“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant.  “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time, and saw me.  I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the ditch when we came up, and had not moved since.  I looked at him eagerly when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head.  I had been waiting for him to see me, that I might try to assure him of my innocence.  It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment.  But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four torches, and took one himself and distributed the others.  It had been almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards very dark.  Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in a ring, fired twice into the air.  Presently we saw other torches kindled at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite bank of the river.  “All right,” said the sergeant.  “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear.  “You are expected on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.  Don’t straggle, my man.  Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard.  I had hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches.  Mr. Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so we went on with the party.  There was a reasonably good path now, mostly on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there where a dyke came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate.  When I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us.  The torches we carried, dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring.  I could see nothing else but black darkness.  Our lights warmed the air about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they limped along in the midst of the muskets.  We could not go fast, because of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut and a landing-place.  There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged, and the sergeant answered.  Then, we went into the hut where there was a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen soldiers all at once.  Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their great-coats, were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again.  The sergeant made some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board first.