The Yeoman Adventurer
been surprised and I should not have been to blame. It galls me, however,
to have to confess that I was very properly caught, jailed, and ironed for
not knowing what a dragoon was. A man ought to know that after being
captain of a troop of the best for a fortnight, but I didn't. Being all
for logic, the least useful thing in life, I had arrived at the conclusion
that a soldier on horseback is a horse-soldier. So he is, except when he's
a dragoon, as I found to my cost. If the bold Turnus or Mr.
Pink-of-Propriety Aeneas had hit upon the dragoon idea, I should have
known all about it, because it would have been in Virgil. Even the Master
has his deficiencies.
My Lord George Murray elected to fight at Clifton, a defendable place
between Shap and Penrith. Just south of the bridge the road ran off the
moor into the outskirts of the village, with a stone wall on one side and
a high edge on the other. The enclosures on either side were packed with
clansmen, and our wings stretched beyond on to the moor, here dissected
into poor fields by straggling hedges.
The Colonel, the happiest man in England that day, had posted me across
the road, right out on the moor, ready to gallop back at once with news of
the enemy's approach. It was now quite dark, except when the moon rode
free of the dense blotches of clouds that filled the sky. In one such
glimpse of light, I caught sight of several bodies of horse on the moor to
the east of the road. The regiment nearest to me wheeled to the left, and
trotted obliquely across the road. Its direction made its purpose clear.
It was feeling its way across our front to our flank on the west of the
village. I rode back at once to report.
"Good lad!" said the Colonel, offering me his snuff-box. "It's just what
we want 'em to do. Go where there's a bellyful for you! Fine soldiering
that! The fool duke ought to pound us out into the open with his guns.
Hope you'll enjoy your first fight, Oliver! It's a glorious game. Pity of
it is the counters are so costly. Good luck, my dear lad!"
I went back to my men whom I had left in the covered way between the wall
and the hedge. It being clear that the exact whereabouts of the regiment I
had particularly observed was of great consequence, I rode out again with
a couple of men, at the request of one of the chiefs, to see if I could
make out what was happening. There was no trace of it. It should by now
have been visible on my right, the moon being out again, but there was not
a single trace of it. I could see the line of one hedge and beyond that
another. The other regiments had not advanced and this one had disappeared.
Perplexed, I halted my men, pulled the sorrel's head round and cantered
slowly towards the nearer hedge. Then I learned that dragoons are
horse-soldiers who fight on foot, behind hedges for choice. Half a dozen
carbines rang out, the sorrel rolled over, and though I escaped the
bullets and jumped clear of my horse, I was pounced on by a body of men
and pulled ignobly through the hedge. I did everything doable, but they
swarmed over me like ants, bore me down by weight of numbers, and sat on
me.
"It's him right enough," I heard one of them say. "Fetch the sergeant!
There's a bit of fat in this, lads!"
A minute later, I was hauled on to my feet. A seared face, with a
dab-of-putty nose on it, leered delightedly into mine.
"Got you, by G--!" he said.
I had been captured by Brocton's dragoons. Now we should come to points.
Without another word to me, and after a savage injunction to the men to
see I did not escape on peril of their lives, he went off and fetched his
lordship. They came running back together as if the greatest event
imaginable had happened.
"Ha! Master Wheatman," cried my lord very happily, "this is indeed a
sight for sore eyes."
"To be sure," said I, "your lordship's were pretty bad the last time I
saw them."
He made no retort, being indeed too excited to notice pin-pricks, but
ordered the sergeant to take me to the rear under a strong guard. "Make
sure of him!" he cried, and added in a lower tone, as I moved off under
the combined pull and push of my captors, "Make sure of it." He then went
off to his own place in the line.
The sergeant did not come with us, and I had been tugged nearly to the
second hedge before he overtook us. To my astonishment he was carrying my
saddle on his head, where, in the dim light, it looked like a gigantic
bonnet. He swore at the men for loitering, and on we went to the second
hedge. We struck it at a point where there was neither gate nor gap, but
the dragoons bashed it down with their carbines and trampled it down with
their boots, and so made a way.
Two of the men were through, and I was being hauled through, when there
was a spattering of shots from behind. Over the noise a stentorian voice
called out "Claymores!" It was the Highland warcry, and, with
reverberating yells, the clansmen poured out of the nearer enclosure to
attack the dragoons lining the hedge.
The sergeant drew his sword, and, as we raced on again, struck viciously
with the flat of it at his men to make them run faster. A queer figure he
cut in the moonlight as he raced along, swearing and slashing, with the
skirts of the saddle flapping against his lean ribs. At last we got out on
a poor road lined with trees and turned south along it. There was urgent
need for him to haste now, for Brocton's dragoons had been cut out of
their cover and were being pushed back to the hedge we had just left. The
sergeant halted a moment to take stock of the situation, and then we
hurried on again. Every time he struck a man for lazy running, the man in
his turn paid me with punch or kick. After a mile or so, the avenue made
an abrupt turn to the east and brought us out on the main road in the rear
of the Duke's army.
The moon showed us a little cottage, standing off from the road in a poor
plot of ground. The sergeant led the way up to it, turned the cottager and
his family out of it into a shed, and set two men without as sentries. He
then made the others strip me to the skin and examined every shred of
clothing, ripping out the linings and even cutting my boots to pieces.
Finding nothing, he flung me the rags to put on again, and then cut the
saddle to pieces and searched that. I knew now why William had so nearly
lost his vail and Donald had been obliged to steal me another saddle. The
sergeant wanted, the letter and papers I had taken from him at the "Ring
of Bells." He was so keen that he omitted to pouch any of my belongings,
and I retained my money, Donald's watch, and the priceless strip of
bloodstained linen. My tuck and pistols were naturally taken from me on my
capture.
"Any luck?" I asked quizzingly, when he at last gave over the search.
Too furious or too cautious to reply, he brutally kicked a dragoon whom
he caught smiling.
After a miserable drag of some two hours, a fresh dragoon came with a
message, whereon the sergeant conducted me to the presence of the Duke,
who was quartered in a large house in the village. The Lord Brocton, the
Lord Mark Kerr, and other officers were with him, and also several ladies
who would have been more at home in Vauxhall. For a minute or two I was
unheeded, and the sergeant could hardly keep himself sufficiently stiff
and awkward. His Grace was in the sourest of humours for, as the talk
showed, he had been beaten. The claymores had taken the conceit out of him
finely. He finished the subject with a string of oaths and then made an
unprintable inquiry of Brocton concerning me. The ladies tittered
profusely, and the most powdery one vowed that His Grace was a great wag.
In further proof of this he snatched a feather near a yard long out of her
pompom, and fanned himself with it while he examined me.
This ducal waggishness gave me time to observe that the sergeant's
uneasiness was icy coldness in comparison with his lordship's. He was
uncertain of speech; his face was the colour of pea-soup; he looked
anxiously, almost affrightedly, at me. He grew plainly more comfortable as
the Duke failed to get any information out of me beyond the fact that the
weather was cold. Finally, when the sergeant was ordered to keep me at his
peril till such time as I could be lodged in Carlisle jail, Brocton
greedily tossed off a bumper of wine and laughed aloud at some vulgar
sally from a lady in a green paduasoy. On leaving I bowed to the Duke. He
was a vigorous, able man with the manners and morals of a bull.
Brocton followed the sergeant out. There was a consultation between them
of which I heard nothing, but the result was that the sergeant picked up a
man as guide who was waiting at the front door, obviously for the purpose,
and took me through and beyond the village to a house on the roadside. The
place was of fair size, built of rough slabs of stone, and evidently a
farm-house. The owner was a lumpish, ungainly fellow, astonishingly
bow-legged. He had a little yapping dog, which jumped backwards and
forwards between his knees like a trick-dog through a hoop.
Preparations had been made for my coming, "by his lordship," as the
farmer blabbed out. I was taken upstairs to a back room, ironed, in the
way I have described, by the parish constable, who had been prayed in aid
for the job, and locked in in the dark. I heard a sentry posted without
the door and another beneath the window. It was some consolation, and I
needed all I could get, to know I was so prized. There was a rough bed in
the room. I tumbled on it, wondered for a few minutes what Margaret would
be thinking of it all, and then went to sleep.
Next morning I made her acquaintance to this extent that she brought me a
jug of thin ale, a lump of horse-bread and a slab of cheese. Her looks
froze my affability, but she does not become important till she smiled,
and I need say no more about her at present.
I saw no other person till nightfall of the third day, when the door
opened and the little dog hopped through his accustomed gap into the room,
and was followed by his master carrying a lighted tallow candle in a rusty
iron candlestick. This imported something unusual, as I was not allowed a
light, and it turned out to be a visit from my Lord Brocton. He ordered
the sentry to follow the farmer downstairs, and examined the door
carefully to see if it was closed thoroughly. I sat on the edge of the bed
and hummed a brisk air with a fine pretence of indifference.
He sat down on the one chair there was, placed his hat on the table, and
said, "I am sorry to see you in this place and condition, Mr. Wheatman."
"Thank you," said I.
"Of course you know there's only one end of it."
"Yes," I replied, and hummed a stave of "Lillibullero."
He leaned forward and said impressively, "The gibbet, Mr. Wheatman!"
"Draughty places!" said I, smiling, as I thought of Nance Lousely. "I can
feel the wind whistling through my bones."
"You are pleased to be facetious, sir. It does credit, I must say, to
your nerves."
"You are pleased to be sympathetic, my lord," I riposted, "whereby you do
no credit to my common sense."
He took short breaths and then reflected a minute or two, during which I
clinked a soft tattoo with my iron wristlets, and eyed him joyously. He
was there--a free lordling, I was here--a chained rebel, but I had him set.
"I have a proposal to make to you, Mr. Wheatman," he said at length.
"I am indeed honoured, but be careful, my lord! It's not in the least
likely, I fear, to be a proposal which you would like the sentry beneath
the window to overhear."
"You are plain and blunt," he said, leaning forward and speaking in a low
tone, "and I will be the same. Return me all the papers you took from my
sergeant at the 'Ring of Bells,' and I will see that you escape and get