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- 6507
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.591Z
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- start_line
- 6444
- text
- forward, and soon came to a black archway, leading far within,
underneath, to a grassy tract, through a tower. Like two boar’s tusks,
two sentries stood on guard at either side of the open jaws of the
arch. Scrutinizing our adventurer a moment, they signed him permission
to enter.
Arrived at the end of the arched-way, where the sun shone, Israel stood
transfixed, at the scene.
Like some baited bull in the ring, crouched the Patagonian-looking
captive, handcuffed as before; the grass of the green trampled, and
gored up all about him, both by his own movements and those of the
people around. Except some soldiers and sailors, these seemed mostly
townspeople, collected here out of curiosity. The stranger was
outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian,
half-Canadian sort of a dress, consisting of a fawn-skin jacket—the fur
outside and hanging in ragged tufts—a half-rotten, bark-like belt of
wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the
knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with
salt-water rust; a faded red woollen bonnet, not unlike a Russian
night-cap, or a portentous, ensanguined full- moon, all soiled, and
stuck about with bits of half-rotted straw. He seemed just broken from
the dead leases in David’s outlawed Cave of Adullam. Unshaven, beard
and hair matted, and profuse as a corn-field beaten down by hailstorms,
his whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but of a royal
sort, and unsubdued by the cage.
“Aye, stare, stare! Though but last night dragged out of a ship’s hold,
like a smutty tierce; and this morning out of your littered barracks
here, like a murderer; for all that, you may well stare at Ethan
Ticonderoga Allen, the unconquered soldier, by ——! You Turks never saw
a Christian before. Stare on! I am he, who, when your Lord Howe wanted
to bribe a patriot to fall down and worship him by an offer of a
major-generalship and five thousand acres of choice land in old
Vermont—(Ha! three-times-three for glorious old Vermont, and my
Green-Mountain boys! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!) I am he, I say, who
answered your Lord Howe, ‘You, _you_ offer _our_ land? You are like the
devil in Scripture, offering all the kingdoms in the world, when the
d——d soul had not a corner-lot on earth! Stare on!’”
“Look you, rebel, you had best heed how you talk against General Lord
Howe,” here said a thin, wasp-waisted, epauletted officer of the
castle, coming near and flourishing his sword like a schoolmaster’s
ferule.
“General Lord Howe? Heed how I talk of that toad-hearted king’s
lick-spittle of a scarlet poltroon; the vilest wriggler in God’s
worm-hole below? I tell you, that herds of red-haired devils are
impatiently snorting to ladle Lord Howe with all his gang (you
included) into the seethingest syrups of tophet’s flames!”
At this blast, the wasp-waisted officer was blown backwards as from
before the suddenly burst head of a steam-boiler.
Staggering away, with a snapped spine, he muttered something about its
being beneath his dignity to bandy further words with a low-lived
rebel.
“Come, come, Colonel Allen,” here said a mild-looking man in a sort of
clerical undress, “respect the day better than to talk thus of what
lies beyond. Were you to die this hour, or what is more probable, be
hung next week at Tower-wharf, you know not what might become, in
eternity, of yourself.”
- title
- Chunk 2