It was the man sent by Arnold,—old Tom MacAlister.

"Take them, Tom, and away with them quick, for God's sake!" cried Dick, handing them to him.

"But ye're hurt, lad!" cried Tom, thrusting the papers deep into an inner pocket.

"The devil I am!" lied Dick. "Only slipped on the snow. You save those papers, or all my work will go for naught! I'll get my wind and follow! Go, Tom! The papers first, don't you understand? I'll have my breath before those fellows can nab me!" And Dick raised one knee, as if already about to rise.

"Vera weel, lad!" said old Tom, compliantly, and plunged forward to round the point of Cape Diamond and follow the shore up the river. The sight of his gaunt figure, swiftly receding in the snow and night, between river and cliffs, was the last glimpse Dick had of Tom, the piper's son, for many a long day.

Dick was not entirely sure he might not indeed elude the two soldiers from the stockade, and overtake Tom. He got up and found he could proceed limpingly. But the soldiers, only a few yards from him when he rose, shortened the intervening distance so speedily that Dick saw they must catch him in a few seconds. He made to grasp his hunting-knife. It was gone, having been displaced from his belt at some contact with the cliff in his descent.

The idea of capture now became intolerable to him. A kind of madness arose in him, making him determined, at any cost, not to fall into the hands of the two enemies at his heels. When he felt himself almost within grasp of the foremost, he wheeled aside, and plunged head foremost into the swift, icy current of the St. Lawrence. While the water gurgled in his ears, he jubilantly pictured to himself the two men standing baffled on the shore and cursing the luck that had robbed them of their prey.

Soon rising to the surface, Dick struck out at random, using both arms and the unwounded leg. Whither would this swim in the dark lead him? He scarcely cared, now that he had accomplished his two missions; his one wish was that it should not diminish his triumph by delivering him up eventually to the foe. All at once something black loomed up before him,—a vessel whose lights he had not taken to be so near, and whose size he could not immediately make out.

As he turned to swim away from it, he heard a voice call out immediately over him, "Man in the river!" He pulled away, but with a constantly weakening stroke. He heard other cries, became vaguely aware that a boat was being sent after him, and presently, when strength and sense were about deserting him, he felt himself caught by the back of his hunting-shirt and drawn, by several hands, from the water to the boat.

He was too little conscious to answer the few questions that were asked him on the way back to the vessel. But as they landed him on the deck, he experienced a return of consciousness and of power to plan. He knew the vessel was a British one, but its people must be unacquainted with his face; hence he dared raise one last, desperate hope of completing his escape. As he stood on the deck, surrounded by the crew that had brought him from the water, he was approached by two officers, one of whom ordered him to stand forward, while the other remained a little aloof in dignified immovability.

"I beg you will put me ashore, sir," said Dick, somewhat excitedly, to the officer who had addressed him. "I had just left the stockade yonder, on a mission for Colonel Maclean. I fell in with a reconnoitring party of rebels, and escaped by taking to the river. May I be landed immediately on the other shore, to go on my mission without delay?"

"What papers have you, to show for this account of yourself?" demanded the officer, scrutinizing Dick.

"I had Colonel Maclean's pass in my hand when I was attacked," said Dick, with no outward falter; "but I must have let it go in the river. I had no other papers; the message I carry is a verbal one."

"A message? To whom?"

"To General Carleton," said Dick, on the moment's invention.

"Why, this is fortunate," said the officer, turning to the motionless gentleman. "General Carleton, this man says he has a verbal message for you."

Dick stood, for a moment, speechless and staring; then, yielding all at once to the fatigues of the night, sank in a senseless heap to the deck.

CHAPTER X.

"BY FLOOD AND FIELD."

The captain of the vessel, on being hailed by a guard-boat from the Lizard frigate, announced the arrival of General Carleton, and, in the ensuing exchange of news, spoke of the man just found in the river. The guard-boat officer replied that the man must be a Virginia rifleman who had escaped that evening from the Adamant, on which vessel this rifleman and another, both captured in the suburbs of Quebec, had been placed with the rebels taken September 24th while attempting a night attack on Montreal. Dick fulfilled, in his attire, the description of the escaped Virginian, and was held on Carleton's vessel when the governor landed, the captain being ordered to hold him for identification by Mr. Brooke Watson, in whose charge the rebel prisoners now on the Adamant had been put. As the governor intended that the Adamant should sail the next day with its prisoners, he caused Mr. Watson to be summoned from his tavern for the purpose of viewing the new captive that night. The governor then hastened to the upper town, to confer with his lieutenant and with Colonel Maclean, and, in the discussion of important affairs, forgot about Dick; while Maclean, on his side, had now other matters for thought than the fugitive spy.

Meanwhile, Mr. Watson, the same eminent merchant who afterwards became lord mayor of London, going rather grumpily from inn comforts to the vessel, in the snow-storm, stumbled down the hatchway, and beheld Dick while the latter lay unconscious in a hammock, the whole upper side of his face concealed by straggling hair. Desirous of getting speedily back to his lodgings, and glad that his quota of prisoners might be restored to its full number, the honest merchant cast a brief glance at Dick in the dim light, unhesitatingly pronounced him to be the missing rascal, and stumbled back up the stairs to the deck.

Thus, through no kindness of intention on the part of his enemies, Dick escaped the fate of a spy, and was assigned to that of a rebel under arms. The next day, having slept well and having had his new wound cared for by a surgeon, who pronounced it trivial, Dick was put aboard the Adamant, handcuffed, by a guard of soldiers that had in the meantime received Mr. Watson's orders concerning him, and thrust into a dark apartment, which was already crowded with shackled prisoners, whose recumbent bodies took up most of the floor. Dick knew not what disposition was to be made of him, nor that the Adamant, already about to set sail with its prisoners and with Governor Carleton's despatches, was bound for England.

"So the minions of tyranny have dragged you back to the den!" rang out a bold, virile voice, from the inner darkness, and presently a stalwart, erect figure strode forth, stepping easily over the legs of the reclining prisoners and planting each foot firmly as it fell. The speaker was evidently able, from recent habit, to see fairly well in the darkness. Coming close to Dick, he suddenly stopped and exclaimed, "By the everlasting, 'tis another man! Brother, I took you first for a comrade who broke the tyrant's chain yesterday. They removed him from this cage, to doctor him, for the filthy air had made him sick; but he broke away and plunged into the river, in the snow-storm. Or else the guard who brought our supper is a liar. Have you heard anything of his fate?"

"No, sir," said Dick, wondering what personage was this whose style of speech was so oratorical, and whose spirit remained so high in this miserable hole. "I am a newcomer here. I am Richard Wetheral, of Hendricks's company of riflemen, from the county of Cumberland, province of Pennsylvania."

"I welcome you to my acquaintance," replied the other, heartily, thrusting forth his manacled hands and grasping Dick's. "I am Colonel Ethan Allen."

"What! The captor of Ticonderoga?" cried Dick, remembering how in the camp at Cambridge the news of that bold feat of a May morning had been celebrated, and how the name of the Green Mountain leader had become an every-day word in the colonial army.

"Fortune threw that prize in my way," said the other, with a modesty so unmistakably pretended that the affectation could only amuse, not offend. "Fortune was not so kind at Montreal, as you may have heard," he added, dismally.

"I had heard of your—your bad luck at Montreal," said Dick, leaning against the oaken wall of the enclosure, "but I little expected the honor of meeting you in these circumstances."

"Yet in these circumstances we have been—in this very den, indeed—since ever the army appeared yonder at Point Levi."

"And where were you before that?" asked Dick, eager to hear the story of so famous a hero from the hero's own lips.

"Why," said the colonel, "we were in more places than one, you may be sure. After our—bad luck, which was all because I was outrageously out-numbered and not concerted with, I surrendered, on the promise of honorable terms, and we were led into the town to be interviewed by their commandant, General Prescott, God—bless him! When he asked me whether I was that Colonel Allen who took Ticonderoga, and I told him I was the very man, he went into a rage and shook his cane over my head and called me a rebel and several worse names; and when he ordered us put in irons and sent on board the Gaspee schooner, he swore I should wear a halter at Tyburn. From the Gaspee I wrote him a letter, telling him of the notorious friendship and generosity with which I had treated the officers I took at Ticonderoga, but he paid no attention to my letter."

"You have the satisfaction of knowing," put in Dick, "that General Montgomery has captured Montreal and taken Prescott prisoner."

"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 damned 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 passage on it. When we came aboard, we were treated in the most bitter, reviling spirit, by the officers, crew, guards, and passengers."

Dick 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 attitude of pride and defiance. The full eyes, nose, and mouth showed sociability and sympathy, as well as pugnacity and assertiveness. 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 Hampshire'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 Dick's destination was to be that of the other prisoners, which they knew was England. Dick's sensations of mind on contemplating this new shift of the wind of circumstance, 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick 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. Dick 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 accumulation 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 ashore, 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 assumed his haughtiest, most scornful, and most belligerent look, as he stepped firmly on English ground, followed by Dick, 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 passed through, though it lacked their look of freshness—that the officers had to draw swords and force a passage. 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 space, 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. Dick 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 ship, 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 Dick, 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 tittering 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 assertion 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 Dick 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 Dick. He then obtained the commandant's permission to write a letter, which he did, addressing it to the Illustrious 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 Dick, "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 Dick, 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 Dick, 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 mass. 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 Dick 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, Dick 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 scraping 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, Dick 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, Dick 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 Dick 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. Dick 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. Dick 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 passed the fishing hamlet, on the track of the horse, Dick was merely an unrecognizable boatman well out in the bay.

The trip to St. Mawes, a small matter to a practised waterman, was to Dick 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-shirt, 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 pass the night. It was from the man's own talk that Dick had learned the name and location of this village, which was eight miles northeastward.

While Dick 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. Passing 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 Dick, 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 Dick 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, Dick 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 Dick'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 Dick, 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, shells 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, passing 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 Cumberland 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 pass 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, passed 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 pass 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 passed on.

They soon saw that Morgan had taken command, and, amid the inevitable crowding together near the barrier, they found themselves in close company with the forlorn hope, headed now by Arnold's secretary, Oswald, and with Lamb and his artillerymen, who had left their field-piece in order to wield muskets and bayonets.

Forward rushed Morgan and the advance companies, right through a discharge of grape-shot from the two cannon commanding the defile. Forward, without slackening, upon the battery, some scaling the walls, some firing through the embrasures; pouring over and through, seizing the captain and thirty of his men as prisoners, driving the rest of the guard away, and taking the enemy's dry muskets to use instead of their own damp ones.

Then Morgan formed his men as he could, and led them on to take the second barrier. The day was about to dawn now, and, although Morgan's men knew it not, the false attack planned against St. John's Gate had failed of being made; the feint against the Bastion of Cape Diamond had served its purpose to conceal Montgomery's march along the shore of the St. Lawrence, but Montgomery, while leading his men from the stockade whence Dick Wetheral had once been fired upon, towards the blockhouse within, had fallen in death before a discharge of grape-shot, while his triumphant cry, "Push on, my brave boys, Quebec is ours!" still rang in the ears of his New Yorkers. Montgomery's men had thereupon retreated, and thus the British force, warned of the very first movements by a too early discharge of the signal-rockets, was enabled to concentrate against the division now between the first and second northern barriers of the lower town.

Morgan's advance followed a curving course along the sides of houses, to where the narrow street was crossed, not far up from its mouth, by the second barrier, which was at least twelve feet high. Meanwhile Morgan had despatched Captain Dearborn, with a party, to prevent the enemy's coming from the upper town through Palace Gate and down the promontory's St. Charles side, which was neither as high nor as steep as the St. Lawrence side.

Behind the barrier now to be taken, was a platform whence cannon poured grape-shot, defended by two ranges of musketeers with fixed bayonets. The enemy fired also from the upper windows of houses beyond. The Americans speedily upbuilt an elevation to a height approaching that of the barrier, men falling all the while beneath the fire from the barrier, the houses beyond, and the walls far above at the right. Morgan's first lieutenant, Humphreys, climbed this mound to scale the barrier, but a row of bayonets forced him back.

Seeing the impregnability of the barrier to his present force, and the rapidity with which that force was depleted by the terrible fire, Morgan thundered and cursed. Hendricks and Steele were calm, encouraging their men to patience, and directing them whither to return the enemy's fire. At last Lieutenant Humphreys fell in the street, dying on the spot. Then Morgan ordered his men to enter a house close to the barrier, and fire from the windows.

Into the house and up to the second story rushed Hendricks, Steele, Tom MacAlister, and many others. Steele ran to the first window and aimed his gun towards the barrier; but, without firing, he suddenly stepped back with a sharp cry, and held up one of his hands to look at it, entrusting his gun wholly to the other. Where three fingers had been, there were now three crimson stumps. Hendricks and MacAlister took another window. As Hendricks was about to shoot, a ball tore its way to his heart; he lowered his rifle, took on a swift look of pain, staggered a few feet backward, fell with half his body on a bed, and died there almost instantly. While the hell continued in and about the house, as the daylight increased, a party of British rushed out from Palace Gate, captured Dearborn and his men, fell upon the rear of Morgan's party, and presently, when the dauntless Virginian had had his rage out, received the surrender of him and his officers and men. "I wonder," thought old Tom MacAlister, as he marched in the line of prisoners to the great ruined Franciscan monastery, near the Reguliers, "how the lad Dick would 'a' fared if he'd been wi' us the braw night past? Weel, weel, maybe it's better he was called away when he was, for, whether he be on the earth or under, it's little he'd 'a' relished finding out 'twas for this we marched through Maine and hungered and froze in the snaws of Canada!"

'Twas for that, had been the planning and the money-spending, the suffering and the starving, the toils and the bloodshed,—for that, and for the glory of heroic failure.

CHAPTER XI.

THREE WHIMSICAL GENTLEMEN AND A BEAUTIFUL LADY.

He walked but twelve miles that day, arriving after nightfall at Liskeard, and lodging till morning at an inn near the handsome Gothic church of St. Martin. When he came to pay his bill he found it took all his money but a few pence, and thus he set forth, on the first day of the year 1776, bound eastward, with empty pockets, friendless in a strange and hostile land, with no fixed intention save the vague one of eventually returning to fight for his country, with no present plan save to keep moving on.

Not seeking food once during a journey of seventeen miles, he finally crossed the Tamer, from Cornwall into Devonshire, and arrived at Tavistock with less curiosity to view the vestiges of the tenth century abbey there, than to learn where his dinner was to come from. He had decided to beg, if necessary; he considered that his own people, as was the custom of his country, entertained freely every hungry or roofless man that came to their home in the wilderness, therefore some hospitality was due him from the world at large; and he reasoned that, being now among a hostile people, whose government was responsible for his present situation, he was morally entitled, without reproach, to whatever he could, in the name of charity, obtain from that people. Profiting by some of Tom MacAlister's related experiences, he had bethought himself, on the road, of certain possible methods of overcoming charity's coyness.

The first door at which he knocked, in Tavistock, was promptly shut in his face, by a man who blurted out something about rogues and vagabonds, and ere Dick's civil greeting was finished. At the next house a frowning old woman was equally inhospitable. But at the third, the cottage of a serge-weaver, the young girl who opened the door allowed her soft eyes to rest on Dick before making a move to close it, and Dick improved the moment to assure her that he was no common rogue and vagabond, but an honest teller of fortunes by cards, who saw already in her face the signs of a great surprise in her own immediate future. The girl opened the door wider, and Dick stepped in with such a courteous bow to the two other occupants of the room that they rose instinctively to receive him, blinded to his garb by his gentlemanly bearing. It was meal-time, and the family at table consisted of father, mother, and the girl who had opened the door.

Dick lost no time, but asked for a pack of cards, with such a smile, and so much as if the request were the most natural one possible, that the mother told the girl where the cards were, and the girl immediately brought them. Dick began by telling the fortune of the head of the house, who was so diverted with the prediction of a gift from a dark man, that Dick's invention was allowed full exercise regarding the future destiny of each member of the family. The mother then speaking of a dream she had recently had, Dick promptly offered to interpret it for her, and its meaning was so favorable that the interpreter was soon in the way to gorge himself with beef and ale. He then did some card tricks that Tom had taught him, and, perceiving that a pack of cards would thereafter be a useful implement to him, eventually won the cards themselves, on a bet as to the location of a certain one of them. Having found that his card tricks amused, he resolved to rely on them thereafter, and not to stoop again to fortune-telling, an old woman's business adopted by him for the once as most likely means of exciting the girl's curiosity.

He went from the weaver's house to the inn hard by the church of St. Eustache, and, obtaining a friendly reception by the conciliating manner and flattering air with which he accosted the servants, passed the afternoon in manipulating the cards, to the mystification of kitchen wenches, ostlers, and tipplers of low degree; winning a few sixpences from the last named in a fair game of skill. He thus earned a supper in a kitchen, and a bed in the stable-loft.

The next day he walked twenty-one miles, crossing Dartmoor Forest and the vast common, doing card tricks for a meal in a farmer's cottage at each one of two villages, and lodging for the night at Moreton Hampstead, where his procedure at the inn was in general similar to that at Tavistock.

In the morning he went on to Exeter, which—with its antique houses, its splendid cathedral of St. Peter flanked by the old bishop's palace, its ruined castle of West Saxon kings, its bustling High Street, its bridge across the Exe, and its busy quay—impressed Dick the more for its being the first large town of England to greet his eyes. He remained here many days, going from inn-yard to inn-yard, and, in the poorer quarters, from house to house; always with an address so polite and amiable that few resisted or distrusted him. His look and manner were so different from those of the common wayfarer or mountebank that he found he need stand in no fear of being dealt with as a vagrant. He added to his resources some of Tom's old conjuring feats, which he made new by means of the glib, humorous speeches he was soon able to rattle off. A cause of his prolonged stay at Exeter was the great snowfall and frost, which began January 7th, with a high eastern wind, froze the rivers, and put to shame all recollections of cold weather that dated since the memorable hard winter of 1739-40. Dick spent most of this time in entertaining snow-bound travellers of low degree, at the inns, receiving in payment now a meal, now a share of a bed, now a few small coins. There were nights, though, when he lodged outside, taking short naps in some sheltering angle of the cathedral, and rousing himself at intervals to stir his blood by walking.

On the 2d of February the wind changed and blew from the south. Waiting a few days more, so as to be less inconvenienced by the thaw, Dick started northward, passing through a beautiful country partly in sight of the Exe, dined at Collumpton, and proceeded in the afternoon to Wellington in Somersetshire, where he lay for the night in an open shed appertaining to the inn. The next morning, paying for breakfast with the last of the coins he had earned at Exeter, he went on to the sweet vale of Taunton Dean, and arrived penniless at the town of Taunton, where a singular thing befell him.

He had stopped to look into an inn-yard, to see whether the time was propitious for his obtaining the attention of servants and inferior guests, and thus for his paving the way to one of his unlicensed performances, when a post-chaise drove up and let out a richly dressed young gentleman, with a portmanteau and a gold-headed cane, but not attended by any private servant.

As he was about to enter the inn, this young gentleman, who was of a sedate and self-contained demeanor, stopped for a moment, regarded Dick with a sudden but civil interest, and half perceptibly smiled; he then passed in, while a menial shouldered his portmanteau and followed.

Dick knew at once the cause of the look of interest and of the smile. He was still pondering on it when, a few minutes later, the gentleman came out of the inn, greeted him with most kindly condescension, and said, in a quiet tone, while making sure by swift side-glances that no one overheard:

"My good man, I see you, too, have noticed how much we look like each other."

"In the face, yes," replied Dick; "but not as much in the clothes."

"Quite true," said the gentleman, with an appreciative smile. "I was just about to speak of that. As I looked at you and noticed the resemblance between us, I couldn't but think how different everything would be to me if I were the man in the smock-frock and you were the man in the velvet coat. And then an odd idea came into my head. Said I to myself, 'Why shouldn't I try the experiment, and see how it may be to travel a short way through the world in a smock-frock?' I'm given to whims, you see, and, moreover, it will be a droll thing for me to appear, clad like you, at the house where I'm expected to-night. Ha! How my lord will stare to see me come in! In fine, my good man, I propose that we shall exchange clothes, and go on our different ways!"

"You mean that, for the clothes I have on, you would give me those you wear now?" cried Dick, astonished and amused.

"Precisely, with the cane and snuff-box thrown into the bargain."

"But don't you know you can buy in five minutes a suit of clothes like mine, for a hundredth part of the worth of all you offer me?"

"Yes, I know that, of course. But, you see, it would attract attention, my buying such clothes—"

"Oh, for that matter, I can buy them for you."

"No, for then they would either be new, in which case my—ah—disguise would be easier seen through; or they would be second-hand, and then God knows who might have worn them in the past! Besides, I can afford to pay for my whims, and it pleases me to think that you, too, who resemble me so much, would have the benefit of my clothes, as I should have of yours. Come! Or, rather, wait till I pay in advance for my room, which I'll occupy but half an hour; then I'll take you to it; we can change immediately, and go forth to see how differently the world will look at us."

Convinced, at last, that it was no insane person by whom he should be profiting, Dick saw no reason for interposing further objections; indeed, those already put had been offered merely to satisfy his natural scruples against being on the better side of so uneven a bargain, for the idea of swaggering awhile in costly raiment had instantly attracted him. In less than an hour thereafter, he issued from the inn, fully clad as a gentleman, while his whimsical acquaintance, slinking out as unobserved as Dick had slunk in, tipped him a friendly farewell and made off in the opposite direction, shouldering the portmanteau as if he were a hired porter.

As Dick strutted along the busy street, glancing at the shop-windows, and in turn glanced at by more than one pair of demure eyes, he suddenly bethought himself that a gentleman in velvet and lace, with silk stockings and gold buckles, but without a penny in pocket or in prospect, was a somewhat anomalous personage. Moreover, the county towns and country villages were a field far less worth shining in as a gentleman than were certain fields he now began to think he might soon visit.

He therefore visited certain dealers in the town, and by dinner-time he was minus the gold-headed cane and a gold-mounted snuff-box, but was the richer by a plainer snuff-box; some changes of linen, underclothes, neck-cloths, and handkerchiefs; a bag in which to carry all his movables; and a suit of clothes. He chose the last with a view to the fit only, regardless of the fact that it was a gamekeeper's costume. At another inn than the one where he had met the stranger, Dick doffed his fine feathers, put on the gamekeeper's suit, and dined, paying for his dinner with some money he had over from the proceeds of the cane and snuff-box.

In the afternoon, carrying his bag of clothes slung by a stick over his shoulder, he left Taunton behind, presently abandoned the road that went northward to Bridgewater, and proceeded northeastward, traversing charming vales, and arriving at night at a village about half-way between Taunton and Glastonbury. His pack of cards earned his supper and bed, both in the house of a simple-minded blacksmith.

The next day he passed through Glastonbury, pausing to indulge his imagination before the ruined abbey in which Kings Arthur and Edgar were buried, as well as before the rotting cross in the town's centre, and before the Tor of St. Michael on the hill northeast. He fed nothing but his imagination at this place, and hastened on to Wells, where he stayed his stomach further while admiring the magnificent west front of the Gothic Cathedral, the high square tower and ornate exterior of St. Cuthbert's Church, and the other fine old buildings.

At the inn, he found, among other travellers, a party of lesser gentry on whose hands time hung heavily, their business being finished, but themselves being unwilling to set forth on a Friday. Dick soon ingratiated himself with these gentlemen, whose thick and empty heads were already astray with punch, wine, and ale; and he was made not only a sharer of their good cheer, but the sole occupant of the bed of one whom he tried to assist thither but who persisted in sleeping on the floor instead.

Leaving early the next morning, ere his benefactors were awake to eject him as some presuming plebeian who had availed himself of their drunkenness, Dick proceeded northeastward towards Bath, his eyes rejoicing in the beauty of the Mendip hills and the surrounding country.

When he had reached a spot where a short stretch of road before him had a delightfully secluded appearance, by reason of the trees that overarched it, and the varied slopes that rose gently on either hand, those on the left extending in a series of shapely hills to a far western horizon, he began to think of breakfast. A little way ahead, a vine-grown wall, broken by high gate-posts, marked the roadside boundary of a small, sloping park, belonging to a country-seat whose towers and chimneys rose among the trees some distance within. As Dick lay down his bag to rest, there came from a small door in the wall a gamekeeper, who immediately raised the fowling-piece he carried, and fired at a hawk that circled over a copse at Dick's right. The shot missed, and the gamekeeper reloaded. But when he was ready for a second shot, he shouldered his gun, evidently thinking the bird out of range, although it remained over the copse.

"I'll bring that bird down for you, if you let me," called out Dick, on the impulse of the moment, just as if he had been in his own country.

In reply, the gamekeeper stared in amazement. Dick repeated his offer. Then the gamekeeper found words, and wrathfully ordered Dick from the premises, calling him a vagabond, a poacher, and worse. Dick was about to close the fellow's mouth with a blow, when a loud voice, one that shifted between a bellow and a whine, came from the direction of the great gate:

"What's amiss, Perkins? Hold the damned rascal! I'll make a jailbird of him, that I will! What is it, Perkins? Highway robbery? I'll have him up, the next assizes!"

By this time, the speaker, having got out of a coach just as it was being driven through the gate, had come up to where Dick and the gamekeeper stood. He was a large, pot-bellied man, with coarse features, red face, and bloodshot eyes; a man of about forty, showing in his movements a disability due to a dissolute life, and dressed with a richness that did not avail to soften the impression of grossness he produced.

"The rascal had the impudence of offering to shoot that hawk, sir," said the gamekeeper, looking wroth at the outrage.

"What hawk?" queried the threatening gentleman, looking, and presently sighting the only one in view. "That hawk? Odd's life! If the rogue can shoot that hawk at this distance, I'm his humble servant, that I am! And let him only speak, and the place of under-keeper shall be his, damn me twice over if it sha'n't! D'ye hear that, rascal?"

Philosophically ignoring the last word, Dick replied, "If Mr. Perkins will hand me the gun, I'll show you how we shoot in" (he was going to say "America," but checked himself) "the county I came from."

"Give him the gun, Perkins, give him the gun!" ordered the gentleman, eagerly, responding to anything that appealed to his love of shooting, and already preparing to jeer in case of Dick's failure.

Dick took the gun, aimed carefully, fired; the bird fell into the copse. Whereupon the gentleman, forgetting former threats, impulsively applauded, pronounced Dick a marvel, and, taking it from his garb that he was a gamekeeper, began a brief catechising that resulted in Dick's being forthwith installed as Mr. Perkins's assistant, in a lodge at the farther end of Mr. Bullcott's woods,—for Bullcott was the name of the country squire whose favor Dick's marksmanship had so quickly won. Dick's face, and the straight account of himself that he had invented on the spot, served in lieu of a written "character" with the impulsive and unthinking Squire Bullcott; as subsequently his adaptiveness, quickness of perception, and conciliating manner enabled him to acquire Perkins's tolerance, and to learn the duties of his post so soon that no one discovered he had never filled a similar one before.

In this situation Dick spent the rest of February, all of March, and great part of April; having little company other than that of Perkins and the dogs; rarely seeing his master, who made frequent journeys from home; and not once beholding the Squire's wife, who, said Perkins, was usually ailing and mostly kept her room. He might have had the smiles of any of the maid-servants of Bullcott Hall, but he would never accept amatory favors from low sources as a supposed equal, though he might willingly enough, in his own proper character of gentleman, condescend on occasion to kiss a handsome wench.

One sweet, blossomy day in April, while following the course of a little rivulet, Dick emerged from the woods to a field at whose farther end was a barn, before which stood a large wagon whence a party of strolling players were moving their accessories into the building, for the purpose of giving a series of performances there. By the brookside, at a place hidden from her fellow Thespians by some bushes, knelt one of the women of the company, a rather pretty girl, washing clothes. Standing near this girl, with his back towards Dick, was a man who seemed, from his attitude and gestures, to be pressing on her some sort of invitation, which she apparently chose to ignore. This man presently stooped by her side, and made to put his arms around her, whereupon she gave him a vigorous slap in the face with the wet undergarment she then held.

The man persisting in his attempt to embrace her, and the girl resisting without fear but with repugnance, Dick ran forward, cuffed the man on the side of the head, and announced the intention of throwing him into the brook if he did not immediately let go the lady. The man let go, but only in order to spring to his feet and turn, with clenched fists, upon Dick, disclosing to the latter the furious face of Squire Bullcott.

The Squire, whose wrath instantly doubled upon his seeing that his interfering assailant was his own under gamekeeper, could only roar, sputter, and whine, incoherently, and look as if about to explode. He was deterred from instantly laying hands on Dick by the attitude of defence into which the latter had promptly thrown himself. When Mr. Bullcott had used up his breath in calling Dick vile names, and threatening him with everything from a cudgel to a gibbet, Dick explained that he could not stand by and see any man force his caresses on a lady against her will.

"Lady!" bellowed the Squire. "Why, she's a miserable —— of a vagabond play-actress! Why, you fool, I'll warrant she can't begin to count the men who have had her!"

"I don't stand up for the woman's virtue," said Dick. "I know nothing about that." He perceived that a man who would ever testify with due effect to the virtue of a good woman, must not assert, by oath or blows, a belief in that of a bad or doubtful woman. "But every woman has the right to say who sha'n't have her favors," he went on, "and that girl was resolved you shouldn't have hers!"

"Well, by God, we'll see! I'll have the whole rabble locked up, I will! They shan't give any of their nasty plays where I have jurisdiction! I'll drive them off, and you, too! No, I won't, I'll have you up at the assizes. I'll see you hanged for murderous assault; that I will!"

With which, the girl having already fled to her comrades, and voices being heard to approach, the worthy magistrate plunged into cover of the woods in one direction, while Dick sought similar concealment in another.

Knowing that time had come to resume his travels, Dick hastened to his lodge, and there, the better to avoid arrest on the Squire's order, he put on the fine suit given him by the strange gentleman at Taunton. With all his other clothes in his bag, he then started for the road. As he was passing through the woods, he first heard and then saw Mr. Perkins leading towards the abandoned lodge a pair of ugly fellows armed with bludgeons. Unseen by this party, Dick made a detour that led him eventually to the road, but to a part thereof that necessitated his passing the great gate of the Hall in order to continue his journey northward.

As he was musing on the peculiar appearance he must make in the road, that of a gaily dressed gentleman travelling afoot and carrying a bag, he saw Squire Bullcott come forth on horseback, attended by two stalwart, raw-looking servants. The Squire stared at him, in bewilderment, a moment, then cried out to his servants:

"'Tis the very same! The same damned rogue! I know the rascal in spite of his clothes! Stop him, Curry, and hold him fast! Down off your horses, both of you, or he'll get safe away!"

"I dare you to stop me now!" cried Dick, going straight up to Bullcott and looking him in the face. "I'm a gentleman, and one of your betters, though I did amuse myself by playing gamekeeper to an ignorant brute!"

The Squire glared for a moment in speechless fury, and then, gathering breath and saliva, spat with great force in Dick's face.

The two servants were now dismounted. Mr. Bullcott, enraged to the point of preferring immediate revenge rather than the slow operation of the law, ordered them to use their whips on Dick. They fell upon him together, at the moment when he was blinded by the handkerchief with which he had instantly begun to cleanse his visage of Bullcott's disgusting marks.

Maddened by the blows that rained upon his face, neck, arms, and wrists, Dick struck out wildly at his brawny assailants. At a certain violent rush on his part, they fell back. The Squire seized that moment as an opportune one for riding his horse at Dick, and the latter, leaping aside to avoid the heavy hoofs, tripped on a stone and fell flat in the road, knocking the breath out of his body.

Bullcott now, leaning from his horse, wielded his own whip on Dick's head and back, accompanying the castigation with vengeful oaths and vile epithets. Then, ordering his men to bestow each a final kick on the prostrate body, the worthy gentleman rode off about his business, which, it eventually appeared, was to cause the ejection of the strolling players from the barn before which their merry-andrew had already begun to collect a crowd around his wagon.

Kicked into insensibility, Dick was at last abandoned by the two servants, and he lay in the road until, fifteen minutes later, there came up from the direction of Wells a post-chaise, from which a hearty-looking young gentleman, having ordered the postilion to stop, got out for the sole purpose of examining the prostrate body in the way. He stooped beside Dick, called his valet to bring some brandy, and gently raised Dick's head.

"Who is it?" murmured Dick, summoned out of a wild and painful dream, and resting his blue eyes on the rubicund, cheerful, somewhat impudent face of the young gentleman.

"Who is it?" repeated the latter, blithely. "That's a good one! Here's a gentleman who has fallen among thieves and been left half dead, and the first thing he wants of the Good Samaritan is to know who the Good Samaritan is! Swallow this brandy, sir, and the Good Samaritan will introduce himself."

"You are certainly the Good Samaritan," moaned Dick, after a reviving gulp from the flask held by the valet; "but I haven't fallen among thieves. I fell in only with the most damned boorish scoundrel that ever disgraced the name of gentleman, and I swear I won't rest till I've paid him back what he and his rascal menials did me here, blow for blow, and kick for kick."

"Quite right!" said the other, gaily. "But, in the meantime, what is to be done for you? Can I take you to your house? Do you live hereabouts?"

"No, my home is—quite—far—away," replied Dick, relapsing into a dreamy condition.

The other gently shook him back to full consciousness. "Then where may I take you? Whither were you bound? Towards Bath?"

"Yes, towards Bath," said Dick, on a moment's impulse.

"Well, by George, that's fortunate! You shall be my travelling companion the rest of the way. You don't seem to have your own coach at hand, or any of your servants."