He had
given them cause enough for gratitude. If not, he asked nothing of
them. In the prison he gave his name as Mr. Solomon.
Yet he had made two attempts to escape. In the first he ran away
with two comrades as far as Mezieres. Being pursued by the
_gens-d'armes_ there, and called upon to surrender, his companions
had given themselves up. Not so our hero; nor was he secured until
he lay unconscious with a bullet-hole in the cheek. It was this
which ever afterwards affected his speech, the bullet having cut or
partially paralysed some string of the tongue.
It had been touch-and-go with him; but he recovered, and, passing
henceforward as a desperate character, was drafted south with a dozen
other desperate characters to the gloomy fortress of Briancon.
There, in a second attempt for liberty, a fall from the ramparts had
cost him his leg.
But worse than all his incarceration had been the final tramp through
France--right away north to Valenciennes; then left-about-turn, three
hundred and fifty miles to Tours; then south-east to Riou; and from
Riou south-west to Bordeaux, where the transport took him off--one of
six transports for about fifteen hundred released prisoners. All the
way, too, on a wooden leg! Heaven knows how bitterly he had come to
hate that leg. Yet his heart, hardened though it was by all this
long adversity, had melted as the _Romney_ transport beat up closer
and closer for England, and at sight of Plymouth heights he had
broken into tears.
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