Then the man with the money took Kate again in his arms and carried her easily through the surf to where the men held the leaping craft. One by one the dripping crew and passengers scrambled in, and presently, with four stout fellows bending at the long oars, the boat gathered way through the cold gray waves of the bar towards the masts of the ship which tossed and heaved in the offing.
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE BREAKING OF THE PRISON
Black Peter Hals stood grumbling and snarling at the door of the prison of Amersfort. It was almost sundown, and the outer city ports were closed at that hour. A crowd of merrymakers had just passed on their way to sup at a dancing-tavern. They had cried tauntingly to him as they went by, and the laughing, loose-haired girls had beckoned tantalizingly with their hands.
"Come, thou grizzled old bunch of keys," cried one of them, in a voice that tinkled like a bell, "learn to be young again for an hour. So shalt thou cheat both Father Time, and eke Jack Ketch, thy near kinsman."
"I am waxing old, indeed, when Bonnibel taunts me unscathed," muttered Peter Hals, grimly, to himself, as he watched them out of sight; "it is true there are gray hairs in my poll. But, Lord knows, I have yet in me the fire of youth. My natural strength is noneways abated. I can stand on my feet and swig down the sturdy Hollands with any man—aye, even with a city councillor at a feast of the corporation. But I rust here and mildew in this God-forsaken prison. 'Tis six o'clock of a morning, open the doors! Seven o'clock, take about the breakfast! Ten o'clock, comes a jackanapes spick-and-span officer for inspection! Two o'clock, a dozen new prisoners, and no cells to put them in! Six o'clock, supper and complaints! Then click the bolts and rattle the keys—to bed, sleep, and begin all the pother over again on the morrow! Pshaw!—a dog's life were livelier, a-scratching for fleas. They at least bite not twice on the same spot."
Thus Black Peter Hals, discontentedly ruffling his gray badger's cockscomb on the steps of the prison of Amersfort.
As he watched, a dainty slip of a maid came up the street with a pitcher of coarse blue delft on her shoulder. In the by-going she raised her eyes to those of Peter Hals. It was but a single long glance, yet it sent his ideas every way in a fine scatter, and eke Peter's hand to his mustache that he might feel whether it were in order.
At this moment a dog ran against the girl, and the pitcher clattered to the ground, where it broke into a thousand pieces.