The fighting tail shouted agreement, and Hugh John was promptly haled to the mouth of the prison-house; a rope was rove about his waist, his hands were tied behind his back, and he was lowered down into the ancient dungeon of the Castle of Windy Standard. This place of confinement had last been used a hundred and fifty years ago for the stragglers of the Bonny Prince's army after the retreat northward. The dungeon was bottle-necked above, and spread out beneath into a circular vault of thirty or forty feet in diameter. Its depth was about twelve feet; and as the boys had not rope enough to lower their prisoner all the way, they had perforce to let Hugh John drop, and he lighted on his feet, taking of course the rope with him.
"Come on, lads," cried Nipper Donnan, "let's go and have a smoke at the Black Sheds, and then go up to the Market Hill to see the shows. The proud swine will do well enough down there till his father comes back from London with the cat-o'-nine-tails!"
He looked over the edge and spat into the dungeon.
"That for you!" he cried. "Will ye say now that the castle is your father's, and that we have no right here!"
Hugh John tried to give the required information as to ownership, but it was choked in the folds of the red cravat. Nipper went on tauntingly, all unchallenged.
"There's ethers (adders) down there and weasels and whopper rats that eat off your fingers and toes. Yes, and my father saw a black beast like an otter, but as big as a calf, run in there out of the Edam Water; and they'll bite ye and stang ye and suck your blood! And we are never coming back no more, so ye'll die of starvation besides."
With this pleasing speech by way of farewell and benediction, Nipper Donnan drew off his forces, and Hugh John was left alone.
CHAPTER XVIII THE CASTLE DUNGEON
FOR"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 attitude 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 prick blood from your thumb with a needle), and then I have got to write an account of my sufferings on linen like the abbé, 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 class 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.