"And how did you become prisoners, too?"
"Why, sir, a Mounseer's sloop set on us t'other day when we was running before a stiff gale. The poor little Fury's topmast was carried away and the mainmast sprung. The sloop hugged us till the wind dropped; then she came up alongside and boarded. She had three times our number, and they must have bred different Frenchmen in the days when one Englishman was equal to three; we did our best, as you may believe; she lost half her men, but the other half was still double what was left of us, so we had to haul down our colors, in a manner of speaking. Mr. Blake and the new midshipman have been marched off, I did hear, to a place called Verdun; here's the rest of us, what was left, and if you'll look out of the window, you'll see the poor little Fury lying off the quay there. I s'pose they'll patch her up and call her by a new name, and that's enough to make any Englishman's blood boil, it is."
Jack was angry as Babbage at the success of the sloop in capturing the cutter. But he felt somewhat cheered at the sight of the faces of his messmates; and their presence, strangely enough, set him again thinking of escape. Babbage was a seasoned and knowing old salt, and Jack resolved to have a long and private talk with him at the first opportunity.
But though in the course of a week they had many such talks—in the park while exercising, in the little antechamber at dead of night—they almost despaired of hitting upon any likely plan of regaining their liberty. There was no chance of silencing the sentries at the head of the staircase; any attempt to break open the door would at once be heard outside, and the whole force of warders, all soldiers, would be on the alert. The bars across the windows might indeed be loosened or forcibly wrenched out, and the bedclothes—if the material of which they were made was not too poor—might be torn up and knotted to form a rope; but a small light was kept burning in the room all night, and any work at the windows would certainly be seen by the sentries at the door and by the men patrolling outside.
"Ah now! if only brother Sol was here!" sighed Babbage one evening, when Jack and he had been talking over every plan that suggested itself, possible and impossible.
"What could he do?" asked Jack.
"'Twas a saying of his, sir, 'Nary a way in but a way out,' though I said to him, 'What about a mouse-trap?' Ah, brother Sol 'ud see the way out of this here trap if any man could."
"Well, I wish this brother Sol of yours would get himself captured and come here. Where is he?"
"I don't know, sir; I haven't seed him for four and twenty year. But well I mind the last thing he said to me when he went away. 'Ben,' says he, 'God bless you!' I never forgot them feeling words, sir."
"I suppose not. As he isn't here we must do without him. We must get out somehow, Babbage. I, for one, am not going to rot in France for half a dozen years. Is there anything we haven't thought of?"