“That Yankee pirate Conyngham is loose!” he cried. “I just met him yonder at the corner.”
“You’re mad, man!” returned the sentry. “That was the doctor; he just passed out.”
“It was not,” replied the orangeman hastily. “I know him well; it was Conyngham in disguise.”
The sentry was about to call back into the guard-room when an officer appeared. To him the excited orangeman repeated the news.
“We’ll see about this!” was the officer’s reply, and he despatched a messenger at once to Conyngham’s cell. The fellow returned on the run.
“It is true, captain!” he cried. “Conyngham is not in his cell or the yard, and the doctor is calling the sick list in the French division.”
An instant later a drum rolled and a scurrying squad of red-coated soldiers hastened at double-quick down the main street toward the town.
They found the supposed doctor conversing with a merchant, at the door of his shop, from whom he was asking directions and the time of the next coach going to London, for there Conyngham knew of friends who would help him, and the big city was the safest hiding-place, as shall be hereinafter proved. It was useless to offer resistance, and without a word he surrendered and was marched back to the prison gate.
That night, shorn of his good clothes and in double irons, he was placed once more in the “Black Hole.” He dreamed that some one had restored to him the lost commission, and that instead of being confined as a pirate and a man supposed to be guilty of high treason, he had been treated as an officer should be and accorded the privileges of his position; but he awoke cold and stiff, with the knowledge that his captors would now be harder upon him than ever, and, as he wrote in his own diary, it was “a dismal prospect” again.
That Dr. Franklin had been much concerned in regard to the treatment accorded to Captain Conyngham by the British authorities is proved by the letters and correspondence that passed between him and Conyngham’s friends. Let us look at these letters for a moment and we shall see that these friends were not idle. Here are the authentic copies of a portion of the correspondence.
Jonathan Nesbit, the nephew of Mr. James Nesbit, of Philadelphia, was yet in Europe, living for the time at L’Orient, and in September he wrote to Dr. Franklin as follows: