Part 7

Who were they? Jack wondered. What was their real connection with De Fronsac? What would they do with him? What would Babbage and the men at the boat do when he did not return? What steps would Lieutenant Blake take when he found, as he must soon do, that his midshipman was missing? There was no doubt that the smugglers would promptly remove the kegs and the signaling apparatus from the Folly, and they would have plenty of time to get clear away before the boat's crew became suspicious.

Late in the afternoon, as Jack guessed by the dimness of the light through the grating, he heard voices above. A heavy object was dropped on the floor; the trap-door was lifted, a ladder let down, and three men descended into the room.

"You be coming along of us," said the man who had before addressed him.

"Look here, whoever you are--" Jack began; but he said no more, for the gag was roughly thrust into his mouth, he was once more blindfolded, and taken up the ladder. Then he was lifted from the floor and lowered into what he judged to be a large empty water-butt.

"Double up your knees, Mr. Hardy," said the man. "You be going a little journey."

There was no help for it. Jack feeling, as he afterward said, like a trussed turkey, sat crouching in the butt. The top was hammered on. Then the butt was lifted, carried a few steps, and hoisted on to a cart, which rumbled away. Jack was more angry than alarmed; the men evidently intended him no harm, or they would have knocked him on the head before this; but a water-butt, even though holes have been bored in its sides to let in air, is not the most comfortable of vehicles, and Jack was beginning to feel cramped and bruised and half-stifled when the cart stopped. The butt was lowered, not too gently; Jack was pretty well shaken up. But his former experience was pleasant compared with his sensations when the butt was rolled round and round on its lower edge, as he had seen draymen rolling barrels of beer. His head fairly swam by the time the teetotum movement ceased.

Then he heard voices again, and the creaking of tackle.

"I'm at the shore," he thought. "Surely they're not going to set me afloat!" The idea of going adrift in a water-butt made him feel seasick, till he remembered that it was impossible; the butt would fill with water, and if they wished to drown him they would not have taken so much trouble.

"Why, 'Zekiel," he heard a man say, "was your tub leaking?"

"A trifle, but we've bunged it up; 'tis all shipshape and seaworthy now."

"'Tis mortal heavy, blamed if 'tisn't."

"Course it is; 'tis well-nigh full."

Two or three low chuckles followed this sentence. Then the butt was rolled up what seemed to be a gradual incline, and dropped a foot or two with a bump that set Jack's bones clashing.

"I'm on a boat," he thought, "this is a voyage of adventure. Wish to goodness I could knock the top off this cage of mine and get a little air."

As if in answer to his wish, a few minutes later, when he felt by the motion that the boat was putting out to sea, the lid was knocked off, the gag removed, and he drew a long breath of relief.

"I say, you men," he said, in a husky voice that sounded like that of a stranger, "undo my eyes and hands, and let me out."

There was no answer. He remained in his cramped and uncomfortable quarters for some hours, his repeated requests to be taken out passing unheeded. He began to feel very low-spirited. His body ached all over; his hands were still bound; and the butt was so narrow that he could hardly shift his position by an inch. His chief feeling was no longer rage against De Fronsac, but an intense longing to stretch himself. And then, strange as it appeared to him, he began to feel sleepy.

He was wakened from a half-doze by a loud hail, answered by a fainter one from a distance. A few seconds later he was released from the butt, and lowered, still bound, over the side of the vessel into a smaller boat. The boat did not go far; after a few strokes of the oars Jack felt a slight bump; he was unceremoniously hoisted again; and when at last his eyes and hands were unbound, and he had recovered the use of his sight, he found himself on board a lugger, whose crew had the swarthy faces and red caps of French fishermen. Greetings were exchanged between the men of the two vessels; then the French lugger made sail and stood out into mid-channel.

Jack was too much relieved at having recovered his freedom to mind where he was going. For a time he had not even the curiosity to ask; it was quite enough to breathe freely, and use his eyes and stretch his limbs. But night was drawing on, and when a meager supper was brought to him he asked in French for what port the vessel was making.

"No port, Monsieur," replied the man with a grin.

"Well, what place, then?"

"Where the captain commands, Monsieur."

"And where does the captain command? Speak out, man."

"Only the captain knows, Monsieur."

Jack gave it up. The man's answers were perfectly polite, but it was evident he had received orders to tell nothing. Jack was taken below and made fairly comfortable. When morning dawned and he was allowed to go on deck there was no land in sight. But about midday a coast-line came into view, and in the evening, after beating about for hours, a strong land wind keeping the lugger off shore, the skipper managed to run into a little cove beneath high cliffs. It was a wild part of the Norman coast; there were no dwellings where the lugger ran ashore; and Jack had to tramp for several miles among the Frenchmen, over a rough road, before they arrived at a little fishing hamlet. Here he had to share a pallet bed in the auberge with one of the fishermen, two others occupying a similar bed at the other side of the room.

Jack and his bedfellow both found it difficult to sleep, and the Frenchman proved more loquacious than any of the others. He could speak no English save a few words, and his French was so broad a dialect that Jack, who knew little French at the best, was often at a loss to understand him. But he understood enough to learn that he had been kept in an underground chamber near the Hollow until the time came when a boat might put off, ostensibly for night fishing, really to convey the prisoner to the French lugger, the whereabouts of which would be known to the Luscombe smugglers. He had been carried on board the boat from the cart openly at Luscombe quay.

"Whose boat was it?"

"It was to a man--Monsieur might know him--who calls himself Goujon."

"No, I don't know anybody of that name. Who is he?"

"He is Goujon; that is all."

"Is he a fisherman? What is he like?"

"I have never seen him, Monsieur. For myself, I have never put foot to land in England. But the captain knows him; ah, yes! the captain knows Goujon."

And Jack at last went to sleep, wondering who Goujon could be.

*CHAPTER X*

*A PRISONER OF FRANCE*

Next morning Jack was awakened early and told that he must march.

"Very happy," he said, "but where to?"

He had recovered his spirits. No misfortunes, no bufferings, can long depress a healthy boy of sixteen. Consequently when he learned that he was to tramp to Boulogne, more than fifty miles away, he received the information with a smile. His chief thought was: "Perhaps I shall see that Monstair, Boney himself!" The prospect of a fifty-mile walk in keen, bright weather did not daunt him.

He was accompanied by the skipper of the lugger and several of the men. Now that they were on French soil they had lost their reluctance to talk, and before many miles had been covered Jack was chatting as freely as his command of the language permitted, and laughing at the misunderstandings that occurred on both sides. He learned one fact that made him feel sorry. A few days before, Admiral Keith had exploded some vessels among a hundred and fifty of the French praams at their anchorage outside the pier at Boulogne. But this attempt to destroy the flotilla had not succeeded, the vessels having been separated by distances too wide for the explosion to have the destructive effect intended. The French smugglers were much elated at Admiral Keith's failure, and amused Jack by their confident assertion that before long Bonaparte, or the Emperor Napoleon, as he was beginning to be called, would make himself King of England.

Boulogne was reached at the end of the second day's march. Jack was taken to a commissary of the forces. He did not learn till some time afterward what story the skipper told. It was to the effect that his lugger, while making for Boulogne from St. Malo, had been becalmed off Barfleur, within sight of an English frigate which lay about two miles astern. A boat had been sent from the frigate to capture the lugger. Attempting to board, the English crew had been driven back with severe loss, and this young officer, who had been foremost of the boarding party, had been left in the Frenchmen's hands.

Whether the commissary believed the story Jack never knew. Certainly it was acted upon. He was handed over to the keeper of the town prison, and lodged in the cells below the old belfry tower. Next day, however, he was removed and conveyed under a guard a few miles westward toward Etaples. As he left the belfry with other prisoners amid an escort of gendarmes, he saw riding up the hill towards Wimereux a group of horsemen, led by a stout little soldier in brilliant uniform. The gendarmes saluted; the little man gave a curt and careless acknowledgment, and cantered on. It was Bonaparte himself, riding to review the army he was collecting for the invasion of England. Jack recognized him by his likeness to the caricatures he had seen at home.

"'Tis something to have seen the wonderful Boney!" he thought.

Not far from Etaples he was placed with a number of other prisoners, all English seamen, in an old chateau about a mile from the sea. It had evidently been at one time a pleasant country-house, but from its partly dilapidated condition Jack inferred that it had suffered during the revolutionary riots thirteen or fourteen years before. It was now used as an overflow prison, the regular prisons of the town being filled. The English prisoners in France always outnumbered the French prisoners in England, owing to the greater enterprise of English seamen, which often led them to attempt impossible feats and threw them into the power of the enemy.

The prisoners were kept on the top floor of the chateau, several rooms having been knocked into one. The windows were barred; there were two stories beneath; outside, the walled park all round the house was regularly patrolled by sentries; and there was a guard constantly at the gate. The wall bordering the grounds was about nine feet high and spiked at the top. These facts were at once noted by Jack, for the instant he was shut up he began to think of escape; but the outlook was not promising.

If he wished to escape at the first, his longing was intensified after a few days of prison regime. There were about seventy prisoners altogether, and twenty jailers. The treatment was not far short of brutal. The prisoners had to sleep on coarse pallets of straw, the stalks cut so short that they were like beds of spikes. The food consisted of nothing but brown bread and more or less dirty water. One and a half sous a day were allowed by the government to each prisoner for the purchase of extra food--a miserably insufficient sum; yet, poor as it was, it more often found its way into the pockets of the jailers than into those of the prisoners. The rooms were never properly cleaned, and the jailers thought nothing of bullying and assaulting brutally any man who had the audacity to grumble.

Jack had the good luck to be spared some of the worst hardships. He was allowed the use of a small room off the larger one--a kind of antechamber, the partition of which was only half demolished where the separate rooms had been knocked into one for the reception of the prisoners. A door opened directly on the staircase; it was kept closed, and it had a grating through which the sentry on duty could watch what was going on.

The warders, drafted from two companies of infantry in the neighboring town, were relieved daily. This was a precaution taken, no doubt, to prevent them from getting tired of their job and relaxing in their watchfulness. At all hours of the night the steady tramp of the sentries round the house could be heard by wakeful prisoners above. And many were wakeful, for their poor fare was ill calculated to encourage sleep, and as the days passed they shivered with the cold. It did not occur to the officer in command, a rough-tongued captain who had apparently risen from the ranks, to provide a fire; and when one of the prisoners ventured to ask for one, he got a snubbing.

Jack was the only officer among the captives. He learned afterward that officers were often liberated on parole, but this was entirely in the discretion of the district commandant, and Jack was unlucky in coming into the hands of a bully. He tried to keep cheerful, but it was hard in such depressing surroundings. The only pleasant part of the day was the short interval allowed for exercise in the park. A space was roped off within which the prisoners might run or walk; it was a considerable distance from the wall, and sentries with loaded muskets stood on guard. There was thus no chance of making a dash for liberty; but the opportunity of stretching their legs in the open for twenty minutes was a boon to men accustomed to the freedom of life on the sea.

Thus four months passed. Every day was like another. A little news came to the prisoners at times through the jailers--how further attempts to destroy the flotilla of praams at Boulogne had been defeated; how the English had attacked in vain Fort Rouge at Calais Harbor; how Napoleon had been at last crowned emperor by the pope in the church of Notre Dame. But the news which Jack eagerly awaited, of a great victory won by Admiral Nelson at sea, never came.

One day in February, when snow was falling, a new batch of prisoners was brought in, to the disgust of the others, for the room was already overcrowded. But Jack was pleased and vexed at once to see that the new arrivals were no other than Babbage, Turley, and a dozen more from the _Fury_.

"Well! I never did see!" ejaculated the bo'sun, when Jack hailed him. "Bless my eyes, sir, but I thought as you was gone to glory--leastways to Davy Jones, and so did we all. How did you go for to come to this here dirty old hulk of a French prison, sir?"

Jack told the whole story.

"What happened to you and the boat?" he asked.

"Why, sir, we waited for you three hours or more, as we was bid, and when you didn't come back, I said as how we ought to go up along and find you."

"No, you didn't!" interrupted Turley; "that was me. You said our orders was to wait for Mr. Hardy three hours, and the three hours being up, 'twas our dooty to go back and tell Mr. Blake. There, then, old Sparrow-grass!"

Evidently Turley supposed that on French ground the claims of discipline might be ignored. But he was mistaken.

"What do you mean by Sparrow-grass?" demanded Jack as sternly as he could.

"Well, sir, I know that his rightful name is Ben Babbage, but among ourselves, sir, when we thinks of it, we calls him Turnip--"

"That'll do, Turley. You'll call Mr. Babbage by his right name, here and anywhere else; remember that. Go on, Babbage."

"Well, sir, as I was saying, I said as how we ought to go up along and find you. So go we did; but though we spent a couple of hours a-prowling round that there tower, and about the village, and went up to the Grange and all, never a word did we hear of you. So we had to give it up, and we went back and reported you missing to Mr. Blake. He put in at Luscombe himself, and raised a deal of dust, sir, but 'twas no good. So he reported you to the admiral at Portsmouth as missing, and we got another officer in your place, a slack-twisted young--beg pardon, sir, I was a-going to do what Turley done, sir, call names; but I won't--leastways, not in your hearing, sir."

"And how did you become prisoners, too?"

"Why, sir, a Mounseer's sloop set on us t'other day when we was running before a stiff gale. The poor little _Fury's_ topmast was carried away and the mainmast sprung. The sloop hugged us till the wind dropped; then she came up alongside and boarded. She had three times our number, and they must have bred different Frenchmen in the days when one Englishman was equal to three; we did our best, as you may believe; she lost half her men, but the other half was still double what was left of us, so we had to haul down our colors, in a manner of speaking. Mr. Blake and the new midshipman have been marched off, I did hear, to a place called Verdun; here's the rest of us, what was left, and if you'll look out of the window, you'll see the poor little _Fury_ lying off the quay there. I s'pose they'll patch her up and call her by a new name, and that's enough to make any Englishman's blood boil, it is."

Jack was angry as Babbage at the success of the sloop in capturing the cutter. But he felt somewhat cheered at the sight of the faces of his messmates; and their presence, strangely enough, set him again thinking of escape. Babbage was a seasoned and knowing old salt, and Jack resolved to have a long and private talk with him at the first opportunity.

But though in the course of a week they had many such talks--in the park while exercising, in the little antechamber at dead of night--they almost despaired of hitting upon any likely plan of regaining their liberty. There was no chance of silencing the sentries at the head of the staircase; any attempt to break open the door would at once be heard outside, and the whole force of warders, all soldiers, would be on the alert. The bars across the windows might indeed be loosened or forcibly wrenched out, and the bedclothes--if the material of which they were made was not too poor--might be torn up and knotted to form a rope; but a small light was kept burning in the room all night, and any work at the windows would certainly be seen by the sentries at the door and by the men patrolling outside.

"Ah now! if only brother Sol was here!" sighed Babbage one evening, when Jack and he had been talking over every plan that suggested itself, possible and impossible.

"What could he do?" asked Jack.

"'Twas a saying of his, sir, 'Nary a way in but a way out,' though I said to him, 'What about a mouse-trap?' Ah, brother Sol 'ud see the way out of this here trap if any man could."

"Well, I wish this brother Sol of yours would get himself captured and come here. Where is he?"

"I don't know, sir; I haven't seed him for four and twenty year. But well I mind the last thing he said to me when he went away. 'Ben,' says he, 'God bless you!' I never forgot them feeling words, sir."

"I suppose not. As he isn't here we must do without him. We _must_ get out somehow, Babbage. I, for one, am not going to rot in France for half a dozen years. Is there anything we haven't thought of?"

Babbage pursed his lips and pondered.

"We've thought of everything from window to ground," he said presently. "The only thing we haven't thought of is the roof, and we want to go down, not up--leastways, not yet."

"I don't know. What about the chimney?"

"No good, sir. Haven't I seed the sergeant of the guard poke his nose up every day to see if the bars are safe? They're just fixed so that no nat'ral man's head could pass between. Must ha' bin done a purpose."

"Does the sergeant examine them carefully?"

"No, sir; he just stoops down, and cocks his head around, and gives a squint up, and many's the time I'd ha' liked to take advantage of the sitivation to kick him, only I thought I'd better not. 'Kicks is poor tricks,' too, as brother Sol used to say."

"Well, I'll come into your room to-night, and have a look at them. Luckily the chimney is on the same side as the door; the sentry won't see me. We might be able to loosen those bars and clear the chimney."

"And what then, sir?"

"I'd climb the roof and take a look round. Can't say more at present."

"Very good, sir."

In the small hours Jack crept quietly into the larger room and got into the chimney unobserved. The bars were just above his head, and he very soon decided that with a sufficiently hard implement he could loosen the mortar about their ends. That was the doubtful matter. The knives supplied to a few of the prisoners who were given meat for their dinner were removed by the jailers after the meal, and all weapons had of course been taken from the men before they were brought into the room. But next morning Jack managed to force a long rusty nail out of one of the planks of the floor of his room; it seemed to him stout and strong enough for his purpose.

It was necessary to take the rest of the prisoners into his confidence. He got Babbage to tell them what he had in view, and as they were all Englishmen, with just as keen a longing for liberty as himself, there was no fear of their betraying him. As soon as the jailers had distributed the morning rations he slipped into the chimney. Half a dozen of the men, gathered as if casually near the fireplace, screened him from any one who might suddenly enter the room. He began to scrape away the mortar at one end of each of the bars, working as quickly as he could. Turley swept up with his hand the flakes of mortar that fell to the floor. By the evening Jack had worked so well that one bar was loosened sufficiently to be bent down when the time came. Then he got some of the men to tear off scraps of their woolen shirts, and with these he filled up the holes, so that even if the bar was tested by the sergeant there was a good chance that it would hold well enough to prevent discovery.

The scraping occupied him for two more days--one bar a day. By the time he had finished he found that the nail which had served him so well was worn to within half an inch of the head.

He determined to make an expedition up the chimney on that third evening, if circumstances proved favorable. After the evening meal of bread and water he got Ben to use his strength in bending down the bars. Then he crawled through and began to ascend. It was a tight fit. The chimney was narrow; but Jack, never stout, had grown thin on the prison fare, and he wormed his way up by the aid of projecting bricks left for the chimney-sweep; those were the days of chimney climbing. The flue was not very dirty; evidently no fires had been lighted below for a long time.

He reached the top without mishap. There was no chimney-pot. Looking cautiously out, showing as little of his head as possible, he saw the sea rippling far below in the distance, shining ruddy in the glow of the setting sun. A strong easterly breeze was blowing. To the right lay the harbor and town. To the left were two sloops and three or four praams; alongside the nearest sloop a coasting brig; then two fishing smacks. A cable's length from these lay the _Fury_, now apparently refitted with new main- and topmasts, and eastward of her, a little farther out, a lugger and another smack. Jack guessed that, besides the _Fury_, only the sloops and the praams were likely to be armed with cannon, though the lugger might carry a small gun.

The immediate surroundings of the chateau were out of sight, except to his left, being screened by the parapet of the flat roof some feet away from the chimney. Except at one point, where the roof of an outbuilding rose nearly to the same elevation as the part where he was perched, there was a sheer drop of fifteen feet from the top of the chimney-stack.