bedad," said Tom, "our friends were so busy laughing at my tale of the
ensign's wife at the battle of Minden, they forgot to settle the score."
Dick, who had been provided with sufficient silver to see him to
Philadelphia, besides his two gold pieces, speedily paid the bill, and
the two comrades resumed their journey. After several minutes of
silence, Tom expressed some belated surprise at the fact that two
substantial merchants should be travelling afoot. Dick replied that
there must be some interesting reason for so unusual a circumstance.
"Ay," said Tom, "we'll speer them when we catch up to them." The two
trudged on. By and by Dick began to look, each time the road made a
turn, for the horse standing at the side of the way, accordingly to
agreement. An hour had passed since the tavern had been left behind.
Another hour followed. At last Dick broke the silence:
"Is it likely our friends may have lost their way?"
Tom MacAlister drew a deep breath and replied:
"Devil a bit is it them that's lost their way! It's us that's lost our
horse."
"Why, what do you mean? Two such worthy Philadelphia merchants!"
"Philadelphia nothing! I'll warrant they do be a pair of rascals from
the Connecticut settlement in the Wyoming Valley, turned out of the
community for such-like tricks as they've played on us new-born babes.
That's the effect on me of twelve years' residence in the wilderness. My
son, it's time we throwed off our state of innocence and braced
ourselves to meet the mickle deviltry of the world. Richard, lad, I tell
it to ye now, though ye'll no mind it till ye've had it pounded into ye
by sore experience, your fellow man is kittle cattle, and your fellow
woman more so!"
They might have had to walk all the way to Lancaster but that they were
overtaken by a train of pack-horses from Carlisle, and paid the
pack-driver to shift the horses' loads and give them the use of one of
the animals. At evening they arrived at Lancaster, which then had some
thousands of inhabitants and was to Dick quite a busy and town-like
place. He saw the prison where the Indian chief Murhancellin had been
confined on being apprehended by Captain Jack's hunters for the murder
of three Juniata men the previous year. Dick went to see the barracks,
the Episcopal and German churches, and a house where some of the famous
Lancaster stockings were made. He gazed with wonder and hidden
disapproval at the long beards of the Omish men, and enjoyed the bustle
of horses and wagons before the excellent tavern where he and Tom passed
the night. The next morning the two got seats in one of the huge covered
wagons engaged in the trade between Philadelphia and the interior. They
dined at the Duke of Cumberland Tavern, and put up at evening at the
sign of the Ship, thirty-five miles from Philadelphia. This distance was
covered the next day, and a little before sunset, the wagon having
crossed the picturesque Schuylkill by the Middle Ferry and passed under
beautiful trees down the High Street road, through the Governor's Woods
and by brick kilns and verdant commons, and across little water-courses
spanned by wooden bridges, Dick set his eyes on Philadelphia, whose
spires and dormer windows reflected the level sun rays, and whose trim
brick and wooden houses rose among leafy gardens. The town then had
about thirty thousand people, and lay close along the Delaware, its
built-up portion extending at the widest part about seven or eight
streets from the river, not counting the alleys and by-streets. As the
wagon lumbered down High Street, which was then popularly (as it is now
officially) known as Market Street, Dick kept his emotions to himself,
satisfying his curiosity without betraying it, and in no outward way
disclosing how novel to him was the actual sight, which neither excelled
nor fell short of the scene he had so often imagined, much as it
differed from it in general appearance. At Fourth Street, as the wagon
continued east, the houses began to be quite close together. At Third,
the markets began, and ran thence down the middle of the street towards
the Delaware. The wagon, with its eight horses, stopped for some reason
at the Indian King Tavern, near Third Street, whereupon Tom and Dick,
having settled with the wagoner, and not intending to lodge at that inn,
proceeded afoot down Market Street, a part of which was paved with
stones and had a narrow sidewalk for foot-passengers. This last-named
convenience was one that even some of the first cities of Europe then
lacked.
The animation of the streets quite put to shame Dick's recollections of
the little bustle at Lancaster. The rifles and baggage of the two did
not attract much attention among the citizens and tradespeople, in those
days of much hunting, and especially at a time when there was already
talk of new military companies forming, when the provincial militia was
drilling and recruiting, and when men were coming to town to offer the
colonies their services in the event of general revolt. Delegates were
already arriving from other colonies to attend the Second Continental
Congress, which was to meet on the tenth.
As the two comrades approached the London Coffee House, at Front and
Market Streets, they saw three well-dressed citizens issue from the door
and greet with the utmost respect a stocky old gentleman who had just
turned in from Front Street, and whose face was both venerable and
worldly, kind and shrewd, while his plain brown coat took nothing from
his look of distinction, and his walking-stick seemed quite unnecessary
to one whose vigor was still that of youth. He cordially responded to
the three gentlemen, the first of whom detained him for the purpose of
introducing the third. The name by which the old gentleman was addressed
startled Dick for the moment out of his self-possession, and he stopped
and stared with unfeigned curiosity and pleasure. It was his first sight
of a world-famous man, and the writer of Poor Richard's Almanac, whose
proverbs every Pennsylvanian knew by heart, the celebrated philosopher,
the wise agent of the provinces, who had just returned from London, lost
nothing in Dick's admiration from the youth's visual inspection of his
face and person.
While Doctor Franklin stood talking with the three, Dick and Tom went on
past Front and Water Streets, turned down along the wharves, and
presently arrived at their recommended destination, the Crooked Billet
Inn, which stood at the end of an alley on a wharf above Chestnut
Street. The two engaged lodging for the night, bestowed their
belongings, and went for supper to Pegg Mullen's Beefsteak House, at the
southeast corner of Water Street and Mullen's Alley. Having devoured one
of the steaks for which that house was famous, and as it was not yet
dark, Dick proposed a walk about the city. But Tom demurred as to
himself, and said in a low tone, turning his eye towards a party of
young gentlemen who sat at a near-by table:
"Go and see the sights, lad, and ye'll meet me at the Crooked Billet
some time before the hour of setting out, the morning. I've other fish
to fry, for a private purpose of my own. And should ye see me in company
with yon roisterers, mind to call me captain or not at all, for I'm bent
on introducing myself to their acquaintance, and that'll require me
belonging to the quality."
Dick looked at the group indicated, which consisted of a handsome,
insolent-looking young man of about twenty-five and three gay dogs of
the same age, whose loud conversation had dealt exclusively with cards
and other implements of fortune. With no hope or wish of fathoming
MacAlister's designs, Dick paid the bill (for his friend was almost
without money), and left the eating-house. He first inspected parts of
Water and Front Streets, where many rich merchants lived over their
shops; then viewed the handsomer residences in South Second Street; saw
the City Tavern and some of the well-dressed people resorting there;
looked at Carpenter's Hall, where the Congress had met the preceding
year; walked out to the State House, crossed Chestnut Street therefrom,
to drink at the sign of the Coach and Horses, the old rough-dashed
tavern nestling amidst great walnut-trees; loitered on the bridge to
look down at Dock Creek each time he crossed that stream. When, at dusk,
the street lamps were lighted (for, thanks to Franklin, Philadelphia had
long possessed the best street lamps in the world), the town assumed
what to Dick was a fairylike appearance. Of the people he saw in the
streets, perhaps a third wore the broadbrims of the Quakers. A few of
the faces were of the German type, but most were of the unmistakable
English character, and from such of these as were not Quaker a trained
observer might easily have picked out a Church of England person or a
Dissenter at sight. On first entering the city Dick had been struck with
the prettiness of the young women, but now that night had fallen and he
had returned to the vicinity of the river, the few of the fair that he
saw abroad were of rather bedraggled appearance.
As he walked along the wharves, listening to the lap of the tide against
the piles and vessels, he heard a sharp scream of mingled pain and
anger, in a feminine voice. Looking quickly towards the wharf whence it
came, he saw, in the light from the corner of a small warehouse, a young
woman recoiling from the blow of a sailor who was about to strike her
again. She dodged the second blow, and the sailor made ready to deliver
a third, but before he could do so Dick's fist landed on the side of his
head and he dropped to the wharf, dazed and limp. Dick then took off his
hat to the woman, who was a slender creature of about twenty, dressed
with a cheap attempt at gaiety. With quite attractive large eyes, she
quickly viewed Dick from head to foot.
"Rely on my protection, madam," said he, tingling with exultation at
having had so early an opportunity to figure as a rescuer of assailed
womankind.
"I am afraid he will follow me," said the girl, in a low tone, glancing
at the sailor, after her examination of Dick's appearance.
"He will do so at his peril, if you'll accept my arm to the place
where you are going," said Dick, with great gallantry and inward
self-applause.
The girl took the proffered arm, cast a final look at the sailor, who
was foggily trying to get on his legs, and led Dick off at a rapid gait.
They had turned into an alley towards Water Street before the sailor had
fully regained his senses. Up Water Street the girl went, giving Dick
the opportunity to see, by a window light or a street lamp here and
there, that her features, though pale, were well formed. For beauty they
lacked only something in expression. After passing several streets, the
girl turned into another alley that led towards the river, stopped at a
mean two-story wooden house half way down, and asked her preserver to
come in and accept some refreshment. He did so with alacrity, and found
himself in a small room beneath the rafters, the floor bare, the single
window broken in most of its small panes, a tumble-down bed taking up
half the apartment, a broken wooden chair beside a dressing-table, the
whole lighted by a single tallow candle that the girl obtained
down-stairs. Without consulting her guest, she called to some invisible
person below for brandy and water, with two tumblers. Dick sat on the
chair, his hostess on the bed, both in silence, till the liquor was
brought by a fat, red-faced woman with unkempt hair, who grinned amiably
at Dick, and departed only after several suggestive looks at the brandy.
Her fishing for an invitation to partake was all in vain, being
unobserved by the inexperienced Dick.
When he was alone with the heroine of his first adventure, and the
brandy had been tasted, Dick undertook to overcome her reticence, being
sure that she had some story of unmerited misfortune to tell. She soon
gratified him with a tale as harrowing as might have been found anywhere
in fiction. She was the daughter of people of quality who had lost their
all through the schemes of designing persons, and her only weapon
against starvation was her needle. She had that evening delivered some
sewing to the wife of a sea-captain on his vessel, which was to sail
that night, and it was on her return therefrom that she had been
accosted by the sailor, whose blows were elicited by the repulse she had
given him. Her face became more animated as she talked, and Dick began
to think her fascinating. Brandy was called for and served repeatedly,
and at last the red-faced woman who brought it said she was going to bed
and could serve no more that night, and her bill was ten shillings. Dick
promptly paid, forgetting that he was the invited guest, and not
neglecting the occasion to show in a careless way how much money he
carried. The girl then told him that, as he would certainly find his
tavern closed should he return to it at so late an hour, she would, in
spite of appearances and on account of his character and his services to
her, share her own poor accommodations with him for the rest of the
night. As Dick was now in a state in which he would have solicited this
favor had it not been offered, he readily accepted.
When he awoke, at dawn, he found himself alone. Taking up his waistcoat
to put it on, he noticed that a certain inner pocket did not bulge as
usually. A swift investigation disclosed that all his money had
disappeared, silver as well as gold. There was not a sign of his hostess
left in the bare, squalid room. He hastened down the steep, narrow
stairs, and met, in the entry below, the red-faced servitor, of whom he
inquired the whereabouts of the girl. The fat woman professed entire
ignorance of all occurrences since she had left the young people the
night before. From that moment to this, she said, she had slept like a
top, and from her reply Dick learned that she was the proprietress of
the house, and that the unfortunate daughter of people of quality was a
new lodger, of whom she knew nothing. A theory formed itself in Dick's
mind, and he hastened from the house to the Crooked Billet, where he was
astonished to find Tom MacAlister just arrived from a night, like
Dick's, passed elsewhere than at that inn. Dick rapidly recounted his
adventure to Tom, over a morning glass at the bar, and ended his
narration with the words:
"Do you know what her disappearance means?"
"What?" grunted Tom.
"It means that my robbers have carried her away in order to silence all
evidence of their crime! Or, maybe, the sailor tracked us and procured a
gang to abduct her, and robbed me in doing so, either in revenge or to
pay his accomplices!"
"Huh! Ye're ower fu' of them there things ye read in the novel-books,
Dickie, lad."
"By George, this proves that real life is sometimes very like the
novels! I hope this affair will end like them. We must find the girl,
Tom; we must rescue her!"
"Be jabers, we maun be spry about it, then, for the New York stage-coach
starts from the sign of the George in an hour."
"Come, then! But I won't leave Philadelphia till I've found her, though
we have to wait for another day's stage-coach. Come, Tom, for God's sake
don't be so slow!"
Tom indeed walked so deliberately from the Crooked Billet that Dick had
to accelerate his progress by tugging at his arm. Dick hurried him up
along the wharves, without the slightest plan of action formed. "Bide a
wee," said Tom, presently; "sure, there's no arriving anywhere till
ye've laid out your line of march. Come wi' me into yon tavern, and
we'll plan a campaign in decency and order." Dick saw the good sense of
this, and turned with Tom up an alley towards a wretched-looking place,
of which the use was indicated alike by its dirty sign and by the sounds
of drunken merriment issuing from its windows. As Dick and Tom entered,
they saw by whom those sounds were produced,--a sailor and a young woman
drinking together in great good-fellowship at a table. Dick recognized
both,--the sailor whom he had knocked down the night before, the girl in
whose defence he had knocked him down. Both looked up as he entered, and
the girl burst out laughing in a jeering, drunken fashion. "That's him,"
she said to her companion, who thereupon began to bellow mirthfully to
himself, regarding Dick with mingled curiosity and amusement.
"Wha might your friends be?" queried MacAlister of Dick.
"Come away," said Dick, a little huskily; and when the two were out in
the alley, whither the derisive shouts of the pair inside followed them,
he added, "If the stage goes in an hour, we'd better be taking our
things to the sign of the George."
"But your money? 'Twas a canny quantity of coin ye had in the bit pocket
there."
"Damn the money! I couldn't prove anything, and I want to get away from
here. But--by the lord, how can we go on without money?"
"Whist, lad! If some folk choose to spend the nicht a-losing of their
coin, there's others knows how to tell a different tale the morning. Do
ye mind the braw soldier-looking lad I proposed to thrust my company
on, in the beefsteak house? If I didn't introduce myself as Captain
MacAlister, retired on half pay from his Majesty's army, and if I didn't
pile up a bonny pile of yellow boys through handling the cards wi' him
and his pals in his room at the George all nicht, then I'm seven kinds
of a liar, and may all my days be Fridays! Oh, Dickie, lad, a knowledge
of the cards, ye'll find, comes in handy at mony a place in the journey
through this wicked, greedy, grasping world!" And old Tom made one of
his pockets jingle as he finished.
The two travellers returned to the Crooked Billet, paid for the lodging
they had not used, got their weapons and baggage, and went to Second
Street and thereon north to Arch, at the southwest corner of which the
sign of St. George battling with the dragon hung before the fine and
famous inn where the stage-coaches departed and arrived. The "Flying
Machine" was already drawn up before the entrance, the horses snorting
and pawing in impatience to start. Dick and Tom saw their belongings
safely stowed in the coach, which was a flat-roofed vehicle simple and
plain in shape, and loitered before the inn, watching the hostlers and
enjoying the fine spring sunshine, while MacAlister gave Dick a further
description of the card-playing young man from whom much of the money
had been won.
"I took the more joy in winning," added Tom, "for because the young buck
showed himsel' sic a masterfu', overbearing de'il and ill-natured loser,
not at all like his friend wi' the French name, who dropped his round
shiners like a gentleman. And mind here, now, take heed to call me
captain should they fa' in wi' us on the way to New York, for, frae the
talk of them, I conjecture that them and the Frenchman's sister start
the morning hame-bound for Quebec, on their ain horses."
"Do they come from Quebec?"
"Ay, on business for the Frenchman and his sister, wha, it seems, cam'
in for the proceeds of some estate in this town, them being of English
bluid on the mother's side. That I gathered frae the Frenchman's talk
wi' a man of the law wha called while his hot-headed friend and
me and the others were at the cards. Ah, now I mind the friend's
name,--Blagdon, Lieutenant Blagdon; for, bechune you and me, he's a
King's officer on leave of absence frae Quebec, only he keeps it quiet
just now, lest the mob might throw a stane or two his way."
"Then what's he doing here?"
"Bearing company to the Frenchman and his sister. It's like there's
summat bechune him and the girl, though devil a bit could I find that
out, wi' all my speering. But come, lad, while we ha' our choice of
seats."
They entered the coach, where they were soon joined by other passengers.
While Dick was watching the driver on the front seat take up lines and
whip, three horses were brought from the yard, and at the same time two
young gentlemen and a young lady came out of the inn and stood ready to
mount. Dick did not observe them until his attention was called from the
driver by some low-spoken words of MacAlister's:
"That's a sour-faced return for a friendly salutation! 'Tis the English
lieutenant that gave me a scowl for my bow. Sure, the French Canadian
has more civility."
By this time the three were mounted. Dick at once recognized the
robust but surly-looking young man on the right as the arrogant talker
of the beefsteak house, and the rather slight but good-looking and
well-mannered youth on the left as one of the other's companions there.
The lady between the two was partly concealed from Dick's view by the
English officer, until with a crack of the driver's whip the stage-coach
pulled out, when, by looking back, he had a full sight of her. The sight
caused his lips to part and himself to throw all his consciousness into
his eyes alone.
Catherine de St. Valier, daughter of a younger branch of the noble
French Canadian family of that name, was then in her seventeenth year,
tall and well developed for her age, in carriage erect without
stiffness, her face oval in shape with chin full but not too sharp or
too strong, nose straight and delicate, dainty ears, forehead about
whose sides hair of dark brown fell in curves but left the middle
uncovered, brows finely arched and high above the eyes, which were of a
piercing black and never too wide open, full red lips, complexion pale
but clear, with a very faint touch of red in each cheek, her countenance
dignified and made doubly interesting by a slight frown ever present
save when she smiled, which was rarely and then naturally and with no
gush of overpowering sweetness. The slightly thrown-back attitude of her
head was no affectation, but was a family characteristic, possessed also
by her brother.
"What is it, lad?" whispered MacAlister, catching Dick's arm. "Sure,
ye'll be leaving that head of yours behind ye in the road if ye bean't
carefu'!"
"Sure," Dick murmured, as he drew his head in, "I think I've left this
heart of mine back yonder under the sign of the George."
Tom gave a low whistle. "Weel, weel," he then said, "it 'ull soon catch
up, for this Flying Machine, as they call it, is no match for them
Virginia pacers the Canadian folk is mounted on."
This prediction was soon fulfilled. Ere the stage-coach had passed the
outskirts of the city, a little above Vine Street, the three riders had
cantered by at a gait that promised soon to take them far ahead.
"Nay, don't be cast down," quoth Tom. "We're like to run across them on
the journey, and they'll have to wait in New York for their baggage,
which goes by wagon. I mind now, frae the gentlemen's talk, they'll go
up the Hudson by sloop till Albany, then by horse again to Montreal, and
then by the St. Lawrence to Quebec. What a pity they don't be bound for
Boston,--eh, lad! But whist, Dickie! The sea do be full of good fish,
and it's mony a sonsie face ye'll be drawing deep breaths about, now
ye're over the hills and far away,--and ganging furder every turn of the
coach-wheels."
CHAPTER IV.
OF A BROKEN SABBATH AND BROKEN HEADS.
In those days the tri-weekly stage-coaches made the trip from
Philadelphia to New York in the unprecedented time of two days, passing
Bristol and several other thriving Pennsylvania villages, taking ferry
over the Delaware River to Trenton, which then consisted mainly of two
straggling streets and their rustic tributaries; bowling through New
Jersey woods and farms and hamlets, and crossing ferries and marshes to
Paulus Hook, where the passengers alighted and boarded the ferry-boat
for the city whose fort, spires, and snug houses adorned the
southernmost point of the hilly island of Manhattan. Several times,
during the first day of their trip, Dick and MacAlister had brief sights
of the three Canadians, who sometimes fell behind the stage-coach, and
as often overtook and passed it again. Dick nursed a hope of meeting the
party at dinner, or at the tavern where the coach should stop for the
night, yet he inwardly trembled at thought of such a meeting, knowing
how awkward and abashed he should feel in the presence of that girl.
His hopes, however, were disappointed, for, though the riders stopped
where the stage did, they ate in private rooms, and the only one of the
party who came into the bar or public dining-room anywhere was the
English lieutenant, Blagdon, who ignored MacAlister, and bestowed on
Dick only a look of disdain.
On the second morning the Canadians, as before, started with the stage
and were soon out of sight ahead. Dick kept a lookout forward, while
MacAlister engaged in talk with the other passengers, with whom his
narrative powers had by this time made him highly popular. For a long
time Dick was rewarded with no glimpse of the scarlet riding-habit his
eyes so wistfully sought. But at last, at a turn of the road, it came
into view against the green of the woods. Strangely, though, it was not
on horseback. The two young gentlemen stood beside the girl in the road,
and not one of their three animals was to be seen. All this was quickly
noticed by the others in the stage-coach, who uttered prompt expressions
of wonder, while the driver whipped up his four horses.
When the coach came up, Lieutenant Blagdon hailed the driver, who
immediately stopped.
"We are in a predicament," began the young lieutenant, in an annoyed and
embarrassed manner. "Half an hour ago, as we were riding by these
woods, several wild-looking ruffians rushed out from these bushes on
either side of the road, with pistols and fowling-pieces, which they
aimed at us, and demanded our money and horses. We were so completely
taken by surprise, our anxiety for this lady's safety was so great, we
could not have drawn our pistols before they could have brought us
down,--in short, we had to yield up our horses and what little money we
carried, and the robbers made off by the lane yonder, leaving us here."
From the passengers came cries of "Outrage!" "See the authorities!" and
"Alarm the county!" When others had had their say, Tom MacAlister was
for organizing a pursuing party of the passengers, and was seconded by a
reverend-looking gentleman, who asked if one of the robbers was not
blind of an eye.
"The affair was so quickly over, I for one did not notice any
peculiarities of appearance among them," answered Blagdon.
The young Frenchman, standing with his sister at the edge of the road,
now spoke, in perfectly good English: "One of them called another Fagan,
in ordering him to keep quiet; and said 'That's right, Jonathan,' to one
who said we shouldn't delay in hope of assistance, as they would shoot
us at the first sound of wheels or horses coming this way."
"That makes it certain," said the clerical-looking man; "they are the
Pine Robbers, as we call them in our part of Monmouth County, where they
are a great curse. It is surprising, though, that they should venture so
far inland and from their burrows in the sand-hills by the swamps near
the coast. I can be of use in tracking them, as I live at Shrewsbury,
which is not far from the swamps they inhabit and the groggeries they
resort to."
But the officer, learning from further talk that proper steps for the
recovery of the property might require several days, and yet fail, said
the attempt was not to be thought of; that the horses were the only
considerable loss, as his party had relied on money to be taken up in
New York, and that therefore they could do no more than take places in
the stage-coach for that city.
As the inside places were all filled, and one of them would be required
for the girl, Dick was out in the road in an instant, blushingly
blundering out to the Frenchman an offer of his seat to the lady, with
the declaration that he would ride outside,--which in those days meant
on the flat roof of the coach. The Frenchman bowed thanks and held out
his hand to lead his sister to the coach; but she stood reluctant, and
said:
"But the portrait, Gerard!" As she spoke her eyes became moist.
"I fear we must lose it, Catherine," said Gerard, sadly.
"If I can be of any service," said Dick, speaking as calmly as his
heartbeats would let him, and meeting with hot cheeks the first look the
girl's fine eyes ever cast upon him.
"I thank you," said Gerard, "but I fear nothing can be done. My sister
speaks of a miniature portrait of our mother, who is dead. One of the
robbers, the one called Jonathan, seeing the chain by which it was
suspended from her neck, tore it from her and carried it away."
"I will try to recover it, sir," said Dick, bowing to the girl while he
addressed the brother. Hearing a derisive "Huh!" behind him, Dick turned
and saw Blagdon viewing him with a contemptuous smile, which was assumed
to cover the chagrin caused by Dick's undertaking a task the officer
himself had shirked. Dick reddened more deeply, with anger, but said
nothing and went to the coach for his rifle and baggage. MacAlister,
always accepting whatever enterprise turned up for him, promptly got
out, with his own belongings, as also did the reverend gentleman, who
explained that he had intended leaving the coach at the next village, to
go thence by horse to his home at Shrewsbury. The vacant places were
taken by the Canadians, accounts were settled with the driver, Gerard de
St. Valier courteously thanked Dick again, giving him a New York
address but begging him to reconsider so desperate a project, Catherine
sent back one grateful but hopeless look, the driver cracked his whip,
the coach rolled off, and the three men were left alone in the
forest-bordered road.
After a brief consultation, in which it came out that the clerical
gentleman was the Reverend Mr. McKnight, the Presbyterian pastor of
Shrewsbury, it was decided that the three should go back to the last
village passed, which was nearer than the next one ahead, hire horses
there, then return, and make for Shrewsbury by way, first, of the lane
down which the robbers were said to have fled. They would stop at
Freehold, report the robbery to the county authorities, and call for the
services of sheriff and constable in hunting down the malefactors.
"If the loss were merely of money and horses," said the pastor, as the
three trudged along with their baggage on their backs, "I should not
stir far in the matter, seeing that the losers are apparently well
supplied with this world's goods. But the young lady's sorrow at the
loss of the keepsake was too much for me. It will be a kind of miracle
if we get it back. The man Fagan is a desperate rascal, and so, for that
matter, are Jonathan West and all the others. The man whom those young
people heard giving orders to the rest was doubtless Fenton, who
learned the blacksmith's trade at Freehold and was an excellent workman
at it before he took to crime. These men will stop at nothing. When they
are not at refuge in their sand-caves on the edges of swamps, among the
brush, they are plundering, burning, and killing, by night, or spending
their ill-gotten money at some low groggery in the pines. They will rob
anything, from a poor tailor's shop to a wagon carrying grain to mill,
and, though it doesn't sound like Christian charity to say so, they
ought to be hanging now in chains from trees, as they probably will be
some day."
At the village, so much time was lost in obtaining horses, that it was
dark before the three arrived at Freehold, and therefore they put up for
the night at the tavern next the court-house, which abode of justice was
of wood, clapboarded with shingles, and had a peaked roof. In the tavern
it was learned that Fenton and his gang had been seen passing two miles
east of the court-house, that afternoon, going towards Shrewsbury, three
on horseback, the others in a wagon. Mr. McKnight visited a justice of
the peace, the sheriff, and the constable; but, as it was now Saturday
night, those useful officers would not think of budging before Monday.
Dick feared that if a day were lost, even though the miniature should be
recovered, the Canadians would have left New York before he could arrive
there to restore it to them. Accordingly, the next morning, the three
men set out alone towards Shrewsbury, the clergyman having stipulated
that his share in the enterprise should be kept secret, lest his act
might serve the undiscriminating as an example of Sabbath-breaking.
"I am clear in my conscience on that score," said the minister to Tom
and Dick, "and, having put my hand to the plow in this business, I will
not turn back. I can guide you to a rough drinking-place in the woods,
where it is most likely the ruffians will be found. To counterbalance
their superior numbers, we must use strategy, and we have in our favor
the fact that most of them are likely by this time to be helpless with
liquor."
"'Oh, that men should put into their mouths an enemy to steal away their
brains!'" misquoted Tom, who thought it proper that he should speak
piously in the presence of the minister.
"It is fortunate for us if they have done so, in this case," said the
clergyman, with a smile. A moment later he sighed pensively. "My
congregation will be disappointed this morning. I was expected to arrive
home last night and to preach to-day. I have my sermon in my pocket."
"What is the text, sir, if I may be so bold?" asked Tom.
"Leviticus, sixth chapter, fourth verse: 'Then it shall be, because he
hath sinned, and is guilty, that he shall restore that which he took
violently away.'"
"By the powers," cried Tom, forgetting himself, "ye're like to get more
results putting that text into action the morning than by holding forth
on it frae your ain pulpit!"
Under the pastor's guidance, the party turned presently from the road
into the pine forest, through which their horses passed freely by reason
of the complete absence of undergrowth. MacAlister and Dick had left
their baggage at Freehold, and Mr. McKnight's was so light as to
encumber him little. Dick and Tom had their rifles, while the minister
carried Tom's pistol. They proceeded in silence some miles, now and then
emerging on clear places, skirting swamps, and advancing over ground
that became more and more sandy. At last, in the midst of woods, the
minister held his finger to his lips, and all three stopped. From a
distance came the sound of a coarse voice singing in maudlin tones a
tuneless song. The three dismounted, tied their horses to trees, and
walked cautiously forward in single file, Mr. McKnight leading. A low,
one-story log building came into view among the trees. At one end of it,
under a shed roof, stood four horses and a wagon. The bawling of the
song came through a small, unglazed window, of which the oiled paper was
torn.
"They take their pleasure in security now," whispered the minister,
halting a moment, "because the officers of justice will not break the
Sabbath to attack them. On other days they would not be so unguarded. I
will look through the window, and see how the land lies; then we shall
decide what to do."
He led the way to the groggery and applied his eye to a slit in the
oiled paper, while Dick and Tom stood on either side. In a moment, the
preacher crouched down beneath the window, and, motioning Tom and Dick
to do likewise, whispered:
"There has evidently been a fight. Fagan and another are lying on the
floor with their heads bound in bloody rags. Another is lying near them,
dead drunk, as his position shows. Jonathan West is sitting on the
floor, also drunk; it is he who is singing. Fenton and Burke are playing
cards, Fenton's back towards the door, Burke facing it. The keeper of
the place is lying asleep on the bar, and his wife is behind it paring
potatoes. If we are speedy, two of us shall have only Fenton and Burke
and the woman to deal with, while one goes through West's clothes in
search of the miniature."
"Then let us go in at once," said Dick.
"Softly," quoth the minister; "let us all understand what each is to do.
You, lad, perhaps should search West--"
"Nay," put in Tom; "trust me for that. I've plied my fingers on the
battle-field, and can do the thing so quick I can tak' my ain fu' share
of the fighting, too."
"You are right," said the pastor. "The door is unbarred. Let us all
three burst in at once. You, lad, who look the strongest, deal with
Fenton, the man sitting with his back to the door. Strike him down with
the butt of your rifle, and be ready to shoot if he attempts to rise. I
shall take care of the other card-player. You, Captain MacAlister,
search Jonathan West for the portrait, and keep your eye on the woman
behind the bar. If I am not mistaken, she will prove the worst foe of
all."
At MacAlister's suggestion, he and Dick each looked through the slit to
get a view of the chosen field of battle. Then the three stepped softly
around to the door. Each grasped his weapon tightly, and the minister
pushed the door open. All made a move to rush in,--but started back on
being confronted by Fenton and Burke, who stood, each with pistol
raised, doubtless put suddenly on their guard by the sound of footsteps.
Old Tom was the first to recover from surprise. He made a swift lunge at
Burke, which caught that person in the neck, almost breaking it, and
sent him flying back into the room. Tom leaped after him, and was
followed by the minister. Fenton turned to shoot the latter with his
pistol, and Dick availed himself of this movement to bring down his
rifle-butt heavily on the rascal's unkempt head. Fenton did not fall,
but, after staggering a moment, during which Dick reversed his weapon,
turned to shoot the latter, uttering a savage curse the while; he thus
opened his mouth wide, and Dick thrust the muzzle of the rifle therein,
and forced Fenton rapidly backward into the groggery, to the very
farthest corner thereof, pinning him therein with the rifle-muzzle in
his mouth. "Drop the pistol, or I'll fire," cried Dick; and Fenton,
perceiving his disadvantage, did so. Dick kicked the pistol towards the
minister, who picked it up. The gentle McKnight had been raining blows
on the head of Burke, who now succumbed and lay without protest, leaving
the minister free to draw the woman's attention from Tom. She had run
around the bar and threatened with her knife the deft-fingered
MacAlister while the latter was going through West's clothes, an
operation preceded by a quieting blow on the robber's skull from Tom's
rifle-butt. Of the four prostrate men, the drunkest one slept on through
the fray, the two gory-headed rascals opened their eyes and looked on
with apathy, while the proprietor got down off the bar and looked around
for some weapon with which to take a hand. At this moment Dick, who
continued to hold the ferocious but speechless Fenton against the wall,
felt something smooth slipped into his left hand, heard from Tom the
words, "'Tis yours to guard, lad," saw at an instant's glance that it
was the miniature portrait of a woman, and thrust it into his waistcoat
pocket. The proprietor of the place had now picked up a fowling-piece
from a corner and was aiming it at Dick. It was knocked up by
MacAlister, who then fell on its holder and was in a fair way to beat
out his brains, when the woman, having seen her spouse in danger,
abandoned her contest with the minister, and bounded panther-like at
Tom. She lodged the point of her knife in his cheek, and drew it out for
a second blow, whereupon the minister, putting a pistol in each of his
coat-pockets, ran up behind her, caught her by the long hair, and
dragged her out of the house. He did not stop until she was on her back
on the ground. Before she could rise, Tom had sent her husband reeling
with a final blow, and had come to aid the minister, knowing that the
latter had more than a match in the woman. Tom placed his feet on her
hair, which was lying about her head, and, digging his heels into the
sandy earth, put the muzzle of his rifle against her forehead, and told
her it was his custom, as a soldier, to make short work of cutthroat
she-devils of camp-following buzzards. So she lay still, glaring and
panting. Mr. McKnight reentered the groggery, aimed both his pistols at
Fenton, and told Dick to release that worthy and back out of the place
with rifle kept ready to shoot. Dick obeyed, and backed out side by side
with the minister. A minute later, the three thief-hunters were running
for their horses. They mounted, and made their way back to the place
where they had turned into the pines from the road.
"And won't ye stand in danger of retaliation from the devils?" queried
MacAlister, as Mr. McKnight turned to take leave.
"I think they were so drunk, and the thing was so quickly done, they did
not know me from a stranger like yourselves. They would not suspect a
minister of such work on a Sabbath day."
"Begorra, if more such work was done by ministers on Sabbath days, more
of the wicked would get punishment in this world! By the Lord, 'twas a
fine illustration ye gave of the penalties that follow wrong-doing, and
none the waur for that ye thumped a rascal's head instead of the pulpit,
and made the way of the transgressor hard instead of merely saying it
was."
"That's the grandest minister I ever saw, and the only sermon I never
went to sleep at," said MacAlister to Dick, as the two rode back towards
Freehold, Mr. McKnight having taken his way towards Shrewsbury after a
friendly farewell and a tender of his compliments to the young lady to
whom Dick was to restore the miniature.
That night they slept at the village where they had hired their horses.
They had to lose another day in waiting till the stage-coach came
along, and so it was Tuesday morning when they found themselves again on
a "Flying Machine" bound for New York. This time MacAlister's face was
tied up in cloths, the wound in his cheek being not serious, but vastly
inconvenient for the time being. "Another war-scar, bedad!" quoth he. "A
mark of the battle of Shrewsbury Pines."
The greater part of the journey was dampened by a series of April
showers, but when they arrived at Paulus Hook and descended from the
coach, the sun reappeared for a brief display before setting. As they
crossed in the ferry to New York, that English-Dutch-Huguenot seaport
town, in the midst of its hills and trees, seemed to smile upon them.
Looking out towards the bay, with its backing of green heights, Dick got
his first hint of the ocean beyond, and was deeply stirred thereat. In
those days a beach ran at the foot of bluffs that were crowned by
gardens and other grounds behind the spacious residences on the west
side of Broadway. There was no commerce along the North River, all the
Dutch Hudson sloops and the New Jersey boats rounding the point to make
landing in the East River. Dick's gaze, coming in from the bay, past the
green islands, close at hand, rested successively on the fort whose
walls rose from sloping green banks, the governor's garden, the water
ends of crooked streets, the little forest of masts in the East River,
the tiny village of Brooklyn nestling at the foot of the heights on Long
Island, and finally on the ferry landing-place, on which he and Tom
presently set foot. On the recommendation of a fellow passenger on the
ferry, they took lodgings in a small tavern near the Whitehall slip.
During supper Dick was absent-minded and perturbed. He was all afire to
return the miniature to Miss de St. Valier. Tom advised him to wait till
the next day, as it was now quite late. But Dick was fearful the
Canadian party might depart before he could see them. Moreover, the
prospect of again beholding the entrancing Catherine and receiving
thanks from her own lips, although a delicious one, was also
disquieting, and Dick was anxious to face the interview at the earliest
possible moment. He therefore put himself and his clothes into the best
possible appearance, and, while Tom sought the Coffee House, found the
way to the boarding-house in Queen Street at which Gerard de St. Valier
had told him the party would stay. At the door, where he inquired with
much concealed trepidation, a black servant told him the Canadians had
left. His heart sank, but rose again a moment later, when the mistress
of the house, Mrs. Carroll, having overheard, told him the St. Valiers
and Lieutenant Blagdon had gone to the King's Arms Tavern for their last
night in New York, intending to take sloop the next morning for Albany.
It was now dark, the street lamps having been lighted for some time, and
Dick decided that, after all, the morning would be the more suitable
time for approaching the Canadians. Being very tired and desiring to
rise early, he went to bed, and dreamt of the eyes of Miss de St.
Valier.
The next morning he made a hasty breakfast, and was already on the way
to the King's Arms when it occurred to him that he might make himself
ridiculous by intruding on the peerless Catherine too early. He
therefore walked about the town awhile, viewing the markets near the
East River; then going up Broad Street from the Exchange to the City
Hall of that day; then admiring the marble image of William Pitt in a
Roman toga, at Wall and William Streets; the great dry goods shops in
William Street, up to Maiden Lane; the fine broad red and yellow brick
residences, some with many windows, double-pitched and tile-covered
roofs, balustrades and gardens, in William Street, Queen Street, Hanover
Square, and elsewhere: finally crossing to the Broadway, and beholding
the leaden statue of King George, in the Bowling Green or parade-ground
before the fort. At last he entered the King's Arms, which was next but
one to the fine Kennedy house at the foot of the west side of Broadway,
both facing the Bowling Green and fort. In the public room he saw Tom,
who sat reading the New York _Gazette_, and who now merely winked at
him, being of no mind to figure with him in the restoration of the
portrait. Dick put on a bold face and asked the man in charge to
announce him to Mr. and Miss de St. Valier.
"And, pray, what do you desire of them?" queried an insolent voice at
Dick's elbow. He looked around and encountered Lieutenant Blagdon, who
stood eyeing him with a manifest resentment that betrayed an uneasy
divination of Dick's purpose.
Dick was on the point of answering hotly, but contented himself with a
defiant look and the quiet reply:
"I wish to restore the portrait of which Miss de St. Valier was robbed
while in your company last Saturday."
Blagdon's wrath was now mingled with chagrin, at the confirmation of his
fear that another had accomplished for the lady the task he had not
offered to undertake. After a moment's pause, controlling his
expression, he said:
"Miss de St. Valier and her brother left New York yesterday. As I sail
after them on the next Albany sloop, you can give me the portrait. I'll
carry it to them."
Dick looked the other in the face for a moment in surprise, then said,
with a contempt as genuine as the lieutenant's was affected:
"You lie, you know they are still here."
"What!" gasped Blagdon, and turned to an Irish officer in whose company
he was,--for there were still a few British troops in New York, the last
of them not leaving the barracks in Chambers Street for Boston until
June 6th. "By God, did you hear that?" And with great fury, Blagdon, who
was himself unarmed, grasped the other officer's sword, drew it from the
sheath, and would have thrust it into Dick's breast, had not the
Pennsylvanian quickly leaped aside. Furious in turn, at so sudden and
violent an onslaught, Dick caught the sword with both hands near the
guard, wrenched it from Blagdon, and struck the latter heavily on the
head with the hilt. The lieutenant fell, leaving a curse unfinished, and
lay quite motionless on the floor.
After a moment, during which every one in the room stood startled, the
Irish officer stooped over Blagdon, felt his head and chest, and said,
looking up:
"He's done for! The blow has killed him!"
Dick heard a whisper in his ear, "Run for your life, lad!" and felt
himself pushed aside by old Tom, who gave no sign of knowing him, and
the seeming purpose of whose violent movement was to get a look at the
prostrate man.
Mechanically, as in a dream, Dick took the hint and sped out of the
tavern. As he issued forth, a picture of the Bowling Green with its
statue and locust-trees, the green and gray fort and the one linden and
two apple-trees that stood on the city side thereof, was imprinted
lastingly on his memory, heedless as he was of it at the time. Still
holding the officer's sword, and with no course determined on, he ran up
the Broadway. He had not gone far, when he heard a shout behind him,
doubtless from some witness of the blow, "Murder! Murder! Stop that
man!" On he went, while the hue and cry gathered behind him. Up the
roughly paved Broadway, steering wide alike of the house-stoops at the
side and the gutter in the middle, he ran. Once, as he neared Trinity
Church, he glanced back. The pursuing crowd behind him now looked a
multitude, and at its head, crying "Stop that man!" louder than any
other, but giving him a quick gesture to hasten on, was Tom MacAlister.
CHAPTER V.
FROM BROADWAY TO BUNKER HILL.
Despite the circumstances, Dick had a brief feeling of mirth at the
ludicrous appearance of his comrade, who led the chase with such
well-simulated zeal and a face still circumscribed by the white cloth
used to keep in place the bandage on his cheek. Determined to resist
capture to the last, now that he had adopted the course of flight, Dick
plunged forward and on past Trinity Church. Broadway was not then a
business street, and the few people whom Dick passed or who emerged from
the residences or cross streets did not know what was the matter until
it was too late to head him off, so great a start he had of his
pursuers. Before he had reached St. Paul's Church, he looked back again,
whereupon Tom, with his hand before his body so that the pursuers behind
him could not see it, motioned to turn off into the next cross street.
Dick obeyed, and was thus for a time lost to the sight of the party in
chase. Presently the loud voice of Tom showed that he, too, had deviated
into the cross street. Dick turned his head and saw that Tom was the
only one who had yet done so. MacAlister now violently gesticulated to
the effect that Dick should turn into some yard or other hiding-place.
Dick immediately ran through the open gateway of what proved to be a
yard used as a repository for tan. He took refuge behind a high pile of
this article, and sank to the ground, breathless and half-exhausted.
There was no one else in the tan-yard. As he lay panting, he heard Tom
stride by, still hoarsely bawling, "Stop that man!" The direction taken
by the voice indicated that its owner had turned from this street into
another, and soon the sound of the crowd running by was evidence that
they had seen Tom make this last turn and had supposed he was still on
the trail of the hunted man. Their voices and footsteps died out
presently, and Dick was left to ponder on the situation.
He dared not venture out of the yard, lest he be seen by one of those
who had engaged in the chase. He knew that Tom, having led the hue and
cry on a false track, would at the proper time come back for him.
Therefore he could only wait. Meanwhile, as he was led to consider by
the approaching voices of some boys at play, what if he should be
discovered in the tan-yard? Swiftly choosing the remotest and highest
pile of tan, he crouched behind it, hastily scooped out a hole with both
hands, backed into this extemporized burrow, laid Blagdon's sword
beside him, and then, with his hollowed palms, drew in after him
sufficient of the previously removed tan to conceal himself from any but
the most minute observer. Thus buried in the tan, with barely enough
space open about his head to admit a little dim light and a small
quantity of dusty air, he made himself as comfortable as might be. By
and by his ears told him that the small boys had entered the tan-yard;
then that they were having a sham battle, playing that the tan-pile next
his own was Ticonderoga. History was soon reversed, and the English
drove the French from Ticonderoga, whereupon the French properly fell
back to Quebec, which was no other place than the tan-pile in which Dick
lay entombed. He felt the tan shift above him, and saw it slide down
before him and cut off more of his meagre supply of light and air, while
the shouts of Quebec's defenders came to him from overhead. Finally the
English charged Quebec and tumbled the French back from the heights, an
operation that resulted in Dick's having a series of heavy weights
alight on his head, a foot thrust into his eye, his opening entirely
closed up, and himself almost choked. Regardless of consequences, he
thrust his head out through the tan, and saw, to his unexpected joy,
that the last small warrior was scurrying away from behind Quebec. After
awhile the boys left the tan-yard, and Dick found some relief in a
change of position, though he did not emerge from his cave. Now and
then, as the day advanced, he could hear steps and voices of people
passing the tan-yard, and would lie close in fear that some of them
would turn in. He amused himself by imagining what would follow should
the tan in which he lay be loaded on some cart or wagon. So passed an
interminable day, beautiful outside with New York's incomparable
sunshine, but to Dick an age of numbness and pain, due to his long
retention of each cramped position he assumed; of hunger and thirst, of
alarms and conjectures, and of frequent thoughts of the man he had
felled, thoughts which he invariably put from him in his horror of
regarding himself as a slayer. At nightfall he came out of his hole, but
remained behind the tan-pile, listening for a familiar step. At last it
came, cautious but unmistakable. Dick rose, saw a gaunt form in the
gateway, and bounded towards him.
"Whist, lad!" said Tom, grasping Dick's offered hand. "Sure ye sprung up
like a ghaist. The coast is clear now, though eyes will be kept open for
ye in the city and about, for mony a day to come. Let us sit down and
wait a minute or two, till it do be just a wee bit darker. 'Twas a grand
chase I led them, mon, was it not, now?"
"'Twas the best trick I ever saw played. But where did you pass the
day?"
"Why," said Tom, as he sat on a tan-pile, "that's just it. If ony of
them had caught up wi' me, 'twould have come out sure what joke I'd
played them, for, ye see, they'd 'a' found out I was crying 'Stop' at
naething at all. So, for your ain skin's sake, I had to keep well ahead
until I had got out of the town, and then lose myself frae the ither
shouting devils, which I did by turning into the woods at a bend of the
road."
"You had the devil's own endurance to outrun them all," put in Dick.
"Why, ye see, when I got near blowed, I found ither legs than my ain to
help me out. In front of a tavern, ayont yonder, a horse was whinneying
as I came up. All I had to do was to jerk the knot of his halter and
jump on, and who could say me nay when it was chasing a law-breaker I
was, in the interests of justice? And that's how I got away frae the
chasing mob. What was there to do but spend the day in the woods, safe
out of sight and ken of man? For, d'ye mind, if I had come back into the
town, and gone to the tavern for my clothes, why, seeing that news and
descriptions must have been all about by then, as word of mouth goes
nowadays, I'd have been held for complicity in your escape, and then
who'd have come to let you out of your ain hole,--for I ken you maun hae
lodged in one of them tan-piles the day. Nay, nay, lad, never thrust
yourself in the way of forcible detention; that's a rule of mine! We'll
let our shirts and blankets and guns rot in the tavern, and gang on our
way rejoicing."
"But Blagdon,--do you think he is dead?"
"Devil a bit! He'll have come to before they were done chasing his
murderer, and the time he'll spend nursing a bloody head will enable him
to reflect on his sins. But, for a' that, we'll be ganging our way, for
murderous assault is nane sic a pleasant charge to face, however
innocent ye be, when the other side has money and great friends and
ye're a penniless stranger. Besides that, this Blagdon will have the
backing of the soldiery and the lieutenant-governor, and the tavern
people will naturally swear to onything on his side, even to attempted
robbery or the like. Come, Dickie boy, that sword ye retain, as your
proper spoils of war, is worth in money all we leave behind at the
tavern."
The two friends went from the tan-yard and by obscure streets to the
Bowery lane, and followed that till it became the Boston highroad, along
which they then proceeded northward through the country. When they had
passed a few suburban mansions, some fields and swamps and wooded hills,
Tom said, "Whist a bit!" and turned aside into a little copse. In a
moment he emerged, leading a large horse.
"This will save expense of transportation, lad," said he, as he came
into the road; "and moreover 'twill further compensate us for the loss
of our guns and baggage. Bedad, 'twas a lucky blow ye struck that there
lieutenant, to make me lead a chase in front of the tavern where the
good horse here called my attention by a loving whinney."
"What?" cried Dick. "You don't mean to say you are going to keep the
horse you found at the tavern!"
"And wha better should keep him? Do ye see what horse it is? Lad,
there's the hand of Providence in all this! Sure, your eyes ain't used
to starlight if ye couldn't make out auld Robin at the first glance."
Dick stood in joyful amazement. The horse was indeed the one that had
disappeared beneath the self-styled merchants with whom Dick and Tom had
agreed to ride and tie, on the road to Lancaster. The comrades now went
on in the darkness, taking turns at riding, but keeping together and
holding the horse to a slow pace. Dick felt in his pocket the miniature
whose restoration he had failed to effect. When, now, might he hope to
place it in the hands of the charming Canadian girl? He put the
question, but in other words, to his companion, as they rode by the dark
Murray mansion and began to descend towards Turtle Creek.
"If there is war," he added, "there's little chance of my getting to
Quebec for many a day to come."
"Don't presume to read the future, lad!" said MacAlister. "Wha kens what
turn of the wind of circumstance may blaw ye to Quebec? The older ye
grow in the ways of this precarious world, the less ye'll pretend to say
what to-morrow will bring forth. 'He started east and he landed west,'
as the auld song says."
It was near dawn when they passed the Blue Bell Tavern, but, hungry and
tired as both were, Tom advised that there be no stopping till they
should have left the island of Manhattan behind. "When ye're an auld
hand at the business of this warld," said he, "ye'll no tak' ae chance
in a hundred, of trusting yersel', e'en for the time being, in the arms
of justice. Law and justice, my son, are fearfu' things for an honest
man to have aught to do wi'. I'd rather trust my case to the decision of
auld Nick himsel', putting it to him in my ain way, man to man, and
perhaps over a good glass of spirits or two, than to ae judge or jury in
Christendom."
Giving Hyatt's Tavern also the go-by, they crossed the Harlem by the
Farmers' Bridge and continued on the Boston post-road; presently took
the left, where the road forked, and so arrived betimes at East Chester,
which stood invitingly in its pleasant valley, its church tower and
belfry rising among the locust-trees. At the tavern there Tom casually
threw off a brief story to account for having ridden all night, and the
two speedily possessed themselves of a stiff drink, a hot breakfast, and
a clean bed. In the afternoon, being anxious to get out of the province
of New York, lest some extraordinary effort might be made to detain
them, they again took horse, passed through the Huguenot village of New
Rochelle, stopped later at Mamaroneck to rest the horse, crossed the
Byram River to Connecticut at evening, and put up, before night was well
advanced, at Stamford, which wound irregularly along an undulating and
stony road. When they took the road for Norwalk the next morning, they
were thoroughly refreshed, and Dick, having got all the tan-dust out of
his ears, nostrils, and pores, was able to enjoy fully the beauty of
Long Island Sound where it was visible beyond the coves that here and
there indented to the road. That day and the next two days were
uneventful. Between Norwalk and Fairfield they met a courier from the
Massachusetts Committee of Safety to the Continental Congress. He
tarried no longer than to tell them the New England army was increasing
daily and holding the King's troops tight in Boston. At Stratford and
Milford the tavern talk was all of the war; of how the Connecticut
troops already started would acquit themselves, and how many more would
be needed; how this village farmer or that would behave when faced by a
British grenadier; of what steps the Continental Congress would take,
what dark plots the Tories might be weaving in New York, and what might
occur should the British war-vessels bombard the coast towns.
In New Haven, which they entered on a bright, sunny forenoon, a newly
formed company was awkwardly drilling on the green, in sight of the
churches and the college building. While the horse rested, Dick got into
conversation with a young gentleman who stood watching the crude
manoeuvres. Learning that he was Mr. Timothy Dwight, a tutor at the
college, Dick obtained the favor of a view of the college library, and
had the delightful sensation of handling copies of Newton's works and
Sir Richard Steele's, presented by those authors themselves. The scenes
of military preparation witnessed here and at Brentford increased Dick's
eagerness to be at the scene of action. Riding on Sunday through
Seabrooke and to New London, he and Tom had difficulty, by reason of the
strict observance of the day, in obtaining tavern accommodations. But,
as Tom remarked, the rule of not letting the left hand know what the
right one does may work both ways and concern the receiving as well as
the giving of money, and their coin at last found takers. At New London,
where the New York and Boston stage-coach was resting over Sunday, they
learned from its passengers that both the British and the provincials
had barriers on Boston Neck, that the provincials barred Charlestown
Neck as well, and that no one could come out of Boston without a pass
from General Gage, while the American army allowed no one to enter
Boston without a permit. The _Connecticut Gazette_ was full of war
tidings. All these signs of the times made Dick glow with delightful
anticipation. The two comrades crossed the Thames, by ferry, to Groton,
the next morning, and in the forenoon they passed by fair green slopes
and blossoming orchards to the village of Stonington, which lay drowsily
on a point of land that jutted out into a beautifully surrounded bay.
While they drank a pot of ale together at the tavern, they left the
horse Robin tied by the trough in the roadway, where he was viewed with
some admiration by two or three villagers and a well-dressed gentleman
who appeared to be a stranger in the place. Drinking rum and water, near
MacAlister and Dick, sat a sea-captain, who, after overhearing a part of
their talk, asked them why, inasmuch as they were in haste to reach
Cambridge, they did not take passage on his schooner, which was about to
sail that afternoon and would land at some port near Boston within the
territory under the provincials' control. Not waiting for their answer,
he asked them to drink with him, toasted the Continental Congress so
heartily, damned the King and Parliament so valiantly, and proved so
stout a patriot and jolly companion, that Dick, allured also by the
prospect of a sea-voyage, soon declared that for his part he would
prefer going by the schooner, and Tom offered no objection. When the
bargain had been made, a mild, pale-eyed old farmer came in, called Tom
and Dick aside, and asked if they would sell him their horse, or trade
it for another, as he was in need of just such an animal for his farm
work. He made so good an offer that Tom, foreseeing little use for the
horse on his joining the army, consented after very little haggling;
whereupon the farmer went home to get the coin from his strong-box.
"Whist!" said Tom to Dick, with sparkling eyes and a grim smile. "'Tis
the intervention of Providence again. No sooner do we plan to go by sea
than this honest farmer offers to take our horse off our hands, and
names a price I'd nae be sic a fool to ask, mysel'. 'Tis a sin and shame
to profit by sic innocence!"
They rejoined the sea-captain, whose convivial society made time so
rapid that the farmer was soon back with the money, which he emptied
from a stocking to the table. Tom rattled each piece and found it good,
then went out and untied the horse and placed the halter in the farmer's
hands,--saddle and bridle having gone into the bargain. Tom then
returned to the tavern, where he and Dick had dinner with the
sea-captain. When, after dinner, all three set forth to go aboard the
schooner, they saw the horse Robin being ridden up and down the road by
the well-dressed strange gentleman, who was apparently trying the
animal. The sea-captain saluted the rider as an acquaintance and asked
him when he was going back to Providence. In the short conversation that
ensued, it came out that the gentleman had just bought the horse from
the farmer who had owned him. "When I came here this morning, I had no
intention of buying a horse, though I really needed one," the gentleman
added. "I saw this beast in front of the tavern yonder, and said to the
farmer, who I didn't then know was the owner, that I would give so much
for it. I went about my business then, and when I got back, there was
the owner, offering me the horse at the price I had named."
"Begging your pardon," queried Tom MacAlister, with a queer look, "might
I inquire without offence what that price was?"
"Certainly," replied the Providence gentleman, and he mentioned an
amount once and a half as large as that for which the innocent farmer
had bought the horse from Tom.
Dick looked up at the sky, while MacAlister heaved a deep sigh, shook
his head dismally, and walked towards the schooner.
It was already laden, and the crew were busy with ropes and sails, under
the direction of the mate. The gentle lap of the waves, the creak of the
timbers, the straining of the ropes, and the flapping of canvas, had
their due effect on Dick in the lazy, sunny afternoon. When they had
cast off, and the little wharf and still town and green slopes swiftly
receded, while the creaking schooner sped under a light wind towards the
open ocean, Dick felt as in a kind of joyous dream. When that green
cape, the "Watch Hill" of the Indians, in fact and name, had been some
time passed, the wind changed both in quarter and force, and the mate
opined possible sudden bad weather from the east. Dick felt inward
threats of seasickness, but repressed them. Tom, the piper's son, showed
no sign of the slightest qualm. At nightfall, having feasted his stomach
with fresh-caught codfish, for he had promptly taken on a sea appetite,
and his eyes on the far-reaching billows, Dick retired with Tom to a
bunk beneath the hatches, and soon slept. When he awoke, he was in
pitchy darkness.
"Whist!" said a voice in his ear. "What do ye think, lad? For why did I
pinch ye then? Because, sticking my head out the hatchway for a taste of
air, I heard the rascal captain prattling with the scoundrel mate. This
vessel's bound straight for Boston, lad, and their cursed intention is
to hand us ower to General Gage for a pair of treasonable rebels! How
d'ye like that, now?"
"Let's scuttle his damned vessel first!" quoth Dick.
"Softly, Dickie boy! Aiblins it 'ull come to that, and aiblins we'll
find ither means. Devil a bit let him know we've spied their dirty
trick, mind! Providence is mostly our friend,--saving in the matter of
horses."
So the two kept their own counsel. Going on deck at dawn, they found the
captain so sharing the mate's fears of a bad blow,--that he had decided
to put back to Block Island. MacAlister sent Dick the faintest hint of a
wink. When the old harbor in the east side of that green rolling island
whose Indian name was Manisses was made, MacAlister said he and his
friend would like to go ashore to stretch their legs a bit. The captain,
doubtless deeming it not yet wise to arouse their suspicions, called a
fisherman's boat, which landed them from the schooner's place of
anchorage. They walked up from the landing to some fishermen's shingle
houses, well back from the beach, and speedily closed a bargain with a
sea-browned islander to take them to the mainland in his smack.
The fisherman, allured by the large price offered, and having less to
risk than the captain of the laden schooner, promptly embarked, under
the astonished eyes of the anchored captain, whom Tom gravely saluted
by placing thumb to nose and wiggling his fingers. The captain replied
by vociferously hoping to God the gale would blow the two travellers to
hell. The gale, however, continued to remain in abeyance, though the sky
was filled with clouds and the sea had an unaccountable choppy look and
feel. Tom, having questioned the fisherman regarding localities, now
proposed that the latter should take them to Newport, and doubled his
offer of pay. Induced by greed and by the confidence born of previous
good luck in all weathers at sea, the islander consented, regardless of
the capricious behavior of his sail and the sudden ominous quiverings of
his boat. Yet the storm held off.
Making clever use of the wind when it was brisk, the skipper had his
boat at evening off the precipitous southern coast of the island on
which Newport lies. As he was about to tack, in order to round the point
and so reach the town, which then occupied only a spot on the island's
western side, the storm came, almost without a moment's warning, and
bringing with it a pelting deluge of rain. Before the mariner could
regain any kind of mastery of his little craft, it had been dashed close
to the corrugated land. Dick and Tom escaped being thrown out of the
boat only by grasping its timbers and holding on with all strength. The
vessel was tossed about, for a time, like a cork. Once it seemed in the
act of hurling itself into a gaping chasm which rent the rough sea-wall
from the height of forty feet to unknown depths,--a cleft as wide as a
man is tall, and cut back into the land a hundred and fifty feet. But
the boat fell short of these grinning jaws and in another minute was far
away from them.
From the time when the storm first broke upon them to the time when, by
some strange freak of wind and sea, the smack was riding in a broad bay
east of the threatening sea-wall,--a direction therefrom exactly
opposite to that which the elements seemingly ought to have borne
it,--no one aboard spoke a word. But now the skipper, whose nasal voice
and distinct New England enunciation easily cut through the tumult of
wind and water, briefly expressed his intention of letting the sea carry
the boat straight towards the smooth beach ahead, there being one chance
of safety therein. Tom and Dick awaited the issue with more of curiosity
than of aught else, MacAlister looking exceedingly grim, as always in
times of peril, and Dick, as always in similar times, wearing a kind of
droll smile, as if the joke were on his courage for having got into such
a plight. Before either's senses had caught up to the passing
occurrence, there was a sudden tremendous shock underneath them, a
grinding through some gritty yielding substance, a rolling away of the
sea from the nearly overturned boat; and they found themselves high on
the beach, out of reach of the next wave, that rushed angrily in as if
to clutch them back again.
"'Twas the big brother did it," shouted the skipper, starting to draw
his craft farther up on the beach, and motioning for the aid of the
others.
"What's the big brother?" shouted Dick.
"The third wave. It be always the highest. We'll make the rest of the
voyage to Newport in these here craft," and he pointed down to his
boots.
They moved off through the rain accordingly, and, after a walk of a mile
and a half, arrived at the town, then a busy seaport with a goodly
commerce and a lively trade to the African coast. "For a cold wetting
outside, a hot wetting inside," said Tom, heading for the first tavern
sign; and the three rain-soaked voyagers promptly put his prescription
to the test, taking it in the shape of a steaming punch of kill-devil,
and looking the while through the tavern windows at the rain pouring
down upon the wharves and the vessels safe in harbor.
Next day's weather deterred the two travellers from taking the sloop
through Narragansett Bay for Providence, but they arrived at that town
on the 18th, and lodged in a tavern in the street that ran at the hill's
foot on the eastern side of the Cove, occupying a room that looked up
towards the street crossing the hillside and towards the college on the
summit beyond. Leaving Providence the next day, and going afoot with a
newly recruited body of troops bound for the provincial camp outside
Boston, they passed through Attleboro and other places where the signs
of war's proximity were increasingly plentiful, lodged for the night at
Walpole, and on the evening of May 20th reached the outskirts of the
camp of Rhode Island troops at Jamaica Plain.
Dick thrilled as his eyes ranged over the field dotted with tents, and
as they rested on the muskets and cannon,--for the Rhode Island men had
a train of artillery, and were well equipped, though as yet an
insubordinate lot. Wishing to be nearer the heart of affairs, Dick
hastened on to Roxbury, followed by the unobjecting MacAlister, and
there found several Massachusetts and Connecticut regiments quartered in
tents, log and earth huts, barns, taverns, and private houses. So well
did MacAlister know what steps to take, that on the following Monday the
two were accepted as volunteers, and quartered with Maxwell's company in
Prescott's regiment; were comfortably lodged in a dispossessed horse's
stall, and had traded off Dick's Irish officer's sword for a fiddle,
with two fowling-pieces thrown into the bargain.
On the previous day, Sunday, which was the day after that of the arrival
of Dick and Tom, a vessel had taken some British troops to Grape Island,
in Boston Harbor, to get the hay there stored. An alarm of bells and
guns had brought out the people of Weymouth, Hingham, and other towns,
and they had landed on the island with three companies sent by General
Thomas from Roxbury, driven the British away, burnt the hay, and taken
off a number of cattle. This un-Sabbath-like exploit was the talk of the
camp on Monday, and Dick deplored his not having heard of it in time to
have sought a part in it.
Captain Maxwell's men proved excellent hosts, and, though not on its
rolls, Dick and Tom shared the company's service and experiences in
every way. Colonel Prescott's regiment was soon ordered to Cambridge,
where was stationed the centre of the New England army, consisting of
fifteen Massachusetts and several Connecticut regiments, one of the
latter being General Putnam's. Here were the headquarters of General
Ward, the commander-in-chief, in a fine wooden residence near Harvard
College, and here was Colonel Gridley, the chief engineer, with most of
the artillery. Here were also most of the Yankees' fortifications, these
being yet in process of construction, and consisting mainly of
breastworks in Cambridge and on the road near the base of Prospect
Hill. Further north and northeast was the army's left wing, consisting
mainly of Colonels Stark's and Reed's New Hampshire regiments, and
stationed at Medford, Chelsea, and near Charlestown Neck.
It was the lot of Dick and MacAlister, as participants in the fortunes
of Maxwell's company, to occupy part of a log hut near Cambridge Common
and in sight of the college, and to have no share in the enterprises of
May 27th and 30th, in which American detachments went to Noddle's
Island, near Chelsea, and drove off sheep, cattle, and horses, on the
first occasion killing and wounding several British marines and
capturing twelve swivels and four four-pounders from a British schooner.
There was a skilful removal of sheep and cattle from Pettick's Island
also, on May 31st; and on the night of June 2d Major Greaton took from
Deer Island eight hundred sheep and a lot of cattle, and captured a
man-of-war's barge and four or five prisoners. Dick pined and chafed
that circumstance kept him out of all these interesting proceedings, but
Tom the Fiddler (a name promptly bestowed on him by Prescott's men)
consoled him with many a "Whist, man, bide a wee; there'll be bigger
business a-brewing!"
So Dick bided, with eager anticipations, although, in his inexperience,
heeding the grumbling of others, he thought the conviviality between
certain American and British officers on the man-of-war _Lively_, on
the occasion of an exchange of prisoners, June 6th, did not look much
like war. He was better pleased at the derision with which the raw
troops received General Gage's proclamation of June 12th, which somehow
promptly found its way into camp. In that document the British commander
pronounced those in arms and their abettors to be rebels and traitors,
and offered pardon to such as should lay down their arms, excepting
Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Continually there came exciting rumors
that the British intended to sally out of Boston to attack their
besiegers. But Dick did not know what the American commanders knew, on
June 13th,--that General Gage intended to take possession of Dorchester
Heights on the 18th; hence it was with surprise and a keen thrill that,
on Friday evening, the 16th, he obeyed the order to fall in, and marched
beside MacAlister with the company to Cambridge Common.
There he found that Maxwell's men were part of a detachment which
included other companies of Prescott's regiment, a part of Bridge's, a
part of Frye's, and a number of Connecticut troops under Captain
Knowlton, of Putnam's regiment. There was also some artillery, with
Colonel Gridley himself. And there stood the tall, powerful figure of
Colonel Prescott, wearing a long blue coat, his strong, stern face
shaded by the slightly turned up brim of a great round hat. The air was
charged with expectation, with a sense of great events at hand. The
force paraded on the Common, and then stood with heads bared and hands
resting on the guns, while a venerable-looking gentleman, whom a
whispering comrade named to Dick as President Langdon of Harvard
College, raised his hand heavenward and uttered a tremulous prayer for
the aid of the Lord of Hosts. There was a period of waiting, during
which the colonel consulted quietly with Gridley and the other officers,
while the suppressed excitement of the men made some appear moody and
abstracted, some nervous and sharp in their whispered speeches, others
extraordinarily calm in tone, others oddly jocular. Dick was one of the
last, in mood and countenance, but was so filled with emotion that he
dared not trust himself to speak. Tom was placidly grim and patient,
keeping his wits about him and exhibiting no change in tone or manner.
The fallen darkness gave the human figures, the distant trees and
scattered houses, the rolling landscape, a mysterious look. At last, at
nine o'clock, in low, quick tone, the order was given to march.
First went two sergeants, carrying dark lanterns; then strode Colonel
Prescott, at the head of the detachment. Behind the infantry and the
cannon, the shovels and other tools were borne, with which to make
entrenchments. Keeping strict silence, as they had been ordered, the
men trailed past Inman's Woods, Prospect Hill, and Cobble Hill, crossed
a level space (another common), and halted at Charlestown Neck. Here, in
the darkness, General Putnam rode up, and they were joined by other
officers also.
Presently Captain Nutting's company and a few Connecticut men separated
from the detachment and marched to the lower part of Charlestown, to act
there as a guard. The main force was soon on the march again, and
followed the road over a smooth round hill (the real Bunker's Hill), at
the base of which it halted again. Prescott gathered the officers around
him, and quietly made known the orders he had come to carry out.
Watching the group alertly, Dick saw the officers look or point, now at
the hill just crossed, now at the hill ahead, as if discussing which to
use for the purpose in hand. Finally the men were marched to the hill
ahead, from which Boston on its hills and hillsides could be seen
sleeping, across the wide mouth of the Charles River.
As soon as the men halted, Colonel Gridley began to move rapidly about
the summit of the hill, marking out lines and angles in the earth as he
did so. Guns were stacked by all but certain designated men, of whom
Dick and Tom were two, who remained under arms. Spades were distributed
to the others, who were soon turning up the earth along the lines
traced by Colonel Gridley. As General Putnam started to ride back over
the road they had followed, Captain Maxwell received an order from
Colonel Prescott, and in turn gave the word of march to a party of his
men, in which were numbered Dick and Tom.
This little force followed the captain down into Charlestown, whose
commodious houses among the trees were now deserted. When the party
neared the Old Ferry, which led to Boston, the men were assigned to
different posts along the shore, to watch the motions of the enemy, on
their men-of-war in the river and in Boston opposite, during the night.
With what delicious feelings did Dick pace the shore, to the sound of
the lapping water, in sight of the dark looming vessels of the foe, in
hearing of the British sentinel's voice who passed the "All's well" on
to his comrade! Twice during the night Colonel Prescott came down with
another officer to see what might be seen from the shore. It was almost
dawn when Tom and Dick were marched back to the hill, where the men had
been doing beaver work in the night.
A great change had been made in the appearance of the hill. Mounds of
earth six feet high now enclosed the crest on three sides and most of
the fourth. A rough breastwork had been thrown up as if in continuation
of one of the sides of this redoubt. On the inner side of these works
rough platforms of wood and earth were being made, and Dick and Tom were
now assigned to aid in this duty, the rule of the night having been that
men should dig and mount guard alternately. Dawn came, calm and clear,
while the men were working at the spades. As both mounted a pile of
earth, to level it, Dick took the opportunity to look down over the
parapet, towards Boston. At that instant there came a flash of fire and
a belch of smoke from the port-hole of a vessel in the river, a sullen
boom, and a spattering of earth and dust in the near hillside.
"Bedad," said old Tom, looking down towards the man-of-war, "that
vessel's called the _Lively_; and frae the way she says good morning I'm
thinking we're like to have a lively day of it!"
CHAPTER VI.
THE WIND OF CIRCUMSTANCE.
It was a fine, clear morning, promising a hot day. Looking across the
earthwork, Dick could see people on the housetops and hills of Boston
and the near-by country, attracted by the sound of the _Lively's_ firing
and by the news that the Yankees had fortified the hill. Dick and
MacAlister were presently relieved, whereupon they rested at their
rifles, while others went on working at the platforms. The firing from
the river ceased, but the calm which followed was so like that which
precedes a storm, that Dick was not even startled at the louder booming
that soon arose, from a hill-battery in Boston as well as from the
war-vessels in the river. The men around Dick made jokes about the
enemy's fire, and about what fate might befall one another within a few
hours. The prevalent spirit accorded with the half tragic, half comical
feeling that thrilled Dick's breast and showed in his face.
There came a slight shock and a general sensation when the word went
around that one of the British cannon balls had struck and killed Asa
Pollard, of Stickney's company in Bridge's regiment; and there followed
some ado over the matter of his burial, Colonel Prescott commanding that
he be buried immediately, a chaplain insisting on performing a service
over the body, and Prescott thereupon ordering dispersed the crowd of
men that gathered to hear the service. At this a number of men
rebelliously left the hill. To shame the timid and encourage the brave,
Prescott stepped to the top of the parapet and walked calmly around
thereupon, coolly giving orders, in perfect heedlessness of the balls
that plowed the hillside near at hand. A captain did likewise, and
thereupon the men took to cheering defiantly at each notable specimen of
British marksmanship.
Keyed up to the pitch of recklessness, the men could laugh at the
British fire, but the intense heat of the sun, the fatigue of their
labors, and the hunger and thirst due to the neglect of many to bring
provisions, were foes not as easily disdained. Thanks to Dick's respect
for orders, and to Tom's wisdom of experience, these two had enough to
eat and drink; but many, as they perspired or lay exhausted, growled or
cursed, and thought war a useless, uncomfortable business.
During the morning, while the men worked with the spades, or waited idly
and wondered when, if ever, their first shot would be fired, there were
frequent consultations of the officers, frequent despatchings of
messengers from the hill, or from one part of the hill to another,
frequent signs that seemed to promise action but brought none. There was
a moment of interest for Dick when he became aware, first by sound, and
then by sight, that the cannon in a corner of the redoubt had begun to
reply to the British fire, which had gained in severity and in the
number of its sources.
At about eleven o'clock the men were ordered to cease work on the
entrenchments, and their tools were piled in the rear. General Putnam
now rode up, evidently from Cambridge, and had some discussion with
Prescott, and, apparently as a result thereof, a large party took up the
tools and started off towards Charlestown Neck. Some of this party
stopped at the next hill, to which Putnam rode, and there they began to
throw up breastworks under his orders. Thus the morning passed, in
tedious expectancy.
The burning noon found Dick and Tom again at the parapet, which was now
manned with waiting musket-men. Dick's wandering gaze rested on two
war-ships that were moving up the river towards those already firing.
"Begorra, there's a thing or two doing, yonder in the town," said
MacAlister, with a slight revival from a tone of languor. Dick looked
across to Boston. Through some streets and towards the wharves, trailed
a long, wide line of scarlet, flashing at countless points where the
sunlight fell on polished metal. The line was of British regiments,
doubtless coming to attack the Yankee redoubt.
An oppressive silence fell for a moment on Dick and all his comrades,
while their eyes glistened; then, simultaneously, they raised a wild,
half hysterical cheer, and many a man grasped his weapon tighter, and
sent towards the scarlet line afar an unconscious smile of defiant
welcome.
The thunder of the British batteries and ships all at once swelled to
tremendous volume. The fields by the river, below the redoubt, were
deluged with cannon-shot. "To hinder us frae ganging doon to stop their
landing," explained MacAlister to Dick. Scarlet troops could be seen
moving in Boston towards different wharves, from which at last they
crowded into barges, a few of them hauling field-pieces along with them.
Dick thrilled at the fine sight when the barges were rowed out into the
river and towards a point of land eastward from the hill on which the
Yankee army waited. Passing between the belching vessels and the river's
mouth, and as the wind drove the cannon smoke westward, the barges with
their loads of scarlet and steel stood out clear in the sunlight.
It was one o'clock when the barges huddled together at the point, and
the red-coated troops filed ashore, and began to form in lines, now on
the same side of the river with the colonials who had defied them. Dick
admired the precision of the three lines in which they formed, the
patience with which they waited while their officers consulted and while
the barges went back apparently for more troops, the matter-of-fact
manner in which many of them ate their dinners while they stood.
He was drawn from this sight presently by a cheer from his own comrades,
which heralded the arrival of some teams with provisions and barrels of
beer. While he was partaking of the consequent good cheer, there was
another outburst of enthusiasm, this time over the arrival of Doctor
Warren, recently made a general, and General Pomeroy, who both came to
serve for the day in the ranks, as volunteers. Soon General Putnam rode
back again to the redoubt.
Now the British were seen beginning a movement from the point, and along
the Mystic River, which ran by the hill's northern base as the Charles
ran by its southern one. Some artillery and some Connecticut troops,
detached to oppose this movement, went down the hill and began to
construct a kind of breastwork of a pair of stone and rail fences and
some fresh-cut hay that lay in the fields. But Dick had no attention for
this business, or for the reinforcements that began to arrive over
Charlestown Neck in the fire of the British ships and batteries. All his
powers of sight were for the well-drilled enemy, who had ceased to move
along the Mystic, and now stood near the point.
At about three o'clock the British barges came back from Boston on their
second trip, and, landing short of the point, disembarked their troops
at a place much nearer the redoubt than the first force was. "It's them
we'll be having dealings wi'," said MacAlister, nodding towards the new
arrivals. "There's a regiment that we'll ken the name of later, and a
battalion of marines, not to speak of them companies of light infantry
and grenadiers. Whist, lad, it's like we'll hae the worth of our
labors."
While Dick waited, with his eyes on the force at the foot of the hill,
in front of him, he was vaguely conscious that things were doing
elsewhere; that the field-pieces of the British right wing--the force
first landed--were conversing with the Yankees' cannon; that parties
were being sent out from the redoubt to flank the enemy and were doing a
little futile skirmishing; and that the roars of cannon were more
deafening, the balls raining more thickly and incessantly on the
hillside from the ships and the Boston batteries. At last the British
left wing--the newly landed force, of which Tom had spoken--began to
march towards the redoubt. This left wing had meanwhile been augmented
by some of the regiments that had crossed the river on the first trip of
the barges.
"They're coming, boy," said old Tom. "It's a general movement of both
divisions. They are the best troops in the world, son, dour devils every
ane of them, and they mane to tak' this hill as sure as we mane to hould
it. It's a grand disputation ye're like to see this day, lad!"
Colonel Prescott strode around the platform, instructing the men upon it
how to fire, the men behind it how to hand loaded guns to the first, how
to reload, how to take the places of the disabled. "Remember," said he,
"wait for the word before you fire. Mind you put every grain of powder
to good use; there's none for wasting. Aim at their waist-bands, and
bring down their officers. That musket must be lower, man, when you come
to fire. You, there, with your finger ready to pull, wait for the word,
I tell you!"
Warfare and orders were different with the Yankee army on the hill, from
what they were with the disciplined soldiers marching up to the attack.
Dick was dimly aware of flashes from British artillery posted near some
brick-kilns near the hill's foot, but all his thoughts were on the
infantry, as yet distant but steadily approaching, with a precision
that was proof against marshy ground, tall grass, stone or rail fences,
and other impediments. On they came, at a steady walk, to the beating of
their own drums, marching in silence, looking neither to right nor to
left, outwardly as calm as if on parade, showing in their faces no
complaint against the heat nor any fear of the fate that might await
them, men patient, machine-like in response to orders, their scarlet
coats blazing in the sun, their steel bayonets flashing, men perfectly
groomed, lifted to disdain of death by the sense of comradeship and of
the occasion's bigness and by devotion to the sun-lit flag that
fluttered slightly in the faint breeze,--so they came, their faces fixed
with a mild curiosity on the redoubt, and it seemed to Dick that, coming
in fashion so orderly and businesslike, they could not in possibility be
turned back or stayed. Thrilled with admiration, "By the Lord," he said
to MacAlister, "that's the way to march to one's death! Who could be
afraid to face all hell, either marching with them, or waiting here to
fight against them?"
"Bedad, ye've got the feeling, lad!" Tom answered. "When great matters
do be brewing, a man's ain life is sic a wee sma' thing, he'll no haggle
over it!"
The British left wing approached in long files, its right composed of
tall-capped grenadiers, who came towards the breastwork north of the
redoubt, its centre consisting of several regiments of ordinary foot,
its extreme left being made up of marines, whose commander's figure was
recognized by one of Dick's comrades as that of Major Pitcairn, who had
called on the rebels on Lexington Common to disperse. When the redcoats
were still at a considerable distance, they deployed into line and fired
at the Yankees' works, all in unison, as if each was part of a great
machine. In his admiration of their movement, and of the quiet and easy
manner in which the marching officers had ordered it, Dick heeded not
the whizz of bullets overhead. On some of his comrades the strain was
too great to resist, and they impulsively fired their pieces at the
approaching scarlet lines. Prescott's voice rose in loud reproof of
these, and some of the officers ran along the top of the parapet,
kicking up the guns of men who were taking aim.
On came the enemy, firing at regular intervals in obedience to slight
gestures of their officers. And now they were so near that man might be
distinguished from man, each by his face, though all the countenances
had in common the impassive, obedient, patient, unquestioning look of
British veterans. With the Yankees the tension of inward excitement was
such that Dick and most of his comrades would not trust their voices to
speak; but some grumbled nervously, or even growled as in ordinary
moods. "Bean't we ever going to give it to them?" demanded one, and "Air
we going to let them walk right into the fort, 'thout our moving a
finger?" queried another. It began to look to Dick as if the enemy were
indeed dangerously near, and he glanced at Tom MacAlister, who was
motionlessly breasting the parapet, gun-butt against shoulder, eye
following out the barrel, finger bent to pull at the word. Presently all
growlings ceased, and nothing was heard but the roar of the cannon, the
throbbing beat of the enemy's drums, and the singing of the bullets in
the air. Then the powerful voice of Prescott rang out in the single
word, "Fire!"
There was flash, a crack, a belch of smoke, along the whole redoubt;
and, when the smoke rose, Dick got an indistinct impression of great
gaps in the scarlet lines, of red-coated soldiers lying on the ground in
various positions, some writhing and grimacing, some perfectly still,
some pierced and bleeding, some without visible wound. Those still afoot
were looking astonished and were trying to retain or recover the regular
formation of their lines. Some of them fired back at the redoubt. Dick
mechanically grasped the loaded gun handed to him by a man behind the
platform, and as mechanically relinquished his own emptied weapon to the
same man; in another moment he was blazing away again at a scarlet coat.
Then he himself reloaded, and fired a third time; and after that he saw
the broken scarlet lines in front of him roll back down the hill, in a
kind of disorderly order, many of the redcoats falling behind and
plunging presently to the earth.
"We have actually driven them back!" was his thought, and he bounded to
the top of the parapet, thrown forward by an irresistible impulse to
give chase; but he was stayed by the hindering grasp of Tom MacAlister
upon the seat of his breeches. He looked around in surprise, for several
men had leaped over the parapet, with a cheer, to follow the fleeing
foe. But officers leaped after these men and vehemently ordered them
back into the redoubt. "They're beaten!" cried Dick, ecstatically.
"Maybe," quoth old Tom; "but it'll no be them, I'm a-thinkin', if they
stay so!"
All the world knows they did not stay so; that the rest of that hot,
eventful afternoon, until the termination of the fight, had nothing in
it to give Dick an impression different from those he had already
received; that the British re-formed by the shore, charged up the hill a
second time, and were a second time driven back by the deadly American
marksmanship; that to aid their second attempt they set fire to
Charlestown, but, the smoke being driven westward, failed to accomplish
their purpose thereby; that the British cannon did a little more work
this second time; that the British soldiers were somewhat impeded in
their charge by the bodies of dead and wounded comrades they had to step
over; that their officers had to do some threatening and sword-pricking
and striking to persuade them forward; that their second retreat was in
greater disorder than their first, and left the ground covered more
thickly with dead and wounded; that they waited a long time before they
began their third attack; that on the American side there was much
bungling in attempts to bring on reinforcements that arrived over
Charlestown Neck; that many of the cowardly and the disgruntled slunk
away; that in each charge the occurrences at the redoubt were similar to
those at the breastwork and at the stone and rail fence; that the second
attack left the Americans with very little ammunition. The few artillery
cartridges that contained all the powder at hand were opened, and the
powder was given out to the men with instructions to make every kernel
of it tell.
"If they're driven back once more, they can't be rallied again," said
Colonel Prescott; and his men cheered and replied, "We're ready for
them!" The few men with bayonets were placed at points the enemy would
probably attempt to scale. It was seen that the British boats had been
sent back to Boston,--so that the British troops would not have them to
flee to, as old Tom divined,--also that the British had received
reinforcements from the vessels.
When they advanced in column to the third attack, they came without
knapsacks, and their whole movement was concentrated upon the redoubt
and breastwork, while their artillery was sent ahead and so placed as to
enfilade the Americans in flank. The red lines were but twenty yards
away when Prescott gave the order to fire. The columns wavered at the
volley, but recovered form in a moment, and sprang forward with fixed
bayonets, without firing in return. Dick, knowing he had fired his last
round, and following Tom's example, turned his weapon around to use it
as a club. He was now at the southeastern corner of the redoubt.
The British surged up to the southern side, like a tidal wave, their
front line being lifted by the men behind. A red-coated officer set foot
on the parapet, cried out "The day is ours!" and fell, pierced by the
last bullet of some Yankee inside the redoubt. The whole first rank that
mounted the parapet was shot down, but there was no powder left for the
ranks that followed. Dick brought down his rifle-butt with all his
strength on the head of the nearest redcoat. Before he could raise his
weapon, he felt in his leg the violent thrust of a British bayonet. He
made a wild movement to clutch it, but it was drawn out of him by its
owner's hand. Dick fell forward on one knee, and a moment later toppled
over the parapet and fell outside the redoubt, upon the quivering body
of a dying redcoat, by whose advancing comrades he was soon trodden into
insensibility.
When he opened his eyes again it was late in the evening. The melee was
over. He lay on some hay on the hillside, with a number of other men,
some wounded, some apparently whole, all under guard of sentries who
paced on every side. He soon perceived that the men under guard were of
the Yankee army, while those who guarded them were British, and, as he
presently recognized the redoubt not far away, he knew that the British
had won the day and that he was a prisoner. Before night a surgeon came
and examined his wound, had it washed and tied up by an assistant, and
pronounced it of no consequence. Dick passed the night in exhaustion,
pain, and thirst, on his bed of hay on the hillside.
The next day, while the British were fitting the redoubt for their own
service, and also beginning new works, Dick and his fellow prisoners
were marched down to the river, conveyed by boat to Boston, and led
through certain streets of that town, some of which were curved, some
crooked, some steeply ascending, some flanked by closely built
rough-cast houses with projecting upper stories, some by commodious
brick or wooden residences in the midst of fine gardens; and so into a
stone jail that stood with its walled yard on the south side of the
way. At one side of the entrance, within this prison, was a guard-room,
into which each prisoner was taken for his name to be entered in the
records. Dick was the last to be directed thither. When he had been duly
registered by the proper officer, he turned to follow the guard to the
cell assigned him.
"So we've got you at last," came, in a slightly Irish accent, from a
British officer, who appeared to be in some authority at the prison, but
whom Dick had not before observed closely. "Faith, we'll take care you
shall stay with us awhile, and we'll not give you a chance to murder
English officers, either, as you tried to murder Lieutenant Blagdon in
New York. What have you done with my sword, you spalpeen?"
Dick recognized the officer in whose company Blagdon had been at the
time of the occurrence in the King's Arms Tavern. He would have made an
answer, although the other's question did not in its tone imply
expectation of one; but the guard hurried him away, in obedience to a
sudden gesture of the Irishman.
"At least," thought Dick, "though that man, as Blagdon's friend, counts
himself my enemy, he has done me the service of informing me that
Blagdon is not dead. '_Tried_ to murder Blagdon,' he said. Tom the
piper's son was right. And, thinking of Tom, I wonder where he is now.
Evidently not a prisoner, for our lot seems to comprise all that were
taken. Killed? I can't think that! Does he know what has become of me, I
wonder? Shall I ever see him again?"
Having been conducted up a narrow stairway, he was led along a corridor
and ushered into a large, bare apartment whose wooden door opened
thereupon. But if this apartment was bare as to its wooden walls and
floor and ceiling, it was far from empty, being occupied already by half
a score of men, some of whom were of the party of prisoners that had
come with Dick. The guard now closed the door and fastened it on the
outside, Dick having been the last prisoner lodged.
Dick and his roommates had of floor space barely sufficient for all to
lie down at once, and of light they had only what came from a single
window, which looked across the jail-yard to some rear out-buildings and
gardens appertaining to houses in the street beyond. The unpainted wood
that encased the cell was interrupted only by the window and in certain
places where the inside of the stone outer wall of the prison was
visible. There were in the cell two large wooden pails, which were
removed and returned once a day.
Regularly each day the door opened to admit men who brought water, bread
or biscuit, and sometimes porridge or stew or other food; and the
prisoners were now and then taken, singly or in small parties, to walk
in the yard. They were made by their guards to suppose themselves
recognized not as prisoners of war but as rebels or traitors, and to
consider the slightest acts of consideration towards them as unmerited
privileges. As the days passed, it became manifest that Dick received
fewer such privileges than fell to any of his fellow prisoners. He
promptly attributed this to the influence of the Irish officer.
Did that officer, Dick asked himself, know the story of the miniature?
Probably not, or he would have made some attempt, on Blagdon's behalf,
to obtain it. Such an attempt would doubtless have failed, however, as
was shown in the search made of Dick's person on his capture, a search
which had not disclosed the picture. For Dick, to be ready against the
chance of war, had encased the keepsake in a tight-fitting silken bag,
which he had then concealed in his plentiful back hair, fastening it by
means of tiny cords entwined with locks of hair and with the ribbons
that tied his queue. There it remained during his imprisonment.
Of the thirty prisoners taken by the British in the battle, only a few
were in Dick's cell, the others being confined in other apartments in
the jail. Among Dick's roommates were some citizens of Boston, in
durance for various alleged offences against the royal government. One
was charged with having drawn plans of British fortifications, another
with having given intelligence to the rebels by means of correspondence
smuggled through the lines, another with having had firearms concealed
in his house,--the people having, on unanimous vote of town meeting,
delivered up their weapons on April 27th. A printer was held under the
accusation of having published seditious matter, and one childlike old
gentleman pined in the cell because he was said to have made signals to
the rebels from a church steeple.
This last-mentioned person, a mild, bewigged individual, his features
rendered sharply angular by age, spent his time sitting in a corner of
the cell, his eyes fixed distressedly on vacancy, his lips now and then
opening to utter a childish whimper of protest against his situation.
The printer knew this old gentleman, and gave Dick an account of him. He
was, it appeared, a retired merchant and ship-owner, who, at a time when
people were frequently ascending to roofs to view the doings of the
besieging Yankees, had climbed to a church steeple, on being bantered by
some jocular fellows who had cast doubts on his ability for such
exertion. The gesticulations with which he had called attention to his
success were taken by some prominent Tories to be designed for the
information of the rebels outside the city. Denunciation and
imprisonment had speedily followed. The printer, although he had no
sympathy for the old man, whom he pronounced a rank Tory, said that the
charge was all the more absurd for the very reason of the prisoner's
Toryism, which captivity had not extinguished. When the old gentleman
came out of his state of staring and moaning, as he infrequently did, it
was to deplore articulately the rebellion that had got him into trouble,
and to curse the rebels who were responsible. "Though he has enemies
among the Tories," said the printer, "he has friends among them also,
and it is quite likely he will be released as soon as General Gage takes
time to consider his case."
But July came and went, and the old Tory still lingered in prison,
growing constantly more fretful in his active moments, more trance-like
in his passive ones, more feeble and more attenuated. Meanwhile, Dick
suffered exasperatingly from the heat, confinement, vile air, want of
sleep, and lack of exercise. His wound, slight as it was, was slow in
recovery, because of the bad conditions of his prison life; yet he
scarcely heeded it, so insignificant it was in comparison with the
wounds and other ailments of some of his fellow prisoners. One of these,
in whose thigh a grape-shot had torn a hideous gash that finally became
insupportable to more senses than one, was declared by the surgeon to
require amputation, and the operation was consequently performed in the
prison, little to the sufferer's immediate relief, although he
ultimately recovered. Accounts came, through guards and surgeon's
assistants, of similar operations in the jail, not all of which were as
successful as that performed on Dick's cell-mate.
Fevers and numerous internal disorders assailed Dick and his comrades,
and their cell, in its half light by day and in its black darkness by
night, was the lodging of enfeebled wretches who sat or lay in close
contact on the floor, thrown by pain or restlessness into every
conceivable attitude. Accustomed as he was to outdoor air, and deprived,
as he came to be, of a breath of it, as well as of all exercise, Dick
began early in August to lose vitality with alarming rapidity. He became
as thin and as sharp of feature as the old Tory himself. His exclusion
from the occasional outings in the prison yard became a theme of general
talk in the cell.
One day the surgeon examined Dick's wound, assuming as he did so a kind
of grave frown, and uttering certain ominous ejaculations to himself,
his manifestations having, to Dick's keen intelligence, the appearance
of being put on for a purpose. Later, the same day, through a
good-natured guard, the prisoners received two pieces of news. The first
was that the new commander-in-chief of the rebels, Washington, who had
arrived at Cambridge early in July, had threatened retaliation for any
ill-treatment of American prisoners, and was taking measures that must
eventually result in the exchange of those now in the jail. The second
was that the old Tory's friends were working vigorously on his behalf,
and that an order of release from General Gage might soon be expected.
To every one's surprise, the old gentleman heard this information with
stupid indifference.
The next day, the surgeon returned, accompanied by the Irish officer,
and made another examination of Dick's wound. This done, the surgeon
turned to the officer, and said, in a kind of forced tone and shamefaced
manner, as if he were acting a part he despised, "Amputation will be
necessary in this case, sir."
"Indeed?" said the officer, without even a serious pretence of surprise.
"Then let it be done immediately."
"Immediately, the devil!" cried Dick. "Cut my leg off? Why, there's
nothing the matter with it! I walked on it all the way to this prison!"
"My good man," said the officer, loftily, "you don't know what is best
for you. It's our duty to care for you, even against your own will.
Don't double up your fists! You'll only hurt yourself by resisting. We
shall use force, for your own welfare, if need be." The officer left
the cell, and the surgeon briefly told Dick to be ready to be taken
down-stairs in half an hour, by which time preparations would be made
for the operation in the room used for such purposes; then he followed
the officer.
Before Dick could recover from his bewilderment, or his comrades could
offer other than expressions of indignant amazement, the cell door again
opened, and the friendly guard came in and whispered to the printer that
some of the Tory's friends were down-stairs with a coach and with an
order for the old gentleman's release. The guard had been sent up-stairs
to break the news to the Tory and to make him so presentable, if
possible, that his friends might not have too much cause to complain of
the effects upon him of his imprisonment. The guard, knowing the old
gentleman's state, preferred to entrust the news-breaking to the
superior delicacy and tact of the printer, and, having easily engaged
the latter to perform it, went from the cell to wait in the corridor.
The printer, glancing at the old man and supposing him to be asleep,
rapidly confided to his fellow prisoners what the guard had said, and
then stepped over to the Tory and shook him gently by the shoulder.
After a pause, he repeated the shaking, then stooped closer to the old
man and grasped his body. A moment later, the printer turned to the
expectant prisoners, and said in a loud whisper, "By God, I think
they're too late with their damned release! If I know anything, the old
man's dead!"
Meanwhile, the Tory's friends, three gentlemen of middle age, sat
down-stairs in the guard-room, talking with the Irish officer, who
explained that the prisoner would take a few minutes to make his toilet.
When ten minutes had passed, the officer went to the corridor, and
called up the dim stairway, "Mr. Follansbee's friends are impatient to
see him," a speech meant as a signal for the guard to conduct the old
gentleman down-stairs. The officer then stood at the side of the
stair-foot, while the three gentlemen waited just within the guard-room
door, opposite the officer.
In a minute the guard appeared at the head of the stairs, followed by
two armed comrades, and supporting by the arm a bent, trembling, heavily
wigged, sharp-featured, blinking person, whose clothes, of rich texture,
were the same the old Tory had worn into the prison, but were now sadly
soiled.
Slowly and painfully their wearer descended from step to step, in the
half light of the stairs and corridor. When he reached the foot, the
Irish officer stepped back to make more room for the Tory's three
friends. These now came from the guard-room, and stood with half
smiling, half shocked faces, to give the old man greeting. When he
reached the lowest step, they held out their hands to him, but, to
their astonishment, as the guard let go his arm, he darted forth between
two of them, strode past the sentries at the outer prison door, and,
ignoring the waiting coach, plunged down the street with an alacrity
miraculous in one so enfeebled, and turned off at right angles into the
first street that ran southward.
"His imprisonment has crazed him!" cried one of the three gentlemen.
"Hell and damnation!" cried the Irish officer, rushing up the stairs and
motioning the guard to follow. Entering the cell, he stepped over the
prostrate bodies of several prisoners to a figure that lay motionless in
a corner. The clothes on this figure were Dick Wetheral's, but the face
was that of the dead old Tory. With a curse, and a gesture of threat at
the prisoners in the cell, the officer bounded back to the door,
fastened it, and leaped down the stairs to order a pursuit.
At about the same moment, Dick, tossing the old man's wig back towards
the prison from which he ran, thus conversed jubilantly and defiantly
with himself:
"Cut my leg off, eh? Not if it and its comrade serve me properly to-day!
The printer was right,--'twould have been a shame to waste that order of
release on a dead man!"
As he ran, he divested himself of the old Tory's cumbersome coat,
throwing it over a gate into an alley-way between two houses, and he
also mentally justified his apparent selfishness in consenting to be the
one who should use the opportunity of escape. As the printer and others
had argued, in the few moments available for discussion, Dick's leg was
at stake, he had been singled out for the harshest treatment, there was
an evident intention to persecute the life out of him, and the others
might be presently exchanged, which Dick could not hope to be as long as
the machinations of his enemy could hinder.
When the vital resources called forth by excitement were used up, and
Dick fell back to his weakened and wounded condition, his gait became a
walk. Fortunately, until that time, his way had been mainly through a
deserted street, so that his running had attracted no attention.
Reaching a more populous thoroughfare, on which he saw more soldiers
than citizens, he proceeded southwestwardly in a preoccupied manner, his
coatless condition being easily accounted for by the heat of the season.
At last he sat down to rest on the steps of a large brick church, at a
corner where the street opened to a great, green, hilly, partly wooded
space, which he knew, from previous description and from the military
tents now upon it, to be the Common.
While he was viewing the scene, and gaining breath, and wondering how he
should ever get out of the town, he became conscious of a hurried
movement of men, at some distance back on his own route. Standing on the
highest church step to look, he saw a squad of soldiers led by an
officer whom he took to be the Irishman. Other people about had noticed
this movement, which was rapidly nearing.
To get out of the way inconspicuously, Dick descended from the church
steps, and started at a walk up the steep street that ran by the side of
the church and which bounded the end of the Common. As he tugged up the
hill, he knew by cries and footsteps that the soldiers were making good
speed towards the corner he had left; and just as he reached the top of
the hill he heard a shout from the foot of it.
"Stop that rebel!" were the words, and the voice was that of the Irish
officer. Dick turned into the street that went along the upper side of
the Common, and thence he bounded through the first open gate on the
right-hand side, into a flowery garden before a broad residence whose
wide door, flanked by glass panels and surmounted by a great fan-light,
gaped hospitably from a spacious vine-embowered porch. As he made for
this porch, for the time hidden from his pursuers on the up-hill street
by the trees at the corner of the Common, a young lady came idly from
the door. She first halted at the approaching cry, "Stop that rebel,"
and then stepped back in surprise as Dick, tripping on the steps that
led up to the porch, fell prone at her feet.
"Dear me, what's the matter?" she said, breathlessly; then quickly
stooped and picked up something from near Dick's head.
"That belongs to me!" he said, hoarsely, rising to his knees, and
reaching out for it greedily. It was the precious miniature, which had
in some manner worked from its fastenings in Dick's queue.
"Who are you?" asked the girl, who was slender, blue-eyed, and fair,
still retaining the portrait.
"Stop that rebel!" came the cry from around the corner of the Common.
Dick's mind worked quickly. "I'm the man they're hunting," he said.
The girl frowned, murmured the word "rebel," and looked down at him with
an expression of dislike. From this he knew she was a Tory, hence
friendly to his pursuers and at bitter enmity with his cause.
She looked mechanically at the portrait, which had escaped from its
silken bag. "Is this a lady who is waiting for you to come back from the
fighting?" she asked, with sudden softness of tone and countenance.
"Yes," lied Dick, promptly; "as you also doubtless wait for some one!"
The girl blushed, and looked sympathetically at the portrait, then at
Dick.
"Stop that rebel!" The voice had turned the corner of the Common, but
its owner was still concealed from view by the trees and bushes of the
garden. "The open gate yonder," it added; "search that place!"
"Sit down," quickly whispered the girl to Dick, handing him the
portrait. "There,--under that bench!"
Dick obeyed, from lack of other choice, at the same time losing hope,
for the space beneath the bench was open to the view of any one entering
the porch.
A moment later he felt and saw himself closed in from sight, by the
skirts and petticoat of the young lady, who had taken her seat on the
bench immediately over him.
In this novel hiding-place he lay, half stifled, while the girl politely
answered the questions of the Irish officer, whom she directed to a rear
alley, whither, she said, the fugitive must have betaken himself; and
when the last soldier had gone from the premises she blushingly arose
and faced her equally flushed guest, who stammered the thanks he could
better look than spea
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