Dick was by this time able to make out the speaker's features, as well as the tall, robust figure on which was solidly set the shapely head placed upright in a natural attitude of pride and defiance. The full eyes, nose, and mouth showed sociability and sympathy, as well as pugnacity and assertiveness. There was in the man's whole expression such an unconscious look of irrepressibility, his self-vaunting was so spontaneous, he so evidently took his high-flown phrases seriously, that even his foibles made him the more engaging.
"I made the devil's own time of it," he went on, with a slight smile of pleasure at the recollection, "when they first ordered me to this filthy pen, after my men had already been forced in. I protested quite civilly with Watson, but he cut my representations short by commanding me to follow my men. He said the place was good enough for a rebel, and that a man who deserved hanging had no right to talk of honor and humanity, and indulged in other such talk. A Tory lieutenant who was looking on said I ought to have been hanged for my opposition to the province of New York, in her claim of New Hampshire's lands; and, as if it wasn't enough to call that rightful opposition a rebellion, he suddenly spat in my face. I ran at him, and knocked him partly down with both fists, handcuffed as I am now. He made for the cabin, where he got under the protection of some guards with fixed bayonets, whom Watson ordered to drive me back to the den, for I had sprung after the lieutenant. I challenged him to come out and fight, but the tyrant-loving cur stood shaking with fear. Watson shouted to the guards to get me into the pen, dead or alive, and the low brutes surrounded me with their bayonets. I thought I would try flattery on the rascals, so I said, 'I know you are honest fellows, and are not the ones to blame; I am only in dispute with a calico merchant, who doesn't know how to behave towards a gentleman of the military establishment.' But they paid no heed to my words, and so I was at last driven into this hole at the point of the bayonet. How we live here, you will see for yourself, if you remain with us,—as you probably will, for, by the feel of things, the vessel has cast off."
It was soon plain that the vessel was indeed under way, whence came the inference that Dick's destination was to be that of the other prisoners, which they knew was England. Dick's sensations of mind on contemplating this new shift of the wind of circumstance, this utterly unexpected breaking away from what had seemed to be his immediate destiny, may be imagined. As he sat on the floor, while the vessel rocked and strained, he thought of the home in Pennsylvania, of the army besieging Boston, of Arnold's troops waiting to attack Quebec, of old Tom, of the girl in the great house in Palace Street, of all he was being carried from, and then of the unknown that lay before him. "Over the hills and over the main," sang a voice within him, and with a patient sigh he resigned himself to the guidance of fortune.
The den was about twenty-two feet by twenty. The prisoners confined here, all handcuffed, were thirty-four in number. There were Allen, and thirty-one of the thirty-eight men who had surrendered with him at Montreal, the Virginia rifleman taken in the suburb of St. John's, and Dick Wetheral. Until the day before the end of their voyage,—that is to say, for more than a month,—they were not allowed to leave their dark pen, which contained no furniture or utensil other than two tubs. The experience of prison life that Dick had got in Boston was as nothing to that which he now endured, although in accommodating himself to the latter he profited some by the former.
Besides the close confinement, the irons, and the perpetual darkness, there was the sickening heaving of the vessel, the continual distress of stomach and adjacent organs, the inevitable fever, and the consequent raging thirst, which each man's daily gill of rum and small allowance of fresh water failed to quench. When the prisoners begged for more water on being served with their regular allowance of salt food, they were jeered and reviled by their keepers, and by the Tories who then looked in at them. They were irritated half to madness by vermin of the body. Some of the men raged, others merely fretted; others lay most of the while in a kind of stupor, at times broken with despairing groans.
Allen and Dick both kept their wits, and remained of unbroken spirit. Allen sometimes chafed, but always with a healthy anger, and sometimes he cursed, but more often he declaimed against tyranny, defied the oppressor, and predicted the triumph of liberty. Dick bore the torments of this voyage with a fixed dourness, and, as one annoyance grew upon another, began to see something ludicrous in the very accumulation of miseries, so that his face often went from an irrepressible grimace of inward pain to a peculiar amused smile somewhat akin to that elicited from him on occasions of peril. Moreover, he comforted himself with the thought that, for every dejected moment, fate owed him a moment of exultation, and that the voyage must end some time.
One day the prisoners were unexpectedly ordered to go on deck. They stumbled awkwardly up into the light of the sun, and drank in gladly the fresh air of the ocean. Afar in a certain direction, whither all eyes were turned, they beheld a faint blot of duller color against the different blues of sky and sea. It was the Land's End of England. The prisoners, whose faces had become hideously transformed by the growth of beards during their imprisonment, gazed curiously at the first outlines of the land they had never seen, yet once had loved as the home of their fathers.
The next day the vessel made Falmouth harbor, sailing in between the lofty promontories, of which one on the west side is crowned by Pendennis Castle, one on the east by the castle of St. Mawes. The news spread from the port of Falmouth that American prisoners were to be landed, rebels of marvellous skill with the rifle, and that the chief of them was the taker of Ticonderoga. Consequently, while the prisoners were shaving and making themselves presentable, for which the means had at last been given them, great crowds flocked to the wharf, and to the housetops and high places along the way to Pendennis Castle, in which the prisoners were to be confined.
In due time the prisoners, not less curious, but more self-contained than the spectators, were put ashore, all in their hunters' garb, for Allen himself, a few days before his attack on Montreal, had laid aside his usual costume for a Canadian dress,—a short double-breasted fawn-skin jacket, undervest and breeches of sagathy, worsted stockings, shoes, and a red worsted cap. Allen assumed his haughtiest, most scornful, and most belligerent look, as he stepped firmly on English ground, followed by Dick, who, while he thrilled at knowing himself on the soil he had learned from his parents to call home, had yet a new and unaccountable feeling of pride in that he was American.
The crowd so blocked the way in Falmouth—which place reminded him somewhat of New England sea-towns he had passed through, though it lacked their look of freshness—that the officers had to draw swords and force a passage. So the prisoners were led, with guards before and behind, and between lines of people, many of whom followed on either side, for about a mile's distance from the town, towards the lofty round tower, within walled grounds, that crowned the promontory between sea and harbor. Pendennis Castle rose, a high and gray building of the time of Henry VIII., within close walls, around which a great space, containing a parade-ground and here and there some small houses, was in turn surrounded by lower walls, from which tree-dotted slopes fell in different degrees of steepness to the water almost entirely environing the peninsula. At the entrance the prisoners were taken in charge by Lieutenant Hamilton, the commandant of the castle, and were led through grounds and gates, corridors and stairways, to an airy room provided with bunks and straw.