The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure

by Robert Neilson Stephens

He knew it would not be safe for him to enter the town, and, therefore, as the horse presently calmed of its own accord, Dick dismounted, gave the animal a smart slap to make it proceed on its way, and hastened down towards some fishermen's squat houses that lay near the beach on the outskirts of Falmouth. Noticing several boats drawn up on the sands, Dick knocked at the first door in his way, and brought forth an old woman, who, on his asking how he might get some one to row him across the bay, turned out to be half blind, half deaf, and stupidly indifferent. While he was making his desires clearer to her, he heard an ominous boom from the castle.

He knew this to be the alarm-gun, and looked to see what would be its effect on the old woman, but her unaltered features proved the genuineness of her deafness. At last Dick elicited that all the able-bodied men of the hamlet were in the town, at some merrymaking, but that she could hire a boat to him, which he might row himself, and which, as he said he would not soon return that way, he might leave in the care of a certain fisherman at St. Mawes. Dick paid her out of what money he had kept ever since leaving Arnold's camp, and she thereupon helped him drag a small boat out into the waves, and steadied it for him while he clambered aboard.

His first attempts at rowing were wild efforts, for this bay of the ocean was as different a matter from the smooth Pennsylvania rivers and creeks, as oars were different from canoe paddles. But difficult arts are soon acquired when they have to be, and by those who will admit nothing to be impossible to themselves that is possible to any other. Dick at last contrived to make some kind of headway, thanks to the serenity of the weather and to the favoring tide. By the time, therefore, when the guards from the castle passed the fishing hamlet, on the track of the horse, Dick was merely an unrecognizable boatman well out in the bay.

The trip to St. Mawes, a small matter to a practised waterman, was to Dick one of great persistence and several hours, by reason of his inexperience, through which he covered twice or thrice the distance to be traversed. It was dusk when, at last, after many a dubious look at the castle of St. Mawes that crowned the overlooking hill, he felt the boat grate violently underneath, sounded with his oar, leaped out into the water, and dragged the boat up the beach, now aided and now impeded by the inrolling and receding waves.

He was at the end of the single street of a miserable hamlet lying under a hill and fronting the sea. No human creature was abroad to see him land. He therefore, in order to change his appearance as much as possible from that of an American hunter to that of an English rustic, did away with his belt and leggings, so that his hunting-shirt, being of linsey-woolsey, looked something like a countryman's frock, while his stockings, similar to those of English make, were now in view. He knocked at one of the huts, ascertained the abode of the man in whose charge he was to leave the boat, found that person in, gave out that he was returning to his home near Exeter from a journey in search of a place in service, was regaled with a frugal and fishy supper for a consideration, and then set out afoot towards Tregoney, saying he had a relation there with whom he would pass the night. It was from the man's own talk that Dick had learned the name and location of this village, which was eight miles northeastward.

While Dick was plodding along over those eight miles, with no further plan than to get out of the vicinity of Pendennis Castle, it began to snow. Passing through two villages on the way, he arrived at Tregoney, a decent-looking place, about nine o'clock. He stayed there no longer than to buy an old hat from an aged poor man whose sons worked in the tin-mines at St. Austel, and from whom Dick, having said that his former hat had been blown into the Fal by a gust of wind, obtained information as to the road ahead.

Learning that there was a good inn at Lostwithiel, sixteen miles farther northeast, he decided to proceed thither. The snow increasing, and Dick stopping to rest in some sheltered spot in each of three intervening villages, these sixteen miles were a long business. To a survivor of the march through Maine, however, the cold and the snow seemed no great inconvenience.

When he reached Lostwithiel, though, Dick was so fatigued, with his walk of twenty-four miles and his row across the bay, that he fell asleep almost as soon as his body was stretched on a bed in one of the inn's inferior rooms, to which he had been conducted from the kitchen, where he had found an inn servant already up, despite the fact that the day soon to dawn was Sunday. This servant was a stout female, whose impressionability to masculine merits made easy Dick's admittance to the inn, which might otherwise have rejected such a guest arriving at such an hour. It was not yet daylight, but dawn was near enough to enable Dick, before closing his eyes, to receive a vague impression of the open spire of St. Bartholomew's Church through the falling snow. It made him think of Quebec, and he drowsily wondered what, at that moment, might be doing with old Tom, with Captain Hendricks, Simpson, Steele, and the others of the army far across seas in Canada.

What was doing with them at that moment? It was then a little after six o'clock in the morning at Lostwithiel, two o'clock the same morning at Quebec. The morning was that of December 31, 1775. This is what was occurring at Quebec:

Snow was falling there also, but in a far more violent storm. Wind was blowing the snow in drifts, and with the snow there was a cutting sleet. The beginning of the night had been moonlit, but at twelve the sky was overcast, and then came the storm. This snowfall by night was a thing for which the Americans had been waiting. Montgomery had at last come up from Montreal with three hundred men, and joined Arnold at Point aux Trembles, December 1st. The army had started the next day, amid whirling flakes, for Quebec; had arrived before the city on the 5th, Montgomery having found Arnold's men a fine corps, well disciplined. Later, a breastwork had been thrown up to face the gate of St. Louis; and, by means of a battery mounted partly on ice and snow, shells had been thrown into the town, starting fires in several places. But the heavy guns from Quebec's walls had so dealt with this battery that it had been removed. Thenceforth, execution from the American side had been done mainly by mortars and riflemen, placed in the suburb of St. Roque, outside Palace Gate. It had finally been decided to carry the town by escalade, and this was to be attempted during the first snow-storm, such as that which finally came on this night preceding Sunday, December 31st. The plan adopted was that the lower town should be taken first, Arnold leading an attack on its northern end, Montgomery leading one on its southern end; demonstrations being made against the upper town at St. John's Gate and at the Bastion of Cape Diamond, to distract attention from the attacks below; signal-rockets to be fired in order that all four movements should be made at the same time.