“We’ll take you back with us, since that is what you want,” he rejoined crustily; adding: “And I’d hang you to a yard-arm when we get there, Captain Page—as Sir Henry Clinton doubtless will not. To the rear with you, and consider yourself a prisoner. Pass the captive astern, Bannock, and take the oars out of his boat,”—this last to the ensign in command of the long-boat.
The effect of this order was to turn me adrift without any means of locomotion, and my shallop dropped away from the flotilla on the slowly ebbing tide until the British boats became a shadowy blur in the night. There was some huddling of them for a hasty council of war, I judged, and if so, an order to retreat was all that came of it. With our forces on either side of the river aroused and alert, as the firing would ensure, there was little else to be done.
My masterless craft had drifted a mile or more when the boat expedition overtook me. With no more ado my boat was taken in tow, and I chuckled inwardly. I love a boat and the water as I love a good horse; but it is worth something to have your enemy drag you where you expected to drag yourself, and when the shadows of the great western cliffs were blackening thick upon the waters, I kicked the rowing seat out of the way, and stretched myself at ease in the shallop’s bottom to get a soldier’s nap before the sun should rise upon my further adventures.
The day was dawning coldly when I awoke and found that my rescuers—or my captors—were debarking at the town landing-place under the guns of Fort George. It was a raw morning, my leg was stiff and sore from the splinter wound, and the ensign who ordered me to tumble out had evidently taken his cue from his gruff commander and cursed me heartily because I did not move as quickly as he thought I should.
It is remarkable how the morning after takes the fine edge off the enthusiasm and daring of the night before. When I set foot upon the landing-stage and remembered all that I had undertaken to do in this British stronghold of New York, remembered, also, how at this very moment, most likely, Jack and Seytoun, and—save Mr. Hamilton alone—every friend and enemy I had left behind me in the camp at Tappan was cursing the very day of my birth, my teeth chattered with the morning’s cold, and I would have given many broad acres of the Page tobacco lands to be well out of the wretched tangle into which my desperate mission had led me.
My first near-hand view of the lower town, obtained after I had been turned over to one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides—who was my host or guard, I could not tell which—brought a decided shock. My memories of the city, carried over from a visit made with my uncle Nelson when I was a hobbledehoy of sixteen, were rudely swept away. The great fire of the night of September 20th, 1776, just after the British General Robertson had driven our army back upon Harlem Heights, had made a ruin of what had been the best-built portion of the lower town. Starting near Whitehall Slip, it had left blackened ruins all the way across to the Bowling Green and for some distance up on both sides of Broad Way, and but little in the way of rebuilding had been done during the four years of British occupation. Instead, some of the ruins had been converted into makeshift dwelling places by using the chimneys and parts of the walls that were still standing, eked out with spars from the ships and old canvas for shelter.
It was a dreary prospect that was revealed as we, my guard-host and I, came around the western bastion of the fort and so into the lower end of Broad Way. The fire had spared some few houses on the left, and in one of these, so Mr. Hamilton had told me, Arnold had his headquarters and living-rooms. It was to an inn just beyond these houses, and on the edge of the ruined district, that my walking companion led me; and by the time we were inside and were breaking our fast in the blaze-warmed coffee-room, the hue of things had become less somber, and I could laugh and crack a joke with my entertainer much as if he had been Jack Pettus masquerading in a red coat.
“You do good justice to the commissary, Captain Page,” said my youth in the red coat, when I had begged his leave to order more of the ham and eggs that reminded me most gratefully of Virginia and home.
“If you could know how I have been starved, Mr. Castner,” I retorted. “All you have to do for us—for the rebels, I mean—is to hold them still for a few months longer, and hunger will do for them what your arms have somehow seemed unable to do.”
“Is it that bad, Mr. Page?” he asked.