After an hour or so of this traveling, we came to a rough wooden hut and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged, and the lead Hunter 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 weapons, and a drum of ale, and a low wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen men all at once. Three or four Hunters who lay upon it in their great-coats, were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a boozy stare, and then lay down again.
My fugitive never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the lead Hunter, and remarked:
"I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some persons laying under suspicion alonger me."
“Keep it quick,” returned the lead Hunter, standing hotly looking at him with his arms folded.
“A man can't starve; at least I can't. I took some wittles, up at the willage over yonder - where the church stands a'most out on the marshes."
"You mean stole, mangy thief," said the leader.
"And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's. It was some broken wittles - that's what it was - and a dram of liquor, and a pie."
"You ‘appened to miss a pie, smithee?" asked the lead Hunter, confidentially.
"My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't you know, Pip?"
"So," said my fugitive, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and without the least glance at me; "so you're the blacksmith, are you? Then I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."
"God knows you're welcome to it - so far as it was ever mine," returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. "We wouldn't have you starved to death, poor miserable fellow-creature. - Would us, Pip?"
The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man's throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his Hunter was ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of captives like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, "Give way, you!" which was the signal for the dip of the oars. We saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken up the side and disappear.
