"Oho!" said Sterling, looking into the prisoner's face, "whom have we here? 'By this light, a most perfidious and drunken monster!' 'Most reverend seignior, do you know my voice?' 'Oho, my sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas, that run'st o' horseback up a hill perpendicular!' Why this rascal was he, one John Parker, a soldier on the lines, that nabbed me, being too drunk to understand the claims of my coat to better treatment. Oh, you vagabond, I knew you would come to the gallows!"
"Raise him on his feet," said the tory leader; then turning to the volunteer, he drew from his bosom a soiled and crumpled paper, which he put into Sterling's hands, saying, with a sternness that was perhaps assumed to cover the shame he felt at his own ignorance,—
"Read it.—Our merry men here can make nothing of such pothooks. Read it aloud; and then we'll proceed to judgment."
The volunteer obeyed, and succeeded in deciphering a scrawl, of a style of composition and penmanship so similar to that Miss Falconer had shown the Captain's daughter, that, had he ever seen the latter, he could have been at no loss to identify the correspondent. It was brief, and clear, and to the following effect:
"Honourable Madam to command—
"This here is the letter what I promised to put under the bush; and I put it this night, the 3d of July, in the year of our Lord, Anno Domini as before. The rendezvous is a place called the Tarrapin Hole, a swamp on the east of the road, six or eight miles above Captain Loring's. You turn off from the road at a place where a fresh blazed beech tree grows by a rock; but the path is astonishing twistified, and not fit for horse, but can be surrounded. I had some thoughts of deserting, for I reckon some of these dogs is suspicious; but that might throw them into a panic, and so drive them to the hills, where the devil himself (begging pardon for swearing) could not find them. They say the captain (that's the Hawk) is in the village, or to be there to-morrow, when it would be easy to take him—(remember the red hat; as for the horse, there is no depending on that, for he has 'em scattered all about in depots;) and then the rest is nothing, seeing as how they are in some of a panic already, as not knowing what is to turn up. Howsomever nevertheless, there's one thing I've found out quite astonishing; and that is, that our lieutenant, a most impudent chap as ever you saw, walks about openly, and lives at the old widow Bell's, and"——
"Hah! enough!" cried the leader, suddenly snatching the epistle out of the volunteer's hands. "Have we more traitors than one among us? Who has forgotten orders, and told secrets to new men?"
"I, captain," said one of the men, breaking silence. "This here John Parker and myself were boys together in Monmouth; and so, for old companion's sake, I was more free about the lieutenant, and other matters, than stood in orders, not thinking there could any harm come of it. But I knock under to punishment, seeing the man has been betraying us all, and am ready to do justice on him with knife, rope, hatchet, or rifle-butt; though it goes ag'in' my conscience to take a man that's tied up like a shambled ewe."
"Cut the thongs from his legs," said Oran Gilbert, "or slack them a little. John Parker, I give you three minutes to pray. What, Tom Staples, have you never a rope here that might serve the traitor's turn?"
"I have been twisting one all the morning," said the man who had spoken, displaying a sort of cable constructed of the shreds of a blanket; "for I hoped it might be that, rather than knifing."