Part 11 (2/2)

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CASTLE DUNGEON.

For some time after Hugh John was thus imprisoned, he stood looking up with a face of set defiance through the narrow aperture above, where he had last seen the triumphant countenances of his foes.

”Who's afraid? They shan't say Hugh John Picton Smith is afraid!” were the words in his proud and angry heart, which kept him from feeling insult and pain, kicks and buffetings. Gradually, however, as the sound of retreating footsteps died away, the rigid att.i.tude of the hero relaxed. He began to be conscious that he was all one great ache, that the ropes were drawn exceedingly tight about his wrists, that the gag in his mouth hurt his cheeks, that he was very tired--and, oh!

shame for a hero of battles and martyr in secret torture-chambers, that he wanted badly to sit down and cry.

”But I won't cry--even to myself!” said Hugh John. Yet all the same he sat mournfully down to consider his position. He did not doubt that he had been left there for altogether, and he began at once (perhaps to keep himself from crying) to argue out the chances.

”First,” he said, ”I must wriggle my hands loose, then I can get the gag out of my mouth easy enough. After that I've got to count my stores, and see if I can find a rusty nail to write my name on the wall and the date of my captivity.”

(Hugh John wanted to do everything decently and in order.)

”Then I must find a pin or a needle (a needle if possible--a pin is poisonous, and besides it is so much more easy to p.r.i.c.k blood from your thumb with a needle), and then I have got to write an account of my sufferings on linen like the abbe, or on tablets of bread like Latude. As I have no bread, except the lump that was left over at breakfast, I suppose it will need to be written on linen; but bread tablets are much the more interesting. Of course I could make one or two tablets, write secret messages on them, and eat them after.”

General Smith would have gone on to make still further arrangements for the future, but the present pain of the blood in his hands and the tightness of the rope at his wrists warned him that he had better begin the practical work of effecting his release.

Now General Smith was not one of that somewhat numerous cla.s.s of persons who take all day to do nothing, and as soon as he was convinced by indisputable logic of the wisdom of any course, he threw himself heart and soul into the accomplishment of it. On his hands and knees he went half round the circuit of the wall of his prison, but encountered nothing save the bare clammy stones--with the mortar loose and crumbly in the joints, and the moist exudations of the lime congealed into little stony blobs upon the surface which tasted brackish when he put his lips to them.

So Hugh John stood up and began a new search on another level. This time he did find something to the purpose.

About three feet from the ground was a strong nail driven firmly into a joint of the masonry. Probably it owed its position to one of the Highland prisoners of the Forty-five, who had used it to hang his spare clothes on, or for some other purpose. But in his heart Hugh John dated it from the days of the Black Douglas at least.

Either way it proved most useful.

Standing with his back to the wall, the boy could just reach it with his wrists. He had long thin hands with bones which, when squeezed, seemed to have a capacity for fitting still more closely into one another. So it was not difficult for him to open the palms sufficiently to let the head of the nail in. Then biting his teeth upon his lip to keep the pain at a bearable point, he bent the weight of his body this way and that upon the iron pin, so that in five or six minutes he had worked Nipper Donnan's inartistic knots sufficiently loose to slip over his wrists. His hands were free.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”HE BENT THE WEIGHT OF HIS BODY THIS WAY AND THAT.”]

His first act was to take the red cravat out of his mouth, and the next after that to lie down with all his weight upon his hands, holding them between the floor of the dungeon and his breast, for the tingling pain of the blood returning into the fingers came nearer to making the hero cry than all that had happened that day. But he still refrained.

”No, I won't, I am a Napoleon--Smith!” he added as an afterthought, as if in loyalty to the father, whose legal and territorial claims he had that day so manfully upheld.

But suddenly what was due to his dignified position as a state prisoner occurred to him. Casanova had struck at the wall till his fingers bled. Latude had gnashed his teeth, howled with anguish, and gnawed the earth.

”I have not done any of these things,” said Hugh John; ”I don't like it. But I suppose I've got to try!”

However, one solid rap of his knuckles upon the hard limestone of the dungeon wall persuaded him that there were things more amusing in the world than to imitate Casanova in that. And as at the first gnaw his mouth encountered a tiny nettle, he leaped to his feet and declared at the pitch of his voice that both Latude and Casanova were certainly ”dasht fools!”

The sound of his own words reminded him that after all he was within a mile of home. He wondered what time it might be. He began to feel hungry, and the cubic capacity of his internal emptiness persuaded him that it must be at least quite his usual dinner-time.

So Hugh John decided that, all things being considered, it would be nothing against his manhood if he called for help, and took his chance of any coming. But he remembered that the mouth of the dungeon was in a very retired part of the castle, in the wing nearest to the river, and shut off from the road across the island by a flanking tower and a thirteen-foot wall. So he was not very sanguine of success. Still he felt that in his perilous position he could not afford to neglect any chance, however slight.

So he shouted manfully, ”Help! Help! Murder! Police! Fire!” as loud as he could bawl.

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