"Methinks he could most easily, especially with the tide in his favour; but if he eludes the watch here, the patrol yonder will shoot him like a rat when he crawls out of the water. No, Peter, I have gone over it all in my mind, calculated the method of reaching the water, the length of the swim, and the best place to land. I have even tried to get speech with Dame Grant when she comes with her wares, to see if she could not be bribed to aid me; but the warden never takes his eyes from her until her sales are over and her boat ready to start. She has a solemnly sour face, but mayhap a gold piece would soften her heart to mercy. It was for this that I have hoarded Colborn's gold." "I, too, thought of the bumboat woman, but gave up hope of aid from her, seeing how she is watched. 'Twere as much as her life is worth to give us the smallest assistance," answered Peter. "Yes, we are cut off from every chance, condemned--doomed--and seeing this, I have given up hope." "I am some twenty years your senior, Richard, and I say to you that a sane man never ceases to hope." "Then mayhap I am insane--sometimes I think it may be so. Surely, it was the arch-fiend himself who put it into the hearts of the English to turn these disease-infected hulks into prisons; no mere mortal mind could have in itself conceived such a thought. The fever or the vermin--which were worse, 'twere hard to say. To rot here inch by inch, and the fight going on outside! God, but 'tis hard!" "Hist! the guard is looking at you suspiciously. 'Tis no use getting his ill-will; let us talk of something else." And when the sentinel passed slowly in front of them, the older man was talking of his boy who had died in childhood, and the younger one had dropped his head again upon his breast and sat in moody silence. Thus had life crept on for five weeks, each day of which was a slow-paced agony, each night a long-drawn horror. Wallabout Bay, where the prison-ships were anchored, cut into the Long Island shore on the north, and was protected from the storms that rocked the outer deep. Most of the prisoners were seamen, but now and then a squad of land captives, for lack of some other place in which to confine them, were sent thither to starve and suffer and wait their turn to die. The wound in Richard's head had healed, thanks to Colborn's salve; but the confinement, together with the scant and rancid food and the foul air in the ship's hold where the nights were passed, was slowly undermining his strength of body and of will. Each morning the inhuman order, "Rebels, turn out your dead!" which the guard called down through the opened hatches, sent a shiver of horror to his very soul; and the feeling was not lessened as he aided in selecting the poor fellows who had died in the night, and saw them sewed into their blankets and rowed away to shallow graves upon the shore. Two of the prisoners were made to act as grave-diggers on these occasions, the guard going merely to superintend.