The life of Hyland Gilbert, whom his captors, exasperated by the murder, as they called it, of Falconer, were at one time on the point of tearing to pieces, was saved through the firmness of lieutenant Brooks; but he was treated with much indignity, and even cruelty, being straightway bound both hand and foot to his horse, and thus carried away like the meanest and most desperate of felons. A pair of rude litters were hastily constructed, in one of which was carried the Captain's daughter, while the other supported the clayey corpse of the bridegroom.
These things effected, and the honest Mr. Sterling assuming the station assigned him in the centre of the party, where, although enjoying all appearance of liberty, he was yet esteemed a kind of honourable—or, as the phrase should be, dishonourable—prisoner, the melancholy cavalcade pursued its way back to Hawk-Hollow, within a few miles of which, its leaders stumbled upon Captain Loring and a party of footmen, over whom he had assumed the command. It consisted of no less, indeed, than that identical company of volunteers who had won such immortal distinction on the fourth of July, by their valiant attack, with empty muskets, upon the flying Oran. The reappearance of their enemy was enough to recall them to the field of battle, though they came somewhat of the latest; and uniting themselves with a party of countrymen and domestics whom Captain Loring had previously assembled, and whom he was now gallantly leading to the field of honour, they yielded to his energy the obedience he seemed to consider a matter of right, and thus constituted him commander-in-chief, without much regard to the claims of their own elected officers.
The morning was still misty, so that lieutenant Brooks and his party stumbled upon this formidable detachment without seeing it, or suspecting its existence; and had it not been for the sharpness of his ears in detecting the tones of Captain Loring's voice upon a hill he was just ascending, it is highly probable the magnanimous volunteers would have wiped out the disgrace of their flight before a single enemy, by pouring a warm and well-directed fire into a superior body of friends.
He paused a little,—for he rode at some distance in front of his party,—and distinctly heard Captain Loring's voice giving the following orders to his volunteers:—
"Hark!" said the veteran; "adzooks, you may hear their horse now as plain as the cocking of a sentinel's musket at midnight. Halt, ye vagabonds, and prepare for action. When I say prepare, I mean, adzooks, be ready to swinge 'em. You, Dan Potts, John Small, and Peter Dobbs, detach yourselves to the right, six rods from the road, and lay by to flank 'em: Dick Sturgem, Sam King, and Absalom Short, wheel to the left, and do the same thing—and mind you, you scoundrels, don't any of you be frightened; for, adzooks, I despise a coward above all created things. And harkee, you scoundrels, no gabbling; hold your tongues like soldiers, and talk with your muskets: that's what old general Spitfire used to tell us—'Sons,' said he, 'a soldier should always keep his tongue in his musket.' So be off, and stand fast, flanks; and bang away as soon as you see any thing to bang at. Centre, attend: as soon as you hear the flanks at it, you are to crack away, and give no quarter—no quarter, you scoundrels, do you hear!"
At any other moment, the young lieutenant would have been amused at the enthusiasm and tactics of the veteran of the Indian wars; but this was not a moment for jest. He rode forward, hailing the Captain by name; and the old soldier soon forgot his rage and his followers together, to weep in the arms of his recovered child.
CHAPTER XI.
| 2d Clown. But is this law? 1st Clown. Ay, marry is 't; crowner's-quest law. HAMLET. |
We draw a curtain over the scene of distress displayed in Gilbert's Folly, when the body of Henry Falconer, late the gayest of its inmates, was laid at the feet of his father and sister; and pass to that which followed, when a justice of the peace, acting in the place of a coroner, assembled a jury of inquest around the bloody couch, to determine from the melancholy story of the dead, the fatal responsibility of the living. The official was a personage who exercised, along with the duties of a magistrate, the equally dignified functions of mine host of the Green Tree Tavern; and was, indeed, no less a man than that rival of Elsie Bell, whose formidable opposition, many years before, had completed the downfall of the Traveller's Rest. He was now a man of substance, portly in person, and inflated by the dignity of office into a certain dignity of manner; his step was like the roll of a ship, and when he breathed, it was with a forcible and majestic expiration of breath, like the snort of a war-horse. He had been noticed, as he advanced in the world, for the independence,—or, to speak more strictly, the tyranny with which he conducted himself among his guests; not, indeed, that he ever beat, or even committed them, as, in virtue of his office, he might have done; but because, as he said, he heartily 'despised peing pottered mit 'em.' He was not austere or quarrelsome of disposition, but he was a lover of his ease in his inn; and his despotism was shown less in violent opposition than in contemptuous indifference of all humours save his own. He abhorred all fault-finding, but as he equally detested the trouble of reprehending it, he devised a scheme by which discontent was either nipped in the bud, or severely reproved as soon as made manifest, and all without any labour on his own part. He caused to be painted on his sign-board, having daubed off the green tree to make room for it, the following cabalistic legend,—