The soldier did so.
"You might as well ask me to blow the fire with my mouth full of meal," was Ronald's contemptuous reply; "for I would rather die than betray any man—to a base Saxon churl least of all!"
The soldier clenched his hand, but paused.
"Threaten if you will; but strike not!" said Ronald, with his right hand on his dirk.
"You little villain, would you dare to draw on us?" thundered Major Huske.
"Yes, even if you stood at the head of all your men, and dared to lay a hand on me," replied Ronald, bursting into tears of passion and fury, as he flung the guineas full into Huske's face.
Filled with rage by this insult, the latter rushed upon the brave boy and wrenched his dirk away. Ronald made a desperate resistance, he struggled kicked, bit, and fought; but he was soon dragged into the fort by the soldiers, who cast him, handcuffed, into a dark stone cell.
Huske, a brutal officer of the old Dutch or Revolution school, proposed to tie a cord round the poor boy's head, and twist it with a pistol-barrel or drumstick, until agony compelled him to furnish all the details required about his father's movements; but the officer next in command, Captain Henry Clifford, of the South British Fusiliers,* a humane English gentleman, opposed the cruel idea so vigorously that Huske abandoned it; so Ronald was closely watched, and fed on bread and water.
* New.
He was threatened with being flogged at the halberts, or with being hung on a tree; but nothing would make him tell aught to his father's enemies. Yet, though he kept a brave front to "the Saxons," as he named them, in the fulness of his heart and the solitude of his cell, he wept for his parents, and repeatedly offered up the prayers his mother taught him, and repeated to himself the twenty-second Psalm, "Shi Dhia fhein 'm buachalich" (the Lord is my shepherd).