The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure

by Robert Neilson Stephens

"Yes," replied Catherine, lightly, affecting a triumphant smile of pleased revenge; "I did! You wouldn't take my word that nobody was behind it, and I thought I'd punish you!"

With which she left the room and went serenely down-stairs, followed by the somewhat mystified and crestfallen colonel, who had left his two men to make fast the broken door.

"The young lady was right. No one was there," said Maclean, gruffly, and went immediately to Monsieur de St. Valier, who gave a deep breath of relief and returned to the parlor, whither his guests accompanied him. Blagdon, to be at a distance from Catherine and Gerard, who stood talking together at the stair-foot, went with his two men to the rear of the hall, to wait for the two who had been up-stairs with Maclean. Thus it happened that, of the people in the hall who had seen the figure cross the landing, none but Gerard saw the two privates reappear presently from Catherine's room; and, as Blagdon was in no mood for questions when those two rejoined him, the impression was not corrected that the flying figure had been one of them. Blagdon forthwith led his four men, with the three who had been put on guard beneath the window, to the barracks, dismissed them, and repaired to a drinking-place. Catherine and Gerard went back to their uncle's guests; but the sister, bearing up against the exhaustion caused by the scene she had passed through, showed an abstraction not entirely to be attributed to happiness at the recovery of her mother's portrait.

Dick plodded on through the snow, past near and distant churches, monasteries, seminaries, gardens, fine houses, and mean houses, keeping a frequent lookout behind him, and up and down what streets he crossed, and came eventually to the low rampart near the grand battery, from which the precipice fell steeply to the narrow strip of the lower town that lay between the cliff's base and the St. Lawrence.

This rampart, which could avail mainly to shield the batteries that commanded the shipping in the St. Lawrence, was easy of ascent from the inside, as it could not be expected that any one would attempt leaving the upper town by the almost perpendicular precipice of more than two hundred feet. Yet such was the wild intention that Dick had formed. The attempt, on the part of a fugitive, seemed the more preposterous for the fact that, should he accomplish the almost impossible feat of safely descending the cliff, he would but find himself in the lower town, which was defended at either end and closely guarded along its river edge,—unless, indeed, he should traverse the face of the cliff diagonally, so as to arrive at the base outside the southern barrier of the lower town. As all the world knows, the walls of Quebec encircled the upper town on its high promontory, while the lower town, lying against that promontory's foot, needed no other defence on one side than the promontory itself. It was neither practicable nor necessary that a wall should run down the promontory's side; hence a man, finding himself on the steep declivity between the upper and the lower town, had a way of exit open to him, provided he could traverse obliquely the face of the cliff and could avoid observation from above or below. This way of escape recommended itself to Dick because the city gates would by this time be watched for him, and because it would bring him directly to the place where Arnold's man would be waiting to receive the report that was to have been brought by Mère Frappeur in her boat.

Dick knew the rampart overlooking the St. Lawrence would be the least guarded, as the British force was too small for the proper manning of the many and large defences. Slinking at a distance past the right flank of the grand battery, whose overworked sentries were shivering in the snow, he found a place where a platform enabled him to mount easily the rampart. Across this rampart he crawled, on hands and knees, making out through the falling flakes a single sentry who paced several rods away. Looking over the outer edge of the rampart, his head turned giddy, for a moment, at sight of the precipice falling sheer almost three hundred feet to the narrow fringe of houses and the gloomy river below.

But he chose a spot where there was ample footing at the rampart's base, turned about, backed from the rampart, hung for a moment by his fingers, and dropped to the chosen place, his fall softened by what snow had lodged there. He immediately turned his face towards his distant destination, and peered through the flake-filled darkness for what projections and indentations of the cliff might serve his progress. He thanked his stars for the evidence soon afforded him that his adopted mode of escape was within possibility, perilous though it might be; and then for the falling snow, which shielded him from sight, and for the snow already fallen, which now and then helped him to adhere to the cliff, for the irregularities of the precipice were such that the snow's lodgment had endured here and there on its steep face. These irregularities gave him footing, and so enabled him to proceed.

Many times he slipped, tearing his clothes and scraping his skin, but each time he kept his wits and availed himself of the first stopping-place that offered. The descent was a work of hours, so cautiously did he have to proceed, so carefully to pick out his next footing, so often to rest and regain his breath. At last he passed above the blockhouse and battery which together constituted the inner barrier of this end of the lower town. In the light from the blockhouse he could see a sentry pacing from the cliff's foot towards the wharf by the swift river.

Some minutes more of effort brought Dick past the top of a stockade, which formed the outer barrier. The exultation of success almost intoxicated him. He let himself slide down what remained of the cliff, heedless alike of the sharp projections and of the Canadian militia housed behind the stockade. As he stood, at last, in the narrow way between river and cliff, restraining an impulse to shout with glee, he took the two sheets of paper, containing his report, from beneath his hunting-shirt, and started forward, loudly whistling "Molly, my Treasure."

Suddenly, from over the top of the stockade, a shot was fired. Dick felt a sting, in the vicinity of the bayonet-wound received at Bunker Hill, and fell forward on his hands and knees. A gate in the stockade was thrown open, and two soldiers strode forth, lowering their faces to avoid the falling snow. At the same moment, a tall form sprang out from the shadow of a broken rock in front of Dick, completed the whistled passage of music suddenly cut off by Dick's fall, and said: