Prisoners of Hope Part 15

"Hide them! Quick!" said Landless in a low voice, and wheeled to face a man who stood in the doorway, blinking into the semi-darkness of the room.

The lid of the hollow swung to with a click, the log a.s.sumed its wonted appearance, and the mender of nets, too, turned upon the intruder.

It was the convict Roach who had pushed the door open and now stood with his swollen body and b.e.s.t.i.a.l face darkening the glory of the sunset without. There was no added expression of greed or of awakened curiosity upon his sullenly ferocious countenance. He might have seen or he might not. They could not tell.

"What do you want?" asked Landless sternly.

"Thought as you might not have heard the horn, comrade, and so might get into more trouble. So I thought I'd come over and warn you." All this in a low, hoa.r.s.e and dogged voice.

"Don't call me comrade. Yes: I heard the horn. You had best hasten or you may get into trouble yourself."

The man received this intimation with a malevolent grin. "Talking big eases the smart, don't it?" and he broke into his yelling laugh.

"Get out of this," said Landless, a dangerous light in his eyes.

The man stopped laughing and began to curse. But he went his way, and Landless, too, after waiting to give him a start, left the hut and turned his steps towards the quarters.

Upon the other side of the creek, sitting beneath a big sweet gum, and whittling away at a piece of stick weed, he found the boy who, the day before, had accused him of feeling as fine as the Lord Mayor of London.

He sprang to his feet as Landless approached, and cheerfully remarking that their paths were the same, strode on side by side with him.

"I say," he said presently with ingenuous frankness, "I asks your pardon for what I said to you yesterday. I dessay you make a very good Sec'tary, and Los.h.!.+ the Lord Mayor himself mightn't have dared to strike that d--d fine Court spark. They say he has fought twenty duels."

"You have my full forgiveness," said Landless, smiling.

"That's right!" cried the other, relieved. "I hates for a man to bear malice."

"I have seen you before yesterday. I forget how they call you."

"d.i.c.k Whittington."

"d.i.c.k Whittington!"

"Ay. Leastways the parish over yonder," a jerk of his thumb towards England, "called me d.i.c.k, and I names myself Whittington. And why?

Because like that other d.i.c.k I runs away to make my fortune. Because like him I've little besides empty pockets and a hopeful heart. And because I means to go back some fine day, jingling money, and wearing gold lace, and become the mayor of Banbury. Or maybe I'll stop in Virginia, and become a trader and Burgess. I could send for Joyce Whitbread, and marry her here as well as in Banbury."

Landless laughed. "So you ran away?"

"Yes; some four years ago, just after I came to man's estate." (He was about nineteen.) "Stowed myself away on board the Mary Hart at Plymouth.

Made the Virginny voyage for my health, and on landing was sold by the captain for my pa.s.sage money. Time's out in three years, but I may begin to make my fortune before then, for--" He stopped speaking to give Landless a sidelong glance from out his blue eyes, and then went on.

"A voice speaks through the land, from the Potomac to the James, and from the falls of the Far West to the great bay. What says the voice?"

Landless answered, "The voice saith, 'Comfort ye, my people, for the hour of deliverance is at hand.'"

"It's all right!" cried the boy gleefully. "I thought you was one of us.

We are all in the fun together!"

"We are in for a desperate enterprise that may hang every man of us,"

said Landless sternly. "I do not see the 'fun,' and I think you talk something loudly for a conspirator."

The boy was nothing abashed. "There's none to hear us," he said. "I can be as mum as t' other d.i.c.k's cat when there are ears around. As for fun, Los.h.!.+ what better fun than fighting!"

"You seem to have a pretty good time as it is."

"Lord, yes! Life's jolly enough, but you see there's mighty little variety in it."

"I have found variety enough," said Landless.

"Oh, you've been here only a few weeks. Wait until you've spent years, and have gone through your experience of to-day half a dozen times, and you will find it tame enough."

"I shall not wait to see."

"Then a man gets tired of working for another man, and hankers for the time when he can set up for himself, especially if there's a pretty girl waiting for him." A tremendous sigh. "And then there's the fun of the rising. Los.h.!.+ a man must break loose now and then!"

"For all of which good reasons you have become a conspirator?"

"Ay, it doesn't pay to run away. You are hunted to death in the first place, and well nigh whipped to death if you are caught, as you always are. And then they double your time. This promises better."

"If it succeeds."

"Oh, it will succeed! Why shouldn't it with old G.o.dwyn, who is more cunning than a red fox or a Nansemond medicine-man, at its head?

Besides, if it fails, hanging is the worst that can happen, and we will have had the fun of the rising."

"You are a philosopher."

"What's that?"

"A wise man. Tell me: If this plot remains undiscovered, and the rising actually takes place, there will be upon each plantation before we can get away an interval of confusion and perhaps violence. 'Tis then that the greatest danger will threaten the planters and their families. You yourself have no ill feeling towards your master or his family? You would do them no unprovoked mischief?"

The boy opened his big blue eyes, and shook his head in a vehement negative.

"Lord bless your soul, no!" he cried. "I wouldn't hurt a hair of Mistress Patricia's pretty head, nor of Mistress Lettice's wig, neither.

As for the master, if he lets us go peaceably, we'll go with three cheers for him! Bless you! they're safe enough!"

The sanguine youth next announced that he smelt bacon frying, and that his stomach cried "Trencher!" and started off in a lope for the quarters, now only a few yards distant. Landless followed more sedately, and reached his cabin without being observed by the overseer.

CHAPTER XII

A DARK DEED

Three weeks pa.s.sed, weeks in which Landless saw the mender of nets some eight times in all, making each visit at night, stealthily and under constant danger of detection. Thrice he had a.s.sisted at conferences of the Oliverians from the neighboring plantations, who now, by virtue of his descent, his intimacy with G.o.dwyn, and his very apparent powers, accepted him as a leader. Upon the first of these occasions he had set his case before them in a few plain, straightforward words, and they believed him as G.o.dwyn had done, and he became in their eyes, not a convict, but, as he in truth was, an Oliverian like themselves, and a sufferer for the same cause. The remaining interviews had been between him and G.o.dwyn alone. In the lonely hut on the marsh, beneath starlight or moonlight, the two had held much converse, and had grown to love each other. The mender of nets, though possessed of a calm and high serenity of nature that defied trials beneath which a weaker soul had sunk, was a man of many sorrows; he had the wisdom, too, of years and experience, and he sympathized with, soothed, and counseled his younger yoke-fellow with a parental tenderness that was very grateful to the other's more ardent, undisciplined, and deeply wounded spirit.

Upon the night of their eighth meeting they held a long and serious consultation. Affairs were in such train that little remained to be done, but to set the day for the rising, and to send notice by many devious and underground ways to the Oliverian captains scattered throughout the Colony. Landless counseled immediate action, the firing of the fuse at once by starting the secret intelligence which would spread like wildfire from plantation to plantation. Then would the mine be sprung within the week. There was nothing so dangerous as delay, when any hour, any moment might bring discovery and ruin.