I am confident that Sir William in reality liked us greatly, for he was fond of adventure. Perhaps that was the reason he was not a better general.
"I shall have to place you under guard," said Sir William, calling an aide, "and if ever this war ends and we are alive then, I should like to see you both in England, and show you off as the finest pair of rascals that ever deserved to be hanged and were not."
"It appears to me that we came out of that matter easily," said Marcel, as we left the room.
We remained for a while in Philadelphia as prisoners of the British, and, to our great amazement and equal pleasure, found ourselves heroes with the men who had been our comrades there for a brief space. They considered it the finest and boldest adventure of which they had heard, and Marcel's new cousin, Rupert Harding, was not last in his appreciation.
"I think that I shall prefer you to the real cousin, when I see him," said Harding to Marcel, "and I shall always claim the kinship."
We parted from them with sincere regret when Sir Henry Clinton, who, succeeding Sir William Howe in the chief command, saw no reason to change the latter's plan in this matter, sent us to the American army in exchange for Belfort and others.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE--_George Washington's Mercy_
"Bob," said Marcel, as we rode under escort towards the American army, "the British have dealt handsomely with us,--we have no right to complain of Sir William Howe,--but how about the Americans?"
"Which proves nothing. When I am at fault, I would rather receive the sentence of my official enemy than that of my official friend."
"Don't talk of it," I replied. "We have fared so well in the first four acts of this play that our luck cannot change consistently in the fifth and last."
"Yet I would there were no fifth," he grumbled. I said nothing more, wishing to dismiss the subject from my mind. But I had been thinking of it before Marcel spoke, and his words chimed so well with my own thoughts that my apprehensions grew. The subject would not depart merely because I ordered it to do so. We had left our army without leave. Practically, we were deserters, and General Washington, as all the world knows, was a severe man where a question of military discipline was concerned.