That was only an incident, however. My business was to put my heart and soul into the oars and to keep the narrow gap between me and Seytoun’s boat from closing any more swiftly than it had to. It was closing certainly enough, and by leaping boat-lengths, when my straining ears caught the sound of other oars rolling in muffled row-locks, and a guarded hail came from somewhere in the darkness just ahead of me. I dared not turn around to try to descry the fresh peril. Seytoun’s marksmen were doing better now, and coincident with the low-toned hail ahead a bullet struck the stern of my shallop and neatly stuck a splinter in the calf of my leg.
Another volley from the guardboat would have settled matters, but the volley was never fired—at me. At the flint-snapping crisis my boat’s bow crashed in among banked oars, dark shapes loomed suddenly all around me, and a gruff voice shouted, “Avast there, you lubber! Heave to, or we’ll sink you!”
I needed no command to stop me. The collision with the banked oars, and a dozen hands gripping the gunwales of my shallop, did that for me. What I most needed was the discretion to throw myself flat in the bottom of my boat to escape the storm of lead that was promptly hurled at my pursuers—and that I had, too.
When it was all over, and Seytoun’s boat had turned tail to claw out of harm’s way in frantic haste, I learned to what I owed my opportune deliverance. I had pulled straight into the midst of a British boat expedition (one of the many since Admiral Sir George Rodney had come to Sir Henry Clinton’s aid), sent up from New York to take a chance of surprising some one of our outpost camps. I was rejoicing secretly that my ill-luck had killed the chance of such a surprise, when I was brought roughly to book by the officer in command of the expedition.
“Now, sir, who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?” were his shot-like questions, when my craft had been passed back to the long-boat which served as the flag-ship of the flotilla.
I gave my name and standing briefly, and was adding a hypocritical word of thanks for my rescue when he cut me off abruptly.
“A deserter, eh?” he rasped. “It’s a thousand pities we didn’t let them take you. An officer, too, you say? Then the pities are ten thousand. I would to God some of your fellows in that boat had shot straighter!”
His sentiments were so soldierly and worthy that I loved him for them, and was able to pull the splinter from my leg and laugh.
“You don’t follow your commander-in-chief’s lines very closely, sir,” I ventured. “We gentlemen who are sick of our bargain with General Washington and the Congress get a warmer welcome from Sir Henry Clinton than you are giving me. But there are deserters and deserters; some who are traitors in fact, and some who are merely coming to a better sense of their duty as they see it. My conscience is clear, sir.”
I hoped he would not suspect the double meaning in my answer; as, indeed, he did not. As well as I could make him out in the darkness, he was a bluff, hearty bully of a man; a sea officer, I took it.