"BY FLOOD AND FIELD."
The silent officer was indeed Sir Guy Carleton, governor of Canada, who
had eluded the captors of Montreal by disguising himself as a Canadian
voyager and helping six peasants to row him in a small boat with muffled
oars to Three Rivers, where he had boarded the vessel for Quebec. He now
ordered Dick held below, while the vessel proceeded to a mooring-place.
The captain of the vessel, on being hailed by a guard-boat from the
_Lizard_ frigate, announced the arrival of General Carleton, and, in the
ensuing exchange of news, spoke of the man just found in the river. The
guard-boat officer replied that the man must be a Virginia rifleman who
had escaped that evening from the _Adamant_, on which vessel this
rifleman and another, both captured in the suburbs of Quebec, had been
placed with the rebels taken September 24th while attempting a night
attack on Montreal. Dick fulfilled, in his attire, the description of
the escaped Virginian, and was held on Carleton's vessel when the
governor landed, the captain being ordered to hold him for
identification by Mr. Brooke Watson, in whose charge the rebel prisoners
now on the _Adamant_ had been put. As the governor intended that the
_Adamant_ should sail the next day with its prisoners, he caused Mr.
Watson to be summoned from his tavern for the purpose of viewing the new
captive that night. The governor then hastened to the upper town, to
confer with his lieutenant and with Colonel Maclean, and, in the
discussion of important affairs, forgot about Dick; while Maclean, on
his side, had now other matters for thought than the fugitive spy.
Meanwhile, Mr. Watson, the same eminent merchant who afterwards became
lord mayor of London, going rather grumpily from inn comforts to the
vessel, in the snow-storm, stumbled down the hatchway, and beheld Dick
while the latter lay unconscious in a hammock, the whole upper side of
his face concealed by straggling hair. Desirous of getting speedily back
to his lodgings, and glad that his quota of prisoners might be restored
to its full number, the honest merchant cast a brief glance at Dick in
the dim light, unhesitatingly pronounced him to be the missing rascal,
and stumbled back up the stairs to the deck.
Thus, through no kindness of intention on the part of his enemies, Dick
escaped the fate of a spy, and was assigned to that of a rebel under
arms. The next day, having slept well and having had his new wound
cared for by a surgeon, who pronounced it trivial, Dick was put aboard
the _Adamant_, handcuffed, by a guard of soldiers that had in the
meantime received Mr. Watson's orders concerning him, and thrust into a
dark apartment, which was already crowded with shackled prisoners, whose
recumbent bodies took up most of the floor. Dick knew not what
disposition was to be made of him, nor that the _Adamant_, already about
to set sail with its prisoners and with Governor Carleton's despatches,
was bound for England.
"So the minions of tyranny have dragged you back to the den!" rang out a
bold, virile voice, from the inner darkness, and presently a stalwart,
erect figure strode forth, stepping easily over the legs of the
reclining prisoners and planting each foot firmly as it fell. The
speaker was evidently able, from recent habit, to see fairly well in the
darkness. Coming close to Dick, he suddenly stopped and exclaimed, "By
the everlasting, 'tis another man! Brother, I took you first for a
comrade who broke the tyrant's chain yesterday. They removed him from
this cage, to doctor him, for the filthy air had made him sick; but he
broke away and plunged into the river, in the snow-storm. Or else the
guard who brought our supper is a liar. Have you heard anything of his
fate?"
"No, sir," said Dick, wondering what personage was this whose style of
speech was so oratorical, and whose spirit remained so high in this
miserable hole. "I am a newcomer here. I am Richard Wetheral, of
Hendricks's company of riflemen, from the county of Cumberland, province
of Pennsylvania."
"I welcome you to my acquaintance," replied the other, heartily,
thrusting forth his manacled hands and grasping Dick's. "I am Colonel
Ethan Allen."
"What! The captor of Ticonderoga?" cried Dick, remembering how in the
camp at Cambridge the news of that bold feat of a May morning had been
celebrated, and how the name of the Green Mountain leader had become an
every-day word in the colonial army.
"Fortune threw that prize in my way," said the other, with a modesty so
unmistakably pretended that the affectation could only amuse, not
offend. "Fortune was not so kind at Montreal, as you may have heard," he
added, dismally.
"I had heard of your--your bad luck at Montreal," said Dick, leaning
against the oaken wall of the enclosure, "but I little expected the
honor of meeting you in these circumstances."
"Yet in these circumstances we have been--in this very den,
indeed--since ever the army appeared yonder at Point Levi."
"And where were you before that?" asked Dick, eager to hear the story of
so famous a hero from the hero's own lips.
"Why," said the colonel, "we were in more places than one, you may be
sure. After our--bad luck, which was all because I was outrageously
out-numbered and not concerted with, I surrendered, on the promise of
honorable terms, and we were led into the town to be interviewed by
their commandant, General Prescott, God--bless him! When he asked me
whether I was that Colonel Allen who took Ticonderoga, and I told him I
was the very man, he went into a rage and shook his cane over my head
and called me a rebel and several worse names; and when he ordered us
put in irons and sent on board the _Gaspee_ schooner, he swore I should
wear a halter at Tyburn. From the _Gaspee_ I wrote him a letter, telling
him of the notorious friendship and generosity with which I had treated
the officers I took at Ticonderoga, but he paid no attention to my
letter."
"You have the satisfaction of knowing," put in Dick, "that General
Montgomery has captured Montreal and taken Prescott prisoner."
"Huzza!" cried Allen, and there were utterances of jubilation from the
men on the floor. "So the wheel of transitory events has turned that
way! I hope Prescott will remember the treatment we got on the _Gaspee_.
The irons were bad enough, Mr. Wetheral, but the insults were
intolerable. We received the insolence that cowards always show their
betters when in a position to do so,--for cowards they were on that
vessel, as they proved one day by scattering as if a wild beast was
amongst them, when in a fit of anger I twisted a nail from the bar of my
handcuff with my teeth. They said I was a mad savage, a ferocious
animal,--in their mean souls they couldn't conceive the feelings of a
liberty-loving man under restraint. After five or six weeks we were
transferred to an armed vessel lying off Quebec, under Captain McCloud,
who was a gentleman and treated us well. The next day we were put on
board the vessel of Captain Littlejohn, a brave and civil officer; he
ordered my irons taken off and had me sit at his own table. His
subordinates, too, were friendly to us. And then we were brought on the
_Adamant_, and handcuffed again. We are under the charge of a damned
calico merchant by the name of Brooke Watson, who trades between London
and Montreal. He is the man who visited New York and Philadelphia,
pretending to be friendly to the glorious cause of the colonies, and who
returned to Montreal and wrote letters to Gage's people in Boston,
disclosing what he had learned through his make-believe sympathy. This
vessel is a floating nest of Tories, who have taken passage on it. When
we came aboard, we were treated in the most bitter, reviling spirit, by
the officers, crew, guards, and passengers."
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.
Though their irons were not taken off, the prisoners had here an easy
captivity. They arrived almost on the eve of Christmas, and they were
not forgotten in the beneficent feeling that pervaded England during
Yule-tide. Breakfast and dinner came for Allen every day, with now and
then a bottle of wine, all from Lieutenant Hamilton's table and with
Lieutenant Hamilton's compliments. Dick and the other prisoners,
themselves well fed, got many a crumb from Allen's board, which was
supplied, by a gentleman in the neighborhood, with suppers also. Their
first day or two in the castle having been devoted to a campaign of
extermination against the vermin they had brought from ship, the
prisoners soon recovered spirit and health, in their new surroundings.
With great pleasure they learned that their former keeper-in-chief, the
estimable Watson, had hastened off to London to receive his
compensation.
Allen was often sent for by the commandant, with permission to take the
air on the parade-ground, where many of the Cornwall gentry came to
visit him. This gentle treatment did no more towards weakening his
patriotism than harsh measures had done. For his discourse with those
who came to talk with him was most often upon the cause of the fighting
colonies. He declaimed most high-soundingly on the subject, and Dick,
who was sometimes allowed to accompany him to the parade-ground, would
half amusedly liken him to some would-be Pitt before the House of
Commons or some oratorical Roman hero in a tragedy. Many of his English
hearers would dispute with him, but others would nod hearty agreement,
for there was in England a numerous party that sympathized with the
American revolt. "The conquest of the American colonies is to Great
Britain an eternal impracticability!" he would thunder, rejoicing in
polysyllables.
Some of the visitors came to make sport. Thus, one day:
"What was your former occupation?" asked a sapient gentleman,
quizzingly.
"In my younger days," quoth Allen, ironically, "I studied divinity, but
I'm a conjurer by profession."
"You conjured wrong, then, when you were taken prisoner."
"I know I mistook a figure that time," said Allen, "but I conjured you
out of Ticonderoga."
The tittering of some ladies, for many such were among the visitors,
closed up the inquisitive gentleman's mouth.
Another time, Allen astonished two benevolent clergymen, who had come
expecting to see some sort of untutored savage, by discoursing on moral
philosophy, and by arguing, in approved logical mode, against their
doctrine of Christianity.
There was in the company, one day, an airy youth who claimed to know
that Americans could not bear the smell of powder. Allen, taking the
assertion as a challenge, offered to convince him on the spot that an
American could bear that smell. "I wouldn't put myself on a par with
you," replied the youth. "Then treat the character of the Americans with
respect," demanded Allen. "But you are an Irishman," retorted the young
gentleman. "No, sir, I am a full-blooded Yankee," said Allen, and went
on to use his matchless powers of banter against the other, until the
latter made a confused retreat amidst the laughter of the onlookers.
Another day, a gentleman expressing a desire to do something for him,
Allen replied that he would be obliged for a bowl of punch. The
gentleman sent his servant away, who returned presently with punch and
offered it to Allen. The hero of Ticonderoga refused to take the bowl
from the hand of a servant. The gentleman then handed it himself to
Allen, who proposed that the two should drink together. The gentleman
said he must refuse to drink with a state criminal. Allen thereupon,
with a look of superior indifference, raised the bowl and drank the
whole contents at one long draught, and then gave the bowl back to the
gentleman. The crowd shouted with laughter, in which Allen, quickly
affected by this extraordinary tipple, presently joined; and when he
accompanied Dick back to the cell he was in a state of great jubilation.
There was much conjecture among the prisoners as to their ultimate fate.
Allen told his comrades that a Mr. Temple, from America, had whispered
to him that bets were laid in London that he should be hanged. This
gentleman's information must have been meant as friendly, for it had
been accompanied by a guinea secretly bestowed. But, on the other hand,
it had been hinted on the parade-ground that certain gentlemen intended
to attempt freeing the prisoners by the habeas corpus act, or having
them brought to trial before a magistrate.
"I have a project that should make the government think twice before
stringing any of us up," said Allen one day to Dick. He then obtained
the commandant's permission to write a letter, which he did, addressing
it to the Illustrious Continental Congress, describing his present
state, and requesting that no retaliation be made upon General Prescott
and other English prisoners until it be known how England would treat
himself and his companions.
"But," said Dick, "that letter will surely be opened and sent to the
English authorities, if anywhere."
"That is exactly where I desire it shall go," replied Allen; "and it's
ten to one we shall fare the better in consequence."
The next day the commandant, to whom the letter had been entrusted,
jocularly asked Allen if he thought they were fools in England, and told
him the letter had been sent to Lord North. That its effects were such
as Allen had predicted, was soon shown, but not until after Dick,
suddenly presented with an opportunity, had severed his fortunes from
those of his fellow prisoners in Pendennis Castle.
Some of Allen's visitors came fifty miles to see him. One afternoon,
while he was on the parade-ground, discoursing with several gentlemen
and ladies, and accompanied by Dick, a horse took fright just outside
the outer gateway, at which its rider, who had journeyed far to behold
the famous prisoner, was about to dismount. The scared animal, after a
few wild turns and plunges, galloped madly through the open gateway and
straight for the group surrounding Allen. The people fell back in
confusion, women shrieking, men taken by surprise; visitors, prisoners,
and guards huddled into one disorderly mass. The horse threw its rider,
and reared before the crowd, with fiery eyes and snorting nostrils.
Suddenly a man was seen to rush out from the group, seize the horse's
bridle with both hands together, bring the animal to its fore-knees,
place both hands on the pommel of the saddle, leap astride the horse,
and make it rear again on its hind legs. As if resolved to get the beast
under control at any effort, this volunteer horse-tamer brought its head
sharply around to face the gate, towards which it bolted with such
sudden speed that the two guards there stood back in terror. Once out of
the gate, the animal headed for Falmouth at a furious gallop.
The panic-stricken crowd on the parade-ground now breathed again,
and separated into its three elements,--spectators, guards, and
prisoner,--for, lo and behold, there remained now but one of the two
prisoners! On the ground lay the fallen cap of the other, who had lost
it in his struggle with the horse, and who, now being borne swiftly
towards Falmouth, was none other than Dick Wetheral.
There was some question, with Lieutenant Hamilton and his officers, as
to whether the prisoner intended to escape or merely to conquer the
frightened horse. Hence some time elapsed before finally the alarm-gun
was fired and a searching party sent out. Meanwhile, Dick Wetheral, who
could never afterward recall at exactly what moment his impulse to stop
the horse had turned into the idea of making a dash for liberty, allowed
the horse to run away with him at its best speed. While rapidly
approaching Falmouth, he did a thing that he had often heard old Tom
describe as having been done by certain mountebanks, and which, as his
hands were comparatively small, he had practised with success in
prison,--he folded each hand lengthwise, and, with some painful scraping
of skin at his thumb-joints, worked off his handcuffs, which he then
tossed into a pool of water at the roadside.
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.
At midnight the men repaired to quarters from the farms and
drinking-houses whereat they had been scattered. At two, they began
their march, struggling against a biting wind, their faces stung by the
snow horizontally driven, the locks of their guns held under the lappets
of their coats to avoid being wetted by the snow. Old Tom and the other
riflemen were in their usual place in Arnold's division, which was to
enter the lower town at its narrow northern end, passing between the
promontory's foot and the frozen St. Charles River. Through the suburb
and streets of St. Roque, they breasted the snowy darkness; first went
Arnold, at the head of a forlorn hope of twenty-five men, one hundred
yards before the main body; then Captain Lamb and his artillery company,
drawing a field-piece on a sledge; next, a company with ladders and
other scaling implements; then, Morgan and his company, heading the
riflemen; next, the Lancaster company, led, in Captain Smith's absence,
by Steele; then the Cumberland County men, with their own captain, for
Hendricks, though the command of the guard that morning belonged to him,
had got leave to take part in the attack; and last, the New England
troops. The division would have first to pass a battery on a wharf,
which the field-piece was to attack and the forlorn hope scale with
ladders, while Morgan should lead the riflemen around the wharf on the
ice.
Old Tom plodded not far behind Hendricks, the men straggling onward in
single file. As they approached the houses below Palace Gate, which led
from the upper town on their right, there suddenly burst forth a thunder
of cannon, which mingled soon with the alarming clang of all the bells
in the city. "They've spied our intentions," muttered old Tom to the man
ahead, and strode on.
Presently muskets blazed from the ramparts above. Men began to drop here
and there and to writhe in the snow, but their comrades hurried over or
around them. Hendricks's soldiers could not see far ahead, for the
darkness and the blinding snow; nor could they always make out the path
left by Arnold, Lamb, and the riflemen in advance. They could see
nothing of the foe save the flashes of the muskets from the walls
crowning the ascent at their right.
Presently they became aware of some kind of stoppage ahead; it was made
by the artillerymen, whose field-piece had stuck hopelessly in a
snowdrift. The company with the scaling-ladders made as if to stop also;
but Morgan was at their heels, forcing them forward, hastening on his
own company, and swearing terribly in a voice that rivalled the tumult
of bells and cannon. So the riflemen, preceded by the ladder-bearers,
passed on through the opening made for them by the artillery company.
They were nearing the first barrier now; the uproar of the unseen
enemy's fire was more terrific. And now Hendricks's men saw pass a group
that was returning as with reluctance and difficulty,--two men
supporting between them a third, who was so badly wounded in the leg
that he could not stand unaided. It was Colonel Arnold, upheld by Parson
Spring and Mr. Ogden. "Forward, my brave men!" cried Arnold, in a strong
and heartening voice, and the riflemen cheered and passed on.
They soon saw that Morgan had taken command, and, amid the inevitable
crowding together near the barrier, they found themselves in close
company with the forlorn hope, headed now by Arnold's secretary, Oswald,
and with Lamb and his artillerymen, who had left their field-piece in
order to wield muskets and bayonets.
Forward rushed Morgan and the advance companies, right through a
discharge of grape-shot from the two cannon commanding the defile.
Forward, without slackening, upon the battery, some scaling the walls,
some firing through the embrasures; pouring over and through, seizing
the captain and thirty of his men as prisoners, driving the rest of the
guard away, and taking the enemy's dry muskets to use instead of their
own damp ones.
Then Morgan formed his men as he could, and led them on to take the
second barrier. The day was about to dawn now, and, although Morgan's
men knew it not, the false attack planned against St. John's Gate had
failed of being made; the feint against the Bastion of Cape Diamond had
served its purpose to conceal Montgomery's march along the shore of the
St. Lawrence, but Montgomery, while leading his men from the stockade
whence Dick Wetheral had once been fired upon, towards the blockhouse
within, had fallen in death before a discharge of grape-shot, while his
triumphant cry, "Push on, my brave boys, Quebec is ours!" still rang in
the ears of his New Yorkers. Montgomery's men had thereupon retreated,
and thus the British force, warned of the very first movements by a too
early discharge of the signal-rockets, was enabled to concentrate
against the division now between the first and second northern barriers
of the lower town.
Morgan's advance followed a curving course along the sides of houses, to
where the narrow street was crossed, not far up from its mouth, by the
second barrier, which was at least twelve feet high. Meanwhile Morgan
had despatched Captain Dearborn, with a party, to prevent the enemy's
coming from the upper town through Palace Gate and down the promontory's
St. Charles side, which was neither as high nor as steep as the St.
Lawrence side.
Behind the barrier now to be taken, was a platform whence cannon poured
grape-shot, defended by two ranges of musketeers with fixed bayonets.
The enemy fired also from the upper windows of houses beyond. The
Americans speedily upbuilt an elevation to a height approaching that of
the barrier, men falling all the while beneath the fire from the
barrier, the houses beyond, and the walls far above at the right.
Morgan's first lieutenant, Humphreys, climbed this mound to scale the
barrier, but a row of bayonets forced him back.
Seeing the impregnability of the barrier to his present force, and the
rapidity with which that force was depleted by the terrible fire, Morgan
thundered and cursed. Hendricks and Steele were calm, encouraging their
men to patience, and directing them whither to return the enemy's fire.
At last Lieutenant Humphreys fell in the street, dying on the spot.
Then Morgan ordered his men to enter a house close to the barrier, and
fire from the windows.
Into the house and up to the second story rushed Hendricks, Steele, Tom
MacAlister, and many others. Steele ran to the first window and aimed
his gun towards the barrier; but, without firing, he suddenly stepped
back with a sharp cry, and held up one of his hands to look at it,
entrusting his gun wholly to the other. Where three fingers had been,
there were now three crimson stumps. Hendricks and MacAlister took
another window. As Hendricks was about to shoot, a ball tore its way to
his heart; he lowered his rifle, took on a swift look of pain, staggered
a few feet backward, fell with half his body on a bed, and died there
almost instantly. While the hell continued in and about the house, as
the daylight increased, a party of British rushed out from Palace Gate,
captured Dearborn and his men, fell upon the rear of Morgan's party, and
presently, when the dauntless Virginian had had his rage out, received
the surrender of him and his officers and men. "I wonder," thought old
Tom MacAlister, as he marched in the line of prisoners to the great
ruined Franciscan monastery, near the Reguliers, "how the lad Dick would
'a' fared if he'd been wi' us the braw night past? Weel, weel, maybe
it's better he was called away when he was, for, whether he be on the
earth or under, it's little he'd 'a' relished finding out 'twas for
this we marched through Maine and hungered and froze in the snaws of
Canada!"
'Twas for that, had been the planning and the money-spending, the
suffering and the starving, the toils and the bloodshed,--for that, and
for the glory of heroic failure.