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THE ROAD TO PARIS
BY
R. N. STEPHENS

Works of

ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS

An Enemy to the King
(Sixth Thousand)
The Continental Dragoon
(Fifth Thousand)
The Road to Paris
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY, Publishers
(Incorporated)
196 Summer St., Boston, Mass.

THE ROAD TO PARIS

"A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO LONGER TRUE."

THE ROAD TO PARIS
A Story of Adventure
BY
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
AUTHOR OF
"AN ENEMY TO THE KING"
"THE CONTINENTAL DRAGOON," ETC.
Illustrated by
H. C. EDWARDS

"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."

—Old Song.

BOSTON
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
1898

Copyright, 1898
By L. C. Page and Company
(INCORPORATED)
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.

"D'Artagnan ... touched the earth, moistened
with the evening dew, with the ends of his fingers,
crossed himself as if at the holy-water vessel of a
church, and retook alone—ever alone—the road to
Paris."

—The Viscount of Bragelonne.

CONTENTS.

• CHAPTER PAGE
  Introduction[ ix]
  I. A Lodge in the Wilderness [1]
  II. "Over the Hills and Far Away"[ 21]
  III. At the Sign of the George[ 50]
  IV. Of a Broken Sabbath and Broken
  Heads [ 72]
  V. From Broadway to Bunker Hill [ 92]
  VI. The Wind of Circumstance [ 118]
  VII. The March through Maine [ 150]
  VIII. Within the Walls of Quebec[ 175]
  IX. The Incidents of a Snowy Night[201]
  X. "By Flood and Field"[227]
  XI. Three Whimsical Gentlemen and a
  Beautiful Lady [ 257]
  XII. The Devil to Pay at the Pelican Inn [ 288]
  XIII. "Up and Down in London Town" [ 323]
  XIV. "Fair Stood the Wind for France" [ 352]
  XV. An Elopement from a Diligence [ 376]
  XVI. Pastoral and Tragedy [ 401]
  XVII. "Stone Walls Do Not a Prison
  Make" [ 426]
  
  XVIII. Dick Gives a Specimen of American
  Shooting [ 452]
  XIX. The Favor of a Prince [ 474]
  XX. The Honor of a Lady-in-waiting [ 499]
  XXI. "The Road to Paris"[ 524]
  

ILLUSTRATIONS.

• PAGE "A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO
  LONGER TRUE" [ Frontispiece]
  "THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY
  YEARS OLD" [ 36]
  "IT WAS THE MAN SENT BY ARNOLD"[ 223]
  "BEARING THE SWOONING FORM OF AMABEL"[ 294]
  "'OH, YOU HAVE A VISITOR! MON DIEU, SILVIUS!'"[ 431]
  "FREDERICK II. RECOILED A STEP OR TWO"[ 518]
  

INTRODUCTION.

"With our company of riflemen that marched in Arnold's army through the Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, there was a sergeant's wife, a large and sturdy woman, no common camp-follower, but decent and respected, who one day, when the troops started to wade through a freezing pond, of which they broke the thin ice coating with the butts of their guns, calmly lifted her skirts above her waist and strode in, and so kept the greater part of her clothes dry in crossing. Not a man of us made a jest, or even grinned, so natural was her action in the circumstances. I have often used this instance to show that what the world calls modesty is a matter of time and place, and I now hold that too much modesty is out of time and place when a man who has had more than a fair share of remarkable experiences undertakes a true relation of the extraordinary adventures that have befallen him. So, if the narrative on which I am setting out be marred by any affectation, it will not be the affectation of modesty.

"When I was a boy in our valley behind the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania, I used to read the 'True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, from 1593 to 1629,' and wonder whether I should ever have any travels or adventures of my own to make a book of. When, afterwards, I did go a travelling, and adventures did come thick and fast upon me, I was too much engrossed in the travels and adventures themselves to give a thought as to what matter they might be for narration. Not till this breathing-place came in my life, did my boyhood dreams return to my mind, and did I realize that my part in battle and imprisonment, danger and escape, love and intrigue, would make a book that might be worth fireside reading. That book I now begin, and shall probably finish it if I be not interrupted by untimely death or by some new call to scenes of enterprise and turmoil,—for it is no retired veteran, but a man early in his twenties, that here tries whether with pen and ink he can make as fair a show as he has already made with implements less peaceful."

The foregoing lines constitute the first two paragraphs of a book entitled "The Travels and Adventures of Richard Wetheral, in America, England, France, and Germany, in the years 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1778," of which it happens, by strange circumstance, that I possess the only copy. The title-page shows that it was published by (or "printed for") J. Robson, Bookseller, in New Bond Street, London, in 1785. The three brown 16mo volumes first caught my glance when they lay with a heap of ragged books on a board before a second-hand shop in Twenty-sixth Street, there being attached to the board a weather-beaten square of pasteboard, bearing the legend, "Your choice for ten cents." Not until I had paid the dealer thirty cents and separated the three volumes forever from their musty companions, which were mostly of a theological character, did I discover, by parting a blank leaf from the adjacent cover, to which it had long been sticking, that the book was a treasure, for which the dealer would have charged me as many dollars as I had paid cents, had he anticipated my discovery. The long-concealed page bore on its brown-spotted surface an inscription, in eighteenth century handwriting, turned yellow by age, signed by the author of the book, and to the effect that he had caused his true narrative to be published without his wife's knowledge, thinking this book might afford her a pleasant surprise, but that the surprise with which she first perused it was so far from pleasant, she had forthwith, in the name of modesty, demanded its immediate suppression, which was at once accomplished by her indulgent husband, who had preserved only this one copy for the benefit of posterity. When I asked the bookseller how he had come by the copy, he told me, after an investigation, that he had bought it with a lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recently deceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came, that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of a hundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumes among the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.

In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes to the world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and not presenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforward English. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recently with novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuine autobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with some nausea. The second reason is that the hero, writing only of his own doings and his own witnessings and in his own day, necessarily omitted many details, obtainable by me from other sources, and useful not only for filling in the background of his narrative, but also that they throw light on some points that were not quite clear to himself.

THE ROAD TO PARIS.

CHAPTER I.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.

In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees, tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling. From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of wilderness life.

They arrived one evening at the wigwams of a Shawnee village on the verge of a beaver pond, and were received in so friendly a manner by the Indians that Wetheral decided to live for a time among them. Mercer, joined by some other enterprising newcomers from the old country, went farther westward; but the two friends were destined to meet often again. Wetheral built himself a hut near the Indian village and indulged to the full his love of hunting, fishing, and roaming the silent forest. Often he saw other white men, for already the Scotch and Irish and English had begun to build their cabins and to clear small fields on both sides of the Susquehanna, across which river there were ferries at a few infantile settlements. By 1750 so many other English and Scotch, some of the men having their wives with them, had put up log cabins near Wetheral's, and had cleared ground for farming all around, that the settlement merited a name, and took that of Carlisle. The Indians, succumbing to the inevitable, betook themselves elsewhere.

Wetheral, with all his love for the free life of the woods, welcomed civilization, for he was of gentle birth and of what passed in those days as good education, and had a taste for learning. His life was now more diversified. He not only hunted and fished, but also cultivated a few acres, and during a part of each year he did the duties of schoolmaster to the settlement,—for the Scotch-Irish, like the Puritans of New England, went in for book-learning. He sent the skins obtained by him in the chase to Philadelphia by pack-horse, and sometimes, for the sake of variety, accompanied them, passing, on the way, through the belt of country industriously tilled by the growing German Protestant population, and through that occupied by Quakers and other English, in the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. In his own neighborhood the people of the best manners and information were Presbyterians, and in course of time he came to count himself as one of them, less from religious ideas than from a natural wish to associate himself with the respectable and lettered element; for, much as he loved the roaming life of the hunter, he was repelled by the coarseness and violence and ill living of a certain class of nomadic frontiersmen who doubtless had good reason to keep their distance from politer communities.

He was one of the Pennsylvanians who went as pioneers in Braddock's fatal expedition, and on that he saw Colonel Washington. He marched with his old friend, Hugh Mercer, in the battalion of three hundred men under Col. John Armstrong, of Carlisle, in 1756, from Fort Shirley to the Indian town of Kittanning, which the troops destroyed after killing most of its hostile inhabitants. During a part of that year and of the next, he served in the provincial garrison at Fort Augusta, far north from Carlisle, and east of the Susquehanna.

Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder.

As the young wife, who was kind of heart and wise of head, desired to be near the roof whence she had fled, that a reconciliation might be the more easily attempted, Wetheral traded off his field and cabin at Carlisle, returned northward across the Kitocktinning mountains to the neighborhood of his wife's former home, built a log house of two rooms and a loft, near the left bank of the Juniata, a few miles above that river's junction with the Susquehanna, and there, in the month of April, 1758, he became the father of Richard Wetheral, the hero of this book.

The child's arrival was aided by his maternal grandmother, who had already melted towards the young couple, although her husband still held out against them. The surgeon whom Mr. Wetheral had summoned from Fort Hunter, which the settlers were garrisoning because of signs of an Indian outbreak, arrived too late to do more than pronounce the boy a healthy specimen and predict the speedy recovery of the mother, who was indeed of sturdy stock. The household whose different members the observant infant soon began to discriminate consisted of the father, whose dauntless and hearty character has already been slightly indicated; the mother, who was comely and strong in nature as in face and form; a younger sister of the mother's, and a raw but ready youth hired by the father to aid in working the little rude farm and in protecting the family from any of the now rampant Indians who might threaten it. For Mr. Wetheral's house was so near Fort Hunter that he chose to stay and occupy it rather than to take refuge within the stockade of the fort, which latter course was followed by many settlers of the near-by valleys when the Indian alarm came in the month of our hero's birth.

But the Wetherals were not molested by any of the Indians that roamed the woods in small parties, in quest of the scalps of palefaces, during the spring and summer of 1758. Often, though, there came news by horse and canoe, and carried from settlement to settlement, from farm-cabin to farm-cabin, of frequent depredations: how in York County Robert Buck was killed and scalped at Jamieson's house and all the rest of its dwellers were carried away; how, near at home, in Sherman's Valley, a woman was horribly killed and scalped; how, in July, Captain Craig, riding about seven miles from Harris's Ferry, was suddenly struck in the face by a tomahawk thrown from ambush, put spurs to his horse and fled from his yelling savage assailants, escaping by sheer speed of his animal, the blood flowing from the huge gash cut in his cheek by the well-aimed hatchet; how fared the soldiers who set off in search and pursuit of the red-faced enemy, and who were none other than the hardiest of the settlers themselves, accustomed to shoot Indians or bear, to burn out rattlesnake nests, or to farm the ill-cleared land, as occasion might require.

Thus the talk to which Dick Wetheral (for it was early settled that he should be called Richard, a favorite name in his mother's family) became accustomed, as soon as he knew what any talk meant, was of frightful perils and daring achievements. Such talk continued throughout all his childhood, though after 1758 the Indians were peaceful towards central Pennsylvania until 1763.

The boy early showed an adventurous disposition. His first explorations, conducted on all-fours, were confined to the two rooms on the ground floor of the house, but at that stage of his career a journey to the end of the kitchen from the extremity of the other apartment, which served as parlor and principal bedroom, was one of length and incident. New territory was opened to him to roam, on that eventful day when his aunt carried him up the ladder to the loft, which was divided by a partition into two rude sleeping-chambers, and in which he derived as great joy from being set at large as Alexander would have drawn from the discovery of a new world to conquer.

When the boy was in his second year, his world underwent a vast enlargement. This came about through his father's building a house to which the original log cabin of his birth became merely the rear wing. The new structure, made of logs covered with rough-sawn planks, destined to be annually whitewashed, provided two rooms on the ground floor, and two bed-chambers overhead. One of these lower rooms communicated by a door with the original log building, of which the ground floor was transformed, by the removal of the partition, into one large kitchen. From the new parlor a flight of stairs led to the room above, whence a low door and a few descending steps gave entrance to the old loft, so that the young explorer, by dint of long exertion, could reach the second story unaided. And now his days were full of experiences. From his favorite spot near the kitchen fireplace, to the farthest corner of the spare bedroom down-stairs, by way of the parlor (which was invariably called "the room"), was a trip sufficient for ordinary days. But in times of extraordinary energy and ambition, the crawling Dick would make the grand tour up the stairs and through the four second-story apartments, which seemed countless in number, and each a whole province in itself. So long ago was yesterday from to-day, at that time of his life, that this immense journey was full of novelty to him at each repetition, the adventures of one journey having been forgotten before another could be undertaken. And these adventures were as numerous as befell Christian in his Pilgrim's Progress. There were dark corners, queer-looking articles of furniture seemingly with life and expression, shadows of strange shapes, that made the young traveller pause and hold his breath and half turn back, until reassured by the sound of his aunt's voice calling to the chickens in the kitchen yard, his father or the hired man sharpening his sickle or calling to the plow-horse in the field beyond, or—most welcome and reassuring of all—his mother singing at her work in the rooms below.

What a great evening was that when the little indoor explorer found a fellow traveller! Dick was already in bed and asleep, having retired somewhat against his will, as he would have preferred to remain up until his father's return from a horseback journey on business down the river. When he was awakened by his mother, on whose face he saw a smile that promised something pleasant, he blinked once or twice in the candle-light, and looked eagerly around. He saw his father standing near his mother, and between the two a great black head whose long jaws were open in a kind of merry grin of good-fellowship, and from between whose white teeth protruded a red tongue that evinced an impulse to meet the wondering Dickie's face half way. The boy gazed for a moment, then threw out his hands towards the beaming face of the newcomer, and screamed with gleeful laughter. A moment later the dog was licking the youngster's face, while Dick, still laughing, was burying his fingers in the animal's shaggy black coat. Thereafter, the boy Dick was attended on all his expeditions by the dog Rover, and never were two more devoted comrades. The dog was a mixture of Scotch collie and black spaniel, and, though in size between those two breeds, looked a huge animal from the view-point of two years. If Dick required less than the usual grown-up assistance in learning to walk, it was because Rover was of just the size to serve as a support.

Dick now began to make excursions outdoors. Of course he had already spent much time in the open air, but always under the eye of some member of the household. His previous travels from the house had, by this guardianship, been robbed of the zest of adventure. The first trips abroad that he made independently were clandestine. Thus, one afternoon when the men were in the fields, and his aunt was busy tracing figures in the fresh sand that had been laid on the parlor floor, he availed himself of his mother's preoccupation over her spinning-wheel to sally forth from the kitchen door with no other company than Rover. His mother, humming a tune while she span, did not at first notice the silence in that part of the kitchen where Dick's presence was usually manifest to the ear. At last, the bark of Rover, coming with a note of alarm from a distance of several rods beyond the kitchen door, roused her to a sense of the boy's absence. With wildly beating heart she ran out, and towards the sound, which came from beyond the fruit-trees and wild grapevines that bounded the kitchen yard. She soon saw that Rover's call for help had reason. Little Dick was leaning over the edge of a deep spring, staring with amusement at his own image in the clear shaded water. Who knows but the nymphs of the spring would have drawn him in, as Hylas was drawn, had not the mother arrived at that moment, for the boy was reaching out to grasp the face in the water when she caught him by the waist?

Another time, it was not the warning bark of Rover, but the merest accident, that rescued the boy from a situation as perilous. His aunt, going into the little barn near the house, to look for eggs, saw him sitting directly under one of the plow-horses in a stall, watching with interest the movements of the animal's fore-feet, as they regularly pawed the ground. On being taken back to the house, little Dick was made to understand that solitary expeditions were forbidden, and in so sharp a manner that thereafter he rarely violated orders. He was carefully watched against the recurrence of temptation to travel. A constant source of terror to the mother, on Dick's account, was the nearness of the river, whose bed lay a few rods to the south, not far from the foot of a steep bank which fell from the piece of ground on which the house stood. This piece of ground was surrounded by a rude fence, and the boy spent many a longing quarter of an hour in looking through the rails at the river that flowed gently, with constant murmur, below. Between the river and the bank ran what some called a road, what may have formerly been an Indian trail, and what in Dick's time was really but a rough path for horses. It led from the farms farther back up the river, behind the azure mountains at the west, down to the more thickly settled country beyond the mountains at the east, and afar it joined the road to Lancaster and Philadelphia.

The boy's parents early taught him his letters, for the elder Wetheral had brought a few books with his meagre baggage from the old country, and had since acquired, from some of the settlers of the best class, a few more, two by dying bequest, two by gift, and four or five by purchase and trade. With the contents of some of these, Dick first became acquainted through his father's reading aloud on Sundays and rainy days, before the kitchen fire. One of these was Capt. John Smith's account of his marvellous achievements. Strangely enough, or rather naturally enough, the parts of this book that most interested Dick were not where Smith told of his adventures with Indians in America, but where he related his doings in Europe; for Indians and primitive surroundings were familiar matters to Dick, whereas accounts of the old world had for him all that charm which a boy reared in the midst of civilization finds in pictures of wilderness life. A few of the books were illustrated with prints, which the boy studied by the hour. One of these books was an odd volume of a history of the world, and contained mainly that part which related to France. It had crude engravings of two or three palaces, a few kings, three or four queens, a Catholic killing a Huguenot in front of the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, a royal hunt, and the Pont Neuf, backed by the towers of Notre Dame and flanked by buildings along the Seine. These rough pictures, thanks to some mysterious cause or other, exercised on little Dick a potent fascination.

"Who is that?" he asked his mother one day, pointing to a wood-cut that purported to portray a human being, as he lay sprawling on the floor, his favorite book opened out before him.

"That is a king," replied his mother, looking down from her sewing. The mother and the boy were alone in the kitchen.

"King David?"

"No; a king of France."

"King George?"

"No; King George is king of England, where your father came from, and your grandfather, and of America, where we are. France is another country."

"Where does this king live?" pointing to the wood-cut.

"He is dead now. He died long ago. He lived in a city called Paris, in the country called France."

"Is that a house?" The boy had turned to a supposed picture of the Louvre.

"Yes, a great, big house, a palace they call it, because it belongs to the king."

"Did it belong to that king?"

"Yes, I think so. It is in the city where I told you that king lived, Paris."

"Is this house in that city, too?" He indicated a building in the picture that showed the Pont Neuf.

"Yes." The mother laid down her sewing and stooped beside the boy. "And so is this house in Paris. And this. And this, too. All these houses are in Paris."

"Do all these people live there, the pretty ladies and soldiers?"

"They all did, I suppose."

"How many houses are there in Paris?"

"Oh, a great many thousand."

"More than there are in Carlisle?"

"Oh, yes! A hundred times more."

"Where is Paris?"

"Oh, very, very far away."

"Which way?"

"Why, that way, I think." She pointed towards the east. "Your father can tell you exactly, when he comes in."

"How far away is it? As far as Carlisle?"

"Much farther than that. Your father can tell you."

"As far as Lancaster?"

"Oh, farther. Farther than Philadelphia. Away across land and water."

"As far away as the farthest mountains yonder, the blue ones against the sky?" He had risen from the floor, and he pointed eastward through the open kitchen doorway.

"Oh, yes. If you went clear across those mountains, you wouldn't be near Paris yet."

"But if I went on and on, far enough, I'd get to Paris at last, wouldn't I?"

"Yes, at last," said the mother, smiling, and drawing the boy to her and kissing him, impelled by the mere thought of the separation his query suggested to the fancy.

When she returned to her sewing, he continued looking for awhile towards the distant east, then resumed his study of the pictures. At supper that evening he made his father laugh by asking which way a body should go, to get to Paris. His mother explained how his curiosity had been aroused. His father, laughing again, and winking at the mother, said:

"Why, boy, a body would have to start by the road that goes down the river to your grandfather's, that's certain. And if a body travelled long enough, and never lost his way, yes, he would surely get to Paris at the end."

"Would he be very tired when he got there?"

"Very tired, indeed, if he didn't rest several times on the way," replied Wetheral, Senior, keeping up the joke.

The next afternoon Dick's mother, having baked some cakes of a kind that she knew her husband liked hot, sent some of them by the boy to the two men in the field, which was not far from the house but was partly hidden therefrom by the barn and out-buildings and some fruit-trees. Dick, being now four years old, had often gone to the fields with his aunt or mother when water or food had been carried out to the men at work, and as the way did not lie near the river, there seemed no risk in sending him now alone. When, after due time, he did not return to the house, the two women supposed the men had kept him with them in the field. But this was not the case. Mr. Wetheral and the hired man, having seen little Dick tripping back towards the house, ate the cakes in the shade of a tree and returned with sickles to their attack on the wheat, with no thought of the boy but that he was now safe home. When they returned in the evening for supper, their surprise in not finding him there was reciprocated by that of the women at his not coming back with the men. The dog, which had accompanied him to the field and from it, also was missing. The men immediately started in search.

The boy by this time was some distance away. He had crawled through the fence, near the barn, descended the declivity to the horse-path by the river, turned his face eastward, and trudged resolutely on with Rover at his heels. It was some time before he would admit to himself that he was becoming a little tired, and that the stones and twigs in the way were bruising his bare feet perceptibly. At last he conceded himself a short rest, and, following Rover's example, leaned over where the bank was low and the river shallow, and drank. He was soon up again and going forward, forgetful of his former fatigue, and heedless that the sun behind him was nearing the horizon. So long a time is a day to a child! In the afternoon the doings of the morning are of the dim past, or are forgotten, while the evening is yet far away, and countless things may be done before the night comes. He could surely reach those farthest blue mountains in an hour or so, and a little walking thereafter must bring him to this strange, wonderful Paris, so entirely different from his own home and from his grandfather's place down the river. He would have to pass his grandfather's place, by the way, on his walk, and it never occurred to him how long a time it would take him to reach merely his grandfather's, so vague was his recollection of his former visits there. He could see Paris, the king and the palaces and the soldiers and the beautiful ladies and the great bridge, and return home by supper-time; and he would have so many things to tell that his father and mother would make his punishment a light one, or might even forget to punish him at all.

He came to a place where the path divided. After a moment's hesitation, he took the wider branch, which carried him from the riverside, straight into the unbroken woods. Presently this path ended abruptly, so that there was nothing before him but thick undergrowth. Rather than retrace his steps to reach the branch that he had rejected, which must be the one he ought to have taken, he started to reach it directly through the woods, moving towards where he thought it should be. He made his way cautiously, lest he might tread on some rattlesnake or other serpent, which could not be as easily seen in the dimness of the forest as in the path by the river. That dimness increased apace, and still he had not found the path. At last the boy paused, perplexed and a little appalled. The chill of evening came on. He was very tired now. He began to think of Indians, bears, and other savage things with whose existence in the neighborhood he was well acquainted, and of monsters of which he had heard from his parents, such as giants, lions, and other horrible things. Wherever his view lost itself in the dark arches of the trees, he imagined mysterious and frightful creatures were concealed, ready to appear at any moment. He summoned heart, and trudged on again. Finally it became so dark that he feared to proceed lest he might, at any step, land in a nest of snakes. Rover stopped close beside him, and looked in his face, as if for counsel. He put his arm around the dog's neck, and the two together sank down on some mossy turf at the foot of a tree. Rover curled up with his chin on the boy's shoulder, and Dick lay with his head on the dog's shaggy side. Dick would have cried, had his impulse ruled, but he was already too proud to make such an exhibition of weakness in the presence of Rover. Thus they lay while night fell. Now and then Rover raised his head a little and listened. The boy was too much overcome by his situation to think of what might ultimately befall. He could only wish, with an intensity as keen as could be endured, that he was home by his mother's side in the candle-lit kitchen, and nestle closer to the dog. The insects of the forest kept up an ear-piercing chorus of chirps, whirrs, and calls. At last reality melted imperceptibly into dreams, in which the boy was again toiling forward on the road to Paris. A terrible noise broke in upon his dream. Starting up, he found it was only the barking of Rover, a bark of eagerness and joy rather than of alarm or threat. A faint light approached slowly through the trees. It resolved itself at last into a lantern, and the huge dark object beside it became a man, who called out, as he came rapidly nearer:

"Dick, lad, are you there with the dog?"

A minute later the boy was in the arms of his father, who was striding back towards the path, while Rover ran yelping gleefully before and behind and on every side.

How short was the journey back to the house, compared with that which Dick had made from it in the afternoon! Almost before Dick had finished his explanation to his father, in somewhat incoherent speeches and a rather unsteady voice, they beheld the kitchen's open door, in which the mother stood waiting. She caught the boy in her arms, covered his face with kisses and tears, and declared he should never go out of her sight again.

"But I'll go some day, when I'm grown up," said little Dick, as he sat filling himself with supper a half-hour later. "I didn't know the road to Paris was so long."

And he didn't know his road to Paris should one day be taken with no thought of its leading him there, and how very roundabout that road should be.

CHAPTER II.
"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."

The next time Dick went far from home was when the hired man, John Campbell, took him past his grandfather's island, and thence on down the Susquehanna and into Sherman's Valley, whither Campbell was bent on a courting expedition. During his visit at the house of Campbell's friends, Dick attended the burning out of a snake-nest, an occasion that was participated in by settlers from all the country round. The nest was in a pile of rocks in some woods that a farmer intended to transform into a field for cultivation. Here rattlesnakes and copperheads throve and multiplied. Men with axes and sickles cleared a circle around the rock-pile, at some distance from it, and then set fire to the wood within. When the flame reached the snakes, for which there was no escape, their writhing was a novel sight. Dick, who at first enjoyed the spectacle as only a young boy can enjoy scenes of wholesale slaughter, at last came to being sorry for the victims, because they had no fair fighting chance. The loathsome odor that soon arose drove him away, so that he lost most of the rum-drinking and other jollification that followed the snake-burning.

Snakes, though he could pity those attacked with fire and at a disadvantage, were Dick's abomination. Their abundance was a chief reason why he dared not gratify his taste for roaming far from the house. As yet, when he came on one suddenly, he would act the woman,—that is to say, he would run in great fright, or sometimes stand still in greater, till help came or the snake fled of its own accord. It was several years before he had the courage, on hearing the shriek of some snake-affrighted harvesting woman in the fields, to vie with the men in running to her rescue. For a long time he envied the readiness with which his father, if confronted by a snake while reaping, would club it to death and then, sticking the point of the sickle through its head, hold it up for the other harvesters to see.

But there was a long season when the settlers need have no fear of rattlers and copperheads, nor of Indians, either; that was the winter. Dick was allowed to walk abroad a little more freely then, for the very reason that the cold was sure to bring him soon back again to the vast fireplace. There were other reasons than those of weather, why that fireplace was a magnet to Dick. There, in the time of little work, when the world outside was white and wind-swept, Dick's father would sit and read to the household, or tell of his fights and dangers on both sides of the ocean. There, when the cider went round, was great flow of joke and story and song. For Dick's father, though a man of strict standards of behavior, and outwardly stanch to his adopted sect, which in his neighborhood stood for decency and education, was a man of lively wit and of jocular turn of mind. Dick's mother, though of a severely Presbyterian family, and humbly religious, was of too kindly and cheerful a nature to be soured by piety, and too rich with the health of this pleasant earth to be constantly thinking of another world. She had sensibility and emotion, with the common sense and strength to control them. Her younger sister partook of the prevalent lightness of heart. Campbell, the hired man, whose raw stolidity was tempered by a certain taciturn jocoseness, contributed to the household mirth by the stupid wonder with which he listened to the others, the queer comments he sometimes made, and the snores with which he often punctuated the general conversation when he slumbered in his seat in the fireplace. Dick's place was opposite Campbell's, and when he sat there in the evening he could look up and see the stars through the top of the chimney. Rover's spot was at Dick's feet, whence in his dreams he would echo the snores of Campbell.

The father would tell of his share in Prince Charlie's defeat at Culloden, of his own escape and Dr. Hugh Mercer's to the Scottish port whence they had sailed; of that fatal march of Braddock's army towards Fort Duquesne, and the fearful death that blazed out from the seemingly empty woods around, and the conduct of the young Virginia colonel, Washington, and the night burial of the mistaken English general by torchlight in the dismal forest; of the march of resolute John Armstrong, the Scottish Covenanter, of Carlisle, to Kittanning, in 1756; the destruction of the Indian town, the slaughter of the Indian chiefs, and the wounding of nearly all Armstrong's officers; how Wetheral's friend, Mercer, a captain in the expedition, wounded and separated from his men, wandering for weeks alone in the forest, living on roots and berries, once repulsing starvation by eating a rattlesnake, at last came upon waters that led to the Potomac, and so reached Fort Cumberland. Wetheral told of George Croghan, the Indian trader, who had figured in Braddock's campaign; and of Captain Jack, called also the Black Hunter, the Black Rifle, and the Wild Hunter of Juniata, who with his band of hunters scourged the Indians in revenge for his wife and children slain and his cabin burnt while he was away hunting; and of other border heroes, whose names have not lived as long.

In Wetheral's earlier reminiscences, the name that oftenest reached Dick's ears, and most agreeably impressed them, was that of Tom MacAlister, a former fellow Jacobite, whom Wetheral had thought killed at Culloden, but who had turned up, to his great surprise and joy, a sergeant in Braddock's army in America, in 1755. Surviving Braddock's defeat, he had retreated with the remnant of the British army, and since then Wetheral had neither seen nor heard of him. Of all the characters that figured in his father's stories, Dick made MacAlister his favorite. This was not only on account of the warlike deeds he had done, or the jests he had perpetrated, or the comical scrapes he had figured in, or the pithy sayings that Wetheral quoted from him, or the fact that he had served as a soldier in many lands, but also for a circumstance connected with Dick's early acquired love of song. When Dick would express a liking for some particular one of the many tunes his father whistled or sang, the father would say to the mother:

"You ought to hear Tom MacAlister play that on his fiddle or pipe, Betty!"

And when the boy, pleased with the words of some ballad of which his father had remembered but a part, would eagerly demand the rest, the father would usually say:

"I don't know it, Dickie, lad. If Tom MacAlister were here, he could sing it all for you."

Thus Dick came to think of this Tom MacAlister, whom he had never seen, and could with little reason expect ever to see, as the source, of at least the repository, of all the songs that ever were written, and all the tunes that ever were composed. Dick dearly loved the sound of a fiddle, and whenever there was a wedding anywhere in the sparsely settled neighborhood he would beg his parents to take him behind one of them on horseback, or to let him go with John Campbell, that he might enjoy the scraping of the fiddles, while the rustic guests danced, and made merry with rum, hard cider, and peach brandy.

If he could only hear Tom MacAlister play the pipe or fiddle! If he could but once see that hero in the flesh, touch the hands that had performed so many acts of valor, behold the face that had been turned towards so many foes, hear the voice that had uttered so much wisdom, sung so many ballads, and could tell so many true tales of marvellous experience! To Dick, this much-talked-of Tom, who might no longer be among the living, was as a hero of legend, a Jack the Giant Killer, a Mr. Greatheart, a Robinson Crusoe.

Some of the songs sung by Dick's father, and by his mother, too, who had picked up most of her tunes from her husband, were Jacobite ballads. One snowy day, in Dick's fifth winter, his father, mending a bridle beside the fire, was heard by Dick to sing in a low voice:

"'There was a wind, it cam to me,
Over the south, an' over the sea,
An' it has blawn my corn and hay,
Over the hills an' far away.'"

Dick looked up from where he was sitting, by the legs of a skillet under which some brands were burning.

"Is that the tune it means when it says about Tom that was a piper's son, all the tune that he could play was 'Over the hills and far away?'" he asked.

"I don't know, son. There are a great many songs of 'Over the hills and far away.' Tom MacAlister used to sing them all."

Dick studied a moment, then asked:

"Who was Tom MacAlister's father?"

"A Highland man, and I've heard Tom say he was a great player on the bagpipe."

"Why, then," cried Dick, "maybe he was the Tom that was a piper's son!"

"I shouldn't doubt it in the least," replied Wetheral, with a wink and a smile at his wife.

But Dick's face, after glowing for a moment with the exultation of so great a literary discovery, soon fell.

"No," he said; "because Tom MacAlister could play hundreds and hundreds of other tunes, and Tom that was a piper's son could play only 'Over the hills and far away.'"

"Ay," said the father, "but then, you see, that song might have been about Tom MacAlister before he had learned any other tune than the one. I think he told me once that for a very long time he couldn't play any other."

Mrs. Wetheral smilingly shook her head in hopeless disapproval of the jocular deceit practised by her husband on little Dick; but the boy was too taken up with his discovery to observe her movement, and so from that day, to him, Tom MacAlister and Tom who was a piper's son were one and the same Tom.

But there came a time when neither singing nor fiddling was in season, and when reminiscences of past dangers in foreign lands gave way to fears of imminent dangers at home. This was in the spring of 1763, when Dick was five years old, but possessed of such strength and endurance as would be marvellous in a boy of that age nowadays. Almost as soon as the woods and fields were green again, and the orchards white and pink with fruit-blossoms, came news, from every side, of Indian surprises and alarms. The Pennsylvania tribes, such as the Delawares and Shawnees, once friendly to the English settlers, but rendered contemptuous of them by Braddock's defeat, had not ceased ravages against them, even after Wolfe's victory at Quebec in 1759 had made the English masters of the continent. It seemed now, in 1763, as if the redskins had mustered their strength for a decisive series of revengeful blows against the colonists. In from the west and down from the north they came, unseen, unheard, penetrating the whole frontier in small parties, striking without warning, often where least expected, destroying by rifle-ball, knife, tomahawk, and fire. No one knew when a painted band, armed for slaughter, might not suddenly appear as if by magic from the apparently solitary wilderness around. No settler's family could go to bed at night with the assurance that they might not be aroused before dawn by smoke and flames or by the unearthly shrieks of savages. Most of the settlers in the valleys south of the Juniata fled across the mountains to Carlisle. Some from the vicinity of the Wetherals took refuge in Fort Hunter, which consisted of a rectangular stockade, with a log blockhouse rising from the corner, and with cabins inside to serve indifferently as barracks for the Provincial soldiers and as temporary lodgings for the people of both sexes and every age who took refuge there.

Dick's grandfather, deciding to remain in his large and strong house on his island in the Susquehanna, invited the Wetherals thither, actuated in part, perhaps, by the consideration that his son-in-law would prove a notable addition to the home garrison. Wetheral accepted, for the sake of his family, although the reconciliation between himself and his stiff-necked father-in-law had never been more than merely formal. The Wetherals had no sooner joined the large family in the island mansion than there came word, by terrified refugees, of killings and burnings on the Juniata, quite near, as distances between neighbors then went, to Wetheral's house. Later came similar tidings up from Sherman's Valley. Houses of those who had fled were burnt, and, as summer advanced, a great deal of their grain was destroyed. When harvest-time came, several of the men who had fled returned in parties, well armed, to get in their crops. A party, strong in numbers, would go from farm to farm, taking in each harvest as rapidly, and bestowing it as securely, as possible.

At a certain time in July, one such party of reapers was working on the farm of William White, who lived not far from Dick's grandfather. This party had been reinforced by some of the men now at the latter's place, one of whom was John Campbell. The nearness of White's house, the large force of men there, and the fact that the Indians were thought to have gone out of the neighborhood, had enabled Dick to get permission to go with Campbell to this reaping, at which there was a famous fiddler from Tuscarora, of whom the boy had often heard. On Saturday evening, after the work was done, Dick revelled to his heart's content in the scraping of this frontier virtuoso. The reapers made merry so late that night, that they were quite willing to observe the ensuing Sabbath by resting most vigorously.

All the warm sunny morning, they lay on the floor of the principal room. Dick alone showed any disposition towards activity. While the men slumbered, or turned heavily over on the floor, or stared drowsily at the wooden ceiling, or stretched and yawned, Dick amused himself by climbing up the ladder to the loft overhead.

He had reached the round next to the top one, and was about to thrust his head up through the opening into the loft, when he heard a slight creak from the door of the room below. He looked in time to see it swing open, and three painted, naked, feather-crowned bodies appear in the doorway, each one behind a rifle whose muzzle was instantly turned towards some sleeper on the floor. Terrified into dumbness, Dick's gaze involuntarily turned towards the window opposite the door. The oiled paper that had served instead of glass had been swiftly and silently cut away with a knife, and three savage heads appeared above the window base, each shining eye directed along a different rifle-barrel towards one of the prostrate reapers.

Dick opened his mouth to cry out, but he could emit no sound. Before he could form a thought, the six rifles blazed forth in concert, and an instant later the room below was filled with smoke, shouts of pain, and furious curses. A terrible chorus of piercing war-screams from outside the house showed that the redskins who had crept up so silently were in large number. Dick tarried no longer, but sprang up into the loft and ran wildly to a little window at the end of it. He supposed that he had been seen and would be followed up the ladder.

He thrust out his head and looked down. This little window was over the one through which three of the savages had fired into the room down-stairs. He saw three other Indians aiming in through the lower window, while the first three were reloading their rifles. Others were shrieking their war-whoop and brandishing the knives and tomahawks with which they were to complete the work begun with the rifles. Up from the ladder hatchway, amidst the noise of heavy bodies falling and of the men rushing to their arms and yelling and swearing, came the sound of another volley, fired probably through the doorway. Dick drew his head in and waited with wildly beating heart, wondering what to do, and fearing to look back towards the hatchway lest he might see savages rushing up after him, with gleaming knives and upraised tomahawks. But none came. The noise from the room below indicated that knives, tomahawks, and guns had business enough down there.

After what seemed a space of several minutes, Dick cautiously looked again out of the window. He saw now but one savage, and that one soon disappeared through the lower window, into the room where his fellows were completing the slaughter of the unprepared reapers. The hideous shrieks of triumph that came up through the hatchway told clearly enough that victory was with the attacking party, and that the scalping-knife was already in use.

Suddenly Dick's blood turned cold. A sound of sharp, eager grunting, detached from the general hubbub below, arose immediately beneath the hatchway. A red hand appeared through the opening, grasping the loft floor against which the ladder rested.

The little window at which Dick stood was neither glazed nor papered. He went out through it, feet first; hung for a moment by his fingers to the ledge, then dropped to the ground below, fell on his side, scrambled to his feet, turned his back to the house of shrieking slaughter, and ran across the field towards the nearest woods. Though the direction in which he went took him farther from his grandfather's, he nevertheless did not stop or turn, on reaching the woods, but ran straight on, as fast as the irregularities of the ground would let him, and for once with reckless disregard of possible snakes, his only thought being to put the greatest distance between himself and the yelling murderers behind him.

After a long run, he stopped for lack of breath, and began to consider his situation, as well as the rapid beating of his heart would allow him to do. He regretted that he had not taken Rover with him to White's,—if he had done so, he might now have at least the comfort of the dog's society. At last he decided to make for his grandfather's, by a détour which would take him far from the house where the savages were now holding their carnival of blood. This détour required several hours, as his bare feet suffered from contact with stones, thorns roots, and the rough bark of fallen branches. Finally, on hearing a sound as of a horse's foot crunching into stony soil, a little to the left and ahead, he stopped and stood still. The sound continued. Could it be that he was near a bridle-path and that this sound indicated some solitary traveller? As yet he could see nothing moving through the thick forest. While he waited, a slighter sound close at hand, that of an instant's movement among bushes, suddenly drew his glance. From a mass of laurel near the ground, gleamed a pair of eyes directly at him, on a level with his own. He started back, thinking they might belong to a wildcat or some other crouching animal.

Instantly the owner of the eyes swiftly rose, and stood erect from the bush,—a naked Shawnee, daubed yellow, and carrying knife and tomahawk. Dick turned and ran, casting back one look, in which he saw the Indian hurl the tomahawk after him. The boy fell forward on his face just in time to feel the wind of the hatchet instead of the hatchet itself, which cleft the air directly over his head and lodged in a tree-trunk in front of him. The Indian, abandoning his intention of remaining in the bush, for which he had doubtless had his own reason, now glided after Dick, who had not half risen when he felt the Shawnee's fingers grasp his long hair, and saw the knife describe a rapid circle in the air in preparation for its descent upon his scalp. The boy cast one despairing look up towards the Indian's implacable face.

The stillness of the woods was suddenly broken by a loud detonation. Something dug into the Indian's breast, a horrible grimace distorted his face, a fearful cry came from his throat, his knife-blow went wide, and he leaped clear over Dick, retaining some of the boy's hair in his clutch as he went. The next moment he lay sprawling, face downward, some feet away. He stiffened convulsively, and never moved again.

Dick looked towards the direction whence the shot had come. In a little opening among the trees he saw a horse standing; on its back a tall, gaunt, brown-faced stranger, from whose rifle-muzzle a little smoke was still curling. The newcomer was apparently about forty years old; wore an old cocked hat, a time-worn blue coat, whose long skirts spread out over the horse's rump, a red waistcoat, patched green breeches, and great jack-boots that had known much service. His long brown hair was tied in a queue, and, besides his rifle, he carried before him an immense pistol. A long, projecting chin gave a grotesque turn to his features, whose grimness was otherwise modified by amiable gray eyes.

"Sure, sonny," he called out to the astonished and staring Dick, "it's the part of Providence I played towards ye that time; in return for whilk favor, tell me now the way to one Alexander Wetheral's house, if ye ken it."

Not sufficiently learned in dialects to note the stranger's mixture of Scotch and Irish with the King's English, Dick eagerly proffered his services and said that Alexander Wetheral was his father.

"What, lad! Gie's your hand, then, and it's in front of me ye shall ride hame this day. It's a glad man your father 'ull be, when he sees ye bringing in Tom MacAlister as a recruit, and no such raw one, neither!"

"THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY YEARS OLD."

Dick almost fell off the horse, to whose shoulders the stranger had lifted him.

Such was his first meeting with Tom that was a piper's son.

The two reached Dick's grandfather's without molestation, and the newcomer was duly welcomed. Lack of occupation in Europe, and the desire to be always enlarging his experiences, had brought him again to the New World, and in search of his early friend.

He had immediate opportunity to employ his courage and prowess. A few days after Dick's adventure, there came to his grandfather's house a settler named Dodds, with an account of how the same Indians who had shot the reapers at White's had thereupon gone to Robert Campbell's on the Tuscarora Creek, found Dodds and other reapers there resting themselves, and first made their presence known by a sudden deadly volley of rifle-balls. In the smoke and confusion, Dodds had made, unseen, for the chimney, which he had ascended by great muscular exertion while the massacre was proceeding in the room below. He had dropped from the roof and fled to Sherman's Valley, where he had given the alarm, which he was now engaged in spreading.

Dick's father and grandfather, with all the aroused settlers who could be summoned, speedily organized a party to make war on the savage invaders. In the expedition this force made, MacAlister was in his element. He was one of the detachment of twelve who overtook twenty-five Indians at Nicholson's house and killed several, at the cost of five of the white men. The chasing of Indians, and the fleeing from them, continued all summer. William Anderson was killed at his own house, depredations were committed at Collins's, Graham's house was burnt, and in September five white men were killed in a battle at Buffalo Creek. Finally a hundred volunteers, including Wetheral and MacAlister, went up the Susquehanna to Muncy, encountered two companies of Indians that were coming down the river, killed their chief, Snake, and drove the others back from the frontier. In the fall, the Wetherals, with their guest, went back to their own house, but not at the first waning of summer. Too many settlers, deceived by the earliest signs of winter, had in times past returned to their houses, thinking themselves safe from further Indian ravage; but, with the brief later season of warm weather, the Indians had reappeared for final strokes, and hence that fatal season received the name of Indian summer.

Tom MacAlister, impelled by his friendship for Wetheral, and by the charm that he found in the still wilderness, took the place formerly occupied in the household by John Campbell, who had been killed at White's. If not in the field, at least at the fireside and in the dooryard, he was a vast improvement upon his heavy-witted predecessor. With a fiddle, bought from a settler, Tom soon verified all the assertions Wetheral had made about his musical ability.

As 1763 was the last year of general Indian outbreaks in the neighborhood, the arts of peace thereafter had full opportunity to thrive in the Wetheral household. From childhood to pronounced boyhood, and then to sturdy youth, Dick Wetheral grew, to the constant accompaniment of Tom MacAlister's fiddle. Dick became, in time, a fairly capable tiller of the soil, an excellent horseman, a good hunter, a comparatively lucky fisherman. He was a straight shot at a distant wild turkey, a quick one at a running deer, and a cool one at a threatening bear. He was a great reader, not for improvement, but for amusement and because books gave him other worlds to contemplate. When he had read and re-read all the volumes of his father's little stock, he took means to learn who else owned books in the neighborhood. The owners were few and far between, and fewer still were the books possessed by any one of them. But what books there were, Dick hunted down, taking many a long ride in the quest, buying a volume when he could, or trading for it, or borrowing it.

Thus he made the acquaintance of Fielding's novels, and one or two of Smollett's, and of Shakespeare's plays, and from all these he acquired standards of gentlemanly conduct and manners, and ideals of feminine beauty and charm, which standards and ideals kept him alike from close association with the raw youths of the neighborhood, and from succumbing to the primitive attractions of any of the farmers' daughters. Slowly and imperceptibly, by his reading and his thoughts, he was, if not fitting himself for a vastly different world from the one about him, at least unfitting himself for the latter. One cause of his strong attachment to Tom MacAlister, after he had come to regard that worthy in a more accurate light, and no longer idealized him as the half mythical hero of his childhood, was that Tom represented the great world of cities and courts.

Tom was the son of a Scotch father and an Irish mother, and one of the two had a sufficient streak of English blood to account for Tom's length of chin. To his mixed ancestry was due his unique intermingling of brogues and accents. It was a question which was the greater, the severity of his visage or the drollery of his disposition. It was looked upon as a caprice of nature that a man of so sanctimonious an aspect should on occasion swear so hard, and that he who could drink so enormously of liquor should retain such meagreness of body. He advocated strict morality, though he admitted having himself been a sad lapser from virtue. He testified frankly to having broken "all the ten commandments and half a dozen more." He had been a great patron of the playhouses, could perform conjuring tricks, and was able to oppose a card-cheat with the latter's own weapons. As for religion, wherever he was, he took that, as he took the staple drink, "of the country," a practice which, he said, gave him in turn the benefit of all faiths, and saved him from a deal of inconvenience where piety ran strong. He had fought in 1743 with George II. against the French at Dettingen; "been out" with the Young Chevalier in 1745; followed Braddock to defeat in 1755; served under Frederick of Prussia, at Prague, Rossbach, and elsewhere; and had been under Prince Ferdinand, at Minden, in 1759. The disbandment of his regiment at the end of the Seven Years' War had put his services out of demand.

In winter evenings, before the flaming logs in the great chimney-place, when Tom was not recounting adventures he had experienced, or some he had imagined, or playing the fiddle, or taking huge gulps of hard cider or hot "kill-devil," he was singing songs; and of these the favorite in his list was one or other of the versions of "Over the hills and far away." First, there was the song with which Dick had been familiar since his infancy, and which for a long time he thought alluded to MacAlister himself, beginning thus:

"Tom he was a piper's son,
He learnt to play when he was young,
And all the tune that he could play
Was 'Over the hills and far away,'
Over the hills and a great way off,
And the wind will blow my top-knot off."

Then there was the one which, when it was sung by Tom, Dick took to be a bit of veritable autobiography:

"When I was young and had no sense,
I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence,
And the only tune that it would play
Was 'Over the hills and far away.'"

But what was the song itself to which these verses alluded? Tom knew and sang several, but was cloudy as to which was the particular one. That mattered little, however, as all went to the same tune. There was one artfully contrived to lure recruits to the king's service, thus:

"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."

Then there was one that Tom had heard at the play, sung by a gay captain and a dare-devil recruiting sergeant, and of which the latter half would fill Dick's head with longings and visions:

"Our 'prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel master's shoes,
For now he's free to sing and play,
Over the hills and far away.

"We shall lead more happy lives
By getting rid of brats and wives
That scold and brawl both night and day,
Over the hills and far away.

"Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.

"Courage, boys, it is one to ten,
But we return all gentlemen;
While conq'ring colors we display,
Over the hills and far away."

And there was a duet, which Tom had heard at the opera in London, and which he sang, imitating the respective voices of the highwayman and the adoring Polly.

The tune took a lasting possession of Dick, and the sweet-sounding recurrent line exercised upon him a witchery that increased as he grew. He chose for his bedroom the rear apartment of the loft over the kitchen, because its window looked towards the east, and his first glance at dawn, his latest at night, was towards the farthest hill-tops. There were hills to the west, too, a great many more of them; mountain ranges, from the straight ridge of the Tuscaroras, to the farthest Alleghanies; but Dick's heart looked not in that direction, where he knew there was but savage wilderness all the thousands of miles to the Pacific Ocean. Towards the east, where the live world was, he longed to wing. Strangely enough, so had circumstance directed, he never, till he was seventeen years old, travelled as far as to the farthest mountains in sight southward or eastward. His father had turned his back on the Old World, thrown his interests heart and soul with those of the new land, built up a well-provided home on the outer verge of civilization, joined irrevocably the advance guard of the westward march of men. What little business he had with towns could be done through the pack-horse men and wagoners. So Dick had only his imagination on which to call for an idea of the level country towards the sea. What was behind the hills? How he envied the birds he saw flying towards that distant azure band that backed the green hills nearer! Should it ever be his lot to follow them?

At seventeen Dick was a strong, lithe youth, five feet eleven inches tall, and destined to grow no taller; with a thoughtful, somewhat eager face, whose sharpness of feature and alertness of expression had some suggestion of the fox, but with no indication of that animal's vices; brown hair that fell back to its queue from a wide and open brow; and blue eyes both steady and keen. Such was his appearance one sunny spring morning when he started from the house to join the men in the field, from which the sound of his father's "whoa," and of Tom MacAlister's chirping to the plow-horses, could be heard through the blossoming fruit-trees in which the birds were twittering. He returned his mother's smile through the open kitchen window, at which she stood kneading the dough for the week's baking. As he went towards the lane which ran up in front of the house from the so-called road, he could hear her voice while she half unconsciously sang at her work:

"'Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.'"

He took up the tune and hummed it, and, though the cheerful solitude around him seemed ineffably sweet, he sighed as he followed with his eyes the course of a tiny white cloud towards the high blue eastern horizon. It was Saturday, next to the last day of April, 1775.

As he leaped over the rail fence, from the houseyard to the lane, he saw a horse turn into the latter from the road. He recognized the rider, a good-looking young man, one of the few in the neighborhood with whom Dick was intimate.

"Good morning, M'Cleland," said Dick, heartily. "Where from?"

"From Hunter's Mill, and I can stay only a moment to give you the news, if you haven't heard it." He stopped his horse.

"What news?" queried Dick, wondering whether it might be of another Indian war, like that of Lord Dunmore's in Western Virginia the preceding year; or whether there had been a renewal of the old feud between the Pennsylvanians and the Connecticut settlers up in the Wyoming Valley; or whether the English government had repealed or reinforced the Boston Port Bill. These were matters in which Dick and M'Cleland had both taken interest,—especially the last one, for nowhere had the difference between King and colonies, which quarrel had been growing ever since the passage of the Stamp Act ten years before, been more thoroughly discussed than in the Wetheral household, and nowhere was the feeling for resistance to the King more ardent.

"Great news," said M'Cleland, controlling his voice with difficulty, while his eyes sparkled with excitement. "On the nineteenth the King's troops marched out from Boston to take some ammunition the people had stored at Concord. At Lexington they met a company of minutemen, and there were shots and bloodshed. The whole country around rose and killed God knows how many of the regulars on their way back to Boston. When the messengers left Cambridge, there was an army of Massachusetts men besieging the King's soldiers in Boston. There's no doubt about it. At Hunter's Mill I saw the man who met at Paxton the rider that talked in Philadelphia with the messenger from Cambridge, who had affidavits from Massachusetts citizens. Tell your people. I'm off up the river. Get up!"

Dick never went any farther towards the field. He called in his father and Tom, and there was a long discussion of the situation. Wetheral said that Pennsylvania would be organizing troops, in due time, to back up Massachusetts, and that the only course was to wait and join such a force. But Dick would not hear of waiting. "Now is the time men are needed!" was his answer to every counsel. First make for the scene of war; it would be time to join the Pennsylvania forces when these should arrive there. The father gave in, at last, and the mother had nothing to oppose to the inevitable but the protest of silent tears. To her, the whole matter was as lightning from a clear sky. It was settled; the boy should go, the father should stay. The mother had a day in which to get Dick's things ready. As for Tom MacAlister, who was subject to no man's will but his own, his first hearing of the news had set him preparing for departure. As he tied his own horse to the fence rail the next day, to wait for Dick, he bethought him how of old his motto had been always "up and away again," and he marvelled that he had remained twelve years contented in one place.

It was not yet Sunday noon when Dick, who it was decided should share with Tom the use of the latter's horse on the journey to Cambridge, according to the custom known as "riding and tying," mounted for the first stage. He wore a cocked hat, a blue cloth coat altered from one his father had brought from England, a linsey shirt, an old figured waistcoat, gray breeches, worsted stockings, home-made shoes, and buckskin leggings; carried a rifle, a blanket, and a change of shirts; and had two gold pieces, long saved by his mother against the time of his setting up for himself. Tom MacAlister was dressed and armed exactly as at Dick's first meeting with him, his clothes having been temporarily supplanted by homespun during his years of farm service.

There was a lump in Dick's throat when he put his arms around his mother's neck, and felt against his cheek the tear she had striven to hold back. The last embrace taken, he gave his horse the word rather huskily, and followed Tom MacAlister, who was already striding down the lane. Turning into the road, Dick looked back, and saw his father, his mother, his aunt, and Rover, the last-named now feeble and far beyond the age ordinarily attained by dogkind, standing together by the fence. His father waved an awkward military salute, his mother forced a smile into her face, and the old dog made two or three steps to follow, as in the past, then stopped and looked somewhat surprised and hurt that Dick did not call him. One swift glance from the puzzled dog to his mother's wistful face, and Dick's home in the Pennsylvania valley passed from his sight forever. He cleared his throat, swallowed down the lump in it, and turned his eyes forward towards the east. Tom MacAlister's grim face wore a look of quiet elation, and he could be heard softly whistling, as he trudged on, the tune of "Over the hills and far away."

CHAPTER III.
AT THE SIGN OF THE GEORGE.

As they proceeded, Dick laughingly alluded to the time when, at the age of four, he had started out on this same road, thinking it would take him to Paris in a few hours.

"And wha kens," said MacAlister, in all seriousness, "but this same road may yet lead ye there, or to Chiney, for that matter? Him that sets out on a journey knowing where 'twill land him is a wiser man nor you and me, my son!"

Presently MacAlister fell behind, and was soon lost to sight as Dick rode on. By and by Dick dismounted, tied the horse to a tree by the path, and went on afoot. When he had walked about an hour, he was overtaken and passed by MacAlister, on the horse, which Tom, on coming up to it, had untied and mounted. Walking on alone, Dick in due time found the horse tied at the path's side, and mounted to overtake and pass Tom in turn. He caught up to his comrade at the place where, it had been decided, they should cross the Juniata, which they did on horseback together, partly by fording and partly by swimming the horse. Proceeding as before, and not losing the time to cross to the island for a visit to Dick's grandfather when they reached the Susquehanna, they came at nightfall to the house of a farmer on the west bank of that river, and lodged there. At early dawn they were on their way again, and just as the sun rose Dick reached the crest of the farthest mountains southeast of his home. Who could describe his feelings as he looked for the first time over the fair wooded country that rolled afar towards the purple and golden east? Did his mother, at this moment, looking towards the farthest azure line, know he was there at last, and that he saw what the birds had seen that he had so often envied when they flew eastward? "Get up!" he cried, and urged his horse down the eastern mountainside towards his future.

Riding and tying, the two comrades came to Harris's ferry-house, whence they crossed the Susquehanna in a scow, to the small collection of low buildings—stone residence, old storehouse for skins, blockhouse for defence, and others—which then constituted Harrisburg. While they were crossing, the ferryman at the pole entertained them with anecdotes of the parents of the John Harris of that day,—how they were sturdy Yorkshire people; how the wife Esther once in time of necessity rode all the way to Philadelphia in one day on the same horse; how she was once up the river on a trading trip to Big Island, and heard of her husband's illness and came down in a bark canoe in a day and a night; how she was a good trader, and could write, and had boxed the ears of many an Indian chief when he was drunk; how she could swim as well as a man and handle firearms as well as any hunter; how she worked at the building of her brick house five miles up the Susquehanna; how she once ran up-stairs and took from a cask of powder a lighted candle that her maid had mistakenly stuck in the bung-hole; how the then present John Harris was the first white child born thereabouts and was taken to Philadelphia to be baptized in Christ's Church. Dick would have liked to see the inside of the church at Paxton, three miles from Harrisburg, because one of his acquaintances, having got a girl into trouble, had made public confession before the congregation there, praying in the usual formula:

"For my own game,
Have done this shame,
Pray restore me to my lands again."

He would have liked, also, to seek out some member of the gang of "Paxton Boys" that had killed the Conestogo Indians in Lancaster County, in 1764, and get the other side of that story, which was generally accepted as one of unwarranted massacre of friendly natives. But the impulse to press forward overcame the other, and the travellers, having followed the left bank of the Susquehanna, by the road which had been in existence from Harris's since 1736, lodged on the second night of their journey at a wooden tavern in the village of Middletown. The next morning they turned directly eastward, their backs towards the Susquehanna, and proceeded on the road to Lancaster. They now entered the band of country settled by German Protestants, whose fertile farms gave the slightly undulating land a soft and smiling appearance.

At noon, dining at a rude log hostelry, more farmhouse than tavern, they were invited to drink by two thin, middle-aged, merry fellows, in brown cloth coats and cocked hats, who said they were Philadelphia merchants returning from a view of some interior land which they intended to purchase for the purpose of developing trade. They invited Tom and Dick to drink with them, laughed so boisterously at Tom's sage jokes, and expressed so much admiration of Dick's intelligence and book-learning, that when all four left the tavern to proceed eastward, Dick and Tom, seeing that the two jolly merchants were afoot, took counsel together and agreed to share with them the use of the horse. This generous idea was engendered by a hint that one of the merchants made in jest. The horse was a huge animal and could easily bear any two of four such thin men as were those concerned. Lots were cast to determine which two should be the pair to mount first. One of the two merchants held the straws, and as a result of the drawing he and his companion got on the horse together and started. A turn in the road hid them from view in half a minute. Dick and MacAlister were about to follow afoot, when they were reminded by the tavern-keeper that the drinks taken at the merchants' invitation were yet to be paid for.

"Bedad," said Tom, "our friends were so busy laughing at my tale of the ensign's wife at the battle of Minden, they forgot to settle the score." Dick, who had been provided with sufficient silver to see him to Philadelphia, besides his two gold pieces, speedily paid the bill, and the two comrades resumed their journey. After several minutes of silence, Tom expressed some belated surprise at the fact that two substantial merchants should be travelling afoot. Dick replied that there must be some interesting reason for so unusual a circumstance. "Ay," said Tom, "we'll speer them when we catch up to them." The two trudged on. By and by Dick began to look, each time the road made a turn, for the horse standing at the side of the way, accordingly to agreement. An hour had passed since the tavern had been left behind. Another hour followed. At last Dick broke the silence:

"Is it likely our friends may have lost their way?"

Tom MacAlister drew a deep breath and replied:

"Devil a bit is it them that's lost their way! It's us that's lost our horse."

"Why, what do you mean? Two such worthy Philadelphia merchants!"

"Philadelphia nothing! I'll warrant they do be a pair of rascals from the Connecticut settlement in the Wyoming Valley, turned out of the community for such-like tricks as they've played on us new-born babes. That's the effect on me of twelve years' residence in the wilderness. My son, it's time we throwed off our state of innocence and braced ourselves to meet the mickle deviltry of the world. Richard, lad, I tell it to ye now, though ye'll no mind it till ye've had it pounded into ye by sore experience, your fellow man is kittle cattle, and your fellow woman more so!"

They might have had to walk all the way to Lancaster but that they were overtaken by a train of pack-horses from Carlisle, and paid the pack-driver to shift the horses' loads and give them the use of one of the animals. At evening they arrived at Lancaster, which then had some thousands of inhabitants and was to Dick quite a busy and town-like place. He saw the prison where the Indian chief Murhancellin had been confined on being apprehended by Captain Jack's hunters for the murder of three Juniata men the previous year. Dick went to see the barracks, the Episcopal and German churches, and a house where some of the famous Lancaster stockings were made. He gazed with wonder and hidden disapproval at the long beards of the Omish men, and enjoyed the bustle of horses and wagons before the excellent tavern where he and Tom passed the night. The next morning the two got seats in one of the huge covered wagons engaged in the trade between Philadelphia and the interior. They dined at the Duke of Cumberland Tavern, and put up at evening at the sign of the Ship, thirty-five miles from Philadelphia. This distance was covered the next day, and a little before sunset, the wagon having crossed the picturesque Schuylkill by the Middle Ferry and passed under beautiful trees down the High Street road, through the Governor's Woods and by brick kilns and verdant commons, and across little water-courses spanned by wooden bridges, Dick set his eyes on Philadelphia, whose spires and dormer windows reflected the level sun rays, and whose trim brick and wooden houses rose among leafy gardens. The town then had about thirty thousand people, and lay close along the Delaware, its built-up portion extending at the widest part about seven or eight streets from the river, not counting the alleys and by-streets. As the wagon lumbered down High Street, which was then popularly (as it is now officially) known as Market Street, Dick kept his emotions to himself, satisfying his curiosity without betraying it, and in no outward way disclosing how novel to him was the actual sight, which neither excelled nor fell short of the scene he had so often imagined, much as it differed from it in general appearance. At Fourth Street, as the wagon continued east, the houses began to be quite close together. At Third, the markets began, and ran thence down the middle of the street towards the Delaware. The wagon, with its eight horses, stopped for some reason at the Indian King Tavern, near Third Street, whereupon Tom and Dick, having settled with the wagoner, and not intending to lodge at that inn, proceeded afoot down Market Street, a part of which was paved with stones and had a narrow sidewalk for foot-passengers. This last-named convenience was one that even some of the first cities of Europe then lacked.

The animation of the streets quite put to shame Dick's recollections of the little bustle at Lancaster. The rifles and baggage of the two did not attract much attention among the citizens and tradespeople, in those days of much hunting, and especially at a time when there was already talk of new military companies forming, when the provincial militia was drilling and recruiting, and when men were coming to town to offer the colonies their services in the event of general revolt. Delegates were already arriving from other colonies to attend the Second Continental Congress, which was to meet on the tenth.

As the two comrades approached the London Coffee House, at Front and Market Streets, they saw three well-dressed citizens issue from the door and greet with the utmost respect a stocky old gentleman who had just turned in from Front Street, and whose face was both venerable and worldly, kind and shrewd, while his plain brown coat took nothing from his look of distinction, and his walking-stick seemed quite unnecessary to one whose vigor was still that of youth. He cordially responded to the three gentlemen, the first of whom detained him for the purpose of introducing the third. The name by which the old gentleman was addressed startled Dick for the moment out of his self-possession, and he stopped and stared with unfeigned curiosity and pleasure. It was his first sight of a world-famous man, and the writer of Poor Richard's Almanac, whose proverbs every Pennsylvanian knew by heart, the celebrated philosopher, the wise agent of the provinces, who had just returned from London, lost nothing in Dick's admiration from the youth's visual inspection of his face and person.

While Doctor Franklin stood talking with the three, Dick and Tom went on past Front and Water Streets, turned down along the wharves, and presently arrived at their recommended destination, the Crooked Billet Inn, which stood at the end of an alley on a wharf above Chestnut Street. The two engaged lodging for the night, bestowed their belongings, and went for supper to Pegg Mullen's Beefsteak House, at the southeast corner of Water Street and Mullen's Alley. Having devoured one of the steaks for which that house was famous, and as it was not yet dark, Dick proposed a walk about the city. But Tom demurred as to himself, and said in a low tone, turning his eye towards a party of young gentlemen who sat at a near-by table:

"Go and see the sights, lad, and ye'll meet me at the Crooked Billet some time before the hour of setting out, the morning. I've other fish to fry, for a private purpose of my own. And should ye see me in company with yon roisterers, mind to call me captain or not at all, for I'm bent on introducing myself to their acquaintance, and that'll require me belonging to the quality."

Dick looked at the group indicated, which consisted of a handsome, insolent-looking young man of about twenty-five and three gay dogs of the same age, whose loud conversation had dealt exclusively with cards and other implements of fortune. With no hope or wish of fathoming MacAlister's designs, Dick paid the bill (for his friend was almost without money), and left the eating-house. He first inspected parts of Water and Front Streets, where many rich merchants lived over their shops; then viewed the handsomer residences in South Second Street; saw the City Tavern and some of the well-dressed people resorting there; looked at Carpenter's Hall, where the Congress had met the preceding year; walked out to the State House, crossed Chestnut Street therefrom, to drink at the sign of the Coach and Horses, the old rough-dashed tavern nestling amidst great walnut-trees; loitered on the bridge to look down at Dock Creek each time he crossed that stream. When, at dusk, the street lamps were lighted (for, thanks to Franklin, Philadelphia had long possessed the best street lamps in the world), the town assumed what to Dick was a fairylike appearance. Of the people he saw in the streets, perhaps a third wore the broadbrims of the Quakers. A few of the faces were of the German type, but most were of the unmistakable English character, and from such of these as were not Quaker a trained observer might easily have picked out a Church of England person or a Dissenter at sight. On first entering the city Dick had been struck with the prettiness of the young women, but now that night had fallen and he had returned to the vicinity of the river, the few of the fair that he saw abroad were of rather bedraggled appearance.

As he walked along the wharves, listening to the lap of the tide against the piles and vessels, he heard a sharp scream of mingled pain and anger, in a feminine voice. Looking quickly towards the wharf whence it came, he saw, in the light from the corner of a small warehouse, a young woman recoiling from the blow of a sailor who was about to strike her again. She dodged the second blow, and the sailor made ready to deliver a third, but before he could do so Dick's fist landed on the side of his head and he dropped to the wharf, dazed and limp. Dick then took off his hat to the woman, who was a slender creature of about twenty, dressed with a cheap attempt at gaiety. With quite attractive large eyes, she quickly viewed Dick from head to foot.

"Rely on my protection, madam," said he, tingling with exultation at having had so early an opportunity to figure as a rescuer of assailed womankind.

"I am afraid he will follow me," said the girl, in a low tone, glancing at the sailor, after her examination of Dick's appearance.

"He will do so at his peril, if you'll accept my arm to the place where you are going," said Dick, with great gallantry and inward self-applause.

The girl took the proffered arm, cast a final look at the sailor, who was foggily trying to get on his legs, and led Dick off at a rapid gait. They had turned into an alley towards Water Street before the sailor had fully regained his senses. Up Water Street the girl went, giving Dick the opportunity to see, by a window light or a street lamp here and there, that her features, though pale, were well formed. For beauty they lacked only something in expression. After passing several streets, the girl turned into another alley that led towards the river, stopped at a mean two-story wooden house half way down, and asked her preserver to come in and accept some refreshment. He did so with alacrity, and found himself in a small room beneath the rafters, the floor bare, the single window broken in most of its small panes, a tumble-down bed taking up half the apartment, a broken wooden chair beside a dressing-table, the whole lighted by a single tallow candle that the girl obtained down-stairs. Without consulting her guest, she called to some invisible person below for brandy and water, with two tumblers. Dick sat on the chair, his hostess on the bed, both in silence, till the liquor was brought by a fat, red-faced woman with unkempt hair, who grinned amiably at Dick, and departed only after several suggestive looks at the brandy. Her fishing for an invitation to partake was all in vain, being unobserved by the inexperienced Dick.

When he was alone with the heroine of his first adventure, and the brandy had been tasted, Dick undertook to overcome her reticence, being sure that she had some story of unmerited misfortune to tell. She soon gratified him with a tale as harrowing as might have been found anywhere in fiction. She was the daughter of people of quality who had lost their all through the schemes of designing persons, and her only weapon against starvation was her needle. She had that evening delivered some sewing to the wife of a sea-captain on his vessel, which was to sail that night, and it was on her return therefrom that she had been accosted by the sailor, whose blows were elicited by the repulse she had given him. Her face became more animated as she talked, and Dick began to think her fascinating. Brandy was called for and served repeatedly, and at last the red-faced woman who brought it said she was going to bed and could serve no more that night, and her bill was ten shillings. Dick promptly paid, forgetting that he was the invited guest, and not neglecting the occasion to show in a careless way how much money he carried. The girl then told him that, as he would certainly find his tavern closed should he return to it at so late an hour, she would, in spite of appearances and on account of his character and his services to her, share her own poor accommodations with him for the rest of the night. As Dick was now in a state in which he would have solicited this favor had it not been offered, he readily accepted.

When he awoke, at dawn, he found himself alone. Taking up his waistcoat to put it on, he noticed that a certain inner pocket did not bulge as usually. A swift investigation disclosed that all his money had disappeared, silver as well as gold. There was not a sign of his hostess left in the bare, squalid room. He hastened down the steep, narrow stairs, and met, in the entry below, the red-faced servitor, of whom he inquired the whereabouts of the girl. The fat woman professed entire ignorance of all occurrences since she had left the young people the night before. From that moment to this, she said, she had slept like a top, and from her reply Dick learned that she was the proprietress of the house, and that the unfortunate daughter of people of quality was a new lodger, of whom she knew nothing. A theory formed itself in Dick's mind, and he hastened from the house to the Crooked Billet, where he was astonished to find Tom MacAlister just arrived from a night, like Dick's, passed elsewhere than at that inn. Dick rapidly recounted his adventure to Tom, over a morning glass at the bar, and ended his narration with the words:

"Do you know what her disappearance means?"

"What?" grunted Tom.

"It means that my robbers have carried her away in order to silence all evidence of their crime! Or, maybe, the sailor tracked us and procured a gang to abduct her, and robbed me in doing so, either in revenge or to pay his accomplices!"

"Huh! Ye're ower fu' of them there things ye read in the novel-books, Dickie, lad."

"By George, this proves that real life is sometimes very like the novels! I hope this affair will end like them. We must find the girl, Tom; we must rescue her!"

"Be jabers, we maun be spry about it, then, for the New York stage-coach starts from the sign of the George in an hour."

"Come, then! But I won't leave Philadelphia till I've found her, though we have to wait for another day's stage-coach. Come, Tom, for God's sake don't be so slow!"

Tom indeed walked so deliberately from the Crooked Billet that Dick had to accelerate his progress by tugging at his arm. Dick hurried him up along the wharves, without the slightest plan of action formed. "Bide a wee," said Tom, presently; "sure, there's no arriving anywhere till ye've laid out your line of march. Come wi' me into yon tavern, and we'll plan a campaign in decency and order." Dick saw the good sense of this, and turned with Tom up an alley towards a wretched-looking place, of which the use was indicated alike by its dirty sign and by the sounds of drunken merriment issuing from its windows. As Dick and Tom entered, they saw by whom those sounds were produced,—a sailor and a young woman drinking together in great good-fellowship at a table. Dick recognized both,—the sailor whom he had knocked down the night before, the girl in whose defence he had knocked him down. Both looked up as he entered, and the girl burst out laughing in a jeering, drunken fashion. "That's him," she said to her companion, who thereupon began to bellow mirthfully to himself, regarding Dick with mingled curiosity and amusement.

"Wha might your friends be?" queried MacAlister of Dick.

"Come away," said Dick, a little huskily; and when the two were out in the alley, whither the derisive shouts of the pair inside followed them, he added, "If the stage goes in an hour, we'd better be taking our things to the sign of the George."

"But your money? 'Twas a canny quantity of coin ye had in the bit pocket there."

"Damn the money! I couldn't prove anything, and I want to get away from here. But—by the lord, how can we go on without money?"

"Whist, lad! If some folk choose to spend the nicht a-losing of their coin, there's others knows how to tell a different tale the morning. Do ye mind the braw soldier-looking lad I proposed to thrust my company on, in the beefsteak house? If I didn't introduce myself as Captain MacAlister, retired on half pay from his Majesty's army, and if I didn't pile up a bonny pile of yellow boys through handling the cards wi' him and his pals in his room at the George all nicht, then I'm seven kinds of a liar, and may all my days be Fridays! Oh, Dickie, lad, a knowledge of the cards, ye'll find, comes in handy at mony a place in the journey through this wicked, greedy, grasping world!" And old Tom made one of his pockets jingle as he finished.

The two travellers returned to the Crooked Billet, paid for the lodging they had not used, got their weapons and baggage, and went to Second Street and thereon north to Arch, at the southwest corner of which the sign of St. George battling with the dragon hung before the fine and famous inn where the stage-coaches departed and arrived. The "Flying Machine" was already drawn up before the entrance, the horses snorting and pawing in impatience to start. Dick and Tom saw their belongings safely stowed in the coach, which was a flat-roofed vehicle simple and plain in shape, and loitered before the inn, watching the hostlers and enjoying the fine spring sunshine, while MacAlister gave Dick a further description of the card-playing young man from whom much of the money had been won.

"I took the more joy in winning," added Tom, "for because the young buck showed himsel' sic a masterfu', overbearing de'il and ill-natured loser, not at all like his friend wi' the French name, who dropped his round shiners like a gentleman. And mind here, now, take heed to call me captain should they fa' in wi' us on the way to New York, for, frae the talk of them, I conjecture that them and the Frenchman's sister start the morning hame-bound for Quebec, on their ain horses."

"Do they come from Quebec?"

"Ay, on business for the Frenchman and his sister, wha, it seems, cam' in for the proceeds of some estate in this town, them being of English bluid on the mother's side. That I gathered frae the Frenchman's talk wi' a man of the law wha called while his hot-headed friend and me and the others were at the cards. Ah, now I mind the friend's name,—Blagdon, Lieutenant Blagdon; for, bechune you and me, he's a King's officer on leave of absence frae Quebec, only he keeps it quiet just now, lest the mob might throw a stane or two his way."

"Then what's he doing here?"

"Bearing company to the Frenchman and his sister. It's like there's summat bechune him and the girl, though devil a bit could I find that out, wi' all my speering. But come, lad, while we ha' our choice of seats."

They entered the coach, where they were soon joined by other passengers. While Dick was watching the driver on the front seat take up lines and whip, three horses were brought from the yard, and at the same time two young gentlemen and a young lady came out of the inn and stood ready to mount. Dick did not observe them until his attention was called from the driver by some low-spoken words of MacAlister's:

"That's a sour-faced return for a friendly salutation! 'Tis the English lieutenant that gave me a scowl for my bow. Sure, the French Canadian has more civility."

By this time the three were mounted. Dick at once recognized the robust but surly-looking young man on the right as the arrogant talker of the beefsteak house, and the rather slight but good-looking and well-mannered youth on the left as one of the other's companions there. The lady between the two was partly concealed from Dick's view by the English officer, until with a crack of the driver's whip the stage-coach pulled out, when, by looking back, he had a full sight of her. The sight caused his lips to part and himself to throw all his consciousness into his eyes alone.

Catherine de St. Valier, daughter of a younger branch of the noble French Canadian family of that name, was then in her seventeenth year, tall and well developed for her age, in carriage erect without stiffness, her face oval in shape with chin full but not too sharp or too strong, nose straight and delicate, dainty ears, forehead about whose sides hair of dark brown fell in curves but left the middle uncovered, brows finely arched and high above the eyes, which were of a piercing black and never too wide open, full red lips, complexion pale but clear, with a very faint touch of red in each cheek, her countenance dignified and made doubly interesting by a slight frown ever present save when she smiled, which was rarely and then naturally and with no gush of overpowering sweetness. The slightly thrown-back attitude of her head was no affectation, but was a family characteristic, possessed also by her brother.

"What is it, lad?" whispered MacAlister, catching Dick's arm. "Sure, ye'll be leaving that head of yours behind ye in the road if ye bean't carefu'!"

"Sure," Dick murmured, as he drew his head in, "I think I've left this heart of mine back yonder under the sign of the George."

Tom gave a low whistle. "Weel, weel," he then said, "it 'ull soon catch up, for this Flying Machine, as they call it, is no match for them Virginia pacers the Canadian folk is mounted on."

This prediction was soon fulfilled. Ere the stage-coach had passed the outskirts of the city, a little above Vine Street, the three riders had cantered by at a gait that promised soon to take them far ahead.

"Nay, don't be cast down," quoth Tom. "We're like to run across them on the journey, and they'll have to wait in New York for their baggage, which goes by wagon. I mind now, frae the gentlemen's talk, they'll go up the Hudson by sloop till Albany, then by horse again to Montreal, and then by the St. Lawrence to Quebec. What a pity they don't be bound for Boston,—eh, lad! But whist, Dickie! The sea do be full of good fish, and it's mony a sonsie face ye'll be drawing deep breaths about, now ye're over the hills and far away,—and ganging furder every turn of the coach-wheels."

CHAPTER IV.
OF A BROKEN SABBATH AND BROKEN HEADS.

In those days the tri-weekly stage-coaches made the trip from Philadelphia to New York in the unprecedented time of two days, passing Bristol and several other thriving Pennsylvania villages, taking ferry over the Delaware River to Trenton, which then consisted mainly of two straggling streets and their rustic tributaries; bowling through New Jersey woods and farms and hamlets, and crossing ferries and marshes to Paulus Hook, where the passengers alighted and boarded the ferry-boat for the city whose fort, spires, and snug houses adorned the southernmost point of the hilly island of Manhattan. Several times, during the first day of their trip, Dick and MacAlister had brief sights of the three Canadians, who sometimes fell behind the stage-coach, and as often overtook and passed it again. Dick nursed a hope of meeting the party at dinner, or at the tavern where the coach should stop for the night, yet he inwardly trembled at thought of such a meeting, knowing how awkward and abashed he should feel in the presence of that girl. His hopes, however, were disappointed, for, though the riders stopped where the stage did, they ate in private rooms, and the only one of the party who came into the bar or public dining-room anywhere was the English lieutenant, Blagdon, who ignored MacAlister, and bestowed on Dick only a look of disdain.

On the second morning the Canadians, as before, started with the stage and were soon out of sight ahead. Dick kept a lookout forward, while MacAlister engaged in talk with the other passengers, with whom his narrative powers had by this time made him highly popular. For a long time Dick was rewarded with no glimpse of the scarlet riding-habit his eyes so wistfully sought. But at last, at a turn of the road, it came into view against the green of the woods. Strangely, though, it was not on horseback. The two young gentlemen stood beside the girl in the road, and not one of their three animals was to be seen. All this was quickly noticed by the others in the stage-coach, who uttered prompt expressions of wonder, while the driver whipped up his four horses.

When the coach came up, Lieutenant Blagdon hailed the driver, who immediately stopped.

"We are in a predicament," began the young lieutenant, in an annoyed and embarrassed manner. "Half an hour ago, as we were riding by these woods, several wild-looking ruffians rushed out from these bushes on either side of the road, with pistols and fowling-pieces, which they aimed at us, and demanded our money and horses. We were so completely taken by surprise, our anxiety for this lady's safety was so great, we could not have drawn our pistols before they could have brought us down,—in short, we had to yield up our horses and what little money we carried, and the robbers made off by the lane yonder, leaving us here."

From the passengers came cries of "Outrage!" "See the authorities!" and "Alarm the county!" When others had had their say, Tom MacAlister was for organizing a pursuing party of the passengers, and was seconded by a reverend-looking gentleman, who asked if one of the robbers was not blind of an eye.

"The affair was so quickly over, I for one did not notice any peculiarities of appearance among them," answered Blagdon.

The young Frenchman, standing with his sister at the edge of the road, now spoke, in perfectly good English: "One of them called another Fagan, in ordering him to keep quiet; and said 'That's right, Jonathan,' to one who said we shouldn't delay in hope of assistance, as they would shoot us at the first sound of wheels or horses coming this way."

"That makes it certain," said the clerical-looking man; "they are the Pine Robbers, as we call them in our part of Monmouth County, where they are a great curse. It is surprising, though, that they should venture so far inland and from their burrows in the sand-hills by the swamps near the coast. I can be of use in tracking them, as I live at Shrewsbury, which is not far from the swamps they inhabit and the groggeries they resort to."

But the officer, learning from further talk that proper steps for the recovery of the property might require several days, and yet fail, said the attempt was not to be thought of; that the horses were the only considerable loss, as his party had relied on money to be taken up in New York, and that therefore they could do no more than take places in the stage-coach for that city.

As the inside places were all filled, and one of them would be required for the girl, Dick was out in the road in an instant, blushingly blundering out to the Frenchman an offer of his seat to the lady, with the declaration that he would ride outside,—which in those days meant on the flat roof of the coach. The Frenchman bowed thanks and held out his hand to lead his sister to the coach; but she stood reluctant, and said:

"But the portrait, Gerard!" As she spoke her eyes became moist.

"I fear we must lose it, Catherine," said Gerard, sadly.

"If I can be of any service," said Dick, speaking as calmly as his heartbeats would let him, and meeting with hot cheeks the first look the girl's fine eyes ever cast upon him.

"I thank you," said Gerard, "but I fear nothing can be done. My sister speaks of a miniature portrait of our mother, who is dead. One of the robbers, the one called Jonathan, seeing the chain by which it was suspended from her neck, tore it from her and carried it away."

"I will try to recover it, sir," said Dick, bowing to the girl while he addressed the brother. Hearing a derisive "Huh!" behind him, Dick turned and saw Blagdon viewing him with a contemptuous smile, which was assumed to cover the chagrin caused by Dick's undertaking a task the officer himself had shirked. Dick reddened more deeply, with anger, but said nothing and went to the coach for his rifle and baggage. MacAlister, always accepting whatever enterprise turned up for him, promptly got out, with his own belongings, as also did the reverend gentleman, who explained that he had intended leaving the coach at the next village, to go thence by horse to his home at Shrewsbury. The vacant places were taken by the Canadians, accounts were settled with the driver, Gerard de St. Valier courteously thanked Dick again, giving him a New York address but begging him to reconsider so desperate a project, Catherine sent back one grateful but hopeless look, the driver cracked his whip, the coach rolled off, and the three men were left alone in the forest-bordered road.

After a brief consultation, in which it came out that the clerical gentleman was the Reverend Mr. McKnight, the Presbyterian pastor of Shrewsbury, it was decided that the three should go back to the last village passed, which was nearer than the next one ahead, hire horses there, then return, and make for Shrewsbury by way, first, of the lane down which the robbers were said to have fled. They would stop at Freehold, report the robbery to the county authorities, and call for the services of sheriff and constable in hunting down the malefactors.

"If the loss were merely of money and horses," said the pastor, as the three trudged along with their baggage on their backs, "I should not stir far in the matter, seeing that the losers are apparently well supplied with this world's goods. But the young lady's sorrow at the loss of the keepsake was too much for me. It will be a kind of miracle if we get it back. The man Fagan is a desperate rascal, and so, for that matter, are Jonathan West and all the others. The man whom those young people heard giving orders to the rest was doubtless Fenton, who learned the blacksmith's trade at Freehold and was an excellent workman at it before he took to crime. These men will stop at nothing. When they are not at refuge in their sand-caves on the edges of swamps, among the brush, they are plundering, burning, and killing, by night, or spending their ill-gotten money at some low groggery in the pines. They will rob anything, from a poor tailor's shop to a wagon carrying grain to mill, and, though it doesn't sound like Christian charity to say so, they ought to be hanging now in chains from trees, as they probably will be some day."

At the village, so much time was lost in obtaining horses, that it was dark before the three arrived at Freehold, and therefore they put up for the night at the tavern next the court-house, which abode of justice was of wood, clapboarded with shingles, and had a peaked roof. In the tavern it was learned that Fenton and his gang had been seen passing two miles east of the court-house, that afternoon, going towards Shrewsbury, three on horseback, the others in a wagon. Mr. McKnight visited a justice of the peace, the sheriff, and the constable; but, as it was now Saturday night, those useful officers would not think of budging before Monday. Dick feared that if a day were lost, even though the miniature should be recovered, the Canadians would have left New York before he could arrive there to restore it to them. Accordingly, the next morning, the three men set out alone towards Shrewsbury, the clergyman having stipulated that his share in the enterprise should be kept secret, lest his act might serve the undiscriminating as an example of Sabbath-breaking.

"I am clear in my conscience on that score," said the minister to Tom and Dick, "and, having put my hand to the plow in this business, I will not turn back. I can guide you to a rough drinking-place in the woods, where it is most likely the ruffians will be found. To counterbalance their superior numbers, we must use strategy, and we have in our favor the fact that most of them are likely by this time to be helpless with liquor."

"'Oh, that men should put into their mouths an enemy to steal away their brains!'" misquoted Tom, who thought it proper that he should speak piously in the presence of the minister.

"It is fortunate for us if they have done so, in this case," said the clergyman, with a smile. A moment later he sighed pensively. "My congregation will be disappointed this morning. I was expected to arrive home last night and to preach to-day. I have my sermon in my pocket."

"What is the text, sir, if I may be so bold?" asked Tom.

"Leviticus, sixth chapter, fourth verse: 'Then it shall be, because he hath sinned, and is guilty, that he shall restore that which he took violently away.'"

"By the powers," cried Tom, forgetting himself, "ye're like to get more results putting that text into action the morning than by holding forth on it frae your ain pulpit!"

Under the pastor's guidance, the party turned presently from the road into the pine forest, through which their horses passed freely by reason of the complete absence of undergrowth. MacAlister and Dick had left their baggage at Freehold, and Mr. McKnight's was so light as to encumber him little. Dick and Tom had their rifles, while the minister carried Tom's pistol. They proceeded in silence some miles, now and then emerging on clear places, skirting swamps, and advancing over ground that became more and more sandy. At last, in the midst of woods, the minister held his finger to his lips, and all three stopped. From a distance came the sound of a coarse voice singing in maudlin tones a tuneless song. The three dismounted, tied their horses to trees, and walked cautiously forward in single file, Mr. McKnight leading. A low, one-story log building came into view among the trees. At one end of it, under a shed roof, stood four horses and a wagon. The bawling of the song came through a small, unglazed window, of which the oiled paper was torn.

"They take their pleasure in security now," whispered the minister, halting a moment, "because the officers of justice will not break the Sabbath to attack them. On other days they would not be so unguarded. I will look through the window, and see how the land lies; then we shall decide what to do."

He led the way to the groggery and applied his eye to a slit in the oiled paper, while Dick and Tom stood on either side. In a moment, the preacher crouched down beneath the window, and, motioning Tom and Dick to do likewise, whispered:

"There has evidently been a fight. Fagan and another are lying on the floor with their heads bound in bloody rags. Another is lying near them, dead drunk, as his position shows. Jonathan West is sitting on the floor, also drunk; it is he who is singing. Fenton and Burke are playing cards, Fenton's back towards the door, Burke facing it. The keeper of the place is lying asleep on the bar, and his wife is behind it paring potatoes. If we are speedy, two of us shall have only Fenton and Burke and the woman to deal with, while one goes through West's clothes in search of the miniature."

"Then let us go in at once," said Dick.

"Softly," quoth the minister; "let us all understand what each is to do. You, lad, perhaps should search West—"

"Nay," put in Tom; "trust me for that. I've plied my fingers on the battle-field, and can do the thing so quick I can tak' my ain fu' share of the fighting, too."

"You are right," said the pastor. "The door is unbarred. Let us all three burst in at once. You, lad, who look the strongest, deal with Fenton, the man sitting with his back to the door. Strike him down with the butt of your rifle, and be ready to shoot if he attempts to rise. I shall take care of the other card-player. You, Captain MacAlister, search Jonathan West for the portrait, and keep your eye on the woman behind the bar. If I am not mistaken, she will prove the worst foe of all."

At MacAlister's suggestion, he and Dick each looked through the slit to get a view of the chosen field of battle. Then the three stepped softly around to the door. Each grasped his weapon tightly, and the minister pushed the door open. All made a move to rush in,—but started back on being confronted by Fenton and Burke, who stood, each with pistol raised, doubtless put suddenly on their guard by the sound of footsteps.

Old Tom was the first to recover from surprise. He made a swift lunge at Burke, which caught that person in the neck, almost breaking it, and sent him flying back into the room. Tom leaped after him, and was followed by the minister. Fenton turned to shoot the latter with his pistol, and Dick availed himself of this movement to bring down his rifle-butt heavily on the rascal's unkempt head. Fenton did not fall, but, after staggering a moment, during which Dick reversed his weapon, turned to shoot the latter, uttering a savage curse the while; he thus opened his mouth wide, and Dick thrust the muzzle of the rifle therein, and forced Fenton rapidly backward into the groggery, to the very farthest corner thereof, pinning him therein with the rifle-muzzle in his mouth. "Drop the pistol, or I'll fire," cried Dick; and Fenton, perceiving his disadvantage, did so. Dick kicked the pistol towards the minister, who picked it up. The gentle McKnight had been raining blows on the head of Burke, who now succumbed and lay without protest, leaving the minister free to draw the woman's attention from Tom. She had run around the bar and threatened with her knife the deft-fingered MacAlister while the latter was going through West's clothes, an operation preceded by a quieting blow on the robber's skull from Tom's rifle-butt. Of the four prostrate men, the drunkest one slept on through the fray, the two gory-headed rascals opened their eyes and looked on with apathy, while the proprietor got down off the bar and looked around for some weapon with which to take a hand. At this moment Dick, who continued to hold the ferocious but speechless Fenton against the wall, felt something smooth slipped into his left hand, heard from Tom the words, "'Tis yours to guard, lad," saw at an instant's glance that it was the miniature portrait of a woman, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. The proprietor of the place had now picked up a fowling-piece from a corner and was aiming it at Dick. It was knocked up by MacAlister, who then fell on its holder and was in a fair way to beat out his brains, when the woman, having seen her spouse in danger, abandoned her contest with the minister, and bounded panther-like at Tom. She lodged the point of her knife in his cheek, and drew it out for a second blow, whereupon the minister, putting a pistol in each of his coat-pockets, ran up behind her, caught her by the long hair, and dragged her out of the house. He did not stop until she was on her back on the ground. Before she could rise, Tom had sent her husband reeling with a final blow, and had come to aid the minister, knowing that the latter had more than a match in the woman. Tom placed his feet on her hair, which was lying about her head, and, digging his heels into the sandy earth, put the muzzle of his rifle against her forehead, and told her it was his custom, as a soldier, to make short work of cutthroat she-devils of camp-following buzzards. So she lay still, glaring and panting. Mr. McKnight reëntered the groggery, aimed both his pistols at Fenton, and told Dick to release that worthy and back out of the place with rifle kept ready to shoot. Dick obeyed, and backed out side by side with the minister. A minute later, the three thief-hunters were running for their horses. They mounted, and made their way back to the place where they had turned into the pines from the road.

"And won't ye stand in danger of retaliation from the devils?" queried MacAlister, as Mr. McKnight turned to take leave.

"I think they were so drunk, and the thing was so quickly done, they did not know me from a stranger like yourselves. They would not suspect a minister of such work on a Sabbath day."

"Begorra, if more such work was done by ministers on Sabbath days, more of the wicked would get punishment in this world! By the Lord, 'twas a fine illustration ye gave of the penalties that follow wrong-doing, and none the waur for that ye thumped a rascal's head instead of the pulpit, and made the way of the transgressor hard instead of merely saying it was."

"That's the grandest minister I ever saw, and the only sermon I never went to sleep at," said MacAlister to Dick, as the two rode back towards Freehold, Mr. McKnight having taken his way towards Shrewsbury after a friendly farewell and a tender of his compliments to the young lady to whom Dick was to restore the miniature.

That night they slept at the village where they had hired their horses. They had to lose another day in waiting till the stage-coach came along, and so it was Tuesday morning when they found themselves again on a "Flying Machine" bound for New York. This time MacAlister's face was tied up in cloths, the wound in his cheek being not serious, but vastly inconvenient for the time being. "Another war-scar, bedad!" quoth he. "A mark of the battle of Shrewsbury Pines."

The greater part of the journey was dampened by a series of April showers, but when they arrived at Paulus Hook and descended from the coach, the sun reappeared for a brief display before setting. As they crossed in the ferry to New York, that English-Dutch-Huguenot seaport town, in the midst of its hills and trees, seemed to smile upon them. Looking out towards the bay, with its backing of green heights, Dick got his first hint of the ocean beyond, and was deeply stirred thereat. In those days a beach ran at the foot of bluffs that were crowned by gardens and other grounds behind the spacious residences on the west side of Broadway. There was no commerce along the North River, all the Dutch Hudson sloops and the New Jersey boats rounding the point to make landing in the East River. Dick's gaze, coming in from the bay, past the green islands, close at hand, rested successively on the fort whose walls rose from sloping green banks, the governor's garden, the water ends of crooked streets, the little forest of masts in the East River, the tiny village of Brooklyn nestling at the foot of the heights on Long Island, and finally on the ferry landing-place, on which he and Tom presently set foot. On the recommendation of a fellow passenger on the ferry, they took lodgings in a small tavern near the Whitehall slip. During supper Dick was absent-minded and perturbed. He was all afire to return the miniature to Miss de St. Valier. Tom advised him to wait till the next day, as it was now quite late. But Dick was fearful the Canadian party might depart before he could see them. Moreover, the prospect of again beholding the entrancing Catherine and receiving thanks from her own lips, although a delicious one, was also disquieting, and Dick was anxious to face the interview at the earliest possible moment. He therefore put himself and his clothes into the best possible appearance, and, while Tom sought the Coffee House, found the way to the boarding-house in Queen Street at which Gerard de St. Valier had told him the party would stay. At the door, where he inquired with much concealed trepidation, a black servant told him the Canadians had left. His heart sank, but rose again a moment later, when the mistress of the house, Mrs. Carroll, having overheard, told him the St. Valiers and Lieutenant Blagdon had gone to the King's Arms Tavern for their last night in New York, intending to take sloop the next morning for Albany. It was now dark, the street lamps having been lighted for some time, and Dick decided that, after all, the morning would be the more suitable time for approaching the Canadians. Being very tired and desiring to rise early, he went to bed, and dreamt of the eyes of Miss de St. Valier.

The next morning he made a hasty breakfast, and was already on the way to the King's Arms when it occurred to him that he might make himself ridiculous by intruding on the peerless Catherine too early. He therefore walked about the town awhile, viewing the markets near the East River; then going up Broad Street from the Exchange to the City Hall of that day; then admiring the marble image of William Pitt in a Roman toga, at Wall and William Streets; the great dry goods shops in William Street, up to Maiden Lane; the fine broad red and yellow brick residences, some with many windows, double-pitched and tile-covered roofs, balustrades and gardens, in William Street, Queen Street, Hanover Square, and elsewhere: finally crossing to the Broadway, and beholding the leaden statue of King George, in the Bowling Green or parade-ground before the fort. At last he entered the King's Arms, which was next but one to the fine Kennedy house at the foot of the west side of Broadway, both facing the Bowling Green and fort. In the public room he saw Tom, who sat reading the New York Gazette, and who now merely winked at him, being of no mind to figure with him in the restoration of the portrait. Dick put on a bold face and asked the man in charge to announce him to Mr. and Miss de St. Valier.

"And, pray, what do you desire of them?" queried an insolent voice at Dick's elbow. He looked around and encountered Lieutenant Blagdon, who stood eyeing him with a manifest resentment that betrayed an uneasy divination of Dick's purpose.

Dick was on the point of answering hotly, but contented himself with a defiant look and the quiet reply:

"I wish to restore the portrait of which Miss de St. Valier was robbed while in your company last Saturday."

Blagdon's wrath was now mingled with chagrin, at the confirmation of his fear that another had accomplished for the lady the task he had not offered to undertake. After a moment's pause, controlling his expression, he said:

"Miss de St. Valier and her brother left New York yesterday. As I sail after them on the next Albany sloop, you can give me the portrait. I'll carry it to them."

Dick looked the other in the face for a moment in surprise, then said, with a contempt as genuine as the lieutenant's was affected:

"You lie, you know they are still here."

"What!" gasped Blagdon, and turned to an Irish officer in whose company he was,—for there were still a few British troops in New York, the last of them not leaving the barracks in Chambers Street for Boston until June 6th. "By God, did you hear that?" And with great fury, Blagdon, who was himself unarmed, grasped the other officer's sword, drew it from the sheath, and would have thrust it into Dick's breast, had not the Pennsylvanian quickly leaped aside. Furious in turn, at so sudden and violent an onslaught, Dick caught the sword with both hands near the guard, wrenched it from Blagdon, and struck the latter heavily on the head with the hilt. The lieutenant fell, leaving a curse unfinished, and lay quite motionless on the floor.

After a moment, during which every one in the room stood startled, the Irish officer stooped over Blagdon, felt his head and chest, and said, looking up:

"He's done for! The blow has killed him!"

Dick heard a whisper in his ear, "Run for your life, lad!" and felt himself pushed aside by old Tom, who gave no sign of knowing him, and the seeming purpose of whose violent movement was to get a look at the prostrate man.

Mechanically, as in a dream, Dick took the hint and sped out of the tavern. As he issued forth, a picture of the Bowling Green with its statue and locust-trees, the green and gray fort and the one linden and two apple-trees that stood on the city side thereof, was imprinted lastingly on his memory, heedless as he was of it at the time. Still holding the officer's sword, and with no course determined on, he ran up the Broadway. He had not gone far, when he heard a shout behind him, doubtless from some witness of the blow, "Murder! Murder! Stop that man!" On he went, while the hue and cry gathered behind him. Up the roughly paved Broadway, steering wide alike of the house-stoops at the side and the gutter in the middle, he ran. Once, as he neared Trinity Church, he glanced back. The pursuing crowd behind him now looked a multitude, and at its head, crying "Stop that man!" louder than any other, but giving him a quick gesture to hasten on, was Tom MacAlister.