The Sherwood Ring (17 page)

"I will be delighted to serve the punch for you, Uncle Enos, of course," I finished promptly, knowing what was expected of me. "Where do you want me to stand? The bowl would look pretty under the lights at the end of the dining-room table." I had a sudden fascinating vision of myself posed between two silver candelabra in my flowered satin gown, manipulating the ladle gracefully before a crowd of admiring eyes.

Uncle Enos shook his head.

"Not in the eighteenth century," he said. "In the eighteenth century it was customary to serve the punch at this small table here behind the screen."

"But, Uncle Enos!" I protested. "That's the most inconvenient and out-of-the-way corner in the whole room. Nobody will even be able to see me back there."

"Fortunate child!" agreed Uncle Enos, with another heavy sigh. "Lord! what wouldn't I give for your chance to spend the entire evening in an out-of-the-way corner where nobody would even be able to see me!"

"The — did you say the
entire
evening, Uncle Enos? You don't mean during the dancing and everything?"

"Of course I mean the dancing and everything."

"But if you don't mind very much, I'd really rather — "

"Just think what a nice quiet time you'll have," said Uncle Enos encouragingly.

I was thinking about what a nice quiet time I was going to have, but even then I did not realize exactly how long or quiet the night would actually be. Very few guests found their way into my hidden corner, and those who did evidently spread the word that the punch Uncle Enos had concocted with his own hands according to a recipe he had found in a colonial cookbook was not so successful as he thought it was, for presently hour after hour began to go by without a single soul appearing but a solitary Greek waiter, who stayed only long enough to take away the dirty glasses and bring me a chicken salad from the supper table. Uncle Enos had not had his own way about one thing at least — the waiter was wearing a standard dinner jacket and long black modern trousers — but unfortunately I was not a waiter and had no powerful union to protect me against other people's whims. I could hear music and laughter from the far end of the room, and (by leaning forward and craning my neck) could occasionally catch a glimpse of a flashing knee buckle or a brocaded hoop skirt swirling past on the terrace or going down the steps to the moonlit garden. Otherwise, as far as the Independence Day Ball was concerned, I might just as well have been in bed and asleep.

I had my elbows on the table and was about to shed a few miserable, shamefaced tears into the chicken salad when the sound of a light step made me glance up to find a slim young man standing in the shadow of the heavy screen and languidly gazing down at the punch bowl. The inadequate light of the eighteenth-century candles did not reach his face. I could see only that he was tall and slender and rather sloppily dressed — his black satin knee breeches fitted him badly, and the cuffs of his apricot coat came almost to the knuckles of his thin, long-fingered hands. For one moment it flashed across my mind that it might be Pat, somehow rigged out in one of the fancy costumes which the six waiters had disdainfully left lying in the kitchen. Then the intruder turned, caught my eye on him, and bowed apologetically.

"I beg your pardon," he said, in a slow, rather lazy voice I had never heard before. "I fear I was standing here admiring your punch bowl. I had very little chance to examine it properly the last time I saw it."

He must, I thought, be one of the young scholars Uncle Enos occasionally permitted to work with his collections. "Oh," I said politely, "you've seen the punch bowl before, then?"

"I saw it," explained the stranger, gravely, "on the night I served the punch."

"I — I'm afraid you must be mistaken," I corrected him. "At least, Uncle Enos tells me that only the daughter of the house — "

"This occurred some time before your Uncle Enos was born. Well over a hundred and fifty years ago, to be exact."

I was by now so accustomed to these sudden returns from the past that I did not even start. "You're not by any chance the fool ancestor who began the fool custom of leaving the punch bowl in this particular corner?" I demanded.

"No. Only the fool ancestor who didn't get himself hanged on a fool gallows because the punch bowl happened to be in that particular corner," retorted the young man, placidly. "At your service, Miss Grahame." He took a step forward out of the shadow to bow to me again, and the light from the candles fell suddenly across his face: a thin, curiously attractive face with lazily drooping eyes and an unmistakable dreamy smile.

"But I don't understand," I stammered. "What were you doing here? And how in the world did you ever get out of the Goshen jail in the first place?"

It took rather longer than I thought it would (said Peaceable Sherwood modestly), considering that the Goshen jail in those days was by no means the most perfect stronghold ever devised by the hand of man. Indeed, there was not a lock in the place I could not have opened blindfold with the handle of a prison spoon any dark night of the week. One of my followers — old Timothy — had begun life as a thief in London and was always yearning for the good old days; he used to come away from raids with his pockets full of locks and bolts and teach me tricks with them to keep his hand in while we were hiding up in the hills.

Unfortunately, however, Dick must have warned the authorities to expect something of the sort. I had hardly recovered from the effects of Aunt Susanna's sleeping drops before a village blacksmith had entered my cell and was fastening my right wrist securely to the wall with an iron chain just short enough to keep me from reaching the barred window at one end of the room or the grated door at the other.

If I had been an ordinary prisoner of war it would probably never have happened — officers on both sides were frequently allowed an amazing amount of freedom if they gave their word of honor (parole, it was called) that they would make no effort to escape. But then I was not exactly an ordinary prisoner of war. I was a notorious marauder who had kept the whole countryside in a state of terror for almost a year, and while my uniform was enough to prevent the county officials from actually hanging me, there was no reason on earth why they should go out of their way to make my confinement easy or pleasant.

"There!" said the blacksmith proudly, rising from his knees and mopping his forehead when the work was over, "I reckon that'll keep you put for a while, son."

"I reckon it will," I agreed with him ruefully.

It did. Old Timothy had neglected to teach me how to open a shackle, even supposing that I could have managed it with only my left hand, and the chain was too strong to break by simple force. I thought of trying to wear it through by rubbing one link against another — I even calculated just how long the process would take: sixty-eight years, three months, and eleven days. But as this seemed rather a long time to wait, I decided in the end that I had better do nothing at all but behave admirably until the authorities grew ashamed of their foolish caution and took the chain for some more violent and rebellious prisoner.

Happily, as you see, I am an unusually slender and harmless-looking individual, even at the best of times. It was not very difficult for me to give the impression that I was reduced to a state of complete lassitude and despair. I drooped and pined; I almost never spoke; and when I was not dragging myself wearily from the door to the window like a caged animal, I was lying stretched out on my heap of

straw, gazing pathetically at a distant strip of sky.

It would probably have been even more effective to remain on the straw altogether — but there was no sense in weakening myself so much that I would be unfit for the road when I got to it at last. I worked out the exact distance from the door to the window, and my jailers might have been surprised to learn how many measured miles I actually walked back and forth between the two every day. But I took great care that the jailers never saw anything but a broken spirit creeping in restless misery around the floor; and it was not long before visitors were beginning to ask them almost incredulously if that could really be the notorious Peaceable Sherwood at all?

There were a good many visitors to stare at the notorious Peaceable Sherwood — it was years before I could enjoy a wild-beast show afterwards — and they were all very much alike. Little wiry men usually asked the jailer why I hadn't been hanged on the spot. Large substantial ones generally remarked that I didn't look like much of a handful to them. Grey-haired elderly ladies always cried, "Oh, the poor boy!" while the young and fluttery type preferred to inquire sentimentally if I truly had to be kept tied up like that. Everybody without exception agreed that I was not at all what they had expected, and ended by wondering why such a pother had ever been made about me.

Still, I must say for the authorities that they were very slow to relax their vigilance. It was not until the night of July the third that the prisoner I had been longing for finally arrived — an enormous, hulking bull of a man, blind drunk and fighting mad. He broke loose at one end of the corridor and dragged three guards and the chief jailer all the way down it before he was brought to earth at last just outside my cell. The chief jailer disentangled himself from the struggling heap and came across to the door.

I was stretched out as usual on my pile of straw, apparently too listless even to turn my head and look at the riot still going on only ten feet away from me. The chief jailer watched me speculatively for a moment, nursing a mangled shoulder with one hand and wiping at a black eye with the other. Then he swung around and regarded the new arrival, who was thrashing on the floor like a stranded whale, with one guard holding down his legs and the rest clinging desperately to his shoulders.

"Put him in here and chain him up," he ordered curtly. "Yes, that chain, you fool — do you see any other chain in that cell? Peaceable Sherwood? I'm tired of hearing about Peaceable Sherwood! Turn him loose in the cell for the night. — Which one of you said 'Where'll he be by morning?' Where does he look as if he's going to be by morning, I ask you — a hundred and fifty miles away?"

I was, to be exact, only seven and a half miles away by morning, furiously covering as much highway as I could before daylight made it unsafe for a somewhat bedraggled officer in a British uniform to be seen on the open road. I was headed east and downriver for my old hunting grounds in the hills and forests. Once I got there, it would be a simple matter to slip through the American lines and reach the British army beyond them at New York. When the sun rose, I struck off into the shelter of the woods, found a brook, stripped off my boots, and "broke my scent" by wading upstream almost a mile against the force of the current. I knew every nook and cranny of the country so well that I was fairly certain of eluding any human pursuers, but there was always the chance that they might set hounds on me if they discovered my escape while the trail was still fresh enough to follow.

It was maddeningly slow going: the brook, though reasonably free from rocks and hidden pitfalls, wound and twisted and doubled on its course so often that I could have made three miles on dry land to every one that I made in the water. It was also, I realized with dismay, gradually leading me out of the woods into open fields and cultivated farm land. I could hear a sheep dog barking irritably somewhere far off beyond the trees at my right — and then a distant woman calling faintly: "Boys! Boys! Hurry yourselves! You ought to be dressed this minute!"

"Coming!" answered two other voices together, so loud and so unexpectedly close that I jumped and almost dropped one of the riding boots I was carrying under my arm into the water. The "boys" were evidently swimming or playing by the brook just around the next bend. Another twenty yards and I would have blundered straight into them.

I waited until the last spatter of feet breaking through the underbrush had died away, and then crept cautiously forward to find that around the next bend the brook had been dammed to make a quiet pool, pleasantly screened by sumac. Abandoned on the bank lay a chunk of yellow soap, a rough huckaback towel, and a clumsy razor. The "boys" had apparently been interrupted while they were experimenting with their father's shaving tackle, and had gone away so hastily that they had forgotten to take it with them. The only question was, how soon would they come back for it?

The sensible thing to do was obviously to praise heaven for a narrow escape and leave as fast as my feet would carry me. On the other hand, I had not had a proper bath for six months. I was shaking with weariness, crawling with mosquitoes, plastered from head to foot with dirt and prison muck. I had never felt so hot or filthy in my life. The boys would surely take some time to dress, and perhaps if I were only quick . . .

Unfortunately, I was not quite quick enough. I had finished shaving and was splashing luxuriously in the center of the pool when a startled cry from the opposite bank made me glance up to see a wiry lad of about sixteen petrified on the water's edge and gaping across at me in open-mouthed astonishment. A second boy was making his way down the rocks to join him. He was taller than his companion and perhaps two years older, with a lowering, brutal face and the heavy, dangerous shoulders of a wrestler. There was an ugly cut on the angle of his jaw — the kind caused by a razor in inexperienced hands.