“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 the Nancy Jane was 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 the Nancy Jane’s allotment 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.”