“Yes, but death here would be wasted. Wait.”
From that hour Richard was a changed man; the dulness of despondency was gone, and in its place there had come a recklessness, a demon of desperation, that nothing could still.
“I shall not stay quietly here to be flogged or to rot with the fever and starvation,” he said to Peter, and his jaw was hard and square. “I shall get away or I shall die in the attempt.”
Two days later the flogged man was sewed into his blanket and carried away in the funeral-boat; and the malcontent of the prisoners broke out in angry mutterings. Here Richard, who had been brooding over a plan of escape, believed he saw his chance. By night his plan was laid; and when the hatches were beaten down and they lay in serried rows in the stinking hold, he went from man to man and told his scheme. It was to be a mutiny, a direct revolt. At a given signal they were to rise in a body, fall upon the guards, over-power them—kill them—and then pulling up the anchor they were to run the ship to the open sea, beach her somewhere on the Jersey coast if she gave signs of leaking, and take their chance to hide along the shore until they could get away into the interior. Richard was to head them, for in his voice and manner the men recognized the spirit of a leader. He longed with something akin to ferocity to strike the first blow at the warden.
“And besides,” he said, “since I have proposed the plan it is but meet that I should assume the first risk. If I fall, Peter will take my place. Jack Bangs here has been on the sea all his life, and knows the coast hereabouts as we know our farms at home. What say you to giving him charge of the ship and letting him choose his own sailing crew?”
“Good; he is the man for the place.”
“Very well,” said Bangs; “but we cannot go down the Jersey coast, for we would have to pass too many posts of the enemy, besides the guns in the New York harbour. We must steer east through the sound, and if the ship is beached, it must be on the Connecticut or Rhode Island coast.”
“Very well; that is not so convenient, since it takes us far from our army, but anywhere will be better than here.”
They counted every risk: the difficulty of disarming the guards, the proximity of the other two prison-ships, the interference of the shore patrol in their swift-sailing boat, the disabled and sailless condition of their own vessel; but nothing turned them from their purpose. Every detail of the plot was arranged when toward morning the men lay down for a little rest and sleep.
All the morning Richard scrubbed or cleaned as the guards bade, and then sat on deck with his eyes alternately upon the sun and the ship.