Late in the afternoon, when water drawing had ended for the day, I went to one of the soldiers and asked if I might be allowed to wash our big drum.

“Why, ’twill spoil it,” he cried.  “You’ll get no sound out of a wet skin.”

“I shall only wash one side,” I replied, “and it will give a thicker sound than the dry one, and so add to the variety of the piece we are going to play.”

“Well, wash it then,” he said, and went off grinning to tell his comrades of this latest whimsy.

I fetched the drum from the corner of the room where it lay, and carried it to the well within the keep.  The members of the band were in the secret, and I had asked them to hold the attention of the other prisoners while I set about my task.  The well was situated in a somewhat gloomy corner, and, there being none of the garrison at hand, I was able to accomplish my purpose unobserved and without interference.  Having drawn up a bucketful of water, I unhooked the bucket, unwound the rope until there were but a few feet still left upon the windlass, then cut it, made a gash in the side of the drum, and coiled the lower and longer portion of the rope in the interior of the instrument.  Then I tied the bucket to what remained of the rope, and lowered it into the well, where it hung only a few feet from the surface, but quite out of sight in the darkness.  This done, I carried the drum across the yard, turning its broken side away from the soldiers, who stood smoking against the wall, and who laughed when they saw the water dripping from the instrument upon the flagstones.

The prisoners were all grouped in a ring about Joe Punchard, who was amusing them with a strange dance of his own invention.  He bent his knees till he was almost sitting on the ground, and in that position danced a sort of hornpipe—­a feat that must have imposed a terrible strain upon his inwards, but which he seemed to perform with consummate ease.  The men were so intent upon his antics that I passed them by unnoticed, and gained the lower room of the shed, where I whipped the rope out of the drum and ran with it up into the dormitory, hiding it under one of the beds.  I was down again in a minute, and then, tearing the membrane jaggedly to disguise the fact that it had been cut, I went out into the yard, and when Joe had finished announced with an air of vexation that I had unluckily made a hole in the drum.  At this my fellow bandsmen abused me with a fine show of anger, the bosun in particular storming at me with a violence at which I had much ado not to smile.

The other men laughed, and made fun of our mishap, which boded ill for the success of our concert.  But when we had eaten our evening meal, we got our instruments and played until the sun went down, with a gusto which certainly we had never shown before.  For the nonce I gave up the castanets to the bosun, and beat the drum myself, thumping it on its sound side joyously.  The soldiers gathered round and gave us very hearty applause; and when Runnles, to conclude the program, played them on his flute the air of Au clair de lune, which he had picked up from one of them, they cheered him to the echo.