PUNISHMENT WAS NEAR AT HAND
He saw now, as plainly as he saw the lengthening shadows about him, that punishment for his crimes was near. These stern woodsmen, whose plan for attacking Ticonderoga he had discovered, were in no mood to trifle with him. And what Enoch had told him was an assurance that though he might live to be brought before a court of justice, he must stand trial for his crimes. Neither political influence nor his wealth could save him from the result of his offenses against the laws of man and God. He was made desperate by these thoughts.
He could see from his uncomfortable position the company of scouts busy with their supper. The ordinary observer would not have imagined that these men were the pioneers of two hundred and thirty Green Mountain Boys and the Massachusetts and Connecticut troops. But Halpen knew the army of Americans was coming, and the object of their approach. Unwarned, Captain De la Place and his garrison might be surprised and overwhelmed by these backwoodsmen. Halpen had no particular love for the King, nor for the royal government; but he hated these men who had defended their farms for so many years from the aggressions of his own party. Fear of punishment was reinforced by a desire to worst the Green Mountain Boys. He began to struggle against his bonds.
He had done that early in the day when he was first fastened to the tree; and the thongs had cut into his arms and breast. But now he felt these abrasions not at all. He was mad to be free, and free he would be! The scouts paid him no attention. The sun was set and the forest grew dark. Would he escape he must accomplish the matter soon, or likely Bolderwood or young Harding would come to examine him again, and then the chance would be past.
At last, his flesh cut so deeply that blood ran from arms and body, he stretched the hide rope until he was able to wriggle out of it. There were then his ankles to untie. This he did in a very few moments. He was free! Rising to his knees, his limbs were so paralyzed by inaction that he could not yet stand upright, he crept into the brush and, like the serpent that Bolderwood declared to be his prototype, glided away from the camp and down toward the brush-bordered shore of the lake.
CHAPTER XXII
THE END OF SIMON HALPEN
As they are to-day, the surroundings of Fort Ticonderoga were most picturesque. Nor is the country about the fortifications, and across the lake where the camp of Bolderwood’s scouts was established at the time of our story, and later where the Grenadier Battery was raised, much more thickly settled to-day than it was then. Mt. Defiance, south of the Lake George outlet on the west side of Champlain was a heavily wooded eminence. Behind the scouts’ camp a rugged shoulder of ground, later called Mount Independence, raised its bulk out of the surrounding forest. The formidable promontory on which the French had built Ticonderoga twenty years before, commanded a great sweep of the lake. For mere foot-soldiers, without artillery or explosives, to attack these fortifications seemed utterly preposterous.
Where Bolderwood and his companions were waiting they had an excellent view of the fort. At sunset the garrison was paraded and one gun boomed resonantly across the calm lake. Just before it became too dark to see the other shore, the Americans observed a man come out of the covered way by which the fortifications were entered and approach the shore. There was a light canoe moored there and into this he stepped and paddled out into the lake, evidently aiming his craft for a cove near the scouts’ position. Bolderwood and his comrades were so deeply interested in the maneuvres of this man that Simon Halpen was for the time forgotten.
“We’ll have to take that feller in and hold him for the Colonel to talk to,” suggested one of the scouts when it became apparent that the stranger from the fort was coming ashore near at hand. “He’ll see them boats an’ suspicion something.”