“Lord, lord!” cried I, laughing weakly. “And you’ve got twenty men of the Queen’s Rangers in the hold?”
“Twenty men and the 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—Castner a 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 the Nancy Jane dancing down the harbor with a bone in her teeth and her canvas straining to the gale; with Cousin Ju beginning to feel the coming 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.