“And is he here, too?”

“No.  He happened to have a pocketful o’ money, and so they let him sling his hammock in the town, where he could spend it.  When it is gone, belike they will send him to join us.”

“And let us hope that we’ll be gone as soon as his money, Joe.  I am mighty glad you are here; for if we put our heads together we can surely find some way of getting free.”

“Bless your eyes, don’t I wish we may.  Maybe there’s a fate in it, sir.  Fate jined you and me when it made me set Vetch a-rolling in the barrel, and ’tis fate has jined us all three here.  Ay, please God, sir, one day we’ll slip our cables, clap on all canvas, and steer for the north, though how, whereby, and by what means we can do it beats Joe Punchard.”

The companionship of Joe, at a time when I was weak from my sickness, mightily cheered me, and we spent much of each day together.  Our longing to be free did but increase as the days passed.  The monotony of prison life fretted us, Joe perhaps less than me, for his life had been harder than mine, and as the days grew shorter, and the nipping cold of winter by degrees overtook us, we began to know what real wretchedness is.  By day we could warm ourselves with exercise and active sports in the courtyard, but at night we shivered under our thin coverlets, and I found myself by and by wishing that my bedfellow Runnles had a little more flesh on his bones, for a lean man is no comfort in bed on a bitter night.  Joe was not in my dormitory, or I should certainly have bedded with him.

Above everything else, I think, the wretched food made us unhappy.  If a man be but well fed he can endure much hardship and trouble, and I had never wanted in this respect.  The prison food was bad, ill cooked, and meagre; and though Joe, for one, might have procured better if he had chosen to employ himself in his old trade of coopering, he refused to do so after making one barrel, the price of which, after the soldiers’ commission had been deducted, was something less than a fourth of what it would have been in England.

“’Noint my block!” he cried, when the pitiful sum was placed in his hand.  “Dost think a Shrewsbury man ’ll be done out of his dues by a codger of a Frenchman what he don’t vally no more than pork slush or a stinking dogfish?  Split my binnacle if I be!”

And he flung the money at the amazed Frenchman, and kept his word to work at his old trade no more.

I think this sturdiness of his raised him somewhat in the estimation of our jailers, and in spite of the opprobrious epithets he applied to them (which to be sure they did not understand) he was soon as popular with them as Vetch was the reverse.  Joe was blessed with a great fund of good humor, which withstood all privation and restraint.  He growled and groaned at being compelled to take his turn in scouring the floors and other menial tasks, but after emitting a stream of hot language, which ever appears to flow very freely from the lips of sailor men, he went his way with great cheerfulness.  He joked with his fellow prisoners, and being of a loquacious turn, had many things to tell them of the doings of his hero, Captain Benbow.