Adventure stories; Short stories, English -- Scottish authors; Soldiers -- Fiction
Pretending that the precise time at which their plans could be
executed was dubious, Addison suggested that Lieutenant Moody should
remain at the ferryhouse opposite the city till they returned; and
before departing he told a keeper of it that the visitor was an
officer of the New Jersey Brigade, which the woman understood to be
the force of that name under Washington. To avoid notice, Moody
affected indisposition, and remained in a room upstairs, but with his
arms ready, awake and on the watch.
Next morning he overheard a man saying to another:
'There is the very devil to pay in Philadelphia! There has been a
plot to break into the Senate House, but one fellow has betrayed two
who are now taken, and a party of soldiers are coming to seize a
_third_, who is concealed somewhere hereabouts.'
On hearing this alarming intelligence, Moody took his pistols, rushed
downstairs, and escaped. He was not one hundred yards from the house
when he saw the soldiers enter it! He attempted to gain shelter in a
thicket by leaping a fence, but found the latter lined by cavalry,
and got concealment in a ditch, under the overhanging weeds and
shrubs. There he lay for some time with pistols cocked, and heard
the soldiers pass and repass within ten yards of him. From the ditch
they went all round an adjacent field, where he could see them
probing the stacks of Indian corn with their bayonets; and conceiving
rightly that they would not explore there again, when night fell he
sought shelter in one; and as his pursuers were still about, he
remained in an upright position in the stack, without food or drink,
for two days and nights, enduring excruciating torture. The stacks
were destitute of corn, being merely straw.
After a time he ventured, in the dark, to the bank of the Delaware,
and finding a small boat, while full of grief for the peril of his
brother and friend, pushed off and rowed up the river; and though
many times accosted by people on the water, he replied to them 'in
the rough phraseology of the gentlemen of the oar;' and escaping
unsuspected, after many adventures and circuitous marches, all
undergone in the night, in five days from the time of his landing, he
reached in safety the British headquarters at New York. There was
not the slightest hope that his brother would be pardoned, for the
treason of Arnold and many recent events had infused much rancour in
the minds of the contending parties. Tried by court-martial, the two
prisoners were sentenced to death and executed. John Moody was in
his twenty-third year, and on learning his fate, his father--an old
and deserving soldier--lost his reason. The American bulletin runs
thus in the papers of the time;
PHILADELPHIA, _November_ 14, 1781.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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