XXIIIOPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD
I CONFESS, with some prickings of remorse, that I did not stay to help Seytoun live or die. Fiercely swift as the fight had been, it had cut deeply into the little time I could count on, and no sooner was it ended than I was down on my knees under the table, and burrowing out through the breach in the wall.
Once in the earth kennel, with the candle, and my sword and the clasp-knife, I replaced the bricks hurriedly in the breach and began to sound the wooden bulkhead. To my dismay, it seemed as solid as the earth itself, and I saw nothing for it but to try to dig a passage around it. This might well be the work of hours; but after the moment of despair it gave me, I fell upon the task furiously, digging with the knife, with my hands, and at last with the rapier, boring it around to cut out futile little cones of the crumbling clay.
I was stabbing thus feverishly at the stubborn earth bank, and accomplishing little, as I thought, when sounds in the powder-room behind me made me stop and listen. I heard the door clang back against the wall; heard footsteps and voices, and then the shout of surprise when they found Seytoun. I did not needto look at my watch to see the time: it was midnight and my gallows guard was come for me.
I think it must have been my good angel whispering at my ear—the prompting to make a last despairing push with the thin-bladed sword in the clay at the back of the shallow excavation. To my joy the steel went through, and by wriggling it about I quickly had a hole through which the keen salt air of the December night poured to refresh me.
Luckily, I was still cool enough and sane enough to be certain that I should never have time to enlarge the hole so that it would serve to let me out. I knew it must be only a matter of seconds until those in the powder-room would find the breach in the wall, and I should be like a trapped rat. But now my brain was working swiftly and clearly. The wooden bulkhead stopping the passage was merely covered with a bank of earth in the ravelin ditch to conceal it. Would my strength suffice to overturn it?
Dropping the sword, I put my shoulder to the bulkhead and heaved. It gave—sprung outward at the top and let a little rain of loosened dirt trickle down upon my head. Again I heaved, lifting until the veins in my forehead seemed about to burst; and I could hear the men in the powder-room dragging the table aside, and pulling the loose bricks out of the breach. Another moment, and—
But that moment was mine. With the final heave the bulwark tilted outward and fell into the outworks ravelin with a smothered crash, carrying me with it. There was a shout from behind to follow me out, anda sentry, pacing his beat on the breast-high banquette beyond the ravelin, stopped, gave a great cry as if he had seen a ghost, and let his musket off.
At the musket-fire and the shouts of those who were wriggling through the breach in the wall of the powder-room, there was a rush of the outworks sentinels from both directions. Seeing at once that my only way lay straight before me, I leaped afoot, dragged the dazed gun-firer from the banquette by his legs, and, with another bound, went over the breast-height and tumbled into the moat.
Here the palisade, a closely set fence of upright stakes driven into the ditch-bottom, balked me, but only until I could spring and reach the top and clamber up. It was here that I nearly got my quittance. If I should drop into the V-shaped ditch beyond the palisade, there was an even chance that I should not be able to climb out to the top of the abattis breast beyond. But if I could balance on the stakes for the single instant necessary, the gulf could be leaped. I drew myself up, balancing precariously on the stake tops; there was a roar of musketry behind me, a sharp twinge in my right shoulder, and I hurled myself outward into space.
I remember vaguely the fall among the sharpened tree-branch spines of the abattis, and, more dimly still, a frenzied effort to roll out of the tangle toward the edge of the sea-slope. After this I knew nothing till I came back to life at the bidding of a tossing and wrenching that seemed to be tearing me limb from limb.
The figure was no figure, as I soon discovered. I was in the thick of a group of men who were running swiftly along the beach, four of them carrying me. Somewhere in the background of the night, other men were running, and now and then muskets barked and there came a whining of bullets overhead.
While I was yet no more than half at myself, a voice I should recognize anywhere gasped a question.
“How much farther, Captain Sprigg?” the voice said; and I reached out and laid my hand on the arm of the big fellow running with my bearers.
“Jack!” I shouted feebly.
“The same, Dickie-lad,” he panted back. And then: “Hold the life in you by main strength, Dick; get a tail-twist on it and hang to it! Beatrix and Aunt Ju are waiting for us in the boats!” And again to Sprigg: “How much farther, in God’s name, Captain?”
It was no farther, as it chanced. At Pettus’s eager repetition of his anxious question, the running group swerved sharply to the waterside, and my bearers plunged thigh-deep into the icy water and lifted me gently over the side of a small boat; over the side and into the keeping of a pair of loving arms that clasped themselves quickly about me.
“Beatrix!” I cried in utter weakness; and then I felt her tears drop like warm rain on my face, and heard sounds as of a hand-to-hand struggle on the beach, in the midst of which our smaller boat put off and was pulled swiftly to the side of a schooner lying out of musket range from the shore.
Here again, helping hands were ready to lift me to the deck, where a spare sail was quickly folded to make a bed for me under the lee of the high bulwarks, and a ship’s lantern was brought, and loving womanly hands, four of them now, began to search anxiously for my wound.
In the thick of it I heard the other boat come bumping against the side of the ship, and the men, a half-dozen or more of them, trooped aboard, bringing a prisoner. Following quickly there was a medley of shouted sailor orders in the harsh nasal twang of Elijah Sprigg’s best voice; and then Jack came to kneel beside me, beseeching Beatrix to tell him I was not dead.
The white canvas was snapping and crackling overhead, and theNancy Janewas heeling to the fair half-gale and racing down the harbor, before they would let me speak; and then all I could say was “Tell me—tell me.”
And they told me, Beatrix and Jack, with Cousin Ju to stroke my forehead and to break in with tearful self-reproachings for the tongue-lashing she had given me in Mr. Vandeventer’s parlor: told me how Jack had got Major Lee’s leave to follow Seytoun to the meeting-place on the Tarrytown road with Askew and Castner; how he had overheard enough to make him disguise himself as a farmer, and dog the three back to New York; how he had accidentally stumbled upon Sprigg and the women as they were making their way to the waterside, and so had been present when Champe brought the news of me.
“But—but how did you come to be so late in starting?” I said, holding my loved one close with the arm they had not bandaged.
“It was God’s Providence, no less, in a thing we took for the greatest disaster that could befall,” said Beatrix gently, taking up the narrative where Jack broke off. “Major Simcoe returned with his troop, and the twenty men of theNancy Jane’sallotment were sent down to embark. Captain Sprigg claimed to have only the little boat, and he fetched the troopers aboard two or three at a time, and the sailors made prisoners of them, putting them in the hold as fast as they came over the side. All this took so much time that the captain was but just bringing us to the shore when Sergeant Champe came with your message.”
“Lord, lord!” cried I, laughing weakly. “And you’ve got twenty men of the Queen’s Rangers in the hold?”
“Twenty menandthe tobacco,” Jack boasted; adding: “and one other fine young fellow—an officer, who was so forward in his pursuit of you that he got tangled up in a hand-to-hand mellay with the long-boat’s crew and we brought him off with us. He says his name is Castner, and he was most anxious to inquire about you, when I told him you were winged.”
Again I laughed, as I should have laughed with my last breath, I think.
“Castner—Castnera prisoner? Treat him well, I do beseech you,” I begged. “He is my friend and one of God’s own gentlemen. But you tell me nothing of Champe.”
“Because there is nothing to tell,” said Pettus sorrowfully. “He went back to the fort to try to get word to you; to tell you that if you failed to dig out, we meant to fall upon your gallows guard for a rescue when they brought you out. They will hang poor Champe, I’m thinking.”
“No,” said I, “they will not hang him. But he may wish they had before he ever hears the old troop call again, Jack,” and I was far indeed from knowing at the moment how true a prophecy I was making.
At this Pettus stood up, and looking back over the schooner’s foaming wake told us how they were displaying signal lanterns on the battlements of Fort George, and how a Bengal light was burning on a ship near the shore to show the sailors heaving up the anchor and making ready to chase us.
“But they’ll never catch us, dear heart!” said my loved one bravely, and again her arms went about my neck.
And so they did not; though to tell of how we ran the gauntlet of the fleet in the lower bay, and of what befell us and our one-and-twenty British captives on a voyage that ended far enough from the Capes of Virginia, would take a livelier pen than mine. For this, as you will see, is but a tale of a few landward days, while that other is of storm and shipwreck, of perilous weeks and weary months, before we saw the tidewater homeland again.
So, then, with theNancy Janedancing down the harbor with a bone in her teeth and her canvas straining to the gale; with Cousin Ju beginning to feel thecoming sickness and begging Jade to take her to the cabin; and with my dear heart whispering to me between her kisses to know if my shoulder pain was more than I could bear, this pen need add no more to a tale which, brief as its measuring was in days and hours, has already grown over-long.
THE END