At the roadside, his hands were bound and a long rope attached to his leg so he could not run without dragging half the company with him.
"Where is the rest of your troop?" demanded a short corporal, whose cheek had been seared some time ago by a sword or bayonet point. "What troop?" responded Jake. "The troop you were intending to assault the chain with, Tory." "I have no troop," said Jake. "I was not assaulting the chain." "What were you doing here then?"
"I am a traveler, on my way to White Plains. I had no money to stay at an inn, and tried sleeping in the woods, until you assaulted me. There is no law against that yet."
The reader can well imagine the contempt with which the corporal met this story. Jake nonetheless stuck to it loudly, and embellished it slightly for their lieutenant, a thin rod of a twenty-year-old who soon appeared from the woods. Without a uniform, the officer must treat Jake as a civilian and hand him over to the civil authorities — or decide he was a spy and shoot him on the spot.
Fortunately, the man seemed inclined toward the former, and Jake kept up his charade as he was marched up the road, in case Busch was still in earshot. The Rhode Islanders were rather pleased with themselves for having captured a man they assumed would eventually be judged a Tory criminal. They celebrated by prodding and pulling him along, greasing his way with epithets and curses, along with a good number of promises of what would become of him if their commander dared to turn his back a few minutes.
Under other circumstances, this show of spirit would have warmed Jake's heart, restoring his high opinion of the Continental army, or at least these troops, who had been mustered at the state's expense. Just now, however, he could have done with a little less enthusiasm — despite the torches, the path was dark and their pace brisk, which meant that he was continually in danger of falling; the soldiers' bayonets had been well sharpened, and pricked almost as sharply on the back of his neck as the dog's fangs had.
After they passed the hillside where Busch had told him to meet, Jake decided the time had come to reveal himself as an American officer. He had left the small glass token identifying himself as a messenger back at Prisco's for safety during his adventure; there was little chance the common soldiers would have realized what it meant in any event. His only hope was to persuade them to take him to their colonel, who would recognize him immediately.
But he must do all of this discreetly, in case the Tory leader was still hiding nearby. Jake stumbled in the dark and rolled on the ground as if he had fallen. Prodded by a pair of bayonets, he groaned about his knee. "Get the lieutenant," he whispered between the louder complaints. "I have to talk to him. Quickly."
The soldiers answered him in a loud voice that he must get to his legs himself or be run through.
"The lieutenant, quickly," hissed Jake. "Pretend to hit me, so that I lie unconscious. I have to see your colonel." "We'll hit you for real, Tory!" shouted one of the men. The other added threats and insults of his own. Jake got to his knees. "I'm a patriot, you idiot," he hissed.
The soldier responded with a heavy curse which would undoubtedly have elicited a like response from Jake — had he heard it. For one of the guards had decided he had suffered enough lies that night from the Tory villain, and smashed Jake across the back of the head with the butt of his rifle, sending him to Sleep's lush vale.
Jake awoke with a start as he was dumped unceremoniously on the dirt from the back of a wagon the Continentals had commandeered to transport him. He had been unconscious for nearly two hours, during which time the soldiers had taken him to a small hamlet east of Continental Village and north of Cortlandville. Largely ruined during a side skirmish related to the Battle of White Plains, the hamlet had once included a church, two stores and a small mill, set up on the creek. All but the church had been destroyed, though the wooden-planked bridge in front of the church's graveyard lately had been restored.
Besides the church, a large barn nearby remained intact; it was now used as common property by the few inhabitants who remained in the three or four houses across the creek on the main road.
While the area was familiar — Jake realized as he shook his head clear that he had come this way searching for Stoneman's farm-there was no time to wax nostalgic. His hands still bound behind his back, he was lifted from the dust roughly and dragged to the church.
His mother would have expressed no surprise over this, but he was not on his way to a service. The building had been appropriated by the Committee Against Conspiracies to be used as a prison for suspected Tories; the guard at the door received him with a ceremonial curse and a threat against his person if he did not comply with all the rules and regulations of the jail.
Still groggy, Jake protested that he was innocent.
"Save your story for Mr. Jay," said the jailer. "He'll hear your case next week. In meantime, you'd best watch your manners inside. As big as you are, there's them who are bigger."
And with that, the man put his foot on the disguised patriot's back and propelled him inside the open door, to the great amusement of his escorts.
When it had been used for services, the interior of the church had been simple, its most lavish ornamentation a thick red carpet that ran down the center of the austere wooden rows. A small lectern was mounted at one side of the altar, itself made of wood. Now that it had become a jail, its decor was plainer still. The furniture was gone, except for a few pieces gathered in a pile at the side of the interior. The carpet remained in place, dividing the room in two; even in the dim light supplied by some candles in buckets at the side of the room it was still a dark if soiled red, and gave the impression of a tongue resting in a mouth.
The long, narrow windows had been filled by boards that ran nearly to the ceiling. A pump organ, once the pride of the small congregation, still stood in the choir, but the door to this balcony was boarded and nailed shut. Heaps of bare hay were scattered along the walls, each topped with a ragged blanket-beds for the accused. A tumble of basins and pipes — amazingly, they seemed to be some sort of still, and perhaps accounted for the sweet, sick odor — stood at the far end of the altar area.
The church's original congregants had been Loyalists, most of whom fled the neighborhood after the Battle of White Plains. They had now been replaced by a mixture of mild Tories waiting examination, and more difficult men, ruffians and thieves whose allegiance belonged directly to the devil. One of the latter, a large, broad-shouldered fellow with a crooked nose and a strange stench about him, approached Jake menacingly, and said he would cut off his binds for a price.
"How much?" Jake asked, wondering to himself if his pocket pistol was still hidden in his vest.
The man leered without answering. He reached for Jake's hands and sawed through the braided rope as easily as if it were a woman's mending thread.
"I'll take your boots in payment, for starters," said the ham-handed brute. "We can work the rest out as we go."
No blow on the head, no matter how severe, could have made Jake acquiesce to such bullying. He saw that he had a large audience, and recognized at once that all were awed by the Tory giant. They would sooner plunge into a volcano than help Jake.
"These boots will never fit," he answered. "You're a bit fat in all the wrong places, beginning with your head."