The Road to Paris Part 15

"Huzza!" cried Allen, and there were utterances of jubilation from the men on the floor. "So the wheel of transitory events has turned that way! I hope Prescott will remember the treatment we got on the _Gaspee_.

The irons were bad enough, Mr. Wetheral, but the insults were intolerable. We received the insolence that cowards always show their betters when in a position to do so,--for cowards they were on that vessel, as they proved one day by scattering as if a wild beast was amongst them, when in a fit of anger I twisted a nail from the bar of my handcuff with my teeth. They said I was a mad savage, a ferocious animal,--in their mean souls they couldn't conceive the feelings of a liberty-loving man under restraint. After five or six weeks we were transferred to an armed vessel lying off Quebec, under Captain McCloud, who was a gentleman and treated us well. The next day we were put on board the vessel of Captain Littlejohn, a brave and civil officer; he ordered my irons taken off and had me sit at his own table. His subordinates, too, were friendly to us. And then we were brought on the _Adamant_, and handcuffed again. We are under the charge of a d.a.m.ned calico merchant by the name of Brooke Watson, who trades between London and Montreal. He is the man who visited New York and Philadelphia, pretending to be friendly to the glorious cause of the colonies, and who returned to Montreal and wrote letters to Gage's people in Boston, disclosing what he had learned through his make-believe sympathy. This vessel is a floating nest of Tories, who have taken pa.s.sage on it. When we came aboard, we were treated in the most bitter, reviling spirit, by the officers, crew, guards, and pa.s.sengers."

d.i.c.k was by this time able to make out the speaker's features, as well as the tall, robust figure on which was solidly set the shapely head placed upright in a natural att.i.tude of pride and defiance. The full eyes, nose, and mouth showed sociability and sympathy, as well as pugnacity and a.s.sertiveness. There was in the man's whole expression such an unconscious look of irrepressibility, his self-vaunting was so spontaneous, he so evidently took his high-flown phrases seriously, that even his foibles made him the more engaging.

"I made the devil's own time of it," he went on, with a slight smile of pleasure at the recollection, "when they first ordered me to this filthy pen, after my men had already been forced in. I protested quite civilly with Watson, but he cut my representations short by commanding me to follow my men. He said the place was good enough for a rebel, and that a man who deserved hanging had no right to talk of honor and humanity, and indulged in other such talk. A Tory lieutenant who was looking on said I ought to have been hanged for my opposition to the province of New York, in her claim of New Hamps.h.i.+re's lands; and, as if it wasn't enough to call that rightful opposition a rebellion, he suddenly spat in my face.

I ran at him, and knocked him partly down with both fists, handcuffed as I am now. He made for the cabin, where he got under the protection of some guards with fixed bayonets, whom Watson ordered to drive me back to the den, for I had sprung after the lieutenant. I challenged him to come out and fight, but the tyrant-loving cur stood shaking with fear. Watson shouted to the guards to get me into the pen, dead or alive, and the low brutes surrounded me with their bayonets. I thought I would try flattery on the rascals, so I said, 'I know you are honest fellows, and are not the ones to blame; I am only in dispute with a calico merchant, who doesn't know how to behave towards a gentleman of the military establishment.' But they paid no heed to my words, and so I was at last driven into this hole at the point of the bayonet. How we live here, you will see for yourself, if you remain with us,--as you probably will, for, by the feel of things, the vessel has cast off."

It was soon plain that the vessel was indeed under way, whence came the inference that d.i.c.k's destination was to be that of the other prisoners, which they knew was England. d.i.c.k's sensations of mind on contemplating this new s.h.i.+ft of the wind of circ.u.mstance, this utterly unexpected breaking away from what had seemed to be his immediate destiny, may be imagined. As he sat on the floor, while the vessel rocked and strained, he thought of the home in Pennsylvania, of the army besieging Boston, of Arnold's troops waiting to attack Quebec, of old Tom, of the girl in the great house in Palace Street, of all he was being carried from, and then of the unknown that lay before him. "Over the hills and over the main," sang a voice within him, and with a patient sigh he resigned himself to the guidance of fortune.

The den was about twenty-two feet by twenty. The prisoners confined here, all handcuffed, were thirty-four in number. There were Allen, and thirty-one of the thirty-eight men who had surrendered with him at Montreal, the Virginia rifleman taken in the suburb of St. John's, and d.i.c.k Wetheral. Until the day before the end of their voyage,--that is to say, for more than a month,--they were not allowed to leave their dark pen, which contained no furniture or utensil other than two tubs. The experience of prison life that d.i.c.k had got in Boston was as nothing to that which he now endured, although in accommodating himself to the latter he profited some by the former.

Besides the close confinement, the irons, and the perpetual darkness, there was the sickening heaving of the vessel, the continual distress of stomach and adjacent organs, the inevitable fever, and the consequent raging thirst, which each man's daily gill of rum and small allowance of fresh water failed to quench. When the prisoners begged for more water on being served with their regular allowance of salt food, they were jeered and reviled by their keepers, and by the Tories who then looked in at them. They were irritated half to madness by vermin of the body.

Some of the men raged, others merely fretted; others lay most of the while in a kind of stupor, at times broken with despairing groans.

Allen and d.i.c.k both kept their wits, and remained of unbroken spirit.

Allen sometimes chafed, but always with a healthy anger, and sometimes he cursed, but more often he declaimed against tyranny, defied the oppressor, and predicted the triumph of liberty. d.i.c.k bore the torments of this voyage with a fixed dourness, and, as one annoyance grew upon another, began to see something ludicrous in the very acc.u.mulation of miseries, so that his face often went from an irrepressible grimace of inward pain to a peculiar amused smile somewhat akin to that elicited from him on occasions of peril. Moreover, he comforted himself with the thought that, for every dejected moment, fate owed him a moment of exultation, and that the voyage must end some time.

One day the prisoners were unexpectedly ordered to go on deck. They stumbled awkwardly up into the light of the sun, and drank in gladly the fresh air of the ocean. Afar in a certain direction, whither all eyes were turned, they beheld a faint blot of duller color against the different blues of sky and sea. It was the Land's End of England. The prisoners, whose faces had become hideously transformed by the growth of beards during their imprisonment, gazed curiously at the first outlines of the land they had never seen, yet once had loved as the home of their fathers.

The next day the vessel made Falmouth harbor, sailing in between the lofty promontories, of which one on the west side is crowned by Pendennis Castle, one on the east by the castle of St. Mawes. The news spread from the port of Falmouth that American prisoners were to be landed, rebels of marvellous skill with the rifle, and that the chief of them was the taker of Ticonderoga. Consequently, while the prisoners were shaving and making themselves presentable, for which the means had at last been given them, great crowds flocked to the wharf, and to the housetops and high places along the way to Pendennis Castle, in which the prisoners were to be confined.

In due time the prisoners, not less curious, but more self-contained than the spectators, were put ash.o.r.e, all in their hunters' garb, for Allen himself, a few days before his attack on Montreal, had laid aside his usual costume for a Canadian dress,--a short double-breasted fawn-skin jacket, undervest and breeches of sagathy, worsted stockings, shoes, and a red worsted cap. Allen a.s.sumed his haughtiest, most scornful, and most belligerent look, as he stepped firmly on English ground, followed by d.i.c.k, who, while he thrilled at knowing himself on the soil he had learned from his parents to call home, had yet a new and unaccountable feeling of pride in that he was American.

The crowd so blocked the way in Falmouth--which place reminded him somewhat of New England sea-towns he had pa.s.sed through, though it lacked their look of freshness--that the officers had to draw swords and force a pa.s.sage. So the prisoners were led, with guards before and behind, and between lines of people, many of whom followed on either side, for about a mile's distance from the town, towards the lofty round tower, within walled grounds, that crowned the promontory between sea and harbor. Pendennis Castle rose, a high and gray building of the time of Henry VIII., within close walls, around which a great s.p.a.ce, containing a parade-ground and here and there some small houses, was in turn surrounded by lower walls, from which tree-dotted slopes fell in different degrees of steepness to the water almost entirely environing the peninsula. At the entrance the prisoners were taken in charge by Lieutenant Hamilton, the commandant of the castle, and were led through grounds and gates, corridors and stairways, to an airy room provided with bunks and straw.

Though their irons were not taken off, the prisoners had here an easy captivity. They arrived almost on the eve of Christmas, and they were not forgotten in the beneficent feeling that pervaded England during Yule-tide. Breakfast and dinner came for Allen every day, with now and then a bottle of wine, all from Lieutenant Hamilton's table and with Lieutenant Hamilton's compliments. d.i.c.k and the other prisoners, themselves well fed, got many a crumb from Allen's board, which was supplied, by a gentleman in the neighborhood, with suppers also. Their first day or two in the castle having been devoted to a campaign of extermination against the vermin they had brought from s.h.i.+p, the prisoners soon recovered spirit and health, in their new surroundings.

With great pleasure they learned that their former keeper-in-chief, the estimable Watson, had hastened off to London to receive his compensation.

Allen was often sent for by the commandant, with permission to take the air on the parade-ground, where many of the Cornwall gentry came to visit him. This gentle treatment did no more towards weakening his patriotism than harsh measures had done. For his discourse with those who came to talk with him was most often upon the cause of the fighting colonies. He declaimed most high-soundingly on the subject, and d.i.c.k, who was sometimes allowed to accompany him to the parade-ground, would half amusedly liken him to some would-be Pitt before the House of Commons or some oratorical Roman hero in a tragedy. Many of his English hearers would dispute with him, but others would nod hearty agreement, for there was in England a numerous party that sympathized with the American revolt. "The conquest of the American colonies is to Great Britain an eternal impracticability!" he would thunder, rejoicing in polysyllables.

Some of the visitors came to make sport. Thus, one day:

"What was your former occupation?" asked a sapient gentleman, quizzingly.

"In my younger days," quoth Allen, ironically, "I studied divinity, but I'm a conjurer by profession."

"You conjured wrong, then, when you were taken prisoner."

"I know I mistook a figure that time," said Allen, "but I conjured you out of Ticonderoga."

The t.i.ttering of some ladies, for many such were among the visitors, closed up the inquisitive gentleman's mouth.

Another time, Allen astonished two benevolent clergymen, who had come expecting to see some sort of untutored savage, by discoursing on moral philosophy, and by arguing, in approved logical mode, against their doctrine of Christianity.

There was in the company, one day, an airy youth who claimed to know that Americans could not bear the smell of powder. Allen, taking the a.s.sertion as a challenge, offered to convince him on the spot that an American could bear that smell. "I wouldn't put myself on a par with you," replied the youth. "Then treat the character of the Americans with respect," demanded Allen. "But you are an Irishman," retorted the young gentleman. "No, sir, I am a full-blooded Yankee," said Allen, and went on to use his matchless powers of banter against the other, until the latter made a confused retreat amidst the laughter of the onlookers.

Another day, a gentleman expressing a desire to do something for him, Allen replied that he would be obliged for a bowl of punch. The gentleman sent his servant away, who returned presently with punch and offered it to Allen. The hero of Ticonderoga refused to take the bowl from the hand of a servant. The gentleman then handed it himself to Allen, who proposed that the two should drink together. The gentleman said he must refuse to drink with a state criminal. Allen thereupon, with a look of superior indifference, raised the bowl and drank the whole contents at one long draught, and then gave the bowl back to the gentleman. The crowd shouted with laughter, in which Allen, quickly affected by this extraordinary tipple, presently joined; and when he accompanied d.i.c.k back to the cell he was in a state of great jubilation.

There was much conjecture among the prisoners as to their ultimate fate.

Allen told his comrades that a Mr. Temple, from America, had whispered to him that bets were laid in London that he should be hanged. This gentleman's information must have been meant as friendly, for it had been accompanied by a guinea secretly bestowed. But, on the other hand, it had been hinted on the parade-ground that certain gentlemen intended to attempt freeing the prisoners by the habeas corpus act, or having them brought to trial before a magistrate.

"I have a project that should make the government think twice before stringing any of us up," said Allen one day to d.i.c.k. He then obtained the commandant's permission to write a letter, which he did, addressing it to the Ill.u.s.trious Continental Congress, describing his present state, and requesting that no retaliation be made upon General Prescott and other English prisoners until it be known how England would treat himself and his companions.

"But," said d.i.c.k, "that letter will surely be opened and sent to the English authorities, if anywhere."

"That is exactly where I desire it shall go," replied Allen; "and it's ten to one we shall fare the better in consequence."

The next day the commandant, to whom the letter had been entrusted, jocularly asked Allen if he thought they were fools in England, and told him the letter had been sent to Lord North. That its effects were such as Allen had predicted, was soon shown, but not until after d.i.c.k, suddenly presented with an opportunity, had severed his fortunes from those of his fellow prisoners in Pendennis Castle.

Some of Allen's visitors came fifty miles to see him. One afternoon, while he was on the parade-ground, discoursing with several gentlemen and ladies, and accompanied by d.i.c.k, a horse took fright just outside the outer gateway, at which its rider, who had journeyed far to behold the famous prisoner, was about to dismount. The scared animal, after a few wild turns and plunges, galloped madly through the open gateway and straight for the group surrounding Allen. The people fell back in confusion, women shrieking, men taken by surprise; visitors, prisoners, and guards huddled into one disorderly ma.s.s. The horse threw its rider, and reared before the crowd, with fiery eyes and snorting nostrils.

Suddenly a man was seen to rush out from the group, seize the horse's bridle with both hands together, bring the animal to its fore-knees, place both hands on the pommel of the saddle, leap astride the horse, and make it rear again on its hind legs. As if resolved to get the beast under control at any effort, this volunteer horse-tamer brought its head sharply around to face the gate, towards which it bolted with such sudden speed that the two guards there stood back in terror. Once out of the gate, the animal headed for Falmouth at a furious gallop.

The panic-stricken crowd on the parade-ground now breathed again, and separated into its three elements,--spectators, guards, and prisoner,--for, lo and behold, there remained now but one of the two prisoners! On the ground lay the fallen cap of the other, who had lost it in his struggle with the horse, and who, now being borne swiftly towards Falmouth, was none other than d.i.c.k Wetheral.

There was some question, with Lieutenant Hamilton and his officers, as to whether the prisoner intended to escape or merely to conquer the frightened horse. Hence some time elapsed before finally the alarm-gun was fired and a searching party sent out. Meanwhile, d.i.c.k Wetheral, who could never afterward recall at exactly what moment his impulse to stop the horse had turned into the idea of making a dash for liberty, allowed the horse to run away with him at its best speed. While rapidly approaching Falmouth, he did a thing that he had often heard old Tom describe as having been done by certain mountebanks, and which, as his hands were comparatively small, he had practised with success in prison,--he folded each hand lengthwise, and, with some painful sc.r.a.ping of skin at his thumb-joints, worked off his handcuffs, which he then tossed into a pool of water at the roadside.

He knew it would not be safe for him to enter the town, and, therefore, as the horse presently calmed of its own accord, d.i.c.k dismounted, gave the animal a smart slap to make it proceed on its way, and hastened down towards some fishermen's squat houses that lay near the beach on the outskirts of Falmouth. Noticing several boats drawn up on the sands, d.i.c.k knocked at the first door in his way, and brought forth an old woman, who, on his asking how he might get some one to row him across the bay, turned out to be half blind, half deaf, and stupidly indifferent. While he was making his desires clearer to her, he heard an ominous boom from the castle.

He knew this to be the alarm-gun, and looked to see what would be its effect on the old woman, but her unaltered features proved the genuineness of her deafness. At last d.i.c.k elicited that all the able-bodied men of the hamlet were in the town, at some merrymaking, but that she could hire a boat to him, which he might row himself, and which, as he said he would not soon return that way, he might leave in the care of a certain fisherman at St. Mawes. d.i.c.k paid her out of what money he had kept ever since leaving Arnold's camp, and she thereupon helped him drag a small boat out into the waves, and steadied it for him while he clambered aboard.

His first attempts at rowing were wild efforts, for this bay of the ocean was as different a matter from the smooth Pennsylvania rivers and creeks, as oars were different from canoe paddles. But difficult arts are soon acquired when they have to be, and by those who will admit nothing to be impossible to themselves that is possible to any other.

d.i.c.k at last contrived to make some kind of headway, thanks to the serenity of the weather and to the favoring tide. By the time, therefore, when the guards from the castle pa.s.sed the fis.h.i.+ng hamlet, on the track of the horse, d.i.c.k was merely an unrecognizable boatman well out in the bay.

The trip to St. Mawes, a small matter to a practised waterman, was to d.i.c.k one of great persistence and several hours, by reason of his inexperience, through which he covered twice or thrice the distance to be traversed. It was dusk when, at last, after many a dubious look at the castle of St. Mawes that crowned the overlooking hill, he felt the boat grate violently underneath, sounded with his oar, leaped out into the water, and dragged the boat up the beach, now aided and now impeded by the inrolling and receding waves.

He was at the end of the single street of a miserable hamlet lying under a hill and fronting the sea. No human creature was abroad to see him land. He therefore, in order to change his appearance as much as possible from that of an American hunter to that of an English rustic, did away with his belt and leggings, so that his hunting-s.h.i.+rt, being of linsey-woolsey, looked something like a countryman's frock, while his stockings, similar to those of English make, were now in view. He knocked at one of the huts, ascertained the abode of the man in whose charge he was to leave the boat, found that person in, gave out that he was returning to his home near Exeter from a journey in search of a place in service, was regaled with a frugal and fishy supper for a consideration, and then set out afoot towards Tregoney, saying he had a relation there with whom he would pa.s.s the night. It was from the man's own talk that d.i.c.k had learned the name and location of this village, which was eight miles northeastward.

While d.i.c.k was plodding along over those eight miles, with no further plan than to get out of the vicinity of Pendennis Castle, it began to snow. Pa.s.sing through two villages on the way, he arrived at Tregoney, a decent-looking place, about nine o'clock. He stayed there no longer than to buy an old hat from an aged poor man whose sons worked in the tin-mines at St. Austel, and from whom d.i.c.k, having said that his former hat had been blown into the Fal by a gust of wind, obtained information as to the road ahead.

Learning that there was a good inn at Lostwithiel, sixteen miles farther northeast, he decided to proceed thither. The snow increasing, and d.i.c.k stopping to rest in some sheltered spot in each of three intervening villages, these sixteen miles were a long business. To a survivor of the march through Maine, however, the cold and the snow seemed no great inconvenience.

When he reached Lostwithiel, though, d.i.c.k was so fatigued, with his walk of twenty-four miles and his row across the bay, that he fell asleep almost as soon as his body was stretched on a bed in one of the inn's inferior rooms, to which he had been conducted from the kitchen, where he had found an inn servant already up, despite the fact that the day soon to dawn was Sunday. This servant was a stout female, whose impressionability to masculine merits made easy d.i.c.k's admittance to the inn, which might otherwise have rejected such a guest arriving at such an hour. It was not yet daylight, but dawn was near enough to enable d.i.c.k, before closing his eyes, to receive a vague impression of the open spire of St. Bartholomew's Church through the falling snow. It made him think of Quebec, and he drowsily wondered what, at that moment, might be doing with old Tom, with Captain Hendricks, Simpson, Steele, and the others of the army far across seas in Canada.

What was doing with them at that moment? It was then a little after six o'clock in the morning at Lostwithiel, two o'clock the same morning at Quebec. The morning was that of December 31, 1775. This is what was occurring at Quebec:

Snow was falling there also, but in a far more violent storm. Wind was blowing the snow in drifts, and with the snow there was a cutting sleet.

The beginning of the night had been moonlit, but at twelve the sky was overcast, and then came the storm. This snowfall by night was a thing for which the Americans had been waiting. Montgomery had at last come up from Montreal with three hundred men, and joined Arnold at Point aux Trembles, December 1st. The army had started the next day, amid whirling flakes, for Quebec; had arrived before the city on the 5th, Montgomery having found Arnold's men a fine corps, well disciplined. Later, a breastwork had been thrown up to face the gate of St. Louis; and, by means of a battery mounted partly on ice and snow, sh.e.l.ls had been thrown into the town, starting fires in several places. But the heavy guns from Quebec's walls had so dealt with this battery that it had been removed. Thenceforth, execution from the American side had been done mainly by mortars and riflemen, placed in the suburb of St. Roque, outside Palace Gate. It had finally been decided to carry the town by escalade, and this was to be attempted during the first snow-storm, such as that which finally came on this night preceding Sunday, December 31st. The plan adopted was that the lower town should be taken first, Arnold leading an attack on its northern end, Montgomery leading one on its southern end; demonstrations being made against the upper town at St. John's Gate and at the Bastion of Cape Diamond, to distract attention from the attacks below; signal-rockets to be fired in order that all four movements should be made at the same time.

At midnight the men repaired to quarters from the farms and drinking-houses whereat they had been scattered. At two, they began their march, struggling against a biting wind, their faces stung by the snow horizontally driven, the locks of their guns held under the lappets of their coats to avoid being wetted by the snow. Old Tom and the other riflemen were in their usual place in Arnold's division, which was to enter the lower town at its narrow northern end, pa.s.sing between the promontory's foot and the frozen St. Charles River. Through the suburb and streets of St. Roque, they breasted the snowy darkness; first went Arnold, at the head of a forlorn hope of twenty-five men, one hundred yards before the main body; then Captain Lamb and his artillery company, drawing a field-piece on a sledge; next, a company with ladders and other scaling implements; then, Morgan and his company, heading the riflemen; next, the Lancaster company, led, in Captain Smith's absence, by Steele; then the c.u.mberland County men, with their own captain, for Hendricks, though the command of the guard that morning belonged to him, had got leave to take part in the attack; and last, the New England troops. The division would have first to pa.s.s a battery on a wharf, which the field-piece was to attack and the forlorn hope scale with ladders, while Morgan should lead the riflemen around the wharf on the ice.

Old Tom plodded not far behind Hendricks, the men straggling onward in single file. As they approached the houses below Palace Gate, which led from the upper town on their right, there suddenly burst forth a thunder of cannon, which mingled soon with the alarming clang of all the bells in the city. "They've spied our intentions," muttered old Tom to the man ahead, and strode on.

Presently muskets blazed from the ramparts above. Men began to drop here and there and to writhe in the snow, but their comrades hurried over or around them. Hendricks's soldiers could not see far ahead, for the darkness and the blinding snow; nor could they always make out the path left by Arnold, Lamb, and the riflemen in advance. They could see nothing of the foe save the flashes of the muskets from the walls crowning the ascent at their right.

Presently they became aware of some kind of stoppage ahead; it was made by the artillerymen, whose field-piece had stuck hopelessly in a snowdrift. The company with the scaling-ladders made as if to stop also; but Morgan was at their heels, forcing them forward, hastening on his own company, and swearing terribly in a voice that rivalled the tumult of bells and cannon. So the riflemen, preceded by the ladder-bearers, pa.s.sed on through the opening made for them by the artillery company.

They were nearing the first barrier now; the uproar of the unseen enemy's fire was more terrific. And now Hendricks's men saw pa.s.s a group that was returning as with reluctance and difficulty,--two men supporting between them a third, who was so badly wounded in the leg that he could not stand unaided. It was Colonel Arnold, upheld by Parson Spring and Mr. Ogden. "Forward, my brave men!" cried Arnold, in a strong and heartening voice, and the riflemen cheered and pa.s.sed on.