Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution
Date: 2023-01-21T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Arnold; Benedict; 1741-1801 -- Fiction

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Title: Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

Author: Francis Lynde

Illustrator: John Wolcott Adams

Release date: January 21, 2023 [eBook #69849]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Bobbs-Merrill Company

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. ARNOLD: A ROMANCE OF THE REVOLUTION ***

“Mais j’y suis, et, mes bons
camarades, par tous les dieux,
j’y reste!”

CHARLES K. JOHNSTON.

MR. ARNOLD

MR. ARNOLD

A ROMANCE OF THE REVOLUTION

By
FRANCIS LYNDE
Author of
The Grafters, The Master of Appleby,
The Quickening, Etc.

Frontispiece by
John Wolcott Adams

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1923
By The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in the United States of America

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | PAGE
I | How We Drank a Toast | 1
II | A Voice in the Night | 13
III | In Which I Shed My Rank | 32
IV | How My Rank Was Regained | 50
V | A Kiss and a Man’s Life | 73
VI | Dark Night | 85
VII | And an Unblest Dawn | 93
VIII | A Walk up Gallows Hill | 104
IX | In Which I Pay a Duty Call | 114
X | In Which a Wall Has Ears | 131
XI | Out of the Nettle, Danger | 146
XII | How the Hook Was Baited | 163
XIII | How a Fish Was Hooked and Lost | 176
XIV | A Cask of Bitters | 192
XV | In the Fog | 205
XVI | The Cup of Tantalus | 209
XVII | Masked Batteries | 221
XVIII | In Which the Wind Keeps Revels | 239
XIX | Mine Honor’s Honor | 256
XX | Traitors All | 277
XXI | The Drumhead Court | 296
XXII | In the Powder-Room | 307
XXIII | Open Field and Running Flood | 329

MR. ARNOLD

MR. ARNOLD

I
HOW WE DRANK A TOAST

IF THERE were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick’s pot-house tavern at Nyack.

The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long pull down the river from Teller’s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the four miles from General Washington’s headquarters at Tappan to keep the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or either of us.

“I’m telling you, Dick, we’re miles deeper in the ditch than we’ve been any year since this cursed war began!” he summed up gloomily, when we had chafed in sour impatience, as all men did, over the sorry condition of our rag-tag, starving patriot army. “Four months ago we had eight thousand men fronting Sir Henry Clinton here in the Highlands; to-day we couldn’t muster half that number. Where are all the skulkers?”

“Gone home to get something to eat,” I laughed. “We need to hang a few commissary quartermasters, Jack.”

“It isn’t all in the commissary,” he contended, “though I grant you there are empty bellies enough among us. But above the belly-pinching, it’s the example set by that thrice-accursed traitor, Arnold, in his going over to the enemy. Not a night passes now but some troop breaks the number of its mess by losing a man or two to the southward road.”

“But not Baylor’s,” I qualified. Pettus was a lieutenant in Major Henry Lee’s Light Horse Legion, and I a captain in Baylor’s Horse, at the moment posted at Salem on scouting duty.

“Our record is broken,” he confessed, staring soberly at his wine-cup. “Some time back, John Champe, our sergeant-major, took the road at midnight, beat down the vidette with the flat of his sword, and galloped off, with Middleton and his troop in hot pursuit. They rode till dawn, and were in good time to see Champe take to the river at Bergen and swim out to a king’s ship anchored off-shore.”

“We of Baylor’s are whole yet, thank God, save for the potting of a man or so now and then by the Cow-boys,” I boasted.

“The Light Horse is stirred to the very camp-followers by Champe’s desertion,” Pettus went on, with growing bitterness. “It’s the honor of the South.” Then, Van Ditteraick’s vile vintage getting suddenly into his blood, he clapped bottle to cup again and sprang to his feet. “A toast!” he cried. “Fill up and drink with me to the honor of Virginia!”

“Always and anywhere, and in any pot-liquor, however bad,” said I; and when he let me have the bottle I filled the cup, and was glad to note that my hand was still steady.

“Now, then—standing, man, standing!” he bellowed, waving me up: “Here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches it, though that man be you or I, Dick Page, live to lose the woman he loves, and then die by inches on a gibbet, with crows to pluck his eyes out!”

If I smiled in my cup it was at the naming of a woman in the curse, and not at Jack’s extravagance, nor at the savage sentiment. For we of Baylor’s had privately agreed and sworn to flay alive and burn the first man caught deserting the colors, no matter what his name should be nor how high his standing.

After drinking his terrible toast, Jack dropped into his chair and relapsed into silence; whereat I had a chance to look about me, and to gather myself for the question which, more than the mere drinking of a birthday bottle with Pettus, had brought me to the point of asking Colonel Baylor’s leave to ride and row from our camp at Salem to Nyack on this raw December day.

“Jack,” I began, when the silence had sufficed, “are you sober enough to thread a needle for me in that matter of Captain Seytoun’s?”

“Try me and see, Dick,” he said promptly, sitting up and pushing the bottle aside.

“Word came to me yesterday, through Martin, the orderly who rode with despatches from the commander-in-chief to Colonel Baylor, that Seytoun had been talking again,” I went on, trying to keep the rage tremor out of my voice. “Martin had it that he had been revamping that old lie about the Pages and the ship-load of loose-wives sent over to Virginia in Charles II’s time. Is this true?”

Pettus shook his head, not in denial, I made sure, but in deprecation.

“This is no time to be stirring up past and gone private quarrels, Dick,” he said. “The good cause needs every sword it has; Bully Seytoun’s, as well as yours.”

“You’re not answering my question, Jack,” I retorted, fixing him with hot eyes. “I heard this of Captain Seytoun, and more: it was said that he cursed me openly, and that he dragged in the name of Mistress Beatrix Leigh, swearing that he would take her from me if I were thrice wedded to her.”

“A mere pot-house tongue-loosing when he was in liquor, Dick,” said my friend placably. “It was here, in this very den of Van Ditteraick’s.”

“Then you heard him?”

Pettus nodded. “And can testify to his befuddling.”

“He shall answer for it some day, drunk or sober,” I vowed; and then I stood my errand fairly upon its rightful feet. “That is what fetched me to Nyack to-day, Jack. There must be some accommodation brought about with Captain Seytoun. I am not made of sheepskin like a drumhead—to be beaten upon forever without breaking.”

“‘Accommodation’?” Jack queried, with a lip-curl that I did not like.

“Yes. You are near to Major Lee, who is your very good friend, Jack; a word from you to the major, and from the major to Captain Seytoun——”

Pettus never knew what it cost me to say this, or he would not have countered upon me so fiercely.

“Good heavens, Dick Page! Has it come to this?——are you asking me to go roundabout to Seytoun to cry ‘Enough!’ for you? Where is your Virginia breeding, man!—or have you lost it campaigning in this cursed country of the flat-footed Dutch?”

I smiled. This, you may notice, was my cool-blood Jack Pettus, who, but a moment earlier, had been telling me that the present was no time to be stirring up private quarrels. But my word was passed—as I knew only too well, and as he could not know.

“I can’t fight Captain Seytoun, Jack; but neither can I brook his endless tongue-lashing,” I said, moodily enough, no doubt.

“‘Can’t’ is no gentleman’s word, Dick,” he insisted, still fiercely emphatic upon the point of honor.

“But just now you said that private quarrels——”

“I was drunk then, on this vinegar stuff of Van Ditteraick’s; but I’m sober now. This thing that you propose is simply impossible, Dick. Can’t you see that it is?”

I must confess that I did see it as a miserable choice between two evils. But my chance to win the love of Mistress Beatrix Leigh had not been lightly earned, and though it was but a chance, I dared not throw it away.

“But if I have a good reason—the best of reasons—for not fighting Captain Seytoun at the present time,” I began.

Pettus flung up his hand impatiently.

“You are the judge of that; also of how far a gentleman from Virginia may go in the matter of eating dirt at his enemy’s hands. But don’t ask me to carry your apologies for his insults to this bully-ragging captain, Dick. I’m your friend.”

I made the sign of acquiescence. The war would end, one day, and then I should be free of my fetterings. Since our legion had been sent across the river, I had had no opportunity of collision with Captain Seytoun—the opportunity which had recurred daily while the two legions, Baylor’s and Major Lee’s, had been quartered together below Tappan. If the gossiping orderly had only kept a still tongue in his head—but he had not, and here I was at Nyack, on Seytoun’s side of the river, with my finger in my mouth, like a schoolboy caught putting bent pins on the master’s seat, mad to have it out once for all with my tormentor, but more eager still to get away with a whole conscience.

Matters were at this most exasperating poising-point, with the two of us sitting on opposite sides of the slab drinking-table and glowering at the half-emptied wine-bottle, when the choice was suddenly taken from me. There was a medley of hoof-clinkings on the stones of the inn yard, a great creaking of saddle leather and clanking of accouterments to go with the dismounting, and some four or five officers of Lee’s Horse tramped into Van Ditteraick’s bar and called for refreshment.

Being fathoms deep in an ugly mood, I did not look up until I felt Jack calling me with his eyes. Then I saw that one of the in-comers was none other than this same Captain Howard Seytoun; that his red face and pig-like eyes spoke of other tavern visits earlier in the day; and that the ostentatious turning of his back upon me was merely the insulting preface to what should follow.

What did follow gave me no time to consider. As if he were resuming a conversation that moment interrupted, Seytoun turned to the man next at hand—it was Cardrigg, of his own troop—and began to harp on the old out-worn lie; of how Richard Page, first of the name, had got his wife out of that ship-load of women gathered up by the London Company from God knows where and sent out to Virginia to mate with our pioneers, and how the taint had come down the line to make cowards of the men, and——

I think he was going, on to tell how it wrought in the women of our house when my hand fell upon his shoulder and he was made to spin around and face me. I do not know what I said; nor would Jack Pettus tell me afterward. I know only that there was a hubbub of voices, that the murky candlelight of the dismal kennel had gone red before my eyes, that Seytoun’s fat hand was lifted, and that before it could fall I had done something that brought sudden quiet in the low-ceiled room, like the hush before a tornado.

Seytoun was dabbling his handkerchief against the livid welt across his cheek when he said, with an indrawing of the breath: “Ah-h! So you will fight, then, after all, will you, Mr. Page? I had altogether despaired of it, I do assure you. To whom shall I send my friend?—and where?”

Pettus saved me the trouble of replying; saved me more than that, I think, for the red haze was rising again, and Seytoun’s great bulk was fast taking the shape of some loathsome thing that should be throttled there and then, and flung aside as carrion.

“Captain Page lodges with me to-night at Tappan,” I heard Jack say, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. And then: “I shall be most happy to arrange the business with your friend, Captain Seytoun, the happier, since my own mother’s mother was a Page.” After which I was as a man dazed until I realized that we were out-of-doors, Pettus and I, in the cold frosty mist, and that Jack was pitching me into the saddle of a borrowed horse for the gallop to the camp at Tappan.

“I’ve taken it for granted that your leave covers to-night and to-morrow morning,” said this next friend of mine, when we were fairly facing southward.

“It does,” I replied; and then with the battle murmur still singing in my ears, and the hot blood yet hammering for its vengeful outlet: “Let it be at daybreak, in the grass cove at the mouth of the creek, and with trooper swords.”

It was coming on to the early December dusk when we rode through the headquarters cantonments below Tappan village, and the four miles had been passed in sober silence. I know not what Jack Pettus was thinking of to make him ride with his lips tight shut; but I do know that my own thoughts were far from clamoring for speech. For now a certain thing was plain to me, and momently growing plainer. By some means Seytoun had learned that I was under bond not to fight him, and he knew what it would cost me if I did. Wherefore, his repeated provocations had an object—which object would be gained, and at my expense, whichever way the morning’s weather-cock of life and death should veer.

Hot on this thought came the huge conviction that I had merely played into my sworn enemy’s hands. If he should kill me, I should certainly be the loser; if I should kill him, I should still be the loser, with the added drawback of being alive to feel my loss.

We were walking the horses, neck and neck, up the low hill leading to the legion cantonments when I asked Jack what I had said and done in Van Ditteraick’s, and if it were past peaceful, or at least postponing, remedy.

“Never tell me you don’t know what you said and did, Dick,” he laughed.

“But I don’t,” I asserted, telling him the simple truth. “I saw things vaguely, as if the place were filled with a red mist, and there was a Babel of voices out of which came a great silence. Then I saw Seytoun with his handkerchief to his face.”

“You saw and heard and did quite enough,” he replied, and his smile was grim. “And there is no remedy, save that which the doctors—and sundry hot-blooded gentlemen of our own ilk—are fond of; namely, a bit of blood-letting.”

“Yet, Jack,” I stammered, “if I say that some remedy must be found; that it is worse than folly for me to fight this man at this time?”

He stopped his horse short in mid-road and swore at me like the good friend he was.

“If you could turn your back on this now, Dick Page,” he raged, when the cursing ammunition was all spent, “I could believe at least one thing the captain says of you. He called you a coward,—as I remember,—and put a scurrilous lie on all the Pages since the first Richard to account for it. Great heavens, Dick! can’t you see that this lie must not go uncontradicted?”

“You are altogether right, Jack,” I acquiesced; and then, telling the simple truth again: “This day I seem to have lost what little wit I ever had. As you say, there is no remedy, now; so we fight at daybreak.”

“Of course you do,” said Pettus; and so we rode on to the horse-rope where the legion mounts were tethered.

It was at the door of Pettus’s quarters, one of the rude log cabins chinked with clay that the army had been throwing up for winter shelters, that a surprise was awaiting me in the greeting of Melton, a young Pennsylvanian who was acting-orderly for General Washington.

“Good evening, Captain Page,” he said pleasantly. “You have despatches from Colonel Baylor for the general?”

“No, Mr. Melton,” I replied, wondering a little. “I am on leave until to-morrow. This is my birthday.”

“Ah,” said he, taking my hand most cordially, “allow me to wish you many happy returns.” Then he went back to the matter of the despatches I was supposed to be carrying. “It is very singular; Mr. Hamilton seemed quite sure, and he was certainly advised of your coming to Tappan headquarters. Perhaps you will be good enough to report to him—after supper?”

I said I should be honored, and he went his way and left us to our frugal evening-bread—how the Dutch speech clings when once you have washed your mouth with their country wine!—prepared for Pettus by his scout and horse-holder.

It was not a very social meal, that supper in Pettus’s hut before the cheerful open fire—fire being the one thing unstinted in that starving camp. My thoughts were busy with the meshings of the net into which I had stumbled; and as for Jack, I think he must have been eager to get me out of the way before Seytoun’s second should call. At any rate, it was he who reminded me of Melton’s hint that I would be expected at General Washington’s headquarters, and I do him no more than fair justice when I say that he sped the parting guest quite as heartily as he had welcomed the coming.

So it came about that it was still early when I set out in the starlight for the low tilt-eaved farm-house a half-mile farther up the road, passing on the way the field where poor Major André had paid his debt and where he now slept in his shallow grave; passing also, a scant hundred yards from the great chief’s headquarters, the fortress-like stone house where André had heard his sentence and spent his last night upon earth.

II
A VOICE IN THE NIGHT

I  FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room of the De Windt house which served as an outer office in the commander-in-chief’s suite. It was my first visit to our army’s brain and nerve center since the execution of Major André, and I saw, in the posting of double sentries and by the many times I was halted before I could come to the door of Mr. Hamilton’s room, one of the consequences of Arnold’s treason. Our general was no longer free to go and come and be approached as simply as he had been in former times.

Mr. Hamilton’s greeting was as pleasant as Melton’s had been, though few ever saw him otherwise than cordial and suave. A slender fine-faced stripling, with the deep-welled eyes, short upper lip and sensitive mouth of his French mother, a man but little, if any, older than I, he had the manner of a true gentleman gently bred, and few as were his years, he carried a wise head on his shoulders.

“Good evening, Captain Page. Come in and stretch your legs before my fire,” he said; “you have the first requisite of a good soldier, Captain; you come promptly when you are called.”

At first I thought he was rebuking me gently because I had stopped to sup with Jack before reporting myself, but a quick glance at his smiling eyes showed me that I was wrong. Yet without that explanation I was left in the dark as to his meaning.

“A soldier’s call is apt to be an order, Mr. Hamilton,” I said, giving him the lead again.

“So was yours,” he announced. “But we scarcely looked for you to come before midnight, ride as you would.”

“I was sent for?” I asked.

“Surely; didn’t you know it?”

“I did not. I left Salem at daybreak, with two days’ leave from Colonel Baylor.”

“In that case,” he said reflectively, “you should have met Halkett on the road, riding with letters to you and to Colonel Baylor.”

“I did not come by the main road to King’s Ferry. I had agreed to meet Lieutenant Pettus at Nyack, and——”

“Ah,” he said, smiling again; “a drinking bout at Van Ditteraick’s in honor of your birthday, I take it. You are sad roisterers—you Virginia gentlemen”—a thing he could say and carry off, since he was himself West-Indian born.

“It was but a single bottle, I do assure you, Mr. Hamilton,” I protested; “and such wine as would make one vow never to be caught under the shadow of a grape-vine again.”

“Still, you are sad roisterers,” he persisted quietly. “And it was precisely because you are the saddest of them all, and, besides, the greatest daredevil in your own or any other troop, that you were sent for at this particular time, Captain Page.”

I hope I was not past blushing at the left-handed compliment, well-meant as it seemed to be. Some few passages there had been in my captaincy where foolhardy daring had taken the reins after wise caution had dropped them hopelessly upon the horse’s neck, and the event on each occasion had had the good luck to prove the wisdom of the foolishness. But as for being a daredevil—why, well, that is as it may be, too. The veriest sheep of a man will often fight like the devil if you can corner him and get him well past caring too much for the precious bauble called life.

But I was killing time, and Mr. Hamilton was waiting.

“Don’t count too greatly upon a roisterer’s courage,” I laughed. “But what desperate venture does his excellency wish to send me on, Mr. Hamilton?”

He held up a slim hand warningly.

“Softly, Captain Page, softly: the commander-in-chief is not to be at all named in this. You will take your orders from me—if you take them from any one; though as to that, there will be no orders. And you have hit on the proper word when you call the venture ‘desperate.’”

“You are whetting my curiosity to a razor-edge,” I averred, laughing again. “By the time you reach the details I shall be ripe for anything.”

He sat staring at the blazing logs for a long minute before he began again; not hesitating, as I made sure, but merely arranging the matter in orderly sequence in his mind.

“First, let me ask you this, Captain Page,” he began at the end of the forecasting minute. “You come of a long line of gentlemen, and no one knows better what is due to a keen sense of honor. How far would that sense of honor let you go on a road which would lead to Sir Henry Clinton’s discomfiture and possible overthrow?”

“There need be little question of honor involved in dealing with Sir Henry Clinton,” I replied promptly. “When he bought Benedict Arnold for a price, and sent his own adjutant-general into our lines as a spy, he set the pace for us. I’d keep faith with any honest enemy, to the last ditch, Colonel Hamilton; but on the other hand, I’d fight the devil with fire, most heartily, if need were, and take no hurt to my conscience.”

“Then I may go on and tell you where we stand. You know very well, Captain Page, the ill effects of Arnold’s treason and desertion; how the infection is spreading in the rank and file.”

I said that I did know.

“This infection is like the plague; it must be stamped out at any cost,” he declared, and the deep-welled eyes flashed angrily. “It is a double evil, sapping the honor of our army on the one hand, and bringing us into contempt with the enemy on the other. The remedy must be a sharp lesson, no less to Sir Henry Clinton than to the traitors. Do you see any way in which it can be administered, Captain Page?”

“If you could once lay hands on Benedict Arnold,” I suggested.

Hamilton nodded slowly.

“You have put your finger most accurately on the binding strand in the miserable knot. If the chief traitor could be apprehended and brought to justice, it would not only stay the epidemic of desertion, it might also convince Sir Henry that we are not to be treated as rebels beyond the pale of honest warfare.”

“Truly,” I agreed. “I wonder it hasn’t been done before this.”

“It has been tried, Captain Page. Let me tell you a thing that is thus far known only to our general, to Major Lee and myself. You have heard of the desertion of a certain sergeant from our army?”

I bowed, saying that I had and knew the man’s name.

“This sergeant posed as a deserter only for the better concealment of his purpose; he went upon this very errand we are speaking of. He is in New York now, and is not only unable to accomplish his object, but is in hourly danger of apprehension and death as a spy.”

“Pardon me, Colonel Hamilton,” I broke in, “but you should not have sent, as they say, a boy to mill. This man would be helpless if only for the reason that he comes from the ranks. Arnold was always a stickler for the state and grandeur of his office; a common soldier could never get near enough to plot against him.”

“Again you have touched upon the heart of the matter, Captain Page. The commander-in-chief suffered the sergeant to go in the first instance (he volunteered for the enterprise, you understand) because he was only a sergeant, and it was not thought to be an errand upon which a commissioned officer could honorably go. But now the affair is all in confusion. The enterprise promises to fail, and our man may easily lose his life on the gallows.”

I rose to terminate the interview.

“Are there any special instructions for me, Colonel Hamilton?” I asked.

The general’s aide laughed like a pleased child and bade me sit down again.

“What a hot-headed firebrand you are, to be sure, Captain!” he said warmly. “I was certain you would not fail us. Have you no curiosity to learn how the choice fell upon you?”

“None whatever,” I replied. “I’m vastly fonder of action than of the whys and wherefores.”

“Then I need only say that you have me to thank for the choice. When it was decided to seek for a stronger head than the sergeant’s seems to be, the choice of the man was left to me, and it was agreed that no one else should know. So this is strictly between us two, as it should be. Colonel Baylor merely knows that you have been detailed for special duty.”

“Good,” I commented. It was best so. By this means I should stand or fall quite alone, as the leader of a forlorn hope should be willing to do.

“As for your instructions, there can be none at all. Our information from the sergeant is most meager; and if it were not, we should not hamper you. Haste and success are your two watchwords. Have you money?”

I had. The Page tobacco of the year before had escaped the clumsy British blockade, and when we Pages sell our tobacco, we lack for nothing in reason.

“That is a comfort,” he smiled. “Our sergeant begged for five guineas in one of his letters, and I promise you we had to scratch painstakingly before we found them. Now for your plan: have you any?”

“The first move is simple enough,” I rejoined. “I shall desert, as the sergeant did, and throw myself into the arms of the enemy. After that—well, sufficient unto the moment will be the evil thereof. I must be guided wholly by conditions as I find them.”

“So you must. And for your communications with me, you may use the same channel the sergeant is using—a Mr. Baldwin, of Newark, who will carry your letters. How will you reach New York?”

I thought a moment upon it.

“The river is the quicker. I have a boat at Nyack; the one in which I pulled from Teller’s Point to-day.”

There was a little pause after this, and I saw that my companion was staring thoughtfully into the fire.

“We have been going at too fast a gallop, Captain Page,” he said at the end of the pause. “We must go back a moment to that point that was raised in the beginning. If you could go with your troop at your back and cut the traitor out and bring him home that would be one thing—and I know of no man fitter to attempt it. But to go as you must go, and use guile and subterfuge ... truly, Captain Page, you must sort this out for yourself; to determine how far in such a cause an officer and a man of honor may go. I lay no commands upon you.”

I put the scruple aside impatiently.

“Benedict Arnold has put himself beyond the pale, Colonel Hamilton. There can be no question of honor in dealing with such as he.”

“Perhaps not,” was the low-toned reply; “though that word of yours is most sweeping and far-reaching. I mean only to leave you free, Captain Page. Our desires, keen as they are, shall not run farther than your own convictions of an honorable man’s duty.” Then he looked at his watch. “The tide serves at eleven, and you have the borrowed horse to return to Nyack. It is best so, since in that way you will seem to be returning to your troop at Salem.”

His mention of the borrowed horse first set me to wondering how he came to know that I had borrowed a horse; but a moment later the wonder went out in a blaze of sudden recollection. As I am a living man, up to that instant I had clean forgotten that I was pledged to meet Captain Howard Seytoun at dawn-breaking in the grass cove at the river’s edge!

I was on my feet and breathing hard when I broke out hotly: “Good heavens, Colonel Hamilton! I can not go to-night; it is impossible! A thing I had forgotten——”

He rose in his turn and faced me smiling.

“Tell me where she lives, Captain Page,” he said slyly, “and I’ll promise to go in person to make your excuses. Nay, no cunningly devised fables, sir, if you please; it is always a woman who hangs to our coat-skirts at the plunging moment. But seriously,” and now his face was grave, “there should not be an hour’s delay. Not to mention our sergeant’s safety, which seems to be hanging in a most precarious balance, there is a sharp chance of your missing the target entirely. Word has come that Arnold is embodying, or has embodied, a regiment with which he may take the field at any moment. No, you must go to-night, if you go at all.”

“But you were not expecting me here from Colonel Baylor’s camp until midnight,” I protested, trying to gain time for the shaping of some excuse that would hide the truth and still seem something less than childish.

“For the anticipating of which expectation by some hours, we are discussing this matter here in comfort before my fire, instead of on horseback and on the southward road, Captain Page. I had planned to ride with you to our outposts, enlisting you as we went.”

“Yet—good lord, Mr. Hamilton! if I could tell you—if I only dared tell you what it will cost me to go to-night....”

He spread his slender hands in a most gentlemanly way.

“I have laid no commands upon you for the services, Captain Page; as I have said, your going rests entirely with yourself. Nor must you think I am trying to bribe you when I point out that the man who carries the enterprise through will have earned much at the hands of his country and of the army. It is for you to decide whether this obstacle of yours is great enough to weigh against the arguments for instant despatch—remembering that these arguments may well include the life of the worthy soldier who has piloted out the way for you.”

It has always been my failing to omit to count the personal cost of anything until the day of reckoning rises up to slap me in the face.

“I’ll go—to-night,” I said grittingly. “But if I could leave an explanatory word with Pettus——”

Again he stopped me in mid-career with a hand laid affectionately on my shoulder.

“You would cancel my permission with your own sober second thought, my dear Captain. That second thought will tell you that there must be no hint, no word or whisper that could remotely point toward your purpose. Further, you must go back to Pettus, smooth over as best you can your visit to me here, and lull his curiosity, if he have any. Then, if you can not tell him point-blank the lie about your returning northward to-night, wait until he is asleep, and make your escape as you can.”

We went somewhat beyond this, but not far; Hamilton telling me of his sergeant’s present besetment, and of how all his plans had come to naught. When I had it all he went with me to the door and I was out of the ante-room when he took leave of me and bade me God-speed; out under the stars and with only the half-mile walk between me and Jack Pettus for the cooking up of all these raw conditions thus thrust masterfully upon me. I saw well enough what I must face; how, when I should turn up missing, Seytoun would lose no time and spare no pains in black-listing me from one end of the army to the other. Yet if I could go quickly and return alive, dragging our Judas with me as the result of the endeavor ... well, then Seytoun would still say that I had deliberately provoked a quarrel which I knew I could not carry out to the gentlemanly conclusion.

It was the cursedest dilemma, no matter how I twisted and turned it about. And to cap the pyramid of misery, there was a lurking fear that Mistress Beatrix Leigh might come to hear some garbled misversion of it, even in far-away Virginia, and would not know or guess the truth. Up to the very present moment, Seytoun owed his immunity solely to her, or rather to a promise I had made her the year before when I came out of the home militia to join Colonel Baylor’s new levies. When she should know the provocation, she might generously forgive the duel, though she had exacted the promise that I would not fight him; but would any explanation ever suffice to gloze over the fact that I had struck the man, and afterward had run away to escape the consequences?—for this is how the story would shape itself in Seytoun’s telling of it.

I saw no loophole of escape, no light on the dark horizon, save at one uncertain point. Seytoun was brave enough on the battle-field; all men said that for him. Yet he was a truculent bully, and bullies are often weak-kneed where the colder kind of courage is required. What if he had pocketed my affront?—had failed to send his friend to Jack Pettus?

The slender chance of such a happy outcome sent me on the faster toward the legion cantonments; and when I saw the scattering of tents and log shelters looming in the starlight I fell to running.

Pettus was waiting for me when I kicked open the door of the low-roofed shelter and entered, and it was my good genius that prompted me to sit by the fire and ask for a pipe and a crumbling of Jack’s tobacco, and otherwise to mask the fierce desire I had to put my fate immediately to the touch. For my Jack was as quick-witted as a woman, and I remembered in good time that I had to deceive him. So my first word was not of Seytoun, or of the quarrel, but of Colonel Alexander Hamilton and the despatches I had been supposed to bring from my colonel.

“Curious how a rumor breeds out of nothing,” I commented, when we were comfortably befogged in the tobacco smoke. “Melton seemed to be sure that I must be the bearer of despatches; and Colonel Hamilton accused me of having ridden over from Nyack on a borrowed horse.”

“The which you did, despatches or no despatches,” laughed Pettus. “But how did you get on with Mr. Hamilton?”

“As one gentleman should when he meets another for a joint shin-toasting before a blazing fire of logs. We chatted amicably, after Mr. Hamilton learned that I brought no word from Colonel Baylor; and when I could break off decently I came away.”

After this silence came and dwelt with us for a while, and when the fierce desire could be no longer suppressed I said, as indifferently as I could: “You have news for me, Jack?”

“If you call that news which we were both expecting—yes. Lieutenant Cardrigg has been here, in Captain Seytoun’s behalf.”

My gasp of disappointment slipped out—or in—before I could prevent it, and it did not go unremarked by Pettus.

“What’s that, Dick? You sigh like the furnace of affliction itself. Twice, already, you have changed your mind about this little riffle with Seytoun. It is far too late to change it again. I warn you as a friend.”

“Truly, it is indeed far too late,” I echoed, agreeing parrot-wise. Then: “You arranged the business as we talked?——to-morrow morning, in the grass cove at the mouth of the creek?”

“How else would I arrange it?” said Pettus querulously. “You were as precise in your instructions as any girl prinking herself for a rout.”

“It is well to be precise,” I offered half absently. The worst had befallen now, and my brain was busy with the shameful consequences which must ensue.

“Cardrigg haggled a little over the trooper’s swords,” Pettus went on reflectively, after a moment. “He is a chip of the same upstart block out of which our red-faced captain was hewn. He said you might have chosen rapiers, if only out of consideration for the captain’s standing; meaning to imply thereby that the captain, at least, was a gentleman, and should be allowed to fight with a gentleman’s weapon.”

“You yielded him the point?” I questioned, trying to show an interest which I could not feel.

“Not I, damn him. I gave him to understand flatly that we stood upon our rights, and that the trooper’s sword was good enough for his principal—or for him and me, if it came to that.”

“It is a small matter,” I said, thinking bitterly that Pettus could not vaguely guess how small a matter this dispute over the weapons had suddenly become. Then I saw how I might perhaps fend off the last and worst of the consequences of the morrow’s revealments; but it was necessary first to pave the way cautiously and carefully.

“The captain is a good swordsman, whatever else may be said of him,” I began after another interval of silence. “It may easily happen that the man who fights with him will cross a wider river than this Hudson of ours, Jack.”

“Bah!” Pettus spat the word out contemptuously. Then he added the friendly smiting, as I expected he would. “Don’t try to make me see you in any other light than that of a true man, Dick.”

“I would not willingly do that, Jack, believe me. But there are always chances, and the wise man, though he were the bravest that ever drew steel out of leather, will provide against them. If I should not come off from this night’s—from to-morrow morning’s work with a tongue to speak for itself, will you carry a word for me?”

“Surely I will. But to whom?”

“To Beatrix Leigh. Tell her she must go down to her grave believing that I was no craven. Tell her——”

“I’m listening,” said Pettus, when the pause had grown to an impossible length.

My lips were dry, and I moistened them and swallowed hard. After all, what word was there that I could send to the woman I loved without taking the risk of betraying my trust as an officer and the confidant of Mr. Hamilton?

“It isn’t worth the trouble,” I went on, when the hopelessness of it became plain. “She will understand without my message; or she will refuse to understand with it.”

Jack laughed boisterously. “I’m no good at conundrums, Dick. I’ll tell her the captain challenged you for brushing a fly from his face. Will that do?”

I smiled in spite of my misery. There would be nothing to tell Beatrix Leigh or any one else about the meeting which was already impossible for one of the combatants.

“Let it go, Jack, and pinch the candle out. Didn’t you hear the drum-roll? We’ll have the patrol in upon us presently. Do you turn in, and catch your few hours of beauty sleep. It’s one of my notions to sit alone before the fire on my birthday night, casting up the year’s accounts. You’ll indulge me, won’t you?”

Jack did it, grumbling a little at what he was pleased to call my churlishness. It was weary work killing the time till he should be safely asleep. I was young, vigorous, and for all my youth, somewhat of a seasoned veteran, but that lonely hour or more spent before Jack Pettus’s fire went nearer to sapping my determination than any former trial I could recall.

I might have made my exit sooner, I suppose. Though he tossed restlessly in his bunk, Jack was asleep before I had filled my second pipe. But there was no object in my reaching Nyack before tide-turning, and I stayed on, dreading the moment which would set the wheels fairly a-grind on my hazard of new fortunes.

It was the hour of guard-changing when I rose noiselessly, struggled into my watchcoat, slung my sword around my neck so that it should not drag and waken Jack, and cautiously secured the little portmanteau which held all the impedimenta I had brought with me from the camp at Salem.

I was carefully inching the door ajar to let me out when Pettus stirred afresh and threw his arms about, muttering in his sleep. I waited till he should be quiet again, and while I stood and held the door, the mutterings took on something like coherence.

“I say you shall drink it! Up, man, up! Now, then; here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches it——”

I whipped through the half-closed door and closed it behind me, softly. It was sobering enough to do what I had to do, without staying to listen to such a word of leave-taking from the dearest friend I owned.

I found the borrowed horse where I had left him at the hitching-rope, and had the saddle on, and the portmanteau strapped to the cantle, when Middleton came up with the guard relief.

“Ho, Captain Page!” he chuckled, when the patrol had thrown the lantern light into my face, “I thought I had caught another deserter in the very act. Has your leave expired so soon?”

I forced a laugh and said it had, more was the pity. And then he asked how I expected to get across the river at that hour; whereupon I told him a part of the truth, saying that I should ride back to Nyack, and from there take the small boat in which I had drifted and rowed down from Teller’s Point.

At this he had the saddle flung upon his own beast, and mounted and rode with me to put me past the sentries on the Nyack road; and now I was enough recovered to grin under cover of the darkness and to picture his rage and astonishment when, within a day or so, he should learn that he had been setting another deserter safely on his way to the British lines. For I made no doubt that the camp, and all the others in the Highlands, would presently be ringing with the news that a captain of Baylor’s Horse had been the latest to go over to the enemy—as, indeed, I hoped they would, since my best guaranty of safety in New York would be in the hue and cry I might leave behind me.

Lieutenant Middleton bade me God-speed at a turn in the road about a mile from his cantonments, and from this on to Nyack I pushed the borrowed nag smartly. At Van Ditteraick’s stable there was only a sleepy horse-boy to rouse up and meet me, and when I had paid the horse’s hire, I made him go with me to the waterside to help me embark, so there might be a witness of the way I went and the manner of my going.

It was the boy himself who pushed me off and saw me lay the boat’s head up the river. And, sleepy as he was, he had wit enough to mumble in broken Dutch that the dunderhead captain had taken the wrong turn of the tide for a pull up the stream.

I headed upward and currentward only until I had made sure that my small boat could not be seen from the western shore. Then I turned the boat’s bow down-stream and pulled lustily for half an hour to warm me, for the gray and cloudy day had cleared into a night of bitter cold.

It was near midnight, as I judged, when I made out by the configuration of the shore lines my passing from the great lake of the Tappan Zee to the narrower channel of the river proper. Here, where King’s Ferry crossed from bank to bank, lay my greatest chance of danger; and taking the mid-channel for it, I unshipped the oars and let the boat drift as it would in the tideway. So floating, when I was well past the line of the ferry, past all hazard of being discovered by one of our patrol boats, as I imagined, I ventured to step the mast and to hoist the little leg-of-mutton sail with which the boat was provided. The showing of the small triangle of white cloth was my undoing. The little craft had scarcely felt the wind-pull, when a dark shape shot swiftly out from the shadow of the western shore and a voice came bellowing at me across the water.

“Ahoy, there! Spill your wind and come to, or we’ll fire upon you!”

My answer was to ship the oars as silently as possible, and to settle down to the long lifting stroke old Uncle Quagga, our black boatman, had taught me on the quiet waters of the James River in the peaceful days before the war began. It promised to be a hopeless flight, with only my two arms against a dozen; but what disquieted me most was the stentorian voice that came booming once again across the gap, cursing me and commanding me to heave to. For the yell was Seytoun’s; and now I remembered that Jack had told me something about Seytoun’s being on boat duty for the middle watch of the night.

III
IN WHICH I SHED MY RANK

IT IS little less than marvelous how the mind’s eye sweeps all the horizons instantly at the apexing point of a crisis. Seytoun’s cursing hail, the sheering cut-water hiss of the well-manned boat as it drove out to head me off, the panic helplessness of my attempt to escape—none of these was distracting enough to cloud the picture of the frightful consequences which would follow my overtaking.

Mr. Hamilton might save me from a deserter’s death; I supposed he would find means to do that much, though all the army would be clamoring for vengeance on me. But every other humiliation the wrath of man could devise would be mine; and in all the mad hurry of the moment one grim determination stood apart in my brain and held itself in readiness to act. I would never be taken alive. If the bullets which would presently begin to spit from the muskets in the watchboat should not put me out of misery, I could at least go overboard with the skiff’s anchor stone to hold me under for the necessary choking time.

The bullets came quickly enough, a ragged fire of them buzzing high overhead to emphasize Seytoun’s second warning. If the marksmen in the watchboat had been my men, I thought I should have a word to say to them about holding well down on a target when powder and lead were worth their weight in gold—as they were with us in that winter of 1780. They wasted a dozen shots on me, I think, before a long drum-roll boomed across the water to tell me that now the camp was aroused and more boats would be coming.

That was only an incident, however. My business was to put my heart and soul into the oars and to keep the narrow gap between me and Seytoun’s boat from closing any more swiftly than it had to. It was closing certainly enough, and by leaping boat-lengths, when my straining ears caught the sound of other oars rolling in muffled row-locks, and a guarded hail came from somewhere in the darkness just ahead of me. I dared not turn around to try to descry the fresh peril. Seytoun’s marksmen were doing better now, and coincident with the low-toned hail ahead a bullet struck the stern of my shallop and neatly stuck a splinter in the calf of my leg.

Another volley from the guardboat would have settled matters, but the volley was never fired—at me. At the flint-snapping crisis my boat’s bow crashed in among banked oars, dark shapes loomed suddenly all around me, and a gruff voice shouted, “Avast there, you lubber! Heave to, or we’ll sink you!”

I needed no command to stop me. The collision with the banked oars, and a dozen hands gripping the gunwales of my shallop, did that for me. What I most needed was the discretion to throw myself flat in the bottom of my boat to escape the storm of lead that was promptly hurled at my pursuers—and that I had, too.

When it was all over, and Seytoun’s boat had turned tail to claw out of harm’s way in frantic haste, I learned to what I owed my opportune deliverance. I had pulled straight into the midst of a British boat expedition (one of the many since Admiral Sir George Rodney had come to Sir Henry Clinton’s aid), sent up from New York to take a chance of surprising some one of our outpost camps. I was rejoicing secretly that my ill-luck had killed the chance of such a surprise, when I was brought roughly to book by the officer in command of the expedition.

“Now, sir, who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?” were his shot-like questions, when my craft had been passed back to the long-boat which served as the flag-ship of the flotilla.

I gave my name and standing briefly, and was adding a hypocritical word of thanks for my rescue when he cut me off abruptly.

“A deserter, eh?” he rasped. “It’s a thousand pities we didn’t let them take you. An officer, too, you say? Then the pities are ten thousand. I would to God some of your fellows in that boat had shot straighter!”

His sentiments were so soldierly and worthy that I loved him for them, and was able to pull the splinter from my leg and laugh.

“You don’t follow your commander-in-chief’s lines very closely, sir,” I ventured. “We gentlemen who are sick of our bargain with General Washington and the Congress get a warmer welcome from Sir Henry Clinton than you are giving me. But there are deserters and deserters; some who are traitors in fact, and some who are merely coming to a better sense of their duty as they see it. My conscience is clear, sir.”

I hoped he would not suspect the double meaning in my answer; as, indeed, he did not. As well as I could make him out in the darkness, he was a bluff, hearty bully of a man; a sea officer, I took it.

“We’ll take you back with us, since that is what you want,” he rejoined crustily; adding: “And I’d hang you to a yard-arm when we get there, Captain Page—as Sir Henry Clinton doubtless will not. To the rear with you, and consider yourself a prisoner. Pass the captive astern, Bannock, and take the oars out of his boat,”—this last to the ensign in command of the long-boat.

The effect of this order was to turn me adrift without any means of locomotion, and my shallop dropped away from the flotilla on the slowly ebbing tide until the British boats became a shadowy blur in the night. There was some huddling of them for a hasty council of war, I judged, and if so, an order to retreat was all that came of it. With our forces on either side of the river aroused and alert, as the firing would ensure, there was little else to be done.

My masterless craft had drifted a mile or more when the boat expedition overtook me. With no more ado my boat was taken in tow, and I chuckled inwardly. I love a boat and the water as I love a good horse; but it is worth something to have your enemy drag you where you expected to drag yourself, and when the shadows of the great western cliffs were blackening thick upon the waters, I kicked the rowing seat out of the way, and stretched myself at ease in the shallop’s bottom to get a soldier’s nap before the sun should rise upon my further adventures.

The day was dawning coldly when I awoke and found that my rescuers—or my captors—were debarking at the town landing-place under the guns of Fort George. It was a raw morning, my leg was stiff and sore from the splinter wound, and the ensign who ordered me to tumble out had evidently taken his cue from his gruff commander and cursed me heartily because I did not move as quickly as he thought I should.

It is remarkable how the morning after takes the fine edge off the enthusiasm and daring of the night before. When I set foot upon the landing-stage and remembered all that I had undertaken to do in this British stronghold of New York, remembered, also, how at this very moment, most likely, Jack and Seytoun, and—save Mr. Hamilton alone—every friend and enemy I had left behind me in the camp at Tappan was cursing the very day of my birth, my teeth chattered with the morning’s cold, and I would have given many broad acres of the Page tobacco lands to be well out of the wretched tangle into which my desperate mission had led me.

My first near-hand view of the lower town, obtained after I had been turned over to one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides—who was my host or guard, I could not tell which—brought a decided shock. My memories of the city, carried over from a visit made with my uncle Nelson when I was a hobbledehoy of sixteen, were rudely swept away. The great fire of the night of September 20th, 1776, just after the British General Robertson had driven our army back upon Harlem Heights, had made a ruin of what had been the best-built portion of the lower town. Starting near Whitehall Slip, it had left blackened ruins all the way across to the Bowling Green and for some distance up on both sides of Broad Way, and but little in the way of rebuilding had been done during the four years of British occupation. Instead, some of the ruins had been converted into makeshift dwelling places by using the chimneys and parts of the walls that were still standing, eked out with spars from the ships and old canvas for shelter.

It was a dreary prospect that was revealed as we, my guard-host and I, came around the western bastion of the fort and so into the lower end of Broad Way. The fire had spared some few houses on the left, and in one of these, so Mr. Hamilton had told me, Arnold had his headquarters and living-rooms. It was to an inn just beyond these houses, and on the edge of the ruined district, that my walking companion led me; and by the time we were inside and were breaking our fast in the blaze-warmed coffee-room, the hue of things had become less somber, and I could laugh and crack a joke with my entertainer much as if he had been Jack Pettus masquerading in a red coat.

“You do good justice to the commissary, Captain Page,” said my youth in the red coat, when I had begged his leave to order more of the ham and eggs that reminded me most gratefully of Virginia and home.

“If you could know how I have been starved, Mr. Castner,” I retorted. “All you have to do for us—for the rebels, I mean—is to hold them still for a few months longer, and hunger will do for them what your arms have somehow seemed unable to do.”

“Is it that bad, Mr. Page?” he asked.

“Worse than I can describe, I do assure you. I doubt not we of the turncoat legion assign all sorts of reasons for our forsaking of the cause, but I am telling you the bald truth—as I shall tell Sir Henry. We are hungry, and an empty stomach knows neither king nor Congress.”

But my young lieutenant laughed in a most friendly way and shook his head at this.

“You are carrying it off as a brave man should, Mr. Page, and making a jest of it. But you are like a good many of the others; a true Loyalist at heart, with only the eleventh-hour determination to turn your back upon whatever influences swung you first in the wrong direction. Confess, now; are there not many others in the same case, and lacking only the eleventh-hour courage to come over?”

I said there were, doubtless—and hoped most fervently that it was the lie I firmly believed it to be. Then, after I had answered freely all his questions about our camp at Tappan—with more and more ingenious lies, you may be sure—I ventured upon the ground of my own perilous debate.

“There have been rumors in the Highlands of Mr. Arnold’s raising of a regiment of his own here in New York. Is that so, Mr. Castner?” I asked guardedly.

The lieutenant nodded, and there was a graver look in his eyes when he asked, in turn, “Do you know Mr. Arnold, Captain Page?”

“I haven’t that honor, as yet,” I replied. “My short service in the Continental Line has been in the horse; and he, as you know, has been lately in garrison at West Point.”

He bowed thoughtfully. “A strange man, Mr. Page; and growing stranger to all of us, I think, as the days pass. He has not come over to us for any overmastering love of the king or the king’s cause, I fear.”

“No?” said I.

“It is little likely. If I read him aright, he is burned and seared through and through with his own ambition.”

It was no part of my plan to be drawn into open criticism of the man I was shortly to approach in the character of an outspoken fellow traitor.

“We must not judge too hastily, Mr. Castner,” I put in placably. “Arnold was greatly respected by his former subordinates, and, truly, he did many things to win their regard, I am told. But that is neither here nor there: this legion he is enrolling—is it horse or foot?”

“Foot. It is called the ‘Loyal American,’ and is pretty largely composed of—of men who, like yourself, Mr. Page, have changed flags.”

“Are the lists full?” was my next query.

The lieutenant smiled.

“Would you take service under your country’s bitterest enemy, Captain Page?”

I laughed.

“Beggars mustn’t be choosers. And as for my country’s enemies; my country is the king’s, or at least, he says it is, though you must confess, Mr. Castner, that the standing-places where a Loyalist may hear the whipping of the royal standard above his head have become sadly few and restricted.”

Once again the lieutenant was shaking his head in mild deprecation.

“You must teach your tongue a better trade, Captain Page,” he said quite good-naturedly. “There are those in this town who would find fault with that last speech of yours.”

I saw at once, what I should have seen at the outset; that this frank-faced lieutenant was not one to be played with in double-meaning rashnesses. So I went back to Arnold and his “American Loyalists,” or “Loyal Americans,” or whatever lying phrase it was that headed his regimental book.

“You have not told me yet of Mr. Arnold’s conscript lists,” I reminded him.

“Nor do I know,” he replied, and was going on to say more when a tall, harsh-visaged fellow, wearing the insignia of a recruiting sergeant, looked in at the door, swept the apartment with a shrewd glance, as if in search of material for his trade of whipper-in, and was turning away when the lieutenant marked him and said to me: “There is a man who can tell you more than I can.” And then to the soldier: “Hey, Sergeant, a word with you!”

It was not until the man stood at our table-end and was near enough to shock me heartily that I recognized him as Major Lee’s emissary, John Champe; the man I had come to drag out of the peril he had blundered into.

Lieutenant Castner smiled at my start of surprise, and he was further edified, I suppose, by Champe’s drawing back with a muttered oath at his recognition of me. There was humor in the situation, but I was in no frame of mind to appreciate it just then.

It was Champe who first broke the awkward little silence. “You called me, sir?” he asked, saluting Castner, and turning his back on me.

I shall never forget how the young redcoat lieutenant played the gentleman at this crisis. Had there been a trace of malice in his heart he might have flung us two flag-changers at each other’s throats and stood aside to see the sport. Instead, he replied to Champe, quite gravely.

“Yes; your lists for the Loyal Americans—are they filling well, Sergeant?”

“They are closed,” said Champe, with his dour face as expressionless as a slab of wood.

“Ah,” said Castner; and then, with a hand-wave of dismissal for the sergeant, which Champe obeyed instantly: “That answers your question, Captain Page. I hope it does not seriously change your plans.”

I assured him that it did not; telling him that I had no plan beyond seeking an audience with Sir Henry Clinton at the earliest possible hour.

“Then your inclination matches with the necessities,” laughed my jailor. “I should be obliged to put you under guard, conveying you to Sir Henry forcibly, if you were not minded to go of your own accord.”

My heart beat a little less steadily at this. Was it possible that Mr. Hamilton’s plot had leaked so swiftly?—that word of my coming, or of my planned-for coming, had already reached the British commander-in-chief? It was a soul-destroying thought, but Castner’s next word relieved me.

“It is a general order,” he explained. “Sir Henry wishes to see each of you gentlemen—our friends from the other side, you know—as soon as may be after your arrival. If you have finished your breakfast we may as well go at once. I don’t know how your late staff headquarters keeps its hours, but our Sir Henry is an early riser.”

There was no reason on my part for delay, and every reason for haste without the appearance of haste. So I made ready to go with the lieutenant, and we presently fared forth into the crisp December morning and took our way to the row of Dutch-fashioned houses with their sides to the street and facing the Green, the row lying a little to the right of Fort George as you face the harbor.

Before one of the houses a sentry stood on guard, and with a stiff presenting of his duty salute to my officer, the man passed us up the steps.

Castner put me into the audience chamber of the man who stood, for us of the patriotic side, as the embodiment of British duplicity and tyranny, without a word to me by way of preparation; and in introducing me I thought there was a twinkle of grim humor in his grave boyish eyes.

“Sir Henry, I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. Richard Page, late Captain Richard Page, of Baylor’s Horse, in Mr. Washington’s army, and the newest of our new friends.”

His handicapping of me in these few words of introduction was most embarrassing—as perhaps it was meant to be—and for the moment I could only stare at the great man sitting calmly behind his writing-table, which, as I remember, was well littered with papers.

At first sight the British commander was disappointing. He was short, fat and stodgy, with the heavy face of a good feeder, and his nose was aggressively prominent. His eyes, as I saw them, were cold and calculating, and I could never fancy them lighting with enthusiasm or mellowing into anything like good-fellowship. And, indeed, it was told me afterward that he was a man to take his pleasures stolidly, warming neither to wine nor women. Washington, Greene, Hamilton, Lee—all of our leaders, were soldiers and they looked it. But this broad-girthed little man with the great nose and the chilling eyes was a soldier and he did not look it.

To my relief, the interview was short, and to my still greater relief it was not made harder for me by the lieutenant’s presence, that gentleman having disappeared after presenting me. Naturally, Sir Henry wanted news of Washington’s army, his dispositions, his plans and intentions; and having by this time come to my own in my heritage of the Page impudence, I lied to him as freely and joyously as I had to Castner, taking care only to make the lies dovetail neatly with what I had told the lieutenant over the inn breakfast-table.

But my cross-examiner saved his shrewdest question for the last, as if he had been a lawyer.

“Now, for yourself, Mr. Page,” he said finally, fixing me with that cold stare that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. “What brought you here?”

This was a harder thing to lie out of than any of the others. My family, and my own record, for that matter, were too well known to let me dish him up some plausible story of how we were all merely waiting the chance to come over to the king’s side. I must invent some personal grievance, and with those chilling eyes upon me it was a task to make the blood thicken in my veins—at a time when it should have been galloping most freely.

It was at this point that I had an inspiration. There is no lie so compelling as the truth, when the truth can be made to serve the purpose of a lie. I had heard that Sir Henry frowned like a straight-laced Puritan upon dueling; that he put it under the ban for his own officers, punishing for it as he would for any other infraction of orders.

My resolve was taken on the spur of the moment.

“Aside from one other cause, which was great enough in itself to make me wish to change flags, I ran away from a duel,” I told him, returning the stare as hardily as I dared.

“How is that, sir?” he demanded, a shade less coldly.

At that I gave him the story of the quarrel with Seytoun, coloring it only so much as to make it appear that dueling was the accepted code in our army, and that the entire ostracising pressure of my late fellow officers had been put upon me to drive me into a corner from which there was no escape save in the course I had taken.

“You have conscientious scruples, Mr. Page?” he asked, after what seemed an interminable weighing and balancing of my tale.

“You may call them so, if you wish, Sir Henry,” I replied gravely. “I have no desire to kill or to be killed in such a cause. And since, if I had stayed, I should certainly have had to fight this Captain Seytoun, I put this with the other, and possibly better, reason, and crossed the lines.”

“And that other reason?” he questioned shrewdly. “Speak plainly, Mr. Page. You stand upon the dividing line between some honorable occupation with us on one hand, and the prison hulks on the other.”

I saw that my excuse was not big enough, and tremblingly tore another page out of the book of truth.

“I am ashamed to tell you of the other reason, Sir Henry,” I demurred, with as near the proper shade of wounded self-esteem as I could simulate. “It touches me very nearly, and in a tender spot. You know, without my telling of it, how we Pages, my father’s family, have given everything to the cause which is even now tipping in the balance of defeat?”

“I do know it,” he replied, somewhat grimly I thought.

“With that in view, Sir Henry, imagine my feelings as a gentleman and an officer when proposals were made to me involving a complete and entire surrender of all that a man of honor may be supposed to hold most dear. Do you wonder, sir, that I have thrown myself into the arms of a generous and high-minded enemy?”

“Ha!” said he, relaxing the hold of the freezing stare for the first time in the interview. “They wished you to turn spy, did they? Mr. Page, I thoroughly applaud your courage and resolution, as well as your frankness in telling me this. Not many men in your situation would have dared to do it. But I have long suspected Mr. Washington and his advisers on this score. It is the least honorable part of their stubborn resistance to their king.”

I should have laughed outright if I had had liberty. This from the man, mind you, who had corresponded secretly for months with Benedict Arnold, bribing, suborning and finally protecting the traitor; the man who had sent the brave Major André, his own adjutant-general, into our lines, if not as a spy, at least as a go-between to treat with our Judas of West Point!

“As you say, Sir Henry, it is the least honorable part of warfare,” I agreed mildly, fearful now lest, my case being safely made, I should say too much.

But Sir Henry would not let it rest at that.

“It is greatly to your credit that you were courageous enough to refuse, Mr. Page,” he went on, taking, as I meant he should, my refusal for granted. And then, as if upon a premeditated thought: “Are you acquainted with Mr. Arnold?”

I said I was not; that my arm of the service, the horse, had never chanced to be under his command.

The commander-in-chief found a pen and quickly wrote me a note.

“Take that to Mr. Arnold,” he said almost graciously. “He lodges next door, and his hour is nine o’clock.” And, as I was bowing myself out: “Stay, Mr. Page; shall I give you an introduction to the pay-master?—for present necessities?”

I understood this to be an offer to pay, not for my allegiance, but for the information he had—or thought he had—of me, and I declined as delicately as I could, saying that a soldier’s wants were few, and that I had taken the precaution to provide for myself out of my private funds. This seemed to please him still more, and, on the whole, the Sir Henry Clinton who bade me an affable “Good morning” was greatly less alarming and formidable than had been the one who had gripped me so chillingly in his stony stare while Lieutenant Castner was presenting me.

Castner was waiting for me in the ante-room, as I found, but this time only to pass me beyond the sentry at the door. The fact that I was allowed to depart unhindered seemed to be a sufficient guaranty that I had satisfied his chief; but I owe it to the young aide to say that his manner to me now was neither more nor less cordial than it had been over the ham and eggs in our breakfast tavern.

Having thus crossed my Rubicon, and, as one may say, burned my boats behind me, the next thing was to find Champe and to put that ferocious patriot on a proper footing with me. But first I had to get rid of my uniform as a captain of Baylor’s Horse, and here Castner served me again, quite willingly, going with me to a shop north of the burned region and knocking the sleepy proprietor out of his morning nap to wait on me.

Though I had said that I did not know Arnold personally, I knew enough of him and of his foppish taste in dress to make me drive a gentleman’s bargain with the shop-keeper; and when I was arrayed like the lilies of the field in such ready-made finery as I could purchase, Castner looked me up and down approvingly, and swore it was a pity I had ever forsaken my proper garmenting to don the coarse homespun which we officers of Baylor’s Horse made it a point of honor to wear.

By the time my bargaining was done, it was too late to go in search of Champe if I were to take Sir Henry Clinton’s nine o’clock hint pointing to Arnold. So, rather against my better judgment, I faced southward with Castner again, giving our Judas the preference over the worthy sergeant-major—a mistake which was to carry heavier consequences than I ever dreamed could cluster upon so small a pin-point.

IV
HOW MY RANK WAS REGAINED

NOTWITHSTANDING Sir Henry Clinton’s voucher for Benedict Arnold’s receiving hour, we found the man, Castner and I, on his door-step and apparently just going out, as we came up.

I expected Castner to introduce me at least, but here I had my first hint of Arnold’s standing, or rather his lack of standing, with the British officers, which was pointed by the lieutenant striding on with his head in the air, and leaving me abruptly to my own devices.

Since boldness was the only word I knew, or could know, in all this business, I ran up the steps, struck my hat to the man I hoped to see well hanged, and gave him General Clinton’s note. While he was reading the scrawl—the British knight wrote a most fearful and wonderful hand—I had time to observe how a few short weeks had changed the traitor.

Always a handsome man, with a clear transparent skin, intellectual features, thin nostrils well recurved and sensitive to every changing mood, and eyes that were almost womanish for size and for a certain languorous sensuousness, he might still have sat for the portrait of that Benedict Arnold who had braved the wrath of General Gates to save the day at the second battle of Stillwater. Yet there was a striking change, apparent even to one who had seen him as seldom as I had. The lips were set in thinner lines, the eyes were gloomy, and, when he turned them upon me, I saw a lurking devil of sullen suspicion in them. Also the deep furrows in his brow had grown still more marked and they had taken an upward and outward curve like the suggestion of a pair of horns.

None the less, his reception of me was bland and cordial, made with a half-offering of his hand, which, I am happy to say, I found it possible to seem to overlook.

“You are very welcome, Mr. Page,” he said, smiling with his lips and at the same time probing me with the eyes of gloomy distrust. “Sir Henry Clinton says kind things of you here”—waving the letter—“and I trust we shall go on to a better acquaintance.” Then, a little doubtfully: “Should I be able to place you more nearly?”

I told him I thought not; that I had probably seen him oftener than he had me. Then I added the bold word which has slain many a better man—the word of open flattery.

“Like many another who knows you even less well than I do, Mr. Arnold, I owe you a debt of gratitude. But for your courageous example, not a few men who are now faithfully serving the king would still be in Mr. Washington’s riff-raff army, fighting for that jack-o’-lantern thing called liberty. And, but for that same act of yours, I can most truthfully say that I should not be here this morning, trespassing on your good nature, sir.”

It was very gross, and I do think Mr. Dick Sheridan himself could not have made the doubl’ entendre more dramatic. Yet this gentlemanly turncoat, whose vanity was even greater than his villainy, gulped it down as I have seen our good Dominie Attlethorpe, of Williamsburg, swallow a luscious oyster.

“You are either the most astute of young scapegraces, or the kindliest, Mr. Page,” he retorted, with the moral glutton’s satisfaction in every intonation. And then: “Have you breakfasted, sir?”

I told him I had; whereupon he asked me to walk with him, saying that we could come at my business as well in that way as in any other, if I would so far indulge him.

I laughed in my sleeve, and gave him the wall, as a poor dependent on his bounty should; and, reckoning again without my host, wondered how long it would take poor Champe to get within such easy gripping distance of his quarry. As we passed northward and eastward, quite to the other side of the town, and well beyond the burned area Arnold put me through my deserter’s catechism, which now, since I had danced through it gaily once for Castner, and again for Sir Henry, came off the tongue as glibly as a schoolboy’s lesson.

It was in front of a rather stately house facing an open space that we paused finally, and I saw a woman come and open the door and close it again quickly when she saw there were two of us. I had but a glimpse of the woman’s face, but that was enough. No one who had ever seen Margaret Shippen would fail to recognize her even though she appeared, as she did to me in that door-opening glimpse, in the guise of a sweet young woman prematurely saddened and aged by sorrow unnamable.

But another thing I saw which disturbed me even more than the sight of poor Peggy Shippen’s face; disturbed me so greatly that I scarcely heard the traitor’s question which gave me the opportunity I had been flattering him for. The distracting thing was a fleeting glimpse of another fair face at an upper window of the house; a clean-cut profile appearing for a single instant behind the leaded panes, and then vanishing so quickly that I began to doubt that it had been there. Now I could have sworn upon a stack of Bibles that there was only one face in all the world that could have flung that profile outline upon any window that was ever glazed, and that face I had left safely behind me in Virginia.

Could it be possible—but no, it was only a fancied resemblance, I told myself; and then I flogged my wits into line again in time to answer Arnold’s leave-taking query that had been all but lost in the sudden jangle of emotions.

“What can you do for me, Mr. Arnold?” I echoed. “That is for you to determine. From what Sir Henry Clinton said, or rather hinted at, I hoped you might be able to make use of me in some way. But I shall be at my best if you keep me near your person, sir. Of that I am very sure.”

Again he swallowed the bait like a greedy gudgeon.

“You shall come to me at my headquarters this afternoon, Mr. Page,” he said, with the air of one of the great ones of earth dealing out largesse to a reverent and admiring vassal; and then he ascended the steps and the door was opened quickly for him by the woman who stood inside.

Some things were made plain to me on my chilly walk back to the southward, with its opportunity for quiet reflection. One was that I had not overrated Arnold’s appetite for flattery, which was in truth even grosser than I had imagined. Another developed out of the side-glimpse given me of the traitor’s domestic affairs. It was not passing strange that Arnold should not wish to have his family with him in the house in the lower town where, as Castner had told me, he ate and slept and had his regimental rendezvous. But I saw more than disinclination in the town-wide severing. It spoke eloquently of the traitor’s social isolation that Arnold should be only a daylight visitor at the house where his wife and child were, without doubt, the guests of family friends of the Shippens.

I was wondering upon what footing he stood in this house, and if he were only tolerated there as he seemed to be elsewhere, when the recollection of the face I had seen at the upper window came to haunt and perplex me again. My last letter from Beatrix Leigh had pictured her hived up in the great house at Sevenoaks, in County Warwick, her father and brothers gone to the south with General Greene,—in whose campaign against Cornwallis she was patently more interested than she was in our humdrum New York fuse-sputterings,—and her mother and all the other women-folk of the tidewater homeland shuddering in anticipation of the long-threatened descent of the British upon the Virginia coast.

She had given me no hint of any intended desertion of Sevenoaks, and though she had many friends in Philadelphia, where her schooling had been, I thought it the height of improbability that she would get even that far on the way to New York in these troublous times. Weighing all these things in the mental balance, I saw how absurd it was to let a momentary sight of a beautiful face at a window run me so far aside from the beaten path of calm reasoning. In sober fact the fancied identification proved nothing but this: that Beatrix Leigh’s face was so constantly present in my mind and heart that I was ready to find and adore it under any suggestive guise.

Having now some little time to call my own, I first secured a lodging at the tavern where the ham had made me homesick for the smoke-houses of Virginia, and then set out to find Sergeant Champe. That I should chance upon him readily enough, I had no doubt; but with the town full of soldiers it proved a more difficult thing than I had foreseen, so difficult that the noon hour found me still groping for my accomplice. But one thing I did find, namely, the barracks of the “Loyal American Legion,” and, with due respect for any true Loyalists there may have been in this traitor-built corps, I never saw a more hang-dog shuffling of men than these who were shortly to call our Judas “General.” They were a curst lot, too, for in all my introductory foregathering with them, I could not find more than three or four who would join me in a soldierly pot of wine.

Castner joined me at the midday meal at my inn, this time as my guest; and now I began to regret my knowing of this fine young fellow, who was condoning in me what must have appeared to him as the most deplorable wickedness a soldier can be guilty of. I foresaw complications, if our acquaintance should go on ripening into friendship; I must use him, or any other man coming in my way, to forward the great end in view, and already the idea of making the young, fine-faced, upright lieutenant an innocent accessory was growing repugnant to me. So I thought it no more than right to give him his warning—which I did.

“You have rooms in the barracks, Mr. Castner?” I asked when we had come to the long-stemmed pipes after the meal in the inn common-room.

“No,” he replied. “Being on detached duty as one of Sir Henry’s aides, I live as I please.”

“And where does it please you to live, if I may ask?”

“In this house at the present time. It is not so good as the best, perhaps; but it is far better than the worst.”

Here was a promise of more complications. My necessary meetings with Champe, which I had thought this tavern so near the fort might shelter, could scarcely come under the same roof with Castner and not awaken suspicion. Yet I reflected that I was not tied to the tavern looking down Broad Way to Sir Henry Clinton’s headquarters with any string; I could break loose whenever I chose.

“It is very good, indeed,” I allowed, thinking still of the breakfast ham and eggs. Then quite abruptly: “You have taken a fancy to me, Mr. Castner, and it does you little credit. You will live longer and have more money and a better digestion, if you give me the cold shoulder.”

The young Briton’s smile was altogether good-natured.

“If I were inclined to be suspicious, which I trust I am not, I might wonder why you particularly wish to be quit of me, Mr. Page,” he said mildly.

“I don’t, on my own account,” I denied bluntly. “But I am telling you the truth—for your own good. Have you ever fought a duel, Lieutenant?”

He admitted that he had, and had come off second best. But it was a mere point of honor with a brother officer, and no life-and-death affair.

“Then you are committed to the code? You think a challenged man should fight?”

“I think a challenged gentleman will always fight,” he corrected.

I hooked an arm over the back of my chair and looked him full in the face.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Castner—always for your own good, you will remember. Yesterday, about this time or a little later, I slapped a man’s face. He sent his friend to my friend, and this morning at daybreak, as I have reason to suppose, a party of three which should have been a party of four, met in a grassy cove on the riverside just below the town of Nyack. At that hour, or possibly a short time afterward, I was breakfasting very pleasantly here with you, as you will recall.”

He was evidently shocked, as I meant him to be, and for a little while he was unable to find the fitting word. When he did find it, it was a most gentlemanly word, I had to admit.

“You have your reasons for telling me this, Mr. Page, and you will pardon me if I say that they do not appear upon the surface. I will ask you one question—which you may answer or not, as it pleases you: Does Sir Henry Clinton know of this?”

“I told him, as nearly as I can remember, in much the same words.”

“Yet he condoned this—this——”

“The poltroonery?” I cut in, helping him out. “Yes, in a way. But his way made a just and even-handed discrimination between a brave man and a coward. You will observe that he did not billet me with his own people; he turned me over to Mr. Benedict Arnold. Now will you give me the cold shoulder, Mr. Castner?”

He took time to think about it, regarding me now a bit wistfully, I thought, and again, angrily. It was a test that a tried friend might have balked at, and he was only an acquaintance of a few hours.

“You have neither the face nor the carriage of a coward,” he said at length, speaking slowly. “Moreover, you are from the South, where your kinsmen would brand you for a deed such as you have described. No, Mr. Page, I shall not cold-shoulder you, because I know very well that you have carefully kept back the key to your riddle. Some day you will think well enough of me to let me have it.”

What could I do with this generous, noble-minded fellow who would not believe ill of me on my own word? There seemed to be nothing for it but to take him as he stood; to make the best of his abounding nobility of character and friendly loyalty. Yet it was now all the harder to deceive him and to play upon this very friendship, as I feared I might be obliged to. I have heard of those who are said to pray, sometimes, to be delivered from their friends, and I have always had a hot corner of despising saved for these cold-blooded ones. But now I found myself on the brink of saying the same unthankful prayer in my own behalf.

When we rose from the table, Castner asked me very kindly if I would walk abroad with him, saying that we might visit the fortification, if I wished. But here I laid down a rule which I meant to adhere to: a spy I might be; a spy I surely should be in every way that might in the future prove helpful to our side. But I did not need to make this friendly lieutenant a blind accomplice, and I would not.

So I pleaded my afternoon engagement with the arch traitor, and was glad I had it to plead; and I went to keep it, a little later, leaving Castner to smoke another pipe by himself before the fire in the tavern bar.

Arnold was writing at his table in the front room of the upper suite when his man, who, as I noted, wore the uniform of the new legion, marshaled me in. Though the event proved that I was expected, Arnold went on with his writing without so much as a look for me, and again I had a chance to mark the deepening furrows in his brow and the brooding look in the moody eyes.

When he was quite through he dropped the quill with a sigh and turned to me.

“Well, Mr. Page, you find me serving myself as I can,” he said. “None the less, I will serve you, too, as I may. Will you take a commission in the new legion?”

I wondered a little at his reckless haste. Had I been in his shoes, I think I should have considered well before confiding in a man whose very presence was a proof of his perfidy to others. But at that time I had yet to learn that the enlisting of the “Loyal American” Legion had proved a stupendous task for our traitor, and one which tried him to the last reserve of his ambitious will. There were privates in the ranks who scorned to serve under him; and when it came to the officering, the difficulties were almost insurmountable. No British regular would go with him willingly, and the few he had were under peremptory orders from Sir Henry Clinton. So now, when he had a chance to secure a subaltern whose fame as a troop leader was not, if I do say it, altogether of the worst, he caught at it.

I made no bones of accepting the commission, meaning that there should be no occasion for my holding it longer than the kidnapping purpose should require; and so I told him, with more flattery, that myself and my sword were at his disposal, or, if he desired, I would place myself in the ranks, as possibly many a better man had done.

“No, no, Mr. Page,” he made haste to say. “We don’t value you so lightly as that. You shall have a captain’s commission when we are ready to sail, and in the meantime, if you please, you may serve as my aide.”

It was here that my wonder burst into speech. Was the man gone totally blind on the side of caution?

“If I speak freely, Mr. Arnold, it is only a subordinate’s duty,” I began. “As your aide I shall be responsible in some sense for your personal safety. That I can not be, if you take in every piece of flotsam and jetsam that drifts across the lines, as you have me.”

He smiled soberly.

“As I said this morning, Mr. Page, you are either a very shrewd young man, or a very mirror of frankness. Don’t you see that your raising of such a question is the best possible proof of your own purity of motives? But I am not so careless as I may seem. Since we walked together this morning, you have been vouched for by an unimpeachable authority.”

“Now angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said I, to the inward Richard Page: “who in the devil’s name has been thrusting a finger into my pie?” But aloud, I said: “It is a good thing to have friends, Mr. Arnold, even if one can not always thank them for specific favors.”

“Nevertheless, you may soon have an opportunity of thanking this one,” he amended; but after this he left me still bewildered as to the how and when and where, passing at once into detail matters concerning the new legion, telling me of the trouble he had been at to find drillmasters and to get the raw levies whipped into some semblance of an effective fighting force.

After some talk of this nature he began sounding me delicately in the Virginian part of me, and instantly I divined that the new legion was to take the field in that quarter, and that my knowledge of the coast and people was an asset that he was counting on in bribing me with the captain’s commission. Whereupon I had a chance to exercise my inventive faculty again; and what he did not know about Virginia and the temper of her people when I was through—well, it would not have filled Governor Thomas Jefferson’s library at Monticello, perhaps, but it would certainly have furnished matter for a goodish-sized volume in the same, I dare swear.

Yet Arnold took it, or seemed to take it, all as Gospel truth, the more readily, I think, because I taxed him with the purpose of invading my native province; and when he would neither deny nor affirm, fell to pleadings for exemptions for my kinsfolk and others, when he, and our triumphant legion, should be carrying fire and sword into the rebellious colony. And afterward, I prayed most heartily, with my head in the dust, that God would forgive me for this excess of daredeviling, for, as He is my witness, I had no more thought that this consummate villain would live to lead an army into Virginia than I had that he would come back from the gallows-grave in which I hoped to see him comfortably planted.

It was while we were talking that one of Sir Henry Clinton’s aides, not Castner but another, came in with a bulky packet addressed to Arnold. I sat quietly by while he opened it, and when I saw the blue ribbon and the great seal appended to the parchment as he unfolded it, I was at no loss to account for the sudden lighting up of his eyes and the smile—it was almost a smirk—of gratification that went with it.

The parchment was his brevet as brigadier-general in His Majesty’s Army, and I hastened to improve the shining hour for another gentle stuffing of his vanity. Rising quickly from my chair, I stood at attention before him, gave him the graceful British salute in my best style, and said, with a true Virginia bow to go with the words: “Let me be the first to congratulate you, General Arnold.”

He tried to laugh it off, tossing the document carelessly upon the writing-table, and calling it a bauble which wise men valued at its true worth. But the gratified smile was still playing fitfully across his face even as he spoke; and in a little while he left me, going to the alcove at the farther end of the long room, where a new uniform was laid out carefully upon the bed.

His viewing of his finery set me to thinking of my own needs in that direction. As Arnold’s aide, I must have a captain’s uniform, and I was the more anxious to hasten it because it would give me an excuse to carry serviceable weapons, which my civilian’s clothes did not. So I broached this subject to my lord Lucifer Judas when he came back to my end of the room, and said I should be ashamed to serve a general in my citizen’s garmentings, and that I hoped my service was to begin at once.

There was no dispute upon this point, Arnold seeming to be as eager to have a bedecked-out captain to tag him around the town, as I was eager to be the tag. And now it appeared that he had overshot the mark in his quartermaster’s stores, having, as he assured me, several more outfittings than he had officers, and among these possibly a captain’s. Hence, I was shortly afterward sent to the legion barracks with an order for my bedizenry, and a second order upon the regimental tailor to cut and alter and fit the same for me that I might report to General Arnold in full panoply by six o’clock at the latest.

I went willingly enough, being glad to escape from the company of a man who stirred up all the evil I ever owned and made my fingers itch to lay hold of him. And because the afternoon was half spent when I began, and because the fussy little Dutch tailorman had to measure and fit and try and measure again, I lost another chance of finding John Champe, and thereby sealed his fate as well as my own, as will appear a little farther on.

Since I was ordered to report to Arnold at six o’clock, I had an early supper at my tavern, and expected to miss Castner. But he came in and sat down at my table before I was through, and I was sure I saw scorn in his honest blue eyes for my new plumage.

“I like you better otherwise,” he said, when I had laughingly given him leave to open his mind. “I hate to see you in that—gentleman’s livery.”

“What!” I retorted; “after I have told you how emphatically it fits me?”

“Yes; even after that.”

“Well,” said I; “I hope you may never have to wear it, Mr. Castner, since you dislike it so warmly.”

“Zounds, man!” he cried, leaping from his chair as if I had pricked him with a sword’s point, “do you know everything?”

Of course, I modestly disclaimed the charge, and begged him to sit down and be at his ease again; but he began to walk the floor of the small snuggery where I had my supper served, biting his lip and giving a very fair imitation of a man too deeply enraged to be able to swear it off easily.

Naturally, I was curious to know how I had unwittingly stirred the mud in the depths of his soul-pool, but I would not question him. Apart from having no special claim upon his confidence, I knew he would tell me of his own accord when the rage-pot became hot enough to boil over.

But the way in which he began to tell me was with a sober question.

“Mr. Page,—Captain Page, I should say,—for the honor of the king’s service you must advise me how you came to know a thing which, I am solemnly assured, has never been mentioned outside of Sir Henry Clinton’s cabinet. If we have traitors that near to us, we must know it.”

Now I was able to laugh at him and once more to beg him to sit down and to compose himself.

“I know nothing; less than nothing, Lieutenant Castner,” I protested. “What did I say to stir you so?”

“You do know!” he insisted. “I saw it in your eyes when you wished that I might not have to wear the uniform of Mr. Arnold’s Loyal Americans. I must know how you found out!”

I laughed again. “So you are to wear it?” I asked. “I’m sure I could not desire a better fellow officer. Yet I think you need not borrow trouble in advance, if it be Mr. Arnold you object to.”

He sat down and rested his elbows on the table, and tried to look me through and through with eyes that were only meant to see out of, and to be read by others.

“More mysteries,” he fumed. And then he added: “They are dangerous, Captain, most peculiarly dangerous for a man in your situation.”

“This is no mystery,” I replied boldly, never letting him loose the eyehold for an instant. “Have you never heard that Mr. Arnold’s health is most precarious? It is, I promise you; every one on the other side of the Neutral Ground knows it well. He will drop off very suddenly some day, Mr. Castner. I may go so far as to say, in strictest confidence to you, that I marked some of the symptoms while I was with him to-day.”

“You surprise me,” he said; but I saw that the nail was holding. Then he asked in a tone that was almost sympathetic, what the malady was.

“It has never been written out in any doctor’s book, I believe,” I rejoined gravely. “It is an obscure thing, coming suddenly and tying a man in knots, so that at the last he can move neither hand nor foot.”

I had him fairly mesmerized by this time, and his voice was hushed when he said: “And you say Mr. Arnold has this—this disease?”

“There is little doubt of it. Indeed, I overheard two men, officers they were in our—in the rebel army, speaking of it only last night, and, naturally, they were lamenting that it had not carried him off before he carried himself off. One of those men had known Mr. Arnold from the beginning, I believe.”

For a long minute Castner was silent, and he seemed to have forgotten the supper that the pretty serving maid had brought him. When he spoke he was plumbing me again with the honest eyes—or he thought he was.

“It is a hard thing to say, Captain Page,” he said, speaking like a man who has been digging in the very bottom layer of his convictions, “but sometimes I think that an outcome like this which you say is threatening would be the best for all concerned.”

“I am sure it would,” I agreed brazenly. But I immediately took the edge off by adding: “For the king’s cause, of course. Mr. Arnold has his abilities; no one will deny that. But however honest he may be in his—ah—convictions, let us say, the obloquy that attaches to eleventh-hour repentances in the popular mind will hamper him, and through him the cause for which he fights.”

Castner smiled leniently.

“You are a strange young man, Mr. Page. You discuss such matters as if they were as remote from you as the stars. Yet you come under Mr. Arnold’s ban—if it be a ban—yourself.”

“Not quite,” I countered hardly. “I have convictions, you see, and I was never living up to them more faithfully than I am at this moment. But now I must beg your leave to go. I am due at Mr. Arnold’s quarters at six o’clock.”

It was but a short walk in the starlit evening to the house next door to Sir Henry Clinton’s. There was a soldier on guard at Arnold’s door now, a tall man standing stiffly in the way to stop me until he saw my Loyal American uniform and the captain’s shoulder-knot. Then he let me pass without a word, and also, as I observed, without the salute.

Arnold was writing again when I ascended to the working room, and with a nod to me and a wave of the shapely hand toward a chair, he went on for a full hour, I should think, filling sheet after sheet with industrious application and singleness of purpose. It was certainly no lightening of my responsibility that made me sleepy when the quill-scratching grew by and by into a soothing lullaby. But there had been a strenuous night and a none too restful day to follow it, and before I realized that I had been asleep, I awoke to find Sir Judas standing over me, with the gloomy scowl of half-aroused suspicion wrinkling his brow, his hands behind him, and his attitude that of a spy at the windows of the unsuspecting.

It is none so easy to come out of a sound sleep in full possession of all the faculties. My first half-waking impression was that something, a word muttered in my sleep, perhaps, had betrayed me, and the impulse that went with it prompted me to spring up and throttle the traitor before he could give the alarm. In good fact, I was starting from my chair with this same insane purpose tugging at me, when his word reassured me.

“You sleep soundly, Captain Page, and I am old enough and burdened enough to envy you the gift of it,” he said moodily. And then, with a touch of sympathy that made me wish he would always show me only the hateful side of him: “I was about to command your attendance for the evening, but you will be needing rest to fit you for to-morrow’s duties, which will be arduous enough.”

Having a good grip upon my senses by this time, I protested at once that I was fit and much refreshed by my sleep, which I found, to my astonishment, had stretched above an hour. Also, I expressed a willingness, which was entirely unfeigned, to accompany him wherever he was going, and I thought his somber eyes lighted a little at that.

“Have you ever heard me spoken of as a timid man, Captain Page?” he asked, with a lifting of the brow that was meant for a smile.

I had not, and I said so. His worst enemy never denied him courage and intrepidity, I think; and when I remembered the stories they told of the rash boy who had fired a pistol at his sister’s French admirer, and had once stripped his coat and offered to fight a stout constable who was interfering with some of his lawless pranks, I could well believe that the daredevil boy of a dozen years was the legitimate father of the man of forty.

“A timid man would scarcely have led the winter march to Quebec,” I said in confirmation of the tribute to his courage.

At this the brow-wrinkling grew into a wintry laugh.

“That was five long years ago, and the times and manners have changed much since then. In Mr. Washington’s camp, now, they would be quoting Shakespeare at me, saying that ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’ Do you read Shakespeare, Captain Page?”

“Not that part of him,” I laughed; adding: “Nor do you, General Arnold.”

“Perhaps not. Yet I find myself growing thoughtful now, where I once took no thought,” he said reflectively; “as in the present instance. You are fresh from Washington’s camp, Captain. Have you ever heard it said that he would give the half of his Virginia estates to lay his hands upon me?”

I could truthfully say “No,” to this.

“It has been told me,” he went on moodily again. “Also that he has his hired desperadoes here in these streets waiting their chance to kidnap me. I am no coward, Captain Page; so much I think I may say without boasting. Yet there is something in that Scripture that speaks of the terror of the arrow that flieth by day and the pestilence walking in the darkness. It will go hard with any or all of these assassin emissaries of Mr. Washington’s if I can ferret them out.”

“It should, if you can catch them,” I agreed. “But in the meantime, you should take no risks, General; your safety means too much to the king’s cause. You may call it a flattery if you will, but it is the simple truth that the King’s Army on this side of the water does not hold another commander who could fill your place, sir,” I said, meaning, of course, that there was no other base enough.

“Oh, as to that,” he said, slipping on his air of grandeur as if it had been a coat. “It would hardly become me to agree with you, Captain Page. Still, what I have done for the Congress and Mr. Washington, I can do for Parliament and King George, I suppose. But we are wandering from the point. I was about to say that one of our friends gives a farewell rout and supper to the officers of the Loyal Americans to-night, and I thought that perhaps, partly because of Mr. Washington’s hired Mohawks, and partly from a desire to show your maiden uniform, you would walk with me, Captain Page.”

I said I would be blithe to go; which was both false and true. I thought it hard that I should have to show myself as a Virginia Page in public places wearing the feathers of a carrion bird. But on the other hand, I was ready to bind myself to Sir Iscariot by every tie that offered itself.

So, when he had buttoned himself into a great watchcoat, thrusting, as I observed, a pair of short, thick-barreled dueling pistols into the outer pockets, we took the stair for it, and so came down to the steps where the crusty soldier stood at attention and saluted as we passed him.

Before we had gone many steps in the street I thought I heard this soldier’s footfalls, or another’s, close behind. Thinking it was a good time to show my bodyguard watchfulness with little hurt to anybody, I said, “One moment, General,” clapped hand to sword-hilt, and made as if I would face about and charge the man who was following us. But Arnold restrained me.

“No, not this time, Captain,” he said lightly. “It is only our door-keeping sentry, and he has orders to keep in touch with us. The streets are dark, and if there should be an attack, three of us might be none too many.”

Having the information that I wanted, I caught the step again, and when we had gone a little farther on our way, I made bold to ask who our soldier-follower was.

“You should know him, as I take it, Captain Page,” was the calm reply. “It is Sergeant Champe, late of the rebel Henry Lee’s Light Dragoons.”

V
A KISS AND A MAN’S LIFE

OUR walking route, Arnold’s and mine, lay over the ground we had covered together in the forenoon, and was of an equal length. But with my brain afire with the possibilities suddenly opened up by the knowledge that Champe was only a step or two behind us—that we two, bent upon the same object, had the traitor practically in our hands—the distance we traversed was all too short to let me invent a way to take advantage of the Heaven-sent opportunity.

Now came the time when I bitterly regretted the headlong rashness that had led me to put the cart before the horse in all the day’s work. It was clear now that Champe was the only building basis for any rational plot to take the traitor; he it was who was in communication with Major Lee, without whose timely cooperation in providing means of escape for us from the town our mere seizing of Arnold would be but a flash in the pan. My first and biggest care should have been to make myself known in my true character to Champe; and a sharp attack of self-abasement followed the reflection that it might easily have been done at our breakfast-table meeting. A nod, a hint, a wink—any signal that might have given him a clue, would have sufficed. And I had tossed the chance aside like a spendthrift, telling myself that the day was yet young!

Now, however, as we strode along through the ill-lighted streets, the laggard afterwit spared me no stab. Somewhere in the darkness behind us—never near enough for me to signal to—tramped the sullen-faced sergeant-major, ready enough to get into action, no doubt, but firmly convinced that he was following two traitors instead of one. For all I knew, the time might be fully ripe for the striking of the blow. The difficulties hitherto, as Mr. Hamilton had explained them, had turned upon successive failures in fitting together simultaneously the two halves of the plot, Champe’s and Major Lee’s. What if the tangle had been straightened out and got into working order in the one-day interval, and I was merely obstructing instead of helping?

The thought was maddening, and yet I dared not risk all by collaring my man and shouting to Champe for help, and so, perhaps, making another blunder; one which would cost Champe’s life as well as mine. The better hope, it seemed, lay in retrieving the prime error of the day at the earliest possible instant; and I was still racking my brain to devise some way of communicating quickly with Champe when we came to the end of our walk.

The house of entertainment, as it appeared, was on the opposite side of the open space from the one which Arnold had visited in the forenoon. It was a mansion, as mansions go in the North, with a narrow lawn, clipped hedges and box-borderings, and it was well illuminated in our honor. I thought we should be early; at that hour our Virginia dames and damsels would be just waking from their beauty naps. But there was music within, and the dancing had begun, though guests were still arriving in pairs and groups.

Some half-dozen or more reached the door of welcome just as we did, and here I hoped to get the chance of speaking the necessary word to John Champe. But though I was sure he had followed us through the gate, he was nowhere to be seen; and when Arnold’s name was called out by the footman in waiting, my own was coupled with it, and again the chance vanished.

Our entry was into a large and brilliantly lighted hall, which was well filled at the moment with the arriving guests; bewigged civilians carrying the solid Dutch pomp bequeathed to their successors by the New Netherlanders; high-bred dames with powdered hair and patches, which, however much they pique the charms of the younger women are, to my mind, a blemish on the face of maturity; officers and their ladies, not so many of the gentlemen wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans as I had expected to see, yet still a fair sprinkling of them.

I missed the name of my hostess, though I afterward learned that it was the roof of Chief Justice Smith, brother of the Joshua Pett Smith who had been the aider and abetter of the Arnold treason from the beginning, that sheltered us. But this and kindred trivialities were but the first few drops before the storm which was presently to make me forget them.

I was still saying empty nothings to an elderly lady to whom I had been passed on, with my brain busy, as it had been for a good half-hour, upon the Champe blunder, when I began to have a growing sense of impending disaster. It was as if I had groped my way into a dark room, believing it to be empty, and had suddenly been warned, by that sixth sense which is yet unnamed in the books, of the presence of another and vaguely threatening occupant.

It is curious how the instinct of self-preservation bobs first to the surface, like a submerged bottle-cork, in an emergency. The impulse was to duck and run, without waiting to see what menaced me, and following it, I bowed and made way for a snuffy old gentleman who was ready to take my entertainer off my hands. But being no better than a blind man in a strange house, I went straight into the thick of the peril. The ballroom lay beyond the broad stair running by easy stages from the upper story, and my thought was to go into the great room and so to lose myself in the throng.

At the turning of the newel-post, when the way seemed altogether clear, a bevy of young women came down the stair, and I stepped back and hung my head and gave them precedence. They fluttered past, with only a glance for the spick-and-span new uniform—all save one. And when I looked up to find the reason it was flashing down upon me in scorching contempt from the eyes of Mistress Beatrix Leigh.

She was standing on the next to the lowest step, leaning with one hand lightly on the stair-rail, and though she was at the instant the very spirit and image of the goddess of scorn and indignation, I never saw her when she was more distractingly beautiful or more to be desired. But she gave me little time to admire her.

“They told me,” she said most cuttingly, “that there would be a Captain Page here to-night; one of our Virginia Pages come at this late day to his proper sense of loyalty. I could not tell them they lied, because I was their guest; and now—oh, Dick! how could you do it!” she ended, with a pitiful quivering of the sweet lip and a sudden upspringing of tears to the beautiful eyes.

The human mind shuffles its cards quickly at such a crisis. Had my secret been my own, she should have had it there and then, and all would have been well. I knew I could trust her, notwithstanding the fact that she was Margaret Arnold’s friend—and her fellow-guest in the house across the square, I feared.

But the secret was not mine, and with the second thought came the enlightening glimpse of how horribly it would distress and embarrass her if she should have even a hint of my true reason for this miserable masquerade. So I hung my head and refused to say the word which would have cleared me, though it broke my heart to keep silence, in the face of the lip-quivering and the tears and the reproachful exclamation.

I could feel that the tears had been driven back and that the glorious eyes were flashing again when she went on.

“You knew I should be here to-night, Mr. Page?” she asked, giving me the courtesy prefix for the first time in all our life-long knowing of each other.

“No,” I replied dumbly. “How could I know it? Your letters told me nothing of this—of your coming to New York.”

“Yet you saw me this morning,” she said accusingly.

“I know now that I did; yet I could not believe it then—nor later, when I tried to think it out. You saw me?”

“I did; and I have been telling myself all day long that I did not. I said it could not be. By so much, Mr. Page, your friends think better things of you than you think of yourself.”

“That may always be true of the worst as well as the best of us,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

She drew herself up proudly.

“I never thought to have it to say for Mr. Richard Page. Will you be good enough to let me pass, sir?”

I stepped back, and she came down the two steps with her face averted. I thought I could let her go; it was my plain soldier duty. But when the fragrance of her was in my nostrils I lost my hold on duty and all else.

“One word, Beatrix, for God’s sake!” I muttered, praying that the words might go to her ears alone. “I must see you before you quit this house, if only for five little minutes! You can’t deny me this!”

She left me without the promise, without a word, without the slightest inclination of the proud head, and I sank fathoms deep into the pit of wretchedness. And, as if to make my punishment the sharper, in another minute I saw her chatting gaily with a little whipper-snapper British coxcomb of an ensign whom I could most joyously have broken in two across my knee.

As may readily be imagined, there was a miserable hour or two for me after this; it might have been a longer or a shorter time, I do not know. The clocks were all stopped for me, and I know that I lived ages head-under in the slime-pit of despair, coming to the surface at intervals, when I had a glimpse of her dancing, as she always danced, the very poetry of motion, with one or another of the house guests, each new man transforming himself, or being transformed, into my bitterest foe because he had my place.

Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all.

During these ages of wretchedness, in which my own dismal misery was only made the blacker by the lights and the gay company filling the rooms to overflowing, she never gave me a look or made me a sign to show that she remembered my presence in the house of merrymaking. But when I could endure it no longer—it was while she was sitting out a dance with that same popinjay ensign that I had desired to break in two—I made my opportunity, passing in plainest view of her on my way to a hothouse garden pavilion connected by a covered entryway with the drawing-room where she was sitting.

The air of the hothouse place was dense and heavy with the perfume of blooming plants, and there was little light save that which filtered through the glass roof and came from a sort of cresset-lamp bracketed to the housewall outside and overhead. But with all its pent-up fragrance, or perhaps, because of it, the glass house was empty, and I flung myself down upon a settle to wait, hoping against hope that she would relent and come and give me a word with her, though what that word should be, I had no more idea than a simpleton.

She did come, after what seemed like another full age of suspense; and when I saw her dear face above the intervening hothouse roses, I thought it was fairer than any flower that ever bloomed, and so I should have told her if she had not frozen me so that I could only stand before her and try to stammer some word of thanks for her coming.

“Well?” she said, chilling me with a look of quiet scorn.

I tried to face her as I had faced my enemies in the field, but it was no manner of use; she had me beaten at my own game, and that before the game was begun.

“How can I say what I’d like to say when you look at me that way?” I protested. “Is it fair to condemn me unheard?”

“I have come to let you say that word you spoke of,” she announced, and her tone was most discouraging.

“You put me a thousand miles off!” I raged. “I can’t shout across the world at you!”

“There is no need to shout or to lose your temper, Mr. Page. You can tell me in ten words, perhaps, why you have thought it proper to change your coat and your flag, when—” she broke down at this and put her face in her hands, and I could hear her saying over and over again softly, “Oh, the disgrace of it!—the miserable, wretched disgrace of it!”

“It is no disgrace, Beatrix,” I burst out hotly. “If I could tell you—if I dared tell you—”

There was no scorn in her eyes when she uncovered them for me. But there were tears.

“Yes; if you could tell me, Dick,” she repeated after me, eagerly.

If I had looked at her another second she would have had it all out of me, in spite of my pledge to Mr. Hamilton, or my life or John Champe’s or any other thing that might be jeopardized. So I had to star-gaze at the flaring lamp beyond the glass roof when I said: “There may be reasons—good reasons, Beatrix. Can’t you trust me to tell you them when we have a better time and—and place than this?”

“There can be no reason at all that will stand in the breach for you, Dick. You know it, and that is why you try to put me off. But there must have been a cause, a most bitter cause, to bring you here in that coat, and as the friend of that unspeakable man whose mere presence makes me lock myself in my room when he comes to see poor Margaret.” She was pleading now; I knew it, and must still be obdurate and hard.

“There was a cause, as you say,” I retorted. “There must have been, since I have fought and spilt blood on the other side. But I can tell you nothing to-night without forswearing myself more than I had to, to wear this coat you dislike so heartily. But I had a cause,” I repeated, going back to the beginning like a clock wound up to strike all its hours over again.

“You are bitter, Dick,” she said, and now she made no secret of her anxious sympathy. “You were always a hot-head, ready to quarrel and fight and take offense where none was meant. But I’ll do you the justice to say that heretofore you’ve always made reparation like a gentleman when your mad fit had passed. But now this dreadful thing is beyond repair—or is it?”

I could lie joyously enough to forward the enterprise which Mr. Hamilton had sent me on, but I could not lie to her who was the heart of my heart, even by implication.

“No,” I said; “it is not beyond repair.”

She caught eagerly at my reply.

“Then you have already repented of this rashest, most wretched passion-flight you ever made, Dick?—you have thought of—of going back to your—to Colonel—”

I laid a finger on my lips and slipped past her to see that the door in the passageway to the drawing-room was fully closed.

“What you are asking me to say would find me a rope very quickly if it came to other ears,” I cautioned, lowering my voice. Then in the same hurried half-whisper, and fearing every moment lest we should be interrupted: “What I have admitted thus far has been the truth in every word. But you must trust me, Beatrix; trust me in spite of everything. And you must not ask me to tell you more.”

“But you’ll promise me, Dick,—” she began.

There was the sound of a gently-closing door and steps in the passage—warnings she did not hear. Again there came that quick shuttling of the mind that covers all the moves of a desperate game in an eye-sweep that can not be measured for its lightning-like swiftness. She was a daughter of the Virginia Leighs, with a father and three brothers in the patriot army. I was a deserter and always to be suspected until I had actually drawn blood in the king’s service. For any of the Tory revelers to find us here together in cool converse.... I saw the shadow of the gibbet hanging plainly over me when I took her suddenly in my arms and stopped what might have been my death-warrant with a kiss on the sweet lips of pleading.

There was a little tableau among the roses in the glass house, with an audience of only one to see it. While a clock might have ticked twice she lay in my arms like some frightened wild thing. For all we had grown up together, I had never let her see the masterful side of me lover-wise, and I do think she was shocked beyond speech or struggling.

But shamed resistance and the strength to make it came quickly enough when a man’s voice said, “Ah, Captain Page, they told me you were here, but they did not add that you had taken a fair prisoner, sir.” And then, as we stood before him, Mistress Beatrix blushing as she had a good right to, and I playing the part of a fond lover taken in the very act, Arnold spread his hands and made his lowest bow and said: “Your humble and most devoted admirer, Mistress Leigh. I have come to tell you that Margaret is asking for you. And you, Captain, to your duty, sir. We have much overstayed our time in this pleasant house.”

Beatrix had fled before he finished, and afterward he straightened up and looked me over with searchings that seemed to read my inmost thoughts. But his words belied his apparent insight.

“I was troubled when they told me you were here with Mistress Leigh,” he said slowly. “But pshaw! I might have known how it was. You are a warm-hearted lover, Captain, and it does you credit. And love knows no politics, I’ll warrant you. Come, let us be going. There is much to be done before to-morrow, and time and tide wait for no man.”

And so we took our departure from the house of revels, and though I looked passionately everywhere for her in the crowded assembly room, I had no other sight of Beatrix, and had to go at last without knowing whether she forgave me for saving my life with that ravished kiss.

VI
DARK NIGHT

IT WAS not much beyond ten o’clock when we stepped out under the cold December stars and bade farewell to Mr. Justice Smith’s hospitable house of entertainment.

I wondered a little at Arnold’s leaving so early, but the wonder was appeased when he took another way back to the seaward end of the town; a way which led to the Loyal American barracks.

Here, though I stood aside and took no part in Arnold’s talk with a group of his officers, I overheard a thing to shock the plotting part of me swiftly into action. In a breath it was made plain that the time for trapping our Judas had shrunk to a few short hours. Early in the morning the legion was to begin embarking for some destination as yet kept secret, and once on shipboard, all chance of our seizing the traitor would be at an end.

This explained most clearly Arnold’s allusions of the afternoon, and his early quitting of the house of merrymaking. Also his saying to me that there was much to be done before the morrow. Truly, there was much to be done. If our business, Sergeant Champe’s and mine, were not to burst like a pricked bubble it must have its beginning, its middle part, and its ending crammed into the few hours that remained to us.

So now I was set mad again upon that elusive chase of Champe, and I had no more idea than a babe unborn what had become of him. Now that I remembered, it struck me like a blow that I had not seen him at all since Arnold and I had passed him on our coming out of the headquarters house in the lower town. After that moment he had been a mere echoing of footsteps in the rearward dark.

Worse than this, he had not been our rearguard on the retreat from Mr. Justice Smith’s to the barracks, or if he had, I had not heard him. Being footloose while Arnold was conferring with his officers about the morning’s move to the ships, I used my liberty and my eyes in a painstaking search, scrutinizing every man in sight who wore a legion uniform. But the sergeant was nowhere to be seen.

This left me to climb desperately into the breach alone—with no scaling ladder in sight; but lord! what would this life be without its little excitements and its apparently unsolvable problems? I was still alive, unhanged, fit and vigorous; with my sweet lady’s kiss—I could swear she kissed me back again, whether she meant to or no—warm upon my lips, and with two good hours of the night available before the tide would turn to oppose an up-river flight.... The biggest battles of the world had been fought and won in less time, I reflected; and when we left the barracks, I was planning just how I would clinch my man so he should not have a chance to get at those flapped coat pockets with their short-barreled pistols.

The onward faring was made in silence, with one of us, at least, listening anxiously for footfalls in the rear—footfalls, which, however, stubbornly refused to become audible. While his moody silence held, I was afraid Arnold would dismiss me at the house door; on which chance I should lose him altogether for the night. But at the very moment of key-fitting he asked me in, saying that there were certain maps of the southern coast which he would like to have me verify for him in the figures of the soundings.

This gave me a little extension of the precious time, at all events, and when we were above-stairs, and he had lighted the candles, the maps were spread on the table and I had to quibble afresh, giving him anchorage depths in the Virginia roadways where a fishing-smack would go aground, and otherwise discrediting the makers of the finest set of navigation charts I had ever seen.

It encouraged me not a little that he was restless while this map-undoing was going on, walking up and down the room and coming now and then to bend over the table to keep the question and answer alive. I say it encouraged me, for the thing I feared was that he would settle down for the night’s work and tell me to leave him. But so long as he stayed afoot and restive there seemed room for the hope that he might be going out again.

The hope was not unfounded, as the event proved. Right in the midst of the map talk he broke off to ask me if I were leg-weary, and if I would favor him by accompanying him to the garden in the rear of the house, where, as he said, it was his nightly custom to walk off the perplexities and brain fatigues of the day.

Anything was better than being hived up in the house with him, I decided, and while the garden promised little, it had the advantage of being out-of-doors and a few paces nearer to the river which must be my highway to success and freedom, if any highway were to be found.

So we tramped down the stair again, and I had my first unsatisfactory sight of the garden at the back. As well as I could make out in the starlight, it was a long and rather narrow area, enclosed within a high wooden fence, with a graveled walk running down the middle of it, and with a few shrubs and stunted trees growing in the neglected flower- and vegetable-beds; as safe a place against any desperate kidnapping purpose as any that could be found outside of the garrison prison yard.

Arnold was still harping upon the Virginia coast and its anchorages when we began to pace a weary sentry-beat side by side up and down the graveled walk, and he kept it up with a great persistence, inquiring minutely into the navigating particulars, and keeping me so busy misleading him that I could not get a moment for the consideration of any plotting plan at all.

But as for that, the whole heavens and earth and all the universe were blankly void of suggestion. I could think of nothing that offered the slightest chance of success. To drop a step behind, to give him a sudden wrestler’s back-throw and afterward to bind and gag him were all simple enough. My six feet of good, sound, country-bred Virginia bone and muscle would answer for these primitive beginnings. But having trussed my fowl, I should be like the man who stole a hobbled horse, which he could neither carry nor ride. I could never hope to escape out of the high-fenced garden with my captive, or to reach the river unhalted, or, reaching it, to have the fairy luck of finding a boat with oars shipped and waiting for me to pull away in.

One of these difficulties—the least of them—overcame itself as we were wheeling to make one of our face-abouts at the lower end of the walk. A board in the high fence paling had been displaced, and when I touched it with my foot it fell outward with a dry clatter and left a gap in the enclosure.

“Your boundaries are tumbling down, General Arnold,” I remarked carelessly; and he replied that it mattered little, since they would be another’s boundaries very shortly. After which he paid no more attention to the gap opened by the falling board; but I did, and every time we made the turn at the walk’s end it tempted me. If I only knew what lay beyond: how far it was to the river’s edge, and what one of a thousand chances I might have of finding a boat unlocked and with oars in it!

But I did not know, could not know; and thus the irresolute “I dare not,” waited upon the “I would,” and I was alternately fever-hot with excitement and shivering in depression, the thing to be desired being so near and yet so inimitably far.

It was some time after the incident of the gap-opening, and while we were passing a point midway between the house and the garden end, that Arnold stopped short in his questioning about the Portsmouth harbor to hold up a finger for silence.

“What was that?” he asked, and I saw his other hand disappear into one of the pistol-hiding pockets.

“I heard nothing,” I made answer, which was the truth.

“It was a sneeze or a cough,” he commented; “I am certain of it.”

The pause gave me time to look around more precisely than I had been able to while he was holding me in talk. The scrubby trees and evergreens might possibly have sheltered an eavesdropper, but not safely. Besides these there was nothing in the garden that would have concealed a cat.

“It was the sentry in front of Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters,” I suggested.

“No,” he objected; “it was nearer at hand. Make a circuit of that shrubbery, Captain Page, while I cover this side.” And I heard the click of a pistol-lock as he pulled the weapon from his pocket.

I ran around the larger clump of evergreens, sword in hand, and found nothing—the more readily since I was not expecting to find anything. When I came up with him again, he appeared to be satisfied, and we went on walking and talking as before, though now I observed that he kept his right hand in the pocket of the greatcoat, and I could feel rather than see that his eyes were roving watchfully from side to side as we paced up and down.

It must have been nearly midnight when the long forced march back and forth in the garden walk ended, and with its ending all hope of carrying off the traitor by main strength and awkwardness bade me farewell, for that night at least. I took it hard, not knowing if there would ever be another night more promising; and when Arnold had put me through the house and out at the front door, telling me to go to my inn quarters and to be prepared for an early reveille, I hung about in the street and made friends with the sentry at Sir Henry Clinton’s door as if I were still on duty, killing time for another full hour until I saw the lights go out in the traitor’s upper room; all this on the barest chance that he might come down again and so re-open the book of fate.

When all was over I went to my tavern, railing at Sir Judas, at John Champe, and most of all at myself for the futile fizzling out of a thing that looked so simple on the face of it. Also, I had a hard word or two for Mr. Hamilton for waiting until the clock had fairly struck before he turned the failing failure over to me.

This is how it looked to me, sober and chilled. But after I had got warm before the blazing fire of logs in the tavern bar, and was the better for a hearty swig of fresh-mulled wine, things took on a cheerfuller hue; and when I lighted my tallow dip and went above-stairs to the great barn-like room which had been assigned me, I was turning over in my mind a wild plan of how I might smuggle in a dozen of my fellows from Baylor’s Horse, snatch the traitor out of his bed, and mount and ride and cut the way out to freedom. By which it would appear that the hot wine, poured into an empty stomach, had straightway climbed to the upper story—a thing quite possible, even when one is twenty-two past, a Virginian, and a well-seasoned soldier, to boot.

I had no more than struggled out of my watchcoat, and was making ready to tumble into bed, when there came a trampling of heavy feet up the stair and along the corridor. Somewhere about opposite my door the footsteps paused, and I paused, too, with my waistcoat half off and the wine fumes clearing from my brain as swiftly as if a cold north wind were blowing them aside.

And, in good truth, I needed to be sobered suddenly, for the next instant the door sprang open as from a lusty kick, and Sergeant-Major John Champe, his saturnine face a devil-mask of furious and frenzied rage, charged in upon me.

VII
AND AN UNBLEST DAWN

THERE was murder in Champe’s bloodshot eyes, and for the moment I was helpless, having the waistcoat bridged across my arms like a hangman’s shackles. Luckily for me, he had no weapon, else it is to be feared I should have quit this troubled scene there and then.

As it was, he flung himself upon me like a wild beast, all claws to grip and teeth to tear, and I went down as if I had been a ten-pin, and he a bowl twirled by the hand of the Giant Grim. Also his clutching fingers were at my throat before I could rip and rend that cursed manacling waistcoat into rags; so, by the time my arms were free, the cold dead air of the big room was no longer mine to breathe, and this fickle world, or what little I could see of it, was turning red and green and black and back to red again before my eyes which seemed to be sticking out of my head on a pair of horns like a snail’s.

But Baylor’s Horse, or any fraction of it, does not die without a struggle. With my hands free, I got a grip of the black-faced maniac’s wrists, held it, tightened it until I could feel the joints crack and his big fingers relax because there was no longer any living connection between them and the pounding heart and maddened brain.

After that it was simpler, though he was the heavier man. With a quick bending of the strangled wrists, I rolled him off of me, holding him so until the red lights stopped their dancing and I could get up with some assurance that I should not be entirely helpless on my feet. Then I loosed him, and staggered upright, reeled across to the door and shut and barred it.

“That’s for you, as well as for myself, you addle-headed idiot!” I panted; and then I swore at him heartily as he sat on the floor nursing his helpless hands.

He was not much behind me in the cursing, his tongue being still uncrippled. What he called me is not in any gentleman’s word-book, but I did not lay it up against him. “You have reason, my friend,” I allowed him, and sat down on the bed’s edge to rest my throat while he eased the burden of his soul.

“Well, have you said it all?” I asked, after he had sworn himself out of breath and doubled up every epithet in the vocabulary of abuse.

“Damn you for a—” he began again, taking a fresh start; and I laughed till my strained eyes ran over with the tears and my throat ached again. The figure of the man, with his darkly ferocious face, sitting hunched upon the floor, his benumbed hands crossed upon his knees and his loose-hung jaw wagging like a panting dog’s in a vain effort to keep pace with the outpouring flood of vituperation, was inexpressibly mirth-provoking to me, though another might not have found it so.

But there finally came an end, alike to his ravings and to my laughter, and we arrived at some better understanding; though not all at once, you may be sure.

“Curse you for a deserting traitor, Captain Richard Page! I’ll kill you for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was his closing volley.

“Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him again.

“What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter; Middleton saw me come off.”

“No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse. Moreover, I deserted for the same identical cause that you did.”

“You lie, Captain Page,” he said quite brutally; but I forgave him.

“I wouldn’t be above it, Champe—to an enemy, and if there were any good end to be subserved. But in this instance I am talking to a friend—you see I can be generous, in spite of your having just tried to choke the life out of me. You’ll understand when I tell you that I know your business in New York, and that I am here solely to help you forward it.”

That was the moment when I thought he would go chittering crazy with rage and despair. Disappointment, mad wrath, sharp remorse, bitter curses directed now at everything he could lay tongue to, boiled out of him as if he had been a pot hung above the hottest fire that ever crackled on a housewife’s hearth.

“Hell and zounds!” he foamed, when he became a little coherent again. “All the devils in the pit fight for that man! Listen, Captain Page: this night was our final chance, and on this night of all others everything was at last in readiness. Major Lee, with a picked troop from the legion, was in hiding in the wood across the river, and a boat from the schooner Nancy Jane was to be hanging off and on to come ashore and take us to the Jersey side.”

“Go on,” I commanded sharply, though the sharpness was not for poor Champe; it was for what I foresaw was coming.

“It was trimmed to the last shaving of a toothpick,” he continued fiercely. “I knew his custom—to walk late o’ night in the garden. I had loosened a board in the fence, and we—the one who was to help, and I—were to seize and bind and gag him, whip him out through the hole in the fence, and so to the river and the boat.”

“I see,” I said; and certainly I did see—far more than was pleasant to contemplate.

“When it was told me he was going to a rout, I thought our cursed luck had tripped us again,” Champe went on. “Then I got the order to follow him, as a guard of honor, I suppose, and here you thrust yourself in, Captain Page.”

“No,” I denied; “I was thrust in; but, like yourself, I take it, I was not sorry to have the chance of keeping him in view. Go on with your tale.”

“It is soon told,” he rejoined. “At the mansion house up yonder, having no orders to wait for his coming out, I ran back to set the trap. Two freezing hours we lay under the cedars in that hell-fired garden, and then we saw the lights, and a little farther on we heard the old fox walking into the trap. But he was not alone, as you know, Captain Page.”

“How many of you were there?” I asked.

“Two: one other and myself. The third was on the river bank, signaling the boat.”

“You should have killed me out of your way, Sergeant Champe. It was your plain duty to your country. If we ever get out of this and back to our own horse-ropes, I shall see you court-martialed for that slip, my good man.”

“There were but the two of us, Captain Dick,” he said, giving me the name my own troop used.

“Well? How many would you ask for, to put the quietus on one man, and he armed only with a sword that you did not need to let him lug out of its sheath?”

His scowl, which was the natural fashion of his forbidding face, broadened into a sardonic grin.

“My fellow under the cedars might have chanced it, since he didn’t know you. But not I, my bully captain. I know you too well, sir. Before we could have said ‘Jack Robinson’ you would have had one or both of us wondering how we came there with so many skin rents to be sewed up.”

“Not at all,” said I. “I should have been fighting on your side. But, of course, you couldn’t know that.”

“No; we couldn’t and didn’t. You know what happened afterward; how we hid and watched you two going back and forth so near to us that any time you passed I could have touched you. Once my fellow sneezed, though he well-nigh burst a blood-vessel trying to stop it. You didn’t hear it, but Arnold did. Then I thought we should have to run the risk of your frog-sticker, Captain Dick, whether we liked it or no.”

“Were you under the evergreens?”

“Sure enough. You made the circle completely around us. But for my taking in a leg, you would have stumbled over me.”

I held up a hand for silence.

“You are fluenter than I am with the soldier-curses, Champe. Will you say over a few of the choicest of them for me? All through those two hours while you were freezing under the evergreens, I was hammering my brain to invent some way by which I could take Sir Judas with my two unaided hands. I knew nothing of Major Lee’s dispositions, or of the boat, or of what you had done; which is pointedly my own fault, since I should have left everything else to wait and hunted you out before I ventured to stick my oar in. Certainly you missed the fool-killing chance of a lifetime, Sergeant, when you failed to run me through with your bayonet this night!”

But at this the humaner side of the dark-faced sergeant-major came to the fore.

“No, Captain Dick,” he said quite civilly. “It was our crooked luck again, and some of it was my fault. I took you for what you seemed to be—this morning, and more than ever, this afternoon and evening when you had the colors on. But it’s done and over, and there are two of us to pay the piper instead of one. It’s the devil’s own pickle we are in, sir, with these coats of ours to tell what we’ll have to do and where we’ll have to go to-morrow.”

I thought so, too, and for a little time could do nothing better than to prop my face in my hands and grill it over back and forth in all its bitterness. But finally out of the grilling came that fuddle-headed thought of mine builded on the fumes of the warmed wine and concerning itself with an assault on Arnold’s house, with men enough to make it somewhat less than madness.

Now my own men were far enough away, but, by Champe’s tale, Major Lee was in hiding somewhere on the Jersey shore; and I knew the mettle of the major and of the men he commanded.

“There is hope yet, Sergeant!” I cried, when the idea had fully taken shape. “Are you hot-blooded enough to go with me where I shall lead?”

Champe wagged his hands back and forth and stretched the fingers.

“The feeling is coming back to them,” he said, and then he got up and signified his readiness.

I explained my plan to him in low tones, remembering, at this late dealing of the cards, that Castner had rooms somewhere on this same floor with us.

“You say Major Lee has a force in hiding across the river. Good; we’ll slip out of this, one at a time, scud for the river, and steal a boat. When we find the major, I shall beg him to lend me a dozen of his men. If he will do it—and you know him better than I do—we’ll steal another boat and come back.”

Champe’s dark eyes were blazing.

“And we’ll sack the house and take the traitor in his bed!” he exclaimed. “Captain Dick, if you can put that through, I’ll lie down and let you walk on me for that neck-wringing I gave you a few minutes back.”

“Never mind the choking-match, Jack Champe; get you out of here, and wait for me in the street. I’ll join you when I’ve pieced my clothes together on me,” I said; and so it was settled.

I found Champe waiting when I had sneaked out of the tavern so quietly, I hoped, as to make my going pass unnoticed. Together we sought the river bank, and craftily dodging a sleepy sentinel, crept down to the water’s edge. Luck was with us this time, for before we had gone a dozen paces along the shore we came upon a small boat riding by a long chain, and, searching in likely hiding-places under the overhanging bank, we found the oars. Pieces of my torn waistcoat answered for the muffling; and in the next passing of the sleepy sentry on the bank above, we pushed off and rowed lustily for the opposite shore.

But that one piece of good luck in finding the boat and getting off unseen exhausted our allotment for the night. Champe’s two confederates, the one who had been with him in the garden, and the other who had been standing guard at the river’s edge, had both disappeared and we knew not where to look for them. In due time we made a landing on the Jersey side; whereupon we became as helpless as a pair of babes in the wood. We had no more idea where to look for Major Lee and his troopers than we should have had if we had been born blind, the third man in Champe’s plot, the river-edge watcher who was to signal to the Nancy Jane’s dinghy, and who was afterward to guide the captors, being the only one who knew.

None the less, we sought and searched, as those who have lost their all, using the time recklessly in exploring every stretch of woodland we could locate in the darkness, and even going so far as to inquire when we found any one stirring at any of the isolated farm houses.

It was just before day that we got our clue. A countryman, looking first askance at our uniforms as his lantern showed us to him, told us that a troop of dragoons had been all day in the wood above his house, but that an hour or more ahead of us they had galloped furiously away on the northward road.

Champe and I exchanged discouraged glances. That settled it for us, and when we were out of sight and hearing of the farmer we made some hurried discussion of what came next on our bill of fare.

“You must take to the road, worn out as you are, and make your way back to your regiment, Sergeant,” I said, settling Champe’s course for him as if I had been his own captain.

But now his dogged courage seemed to have oozed away. “I can never make it, Captain Dick. I’d be overhauled as soon as daylight comes, and that would mean dancing upon nothing for me. They wouldn’t even give me a soldier’s death.”

“Pshaw, man!” said I, half angrily. “Being safely out of the town and this far on the road, you have little to fear.”

But he only shook his head gloomily, and would not be persuaded, breaking in upon me, while I was trying to urge him, with a question as to my own designs.

I laughed. “I came out to snare Sir Judas,” I told him. “That, and nothing less, is what I shall do, John Champe, if I follow him to the ends of the earth.”

“You’ll be taken and hanged,” said Champe.

“Not if I can help it, you may be sure. But come; you must decide. I’m going back, and there is little enough time to do it in, the Lord knows.”

He hesitated yet another minute or two and then rose up stiffly from the log on which he had been sitting. “I’ll go back with you and see it through,” he declared moodily.

I tried once again to dissuade him, showing him how he was likely to have miseries enough as a common soldier in any regiment commanded by Arnold; showed him further how he would certainly be required to choose between death at the last and fighting against his country in very deed and fact.

But it was all to no purpose. Say what I would, his only reply was a stubborn repetition: “I’ll go back with you and see it through.” And when I could get nothing more out of him, we made our way as swiftly as possible back to our stolen boat, taking to the water a short half-hour, I should say, before dawn-breaking.

Our luck, which had left us so promptly after the boat-stealing, gave us a little glimpse of itself again when we approached the New York shore. By the merest chance, we took ground within a few feet of the dangling boat chain, and by chance again, our sleepy sentinel, or another in his place, was at the other end of his beat when we climbed cautiously up the bank.

Once more safely in the town, we separated; Champe to go to his barracks, and I to steal unobserved into my tavern and up the stair and so to my room with the unrumpled bed.

I rumpled the bed duly, in less than two minutes after I had dropped the door-bar, being fully nine-tenths dead for the want of sleep and rest. But I had scarcely pulled the covers up before there came a mighty thundering at the door; and when I went to answer it, I was told that my general commanded my attendance on the moment—and he had sent a soldier to do the summoning.

VIII
A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL

IT nettles me to think that one carrying the name of Page should be a prey to senseless terror, but the sight of that sour-faced soldier standing, with his musket at parade, before my door, made me ill.

Weighing it evenly in a calmer moment, it was not so greatly to be wondered at. A spy’s life always hangs by the slenderest thread, with all the world that touches him a den of wild beasts ready to tear him limb from limb. Besides, I was in the last ditch of weariness and fatigue and a tired body is next to an empty belly for sapping the courage.

But, after all, my soldier caller did not put me under arrest when I was dressed and ready to go with him. On the contrary, he preceded me to Arnold’s house, and when I went in, took up his sentry stand before the entrance, pacing in step with Sir Henry Clinton’s man next door.

When I climbed the stair and met the man whose escapes of the night past might have been measured in thicknesses of a hair, the unreasoning terror gripped me again. Arnold was standing with his back to the door when I entered, and when he turned to face me he was scowling darkly and his first question made my heart turn a somersault within me.

“Where did you go last night, after you left me, Captain Page?”

“Nowhere,—at once,” I asserted, meaning to stay in the boat of truth as long as any two planks of it would hold together. “Your thought that you heard some one in the garden set me to thinking; so I hung off and on here before the house until I saw your lights go out.”

“You saw nothing?—heard nothing?”

“No. The town was as quiet as I dare say it used to be when the Mynheers snored their nights away in it.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward I went to my quarters in the tavern where Lieutenant Castner took me,” I continued, making sure that his next question would knock my boat of truth into splinters, leaving me floundering in a sea of lies. And, truly, I did not feel equal to such a swimming match with him, now, with every drop of blood in me nudging its neighbor to keep awake.

“You found all quiet at the tavern?” he demanded, fixing me with his gaze as I have seen a cruel boy pin a fly to the wall.

“As quiet as a graveyard. The barman was only half awake, and the waking half of him went to sleep after he had mulled me a cup of wine.”

“Strange!” he said; and then he fell to walking the floor, and I had time to catch my breath and to get a fresh grip on myself before he began again.

“After your cup of wine, Captain Page? What happened then?”

“I went up-stairs to the room they had given me. But my sleep was bad.”

“Ha!” said he; “now we are coming to it. What disturbed you?”

It was worse than groping in the dark; it was like groping without the sense of touch to guide me. But I had to go on, though I saw that my road might easily end on Gallows Hill.

“First I heard, or dreamed I heard, a noise as of men fighting. A little later I’m sure I heard a great deal of loud talk and some oaths, and tramplings in my corridor and on the stair. After that, I was awake most of the time, I think, but I heard no more of the inn noises.”

He sat down behind his writing-table and waved me to a chair.

“Sit down, Captain Page, and you shall have the explanation of all this,” he said, and the sudden change in his tone relaxed my strain so violently that I fairly reeled into a chair. “I sent for you thus early to question you before you had the news from other sources,” he went on. “Make a note of it, Captain, and when you wish to examine a witness, get hold of him before his impressions have been distorted out of shape by his confusing of them with the impressions of others. You recall what I was saying last night about the Washington plot against my person?”

I bowed.

“I think I owe my liberty, and perhaps my life, to you, Captain Page; or at least to your presence here up to midnight. There are suspicious circumstances enough to warrant the belief that a plot was laid against me, to be sprung last night. I was in hopes that you might be able to add further information; but your items only confirm the story of the inn people. They thought, however, that the sounds of the scuffle came from your room.”

“If I had been as sound asleep as I needed to be, a battle royal might have been fought in my room without my knowing it,” I replied, regaining something of my self-possession.

“This squabble in the inn seems to have been an aftermath,” he continued; “possibly”—and here I thought he looked sharply at me again—“a meeting of the plotters to jangle over their failure. Which points to a traitor among us, Captain, since there are no suspicious characters quartering at the tavern whose room could have been used for a rendezvous. But one thing is certain: one of the janglers was a soldier of the Loyal American Legion in uniform. A horse-boy saw him slip into the tavern and go up-stairs.”

My heart came into my mouth, and, by the bones of all the Pages, I had to swallow twice to get it down again. Champe was surely skating upon the thinnest ice that ever held the weight of a man, and if he broke through, I should be quite as far from the shore as he.

“But—but the other circumstances, sir,” I prompted, hoping to turn him back from this aftermath business, as he called it, in the tavern.

“They are quite conclusive. All day yesterday a troop of rebel horse was in hiding on the Jersey shore, evidently waiting for some prearranged event to come off. Late in the evening the schooner Nancy Jane dropped a boat, manned by a single pair of oars, and then stood up and down the river for several hours. The dropped boat was seen more than once by our sentries, and it was always hanging in the tideway at the same place.”

“Surely, all this was most suspicious!” I exclaimed, as heartily as I could.

“It was; but this was only the groundwork of the plot. You remember the loose board in the fence at the back of my garden? That board had been removed for a purpose. Captain. At the very moment when you remarked it, there were men in the garden waiting their chance to attack me. They were hidden under the cedars, and it was one of them who coughed or sneezed loud enough for me to hear him.”

“Heavens!” I ejaculated. “What a desperately narrow escape you have had, General Arnold!”

“I think so myself,” he observed quite coolly. And then, without a sign or a word of warning, he struck my slowly recovering self-possession the most treacherous back-blow it ever had. “Captain Page, I owe you something, as I have admitted. But you must be frank with me. The soldier who climbed the stair in the tavern last night was Sergeant Champe, and the door he entered was yours.”

If I ever have a son, I shall pray God to endow him with an alert brain, the choicest gift a man can have. If I had hesitated a single instant as to the course I should pursue, if I had winked a wink too many or drawn a breath a thousandth part of a second too long—well, there would have been a midnight walk for me to the top of Gallows Hill to keep a tryst with some Tory Jack Ketch, with Mistress Beatrix left to cry her pretty eyes out, if she cared anything for poor Dickie Page.

But I did none of these fatal things. Instead, I flushed, sought for the exact face of innocent guilt, and said, “General Arnold, I do most humbly beg your pardon for deceiving you, though I beg you to believe that, as far as I went, I told you the precise truth.” Here I let him see my eyes for long enough to drive that nail well home. “But beyond the time of my going to bed, I hoped you would not press me too closely. Champe did come to my room. He had been making a night of it with some of the other men—their last night ashore—and his temper even when he is fully sober, is none of the best, as you may have already observed.”

He gave me a slow nod, and I went on, gaining a little now in the race with the hangman, I hoped.

“He was most quarrelsome and abusive. He had sought me out, it seems, because he had a drunken notion that I was responsible for your leaving him outside of Mr. Justice Smith’s house last night, and so exposing him to the gibes of those horse-boys and others of the regular line who hate our legion uniform wherever they see it. There was more than a squabble; it was a pitched battle, and I had to beat a little sober sense into him before I could quiet him, and even then he went on babbling foolishness and curses until I was afraid he would have the house about our ears.”

“Go on, Captain Page,” said my inquisitor, most grimly non-committal.

“There is little else to tell you, General Arnold. When I had him sobered a little, I saw him past the tavern bar and farther in safety; and when I quitted him I had his promise that he would go to his barracks and behave himself. I confess I would have kept all this from you, if I could. John Champe, sober, is as good a soldier as ever picked a flint, and since I had given him his beating, I thought to spare him a worse thing. So long as your questions did not touch the man’s loyalty—or mine—I felt warranted in holding back this tale of his stumble into the ale-pot. Soldiers will be soldiers, General, and that officer can get the most out of them who first beats them and then overlooks their little peccadilloes.”

I was in cruel doubt for five age-long minutes as to whether I had made my case or signed my death-warrant. No man was ever better able to hide his mind behind his face save in his sudden upblazes of passion, than was this same Benedict Arnold; and when he rose to walk the floor in gloomy meditation, with his head hanging and his fingers tightly locked behind him, I lived a dozen lifetimes and could well-nigh feel the hemp drawing tight around my neck.

But at the end he let me off with a caution and a veiled threat.

“You should have two lessons out of this, Captain Page,” he said at length, stopping abruptly to stand over me. “One is that it is never worth your while to play fast and loose with me in matters of information. Make your mind a looking-glass for me, or better still, a window-pane, for, sooner or later, I shall always be at the bottom of your profoundest secret. The other lesson is this: your adhesion to the king’s cause is but a day old. Until it gains a little age and dignity, it will be well for you to avoid even the appearance of evil.”

I rose, feeling as any man would who had been given his reprieve after the black cap had been fairly drawn down over his eyes.

“I should have known better, General,” I said, feigning the meekest humility and self-reproach. “And now, sir, if you have orders for me—”

He broke into my tender of services with the welcomest word I had heard in many a day.

“Go to your quarters, Captain Page, and finish the sleep I interrupted. Your rest has been sufficiently broken of late to justify some rebellion in nerve and muscle. The embarkation begins to-day, but we shall do well enough without you.”

It was not more than ten minutes from this early-morning tight-rope dance that I once more tumbled into bed in the barn-like upper room at the tavern, and I was sinking sweetly into the lap of the goddess whose charms we never appreciate until a wakeful night or two makes them precious, when I started up with a cold sweat breaking out in a frost rime all over me. In all the tight-rope business, I had never once thought of Arnold’s questioning Champe, or of how little any story of his would be likely to fit in with mine!

If my stripping for bed had been swift, the reversal of the process left the disrobing as far behind as if it were a tortoise racing the fleetest hound that ever gave tongue on fox’s scent. In frantic haste I dressed and left the inn and made my way to the legion barracks. The embarkation had already begun, they told me, and when I mentioned Champe’s company, it was added that it had gone aboard among the first.

On the face of it, this seemed as if it might be a danger past, but I thought it best to make assurance doubly sure and to that end dragged my weary legs down to the boat-landing where the lighters were putting off to the ships.

It was well indeed that I took this final precaution. Not a stone’s throw from the landing I met Champe, that minute come ashore in one of the returning boats on a peremptory summons from Arnold. Beckoning him aside, I told him hurriedly what was before him, and drilled him upon the story I had invented till he begged for mercy and swore he could say it backward.

That was all very well, but I have learned that a cat killed is a cat safely dead only after it is well buried, with the earth tramped down solidly upon it. So, when I had kept sight of Champe until Arnold’s door opened to swallow him, I found a spying place and watched—and had no trouble in keeping awake, either, I promise you—until I saw him come out again.

He gave me the countersign in passing, as he was on his way back to his ship. It was only a single word, “Hoodwinked,” but it lifted a load from my shoulders that was all but crushing me; lifted the load and let me, for the third time that morning, seek the bed that seemed to have a spiteful grudge against a weary soldier of fortune.

This time there were no cold-sweat alarms to snatch me from the brink, and when next I opened my eyes, the room was dark, and I knew not what day or night of the week it was.

IX
IN WHICH I PAY A DUTY CALL

CASTNER was at the supper-table in the tavern common-room when I went up-stairs, and I found that I had slept the clock only once around. To my surprise, the lieutenant was wearing a uniform to match my own, and I saw now why he had been so sore at my pointless joke. He was to accompany the Arnold expedition; and I was not long in divining the reason when he told me sourly that he had been detailed to act as aide to General Arnold. For all he had paid good king’s gold and a commission in the king’s army for his prize traitor, Sir Henry Clinton was afraid to trust him, and my friend Castner was going along as a sort of amiable spy in Arnold’s military household.

“You don’t seem to take your promotion very joyfully,” I laughed, drawing a chair opposite and sitting down to help him with the cold roast.

“It’s a dirty business,” he blurted out; and then he shut his mouth on his meat and I was left to guess whether he meant his own sending, or the proposed descent of an armed force upon a defenseless coast.

A little later three or four other officers came in for their suppers, among them Major Simcoe, who had commanded the Queen’s Rangers at Germantown. Their talk, which comfortably ignored me either as a deserter and as beneath their notice, or as an untried recruit, turned upon the ship expedition and the secret of its destination, which latter seemed to have been well guarded, inasmuch as none of those present appeared to know where the fleet would cast anchor.

I surmised that Major Simcoe’s ignorance was assumed, however. He was deep in the counsels of Sir Henry Clinton, and was a well-trusted officer. I noticed that he kept his face pretty well in his plate and joined in the conversation only as he had to, letting the younger men keep the ball rolling.

From this table talk I learned that the work of putting the troops and stores aboard the ships had been going on all day, and was likely to dig deep into the night, though when the actual sailing order was to be given, did not appear. I was concerned about this on only one point, namely, the hope that there might be time for a visit, hurried or otherwise, to the house where I had seen Margaret Shippen’s face at the door and Beatrix Leigh’s at the upper window.

What excuse I should have for intruding into a house whose owner’s name, even, was still unknown to me, I could not imagine. But that the thing must be compassed admitted of no question. After what I had done in Mr. Justice Smith’s glass-roofed rose-house, I should be either a knave or a coward to run away in silence. Moreover, I had not learned why Mistress Beatrix was in New York, or how long she meant to stay, or any of the hundred things her presence at the Smith mansion had put question-marks after.

From what I heard at the supper-table, I judged my time was short. It was Major Simcoe who said that when the troops were all embarked, the officers would have shore leave only until the ebb tide would serve to let the ships drop down the bay. It was here that I ventured to ask about the wind, and if it were favorable; and the major said it was not, but that the fleet would come to anchor in the lower bay to wait for it.

It was while we were still at table that an orderly came with a summons for me. I was to report to Arnold at my earliest convenience,—I marked the word and took courage from it,—and I might delay so long as would be necessary to make all my preparations for going aboard beforehand, to the end that I should not be obliged to return to the tavern later on if time pressed.

I showed Arnold’s note to Castner, and the lieutenant very kindly offered to expedite my affair by looking after my impedimenta; which was light enough, since I had only the clothes I stood in, the civilian’s suit I had bought of the Dutch Jew, and my patriot homespun. I was the more willing to turn Castner loose in my room for the packing up, because there were no papers, plans of fortifications or any other spy’s death-sentences for him to stumble on, and it lent a fine air of sincerity to my new pledge to give him my keys and to tell him to take or leave what he chose.

This left me free to accompany the orderly who had brought Arnold’s note, and the young man, a fine young gentleman who was a son of that Colonel Hetheridge who was killed at the battle of Monmouth, walked with me to the door of Arnold’s quarters.

I found the traitor busily writing, as he seemed always to be at my entrances. And, as on a former occasion, he waved me to a chair and went on pushing the quill like a regimental clerk who had got behind in his records. When he had folded, sealed and superscribed his letter, he turned to me, and I saw that Sergeant-Major Champe had not failed either himself or me in the cross-questioning of the early morning.

“You are quite refreshed, Captain Page?” he began most kindly; and again I caught myself wishing that he would not so persistently show me the likeable side of him. “You are fortunate in having no family ties to break when we turn our backs upon New York. Will you take it as an older man’s weakness if I say that I shall leave my heart behind me when we sail, Captain Page?”

I said that his sentiment did him honor; adding that I had once had the pleasure of meeting Mistress Arnold while she was yet Mistress Margaret Shippen in Philadelphia.

“A dear lady, with a heart of pure gold,” he said half musingly. And then more pointedly to me: “She remembers you, Captain—which is the chief reason why I am going to let you be the bearer of this farewell note of mine. You can find the house again?”

“Surely,” I replied; and for the instant I forgot my sworn purpose in sudden gratitude to him for putting me so easily and naturally on the way to a fulfilment of my own desires.

“She will see you—as she might not wish to see another,” he continued. “Tell her only cheerful things, Captain Page. Though she does not know our destination or our purposes, she is weighed down with a presentiment of evil to come. That is why I am writing and sending you. There are limits to the sternest fortitude, and I—”

He broke off abruptly, and I could have sworn there were honest tears in his eyes. But by this time I was clinging blindly to the kidnapping purpose that was my only reason for the present hazards, telling myself if that should fail I should see another side of him soon enough, when he should be leading his ravages against my home land. At twenty-two I had yet to learn that no man, however despicable he may be, is all villain; that there will be some meliorating drop of blood in the worst criminal that was ever righteously hanged for his sins.

Notwithstanding, some inkling of this was beginning to dawn on me, and like a voice out of the air Colonel Hamilton’s words came back to me “—But to go as you must go, and use guile and subterfuge ... truly, Captain Page, you must sort this out for yourself; to determine how far in such a cause an officer and a man of honor may go. I lay no commands upon you.” I was thinking hard, trying to do as Mr. Hamilton had given me leave to do: to determine how far a decent sense of honor would let me go, when Arnold’s voice broke into my reverie.

“You will go with the letter, and take your own time—so much time as she shall require of you,” he directed, giving me the sealed packet. “If you should not find me on your return, Lieutenant Castner will meet you at the shipping wharf and assign you to your vessel.”

This was my dismissal, and I took it gladly for more than one reason. I hoped I should never see this man again until I could more honestly hate him as he deserved—another wish for which I was to pray God’s forgiveness in the time to come.

The streets were quiet as I took my solitary way through them, and over the fort the sky was reddened as if a bonfire were burning on the parade ground. Passing the green I saw the pedestal upon which the lead-gilt equestrian statue of King George had stood, the statue that the men of ’76 had pulled down in their jubilation over the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence, and which had afterward been melted into bullets to be fired at this same Third George’s soldiery.

My way also led past the gloomy sugar-house prison where, in the frightful summer of ’77, so many patriots were confined that not a third of them could get breathing space at the deep port-hole windows; where our brave fellows stayed and rotted and died a dozen in the day rather than purchase their freedom by enrolling themselves in the king’s army, as they were given leave to do.

The sight of the grim, fortress-like stone building, and the thought of the torments for which it stood as a reminder, put me in a sterner frame of mind toward our enemies and went far toward excusing the double-faced part I found myself compelled to play. Yet I tried to hold myself sufficiently aloof so that I should not visit the sins of the husband, and of those men who had suborned him, upon the sorrowful woman I was going to see.

Having been twice over the route in daytime, and twice at night, I had no difficulty in finding the house which sheltered Arnold’s wife and child. A negro house-servant opened to my knock, and upon my asking for Mistress Arnold, admitted me, though not too willingly I fancied. Once indoors, I was shown to a richly furnished room opening off the hall, and was told to warm myself at the fire while the lady was making ready to see me.

I meant to have my duty over with first, and then to see Beatrix afterward, if anything short of force would secure me a sight of her. But as to that, it seemed only fair to borrow a little of the probabilities. If I could make my standing good with Mistress Margaret Shippen, I might be able to persuade her to act as my intercessor.

The lady, whose name was on the letter I carried, did not keep me waiting long: and coming, she entered the room so quietly that she surprised me sprawling like a mannerless trooper before the fire; for which I quickly begged her pardon when I found my feet and made my best bow. Whereupon she was good enough to give me her hand like an old acquaintance, and to say that we poor soldiers had little enough comfort to be denied the ease a cheerful fire afforded.

At this I handed her the letter and she sat down to read it. I gave her all the privacy there was, staring so hard into the heart of the blazing logs, and thinking so pointedly of my own love-affair that I did not know when she finished.

“This is your night for sailing, Captain Page?” she asked gently, and her low voice called me back suddenly from the love-dream backgrounded by the mellowing fire.

I said it was; and after that she sat for a long time gazing with me into the glowing embers. When she began to speak again, I knew why she had hesitated.

“Your place is to be near General Arnold, isn’t it, Mr. Page?” she asked, saying it as one who feels the way carefully.

“I hope so,” I replied, hating myself for saying the double-meaning words for her ears. Then I added: “I am still detached; I have no command; and Mr.—-the general—is having me serve as his aide while we are here in New York.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “He promised me you should be near him.” And then I knew who was the “unimpeachable authority” and that she had vouched for me, and was straightway humbled and made horribly ashamed and remorseful.

“You spoke for me? You should not have done that, dear lady,” I said quickly. So much, at least, I owed to common manhood, I thought.

“And why not, pray? If you could know, Mr. Page, how it comforts me to have the assurance that General Arnold has at least one honorable gentleman near him—”

“Good heavens, madam!” I ejaculated, forgetting all prudence in the smarting of her unconscious stab; “you take a frightful risk in recommending any one in these uncertain times, and especially one who is himself a forsworn—” I stopped in mid-career, remembering that I was treading upon doubly dangerous ground in thus pointing out my own unfitness to the woman who was the wife of the chief forswearer of his age.

“Ah, you are modest, Mr. Page,” she said, being so good and gentle herself as to be unable to see guile in others. And then she added: “You must not try to draw me into the King-and-Congress of it. I used to think I could know and take sides; but now I leave those things to others, and try to rise above them. When this bitter war is over and become a thing of the past, we shall see more clearly than we do now.”

“I would to God it were over at this moment,” I rejoined gloomily.

“I can credit you in that wish: though you are young and eager and a soldier, Mr. Page. War is a very terrible thing, full of peril and danger to those we love; full of weary heart-strainings for us poor women who can only stand and wait. You will serve the general well, will you not, Captain Page?”—this most wistfully.

This time I could have cried out with the pain it gave me to deceive this dear lady. Here was a thing I had never bargained for, even in my wildest imaginings of the crookings and turnings of the way into which I had set my feet. And now, again, Mr. Hamilton’s qualifying words came back to me. How much farther could I go and have any semblance of honor left? But Mistress Margaret was waiting for her answer, and I am glad she can never know what it cost me to give it.

“I shall not serve the general any the less faithfully for any word you have spoken, be assured, dear madam,” I said, descending once more, and still more reluctantly, to the despicable double meanings.

“I shall sleep the easier for that assurance,” she said warmly, flaying me afresh; and then continuing with the sweet archness of the Margaret Shippen I had met in her father’s home: “I know you, Captain, better than you know me—having Beatrix Leigh for a fellow guest under this same roof.”

“Mistress Beatrix would never say a word for me,” I blurted out.

“Oh, no; certainly not for you in person,” was the half-quizzical retort. “But for your family. One would think, to hear her talk, that the Pages,—always excepting yourself, of course, Mr. Richard,—were the lords of the manor and the first gentlemen of Virginia. I promise you, she has given you a name to live up to.”

Now was my time, and I did not let the opportunity slip.

“I wish she might be prevailed upon to give me a little sight of herself—for my leave-taking—Mistress Arnold. Could you—would you—”

She was shaking her head in despair—mock or real, I could not tell which.

“You are a most blundering lover, Captain,” she protested. “After I had plotted and planned to persuade her to show herself at Mr. Justice Smith’s last night—she didn’t want to, I assure you; she is such a spiteful little patriot—after all that, and my telling the general he must bring you; then you go and say or do something that sends her to me in a perfect passion, telling me one moment that she hates you, and the next that she will die of shame and misery. What did you do, Mr. Page? I am curious to know.”

“What did I do? Why, Mistress Margaret, I—that is, I—I asked her how she did, and—” I was as tongue-tied as a schoolboy trying to say his first piece.

“I think you must have,” she said, demurely. “Beatrix is just the person to fly into a rage because you asked her how she did.”

I went dumb at this, but my desire was just as clamorous none the less. So, after we had looked the fire out of countenance for another minute or two, I essayed again. “Think of it, Mistress Margaret; it is desperate hard for me to be this near to her—and on the verge of going to I know not what fate—and not to have a chance to—to—”

“Oh, you young lovers!” she smiled. “Here you are writhing and prickling to have me go, Mr. Richard Page—to be quit of me—and yet you are in a terrible fright lest I should go without promising to send Beatrix to you. Well, I’ll go; but I shan’t promise you she will come—even for a farewell sight of your handsome face and soldierly figure. Stay where you are for ten minutes by the clock. If she does not come by that time, you will have to think on your sins, whatever they may be, and go without your leave-taking.”

I said I would wait, and thanked her, and felt, when she gave me her hand again for her own leave-taking, as if I were twice the hypocritical villain her husband had ever dared to be.

When she was gone, and I had walked the floor of that pretty room a full half-hour, as it seemed to me, I fell to wondering how her mere mention of the time could make the tall clock in the corner go on wagging its pendulum in sly malice while its hands made hours of the minutes. We speak of killing time: I could have wrecked that lying time-piece more than once, and was, I think, standing before it and shaking my fist in its brazen face, when I first heard the hesitant opening of the door.

No, it was not Mistress Margaret, coming back to tell me she had failed. It was Beatrix, and she had waited thus long so that she might curve her lip and train her eyes to flash and look me down, as I had seen her go and hide herself to do many a time when we were children together and had quarreled, as children will.

“Well?” she said, much as she had said it the night before, when she had come into the glass rose-house to make me think she despised me.

“I have come to bid you good-by,” I told her, picking out the most inane word that came to hand. And she would not let even that poor word stand.

“No,” she contradicted; “you came to bring a letter for Margaret. You came to fetch and carry for that dreadful man—as his lackey!”—and here the beautiful eyes burnt me, they were so indignant hot.

“I should have come anyhow,” I asserted. “But I was glad to bring Mistress Margaret her letter: that was a service to her rather than to Mr. Arnold.”

“Call him ‘General,’ Mr. Page; he is your general, isn’t he?” she scoffed.

“So he says, and so he thinks, and so I call him, when I have to. But you must not think, because I am wearing this coat, that I am over-proud of it, or of my service in what we have lately been calling the ‘Traitors’ Legion,’ on the other side of the Neutral Ground.”

“Then, why are you in it?” she demanded. “Why, why, why?”

“It is a long story,” I stammered, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night. But tell me; how is it that you are here in New York, when I thought you were safe in Virginia?”

“It is a long story,” she mimicked, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night, Mr. Richard Page.”

“But I shall stay until I have heard it,” I retorted hardily.

“Oh, if I must ask Mistress Vandeventer to give you the guest-room otherwise, you may know; there is no such mighty mystery about my goings and comings,” she said, with a toss of the pretty head. “There was a ship-load of the Leigh tobacco snapped up by one of the British ships and brought here as a prize. But word came to us at Sevenoaks through good Mr.—no, on second thought, I won’t tell you our friend’s name—through a gentleman of Philadelphia, that it could be ransomed if any Leigh were bold enough to venture for it. There was no one else to venture, so I came. And I have got my prize redeemed, and I am going home again in a few days, or as soon as Cousin Julianna Pettus comes from Philadelphia to sail with me. There now—make the most of it, Mr. Turncoat British-officer Page! Or will you turn traitor to me, too, and have my father’s tobacco seized again?”

It was all very hard; doubly hard now, because my mission, which only a day earlier had held out hopes of a speedy despatching, now stretched out into an indefinite future, and was by so much the more unspeakable to her or to any living soul. But I set her mind at rest about the retrieved tobacco; if, indeed, she thought so small of me as to suspect for a moment that, even as a turncoat, I would turn informer.

“I am no exciseman, whatever else you have written against me in your black books,” I said, and if half the gloom I felt was in the words, she should have pitied me.

Perhaps she did, for from standing, she took the chair lately occupied by Margaret Shippen, and nodded me airily to my own.

“I must not forget my manners, even if Mr. Page does sometimes forget his,” was her wording of the permission to sit beside her.

Now that ravished kiss of the night before sat lightly on my heart, but not so easily on my conscience. God knows, my love for her was big enough to excuse the loving violence ten times over; but it stuck in my throat that, but for my imminent peril, I might not have had the courage to do it. Confession was the thing; but how could I confess enough without confessing too much?

“I came here to-night to beg your forgiveness, Beatrix,” I began, plunging into the middle of the thing because there was no guide-post to show me any beaten highway leading up to it.

She did not pretend to misunderstand.

“Oh; so you are properly ashamed, are you? I think you should be, Richard Page!”

“No, not ashamed: but I shall be sore-hearted if I have to go away and leave you angry at me. But are you angry, Beatrix?”

“Desperately.”

“Would anything I could say—”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Not if I tell you that—” I paused on the brink of the horridest chasm that ever opened before a halting lover in this world of lovers’ pitfalls. If I confessed that the kiss saved my life—as well it may have—how could I make her understand—but I could never make her understand. She would hold me as the paltriest coward that ever breathed if I should so much as hint at the thing which had given me the kissing courage at that perilous moment.

“What could you tell me, if you were so disposed, Mr. Page?” she asked, and now I thought the sarcasm was only half-hearted.

“I could tell you what I have told you a hundred times before, Beatrix; that I love you: that I am never near you without having to fight most desperately for even decent self-control.”

“But I do not love you, Dick Page.”

I jerked my chair around to face her.

“Is it because you do love Seytoun?” I demanded, full of jealous wrath in an instant.

“Foolish boy! Do you say that because I won’t let you quarrel with Captain Seytoun? There may be better reasons why I wish you to keep the peace in that quarter, sir.”

“Yet you say you do not love me?”

“I don’t, Mr. Richard Page—not in the coat you are wearing.”

My arms went out to her, and she moved her chair well out of my reach before she went on.

“No; don’t assume that the coat is a little thing, lightly to be ignored. It is not, for a Leigh. I shall gladly die a spinster before I’ll ever wed it, I do assure you, Dick.”

All this time she was looking steadily into the fire, and I was wondering where her heart-broken sorrow of the night before had gone. But it came, even while I was seeking for words in which to hint that my present Judas-coat might not always stand between us; the trembling of the sweet lips, the welling up of the tears.

“Oh, what madness possessed you, Dick?” she wailed; “you, who were the bravest, the most devoted, the most cheerful when all was darkest!”

I rose and settled my sword-belt. There was more love-violence ahead if I should stay; that, and the certain breaking of my promise to Mr. Hamilton.

“I have greatly overstayed my time; I must go, Beatrix, dear,” I said, and I scarcely knew the sound of my own voice. And when she rose, I caught her in my arms before she could escape. “Kiss me, sweetheart, and bid me God-speed,” I begged.

“For a boon, I will, Captain Page,” she said quickly, holding herself at arm’s length; and now, though her eyes were still wet, she was not weeping. “Tell me where this expedition of yours will land!”

Now that was something I could and would tell her gladly. But when my mouth was open to let the words out, she came close and put her hand over my lips, and hid her face against that cursed coat of double-dealing, saying with a half sob: “Oh, no, no! I would have made you turn traitor again! Kiss me, Dick, and go—go quickly. I—”

She was faint and dizzy—my strong one!—when I led her gently to a cushioned settee and made her lie down with a pillow at her head. Then I sent the negro hallman up for Margaret Shippen; and when Mistress Arnold came hurriedly, I went away, softly, and with a heart that was strangely light and tender. For now I knew that I need not kill Captain Seytoun for any chance he stood to take my darling from me.

X
IN WHICH A WALL HAS EARS

THE red bonfire glow tinting the sky over the parade ground of Fort George had faded into the night when I won back to the lower town. Passing the sentries on the outer scarp of the fort I made my way down to the water-front to look for Castner, and to get my embarking directions.

At the landing-stage, which was lighted by a pair of cresset torches flaring gustily on stakes thrust into the ground, I found the lieutenant. He was forwarding the last few boat-loads of stragglers, and while he busied himself with orders to the ensigns in command of the ships’ boats, I had speech with the quartermaster of the fort garrison, who told me that the greater part of the expeditionary fleet was already standing down the bay.

But Castner had other news for me when he was free to impart it; news which set me aflame with fresh invention fires.

“Good evening to you again, Captain Page,” he said, when he lounged up from the despatching of the last of the boats. “Did you come by the headquarters on your way?”

“No,” said I. “I went on a mission for General Arnold in the town and was told to come directly here.”

“We are delayed,” he announced, not very regretfully I thought. “At the last moment orders came from Sir Henry Clinton detaching our convoy frigate and two of the sloops of war for temporary service elsewhere. The troop fleet is to wait in the lower bay for the return of the three men-of-war, and all officers not on service duty have shore leave during the interval. How does that set with you?”

It was the part of prudence to let the news appear to be a matter of indifference to me, and I answered accordingly.

“A soldier should be prepared for anything; and I’ll dare say the tavern is a fairly good inn—far better than the cabin of an ill-smelling fishing schooner. I thank heaven I have no active command to send me down the bay with the musket men.”

Castner grinned. “I’ve been picking some comfort out of that in my own case,” he admitted. “Do you go back to Mr. Ar—to the general’s quarters?”

I told him I should not, if he would be good enough to report me: that I should go across to the tavern to retake my room, where I might be found if there were any further orders for me. And so we parted at the northwestern angle of the fort, and I was glad to be alone. For now the book of the kidnapping possibilities was suddenly reopened, and my brain was busy with a thousand desperate plots all weaving themselves upon this most opportune delaying of the expedition.

Wanting nothing so much as a chance to let my mind shuttle connectedly among the plot threads, I shunned the tavern and kept on around the northern and eastern escarpment of the fort until I found myself once more approaching the waterside and the landing-place with its two smoky torches still flaring in the wind. The spot was deserted, though it was so close under the guns of the fort that I could hear the tread of the sentinel as he paced back and forth behind the screen of the outer ravelin.

Hearing my footsteps, the sentry stopped and would have challenged me, I suppose, if his attention had not been drawn at the same minute to a ship’s small boat which was approaching the landing. His challenge went for that, instead, and when I heard the answer I stood quickly aside and waited for what should follow. For, by all the good luck that ever fell upon a perplexed and half-desperate plotter, the man who stepped from the stern-sheets of the small boat and made answer to the challenging sentry was none other than my fellow conspirator, Sergeant Champe.

“A courier from the fleet, with letters for General Arnold,” was his reply to the fort’s watch-dog; and when he had taken the few strides necessary to carry him out of earshot from the ravelin and from the two sailors in his boat, I waylaid him, telling him in twenty words how fortune—and Sir Henry Clinton—had given us one more chance to retrieve ourselves.

“Plot for it, then,” was his gloomy response. “I see nothing beyond my going back to the ships presently with the answer to the letter I’m carrying.”

“That you shall not do,” I replied hastily. “We must think up some excuse to keep you ashore. Leave that to me and go on your errand. I’ll wait for you here and have my plan ready against your return.”

The plan, decided on in a half-hour’s chilly marching back and forth across the green while I waited for Champe to come back, was not very complicated. When the sergeant made his appearance I took the despatches and sent him over to the tavern to reengage my room for me, telling him to pose as my soldier-servant therein. Meanwhile, I told him, I would take his place as Arnold’s courier, and it would go hard with me if I should not account for his detention on shore when I could have speech with those on shipboard who had sent him.

Passing on to the landing-place in my new character of despatch carrier, I found the sailors willing enough to exchange the sergeant they had brought ashore for a captain; and at my order to give way, they pulled off to one of the rear-guard vessels of the fleet, where, to my dismay, I found I had to deal with Major Simcoe, whose letters to Arnold had been the despatches carried ashore by Champe.

Quite naturally, the major’s first question was for his messenger, and I was glad that the light of the ship’s lantern was so poor that he could not see my involuntary recoil when I saw who it was with whom I had to fence.

“I am General Arnold’s aide,” I replied guardedly. “Were you expecting some one else, Major Simcoe?”

“I sent a man from the Loyal American detail on board, a sergeant named Champe,” he explained. “Did he return with you, Captain?”

“No. Possibly the general made other use of him,” I suggested.

“Possibly,” said the major, eying me shrewdly from beneath his bushy brows. “But in that case he must have changed his mind after this letter was sent. You will see that it is superscribed to me ‘By the hands of Sergeant Champe,’” and he held the letter so that I might read the writing on the back.

There was no help save in a stout lie quickly told; and even this might have disastrous after-consequences if the major should come ashore later on and follow it up.

“General Arnold is my superior officer, and I do not presume to question his reasons for writing another man’s name on the letter which he gives me to deliver, Major Simcoe,” I said boldly, adding, with even greater impudence: “If you do not wish to receive the general’s despatches at my hands, let me have them again and I’ll so report to General Arnold.”

“Oh, there is no need for any heat about it, Captain Page,” was his even-toned retort. “Only, when you go ashore, I shall be glad if you will look up my sergeant and send him off to me. You shall have the boat’s crew as long as may be necessary.”

Now this was not satisfactory, either, since it made me responsible for the boat’s crew, and, indirectly, for Champe’s return. So I took the high-and-mighty stand again.

“Egad, Major Simcoe,” I protested, “I’m afraid you will have to hold me excused. General Arnold would not be greatly pleased to have one of his aides detailed by you to bring in your stragglers.”

At this the doughty major came close and looked me in the eyes as the poor light would let him.

“Hark you, Captain Page,” he said, speaking so those who stood about should not hear; “you seem bent on quarreling with me when there is no need for it. That is your privilege, sir, and if you were a king’s officer I should be the last man in the army to deny you. As it is—well, a polite word or two may go far with a gentleman in your situation, and I wonder you are so slow in perceiving it. Now, sir, will you report to the general in command that I am short a sergeant, and that I shall be greatly pleased to have the proper steps taken to find and send him off to me?”

If there is one good quality above another in the Page make-up it is the instant knowledge of the precise moment when the trumpet should sound the retreat. I saw now that I had taken the wrong tack with the tart major, and that I must butter him well if I wished to come off without loss.

“Saying nothing of your allusions, Major Simcoe,—which we may well take up at some other time and place,—I beg your pardon on the sergeant’s account,” I said, with no more than the proper touch of offended dignity. “You put me upon my mettle, seeming to question my right to bring you a letter—which you may take as the reason why I did not tell you plainly in the beginning that Champe was sent upon another errand after your letter had been written and superscribed. I am sure you do not question the commanding general’s right to use a warrant officer of his own legion as he sees fit.”

“I beg your pardon, Captain Page,” said the major crisply. “I am a soldier, sir, and I was thinking only of the man’s possible disobedience. Of course, if Mr. Ar—if the general required him, I have nothing more to say,” and he drew aside and read his letter.

Now I had another twinge or two to suffer while I waited, for fear Arnold might possibly have made some mention of Champe in the letter. But in a minute or two the major turned and gave me my dismissal quite courteously, telling me that there was no answer other than to convey his duty to the commanding officer, and to say, if it came in my way, that he, Major Simcoe, would report at the headquarters sometime during the following day—a thing I prayed my good angel to prevent, if it could be done without setting the entire cosmic plan of the universe ajee.

Having thus been given leave to vanish, I made good use of it before any other untoward thing should happen; and with a coin apiece for my two sailor oarsmen at the landing, I answered the sentry challenge from the fort and made my way swiftly to the tavern.

Here I learned that my portmanteau had not been taken away, and that a soldier, calling himself my servant, was waiting for me in the room above. Meaning to give the Royalist barman no chance to think that I cared a rap about any common soldier who might be sitting up for me, I ordered a cup of wine and a pipe of tobacco, and sat quietly before the fire in the supper-room, sipping the one and smoking the other for a full half-hour before paying my score and going above-stairs.

In the barn-like room Champe was improving the interval soldier-wise; which is to say that he had taken the covers from my bed, rolled himself in them, and was sound asleep on the floor. He roused at my incoming, however, and was broad awake by the time I had thrown a log on the smoldering fire he had made.

“Well, and how did you carry it off with the major?” he asked when he had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“Not so handsomely as I should have, had you told me it was Major Simcoe I should have to hoodwink,” I retorted. “But you are safe for the time being—which means until Major Simcoe and Arnold meet each other and fall to comparing notes.”

“And then?” queried my sergeant.

“Then Simcoe will learn that I have lied to him, and Arnold may not be able to remember that he sent you on an errand that prevented your return to the ship with his letter to the major,” I rejoined shortly.

“Which means that we have purchased—how many hours, Captain Dick?”

“God knows; and I do not. But we must make the most of what time we have. No one seems to know where our convoy ships of war have gone, or when they are to return. But with the fleet waiting in the lower bay, the interval can not be long. What we do, we must do quickly.”

“Aye,” said Champe; “and what will that be?”

I had been culling the plots out patiently ever since Castner’s announcement of the delay had set them weaving, and now there was but one that offered any promise of success—and that a desperate one. With the uncertain time-factor we had to count on, it was useless to think of trying to get word to Major Lee in the camp at Tappan. What we did must be done without help from the outside; and upon this hard-and-fast pivot the temerarious enterprise must be made to turn.

“What we thought we might accomplish with a corporal’s guard of Major Lee’s men to help us, we must still do, and do it with our hands, John Champe,” I said.

“Take him forcibly in his house, you mean?”

I nodded.

“I’m with you, Captain Dick,” was the stout sergeant’s rejoinder. “But afterward?”

“That is what it may take us all the time we have, and maybe more, to provide for. The river is our only way out, and we must have a boat, the lightest and swiftest we can find. Do you pull an oar, Sergeant?”

“No so comfortably as I do a bridle rein. But I shall make out when it comes to that. What is your plan?—or have you drawn any picture of it in your mind?”

“It is as simple as knocking a beef yearling in the head with a stone,” I admitted, nettled that I could contrive nothing subtler. “We find our boat, beg, buy or steal it, and place it as near at hand as may be convenient. That done, we lay hands on Sir Judas, sleeping or waking, and then for the river and a long pull with the tide or against it, as fortune chances to smile or frown upon us in fixing the hour.”

“Aye,” said Champe, quite without enthusiasm, “it’s surely simple enough, Captain Dick.”

“Think of a better, then,” I snapped curtly.

The sergeant let me have another sight of his ferocious grin.

“I’ve had my turn of thinking, and it’s you for it now,” he retorted. “I might say that you put your foot squarely into my think-trap and stopped it from going off, but I shan’t. You’ll give the order, Captain Dick, and I’ll obey it, if it tells me to cut Mr. Benedict Iscariot’s throat while he is asleep.”

After that we were silent for a time, both of us weighing and measuring the hazards of the desperate game, I think. Champe still kept his place on the floor, sitting jack-knifed with his hands locked over his knees and his wide-opened eyes staring at nothing. Suddenly, as I was opening my mouth to ask where we were likely to find our boat, he laid a hand on my knee and shook his head.

“What is it?” I asked, but only with my eyes.

“There is some one stirring in the room beyond,” he said in a half-whisper. “Who is your neighbor, Captain Dick?”

Matching his tone, I said that I knew none of my fellow lodgers save Lieutenant Castner, and that I did not know the placing of the lieutenant’s room.

“We were full careless,” said my companion. And then he got upon his feet with no more noise than a cat would have made and suddenly extinguished the candle. The firelight still flung long shadows about the room, and in the shelter of the broadest of them Champe glided away to the wall of suspicion and examined it foot by foot with scrutinizing eyes and gently gliding finger-tips. When he crept back to me he was holding out a forefinger the end of which was whitened with powdered lime.

“That tells the tale,” he whispered. “There’s a whiff of this dust on the floor, and above it, at the height of a man’s head, a peep-hole the size of a goose-quill. We must know who is in that room, Captain Dick.”

Here was a crude peril at the very outset of things; but what the sergeant said was very true. We must know who our spy was at all costs. Taking off our shoes we passed silently into the corridor and found the neighboring door by feeling cautiously for it in the dark. It was on the latch, and after listening breathlessly for a full minute we opened the door by slow inchings and listened again. Still there was no sound, and now we entered the room, groping blindly, first for impeding obstacles and then for the bed where our spy might be feigning sleep.

In this noiseless circuiting Champe went to the right and I to the left, and we met in the far corner where the high, four-posted bed filled a sort of alcove built to contain it. Then I think we both drew breath of relief, for the bed was empty.

“Wait for me,” whispered my companion; and when he returned a little later he had relighted our candle and was carrying it high above his head.

But the candle told us nothing more than our gropings had. The room was unoccupied; was bare of any lodger’s belongings; had evidently been undisturbed since its daytime redding by the chamber-maid. But in the partition wall between it and my room we found the peep-hole which, on the principle of locking the stable after the horse had been most successfully stolen, we carefully plugged.

When we were before my fire again we were little wiser than when we had left it. Our danger turned upon a question of time. When was the hole bored through the partition wall? There was no way of determining this: but Champe was sure he had heard footsteps in the adjoining room at the moment when he had called my attention.

“Take it whatever way you please,” he said; “there’s somebody in this house who suspects you. What we have talked here to-night would hang a whole regiment, and it’s my notion that our spy has heard all he needs to hear and has gone for help to take us.”

“In that case,” said I, “since we can die but once, I for my part choose to die fighting rather than at the rope’s end.” So I got up and barred the door.

“Right you are, my Captain,” Champe agreed most heartily; and then we took stock of our weapons.

Fortunately we were provided with the tools we both knew best how to use. My trooper sword, which I had brought off in the boat escape from Nyack, was with my portmanteau; and this I gave to Champe. For myself there was the captain’s rapier that went with my rank as Arnold’s aide; a good serviceable Scottish blade which I had carefully selected from a dozen or more in the barracks armory for its hang and balance. I thought we should be able to give a pretty good account of ourselves when the time came, and so much I said to Champe.

“Aye,” he replied. “They’ll take the muskets to us before they get us, and then I’ll pray only that they’ll shoot straight. Also, I’ll pray that they do not keep us waiting over-long; I’m fair dead for sleep.”

At this I remembered that the sergeant had lost the whole of the preceding night, as I had, and that he had not had my chance of sleeping out the day in recompense. So, when a full half-hour had passed with no signs or sounds of the expected arresting party, I told Champe to roll himself once more in the bed-covers, leaving me to keep watch. The lack of a boat put any action out of the question for the night; and, deplore it as we might, another day must elapse before we could flog our simple garroting plot into shape.

It was a fruitful vigil that I kept, sitting through the quiet hours before the smoldering fire on the hearth; fruitful because it gave me time to pass in orderly review the exciting events which had been crowded into the short space of two days and nights. I could scarcely realize that the day before the quickly changing scenes of the yesterday, I had been pulling a small boat idly down the river from Teller’s Point, intent upon nothing more pressing than the spending of my few hours’ furlough in Dirck van Ditteraick’s tap-room with Jack Pettus for a boon companion.

This side of that, I had quarreled with Seytoun, taken a huge slice of responsibility in the talk with Mr. Hamilton, made my stirring escape from the patriot camp, changed flags, made my standing good with Sir Henry Clinton and with Arnold, and had lived a fairly busy lifetime in a strenuous day and a still more strenuous night. Moreover, I had discovered Mistress Beatrix Leigh in a place where I had least expected to find her, had stirred her anger and contempt, and—I hoped—in some small measure, at least, her love for me; and had involved myself in a tangle of deceit and double-dealing that might well lead me shortly to a British prison and the gallows.

And, last of all, three days away from our quiet camp in the Hudson hills, I was sitting here in an upper room in the tavern, waiting minute by minute for the summons to a struggle which, if it should come, would, for Champe’s sake and mine, much better end in the swiftest snuffing-out for both of us.

I yawned sleepily. Our spy-takers were a long time making up their minds, I concluded, and I had a hearty wish that they would hurry. No man fights the better for having to sit for hours on end with his bared sword across his knees, straining his ears for the first sounds of the battle signal.

Hence, it was with some dull prickings of disappointment that I roused Champe an hour before dawn, and flung myself upon the bed for a little wooing of forgetfulness to precede the forthbringings of another day. For if there had come a thundering at the door and a shouted command to open in the king’s name, we should at least have confronted a peril known and measurable. But now the darkness was full of mysterious eyes, as the silence told of whispering voices; and no step we should henceforth take would be lacking its hidden snare or pitfall.

XI
OUT OF THE NETTLE, DANGER

CHAMPE let me sleep until day-dawn was fully come and the inn was stirring, calling me then, as he explained, only because he was fearful that some orderly from Arnold’s quarters would be up and asking for me, and so raise a wonder at my holding him, Champe, in my room over night.

Being confronted by the perils of the new day, we were first concerned with the problem of keeping the sergeant out of the way, and out of sight of any curious eyes. It was asking too much of the hazards to make the tavern a rendezvous for him, and while he might possibly venture to show himself in the town, trusting to a nimble lie to account for his absence from his regiment and the fleet, it said itself that he must keep well out of sight of Arnold, Major Simcoe, or any shore-keeping officer of the Loyal Americans.

Breakfast was the earliest consideration, however, and I made shift to answer for that, going down to the common-room when the meal was called, and later bribing the cook to give me a tray of dainties for a brother officer, who, as I said, had been forced to share my room with me for the want of sober sense to find his quarters.

How much this tale imposed upon the cook, a fat Dutchman big enough to make three common men in any fair division of flesh, I do not know. But he gave my “brother officer” the credit of a well man’s appetite, and was discreet enough to discard the tray, making the provisions into a paper-wrapped bundle which I might take to my room without exciting remark.

His breakfast despatched, Champe next wished to know how he was to get out of the tavern unhalted to go upon the boat-seeking quest; and here the contents of my portmanteau came into play. In a little time we had him out of his Loyal American regimentals and into the civilian’s clothes I had purchased to replace my patriot homespun. He made a better-looking gentleman of elegance than I had hoped he would, and when he was well-muffled in the cloak that went with the outfitting, I thought he might pass without curious question.

He was eager to make the attempt, as I was to have him. Any minute a messenger might come from Arnold requiring my attendance, and the wonder we had been trying all the morning to avert would be raised with a vengeance. So, after agreeing upon a low sailors’ groggery beyond the burned district on the eastern water-front as our meeting point for the evening, where either of us who chanced to be the first comer would await the arrival of the other, we parted, Champe going boldly down the inn stair in his new toggery and carrying himself as little like a soldier as any young man of fashion in New York.

Now I took it afterward as a piece of sheer good fortune that the idea came into my head to follow the sergeant down, two steps behind him; and assuredly the event proved the timeliness of the prompting. For in the tap-room, at a little table drawn up before the fire, sat Lieutenant Castner as large as life, breakfasting at his leisure; and if I had not steered Champe aside with a muttered exclamation, the sergeant would have brushed Castner’s elbow in passing. As it was, I had time to thrust myself between; and when the door clanged behind the outgoing Champe, I was making my greetings to the lieutenant and asking him if I might share his table for a dish of tea.

He gave me the invitation cordially enough, but there was a look in his mild eyes that I could not fathom. And I was scarcely facing him across the table before he had me skating on the thinnest ice.

“Who was your double, Captain Page?” he asked, with a jerk of his head toward the door which had let Champe out to freedom.

I saw it all instantly. Castner had been with me two days before and had helped me to select the very clothes Champe was now wearing. It was a thrust that called for the deftest parrying, and I was not at my best—I never am in the mornings.

“The man who went out as I came down?” I said, sparring to gain time. “Do you think he favored me?”

“As to his face I could not say,” was the cool reply. “I think he must have the toothache, to judge from his mufflings. But I spoke of his clothes. Hadn’t you noticed that he was wearing a copy of the suit I helped you buy of the little Dutch Jew day before yesterday, Captain?”

I said I had not noticed it, having other things to think of, but the nonchalant reply did not banish the queer look from Castner’s eyes. And when I sought to drag him away from the dangerous subject by asking if he had learned anything new about the movements of the fleet, he answered my question briefly and went back in a word to my perilous skating pond.

“I wonder that you didn’t remark the gentleman’s clothes,” he said musingly. “I don’t think there is another cloak like that in all New York. You say you don’t know him?”

“How should I know him?” I demanded with a good show of impatience. “I merely saw that some one walked ahead of me down the stair and out of the door.”

“Strange,” he said, in the same half-musing tone. “Do you know, Captain Page, I could have sworn that you spoke to him less than a second before you—rather rudely, I fancied—pushed him aside to shake hands with me?”

I thought it was all up with me now, but I set my teeth on a grim resolve to die fighting.

“Perhaps you could even tell me what I said to this gentleman who, at the moment, was nothing more to me than a stumbling-block in my way,” I said, laughing ironically.

“I can,” he rejoined quite evenly. “You gave him the soldier’s word of command: ‘File right!’ you said, and I almost looked to see you follow it up with an oath.”

He had me fairly at a standstill. He had quoted my word of warning to Champe precisely, and I doubt not the tone in which it was given suggested the oath which might have capped it. Having nothing more to say, I held my peace, and when the lieutenant had given his rejoinder time to sink in, he came at me again, this time very gravely.

“You are not altogether transparent, Captain Page, nor have you been since the hour you landed in New York. I don’t want to think ill of you, because ill-thinking of a man in your situation could have but one meaning. Now I shall ask you a fair question, and you shall answer it as you choose. Do you—”

I held up my hand.

“First tell me frankly what you know, Mr. Castner, and then I shall be equally frank with you,” I interposed; adding: “at least, as frank as I can be without involving a gentleman who, I am sure, wishes to be charitably unknown in this little controversy of ours.”

His smile was shrewdly triumphant, but it comforted me beyond measure. Whatever he knew, it was not enough to hang me—yet.

“You had a fellow guest in your room last night, Captain; so much any one who passed through the corridor and heard you talking might know. That you kept this guest all night is quite apparent from the fact that he wore your clothes when he went out just now. It may be a very simple little mystery and easily explained; but, as I said before, mysteries are dangerous things, Captain—for you.”

Now I knew who had bored the hole in the wall of the unoccupied room next to mine and why it had been bored. Castner had wished to see the face of the man whom I was keeping over night. Remembering how hard it would be to see anything definite through a quill-sized hole in a thick partition wall, I took a chance that Castner was still in doubt as to my roommate’s identity. And so long as I could keep this in the dark, there was hope.

“There is no great mystery about it, Mr. Castner, and nothing to conceal save the gentleman’s name and standing. Before I attempt to explain, may I ask if you know anything of General Arnold’s domestic affairs?”

He shook his head.

“As little as may be, and I might say that I don’t care to know more.”

“Then my task is the easier,” I said. “I had the honor of knowing the general’s wife when she was Mistress Margaret Shippen, of Philadelphia. I may tell you, without breaching her confidence, or the general’s, that I was entrusted with a message for her last night. She gave me no answer at the time; but later, learning, possibly, of the change in the sailing orders, it is not beyond belief that she would wish to communicate again with her husband, is it?”

“I suppose not,” he agreed. “But are you trying to tell me that Mistress Arnold’s messenger came naked, and had to borrow your clothes to return in?”

I laughed heartily at this.

“Were you ever drunk and disorderly, Lieutenant Castner?” I asked. “If so, you may have had to borrow a suit of clothes yourself before now. And possibly the loan of a friend’s room to sober up in. And after such an experience, I dare say you would not care to be recognized by your friend’s friend in the morning when you were making your escape.”

“Then they were your clothes?” persisted Castner, laughing now with me.

“You asked me if he came naked: he did not, but he might have gone that way, but for my generosity. Are you quite satisfied, Mr. Castner?”

“I am obliged to be,” he said musingly.

“Oh, no,” I said. “You may go up to my room and see the gentleman’s castoff clothes, if you wish—though they are not over-pretty to look at. In fact you may have everything but his name, which I feel in duty bound not to disclose. If I hint that he is a near relative of—”

“I beg your pardon,” said the lieutenant, almost shamefacedly, I thought; and then I took my turn at him. It is always well, when you have your enemy on the run, to press him closely lest he turn on you like the Parthians of old.

“How close were you behind us last night, when we came in, Lieutenant?—and how long did you have to listen at my door to have your suspicions aroused?”

He pushed his chair back, and tried to laugh it off, but I would not let him go.

“No, you must not laugh,” I said soberly. “I am not over-quarrelsome, I think, nor do I make too little of your many kindnesses to me. But you can add greatly to my obligations, Mr. Castner, if you will remember that there are gentlemen in Virginia as well as in the king’s army.”

By this time he was apologizing in good earnest, and when he had gone far enough to be quite out of sight and hearing of the danger point, I forgave him most magnanimously, and drew my first real breath of assurance.

His breakfast finished, Castner would not stay to smoke a pipe with me before the fire. His reason for haste added nothing to my comfort. He told me that Major Simcoe was expected from the fleet, and that he must go to the landing-place to meet him on Sir Henry Clinton’s behalf.

This set me to thinking of how I might best throw up a hasty shelter against the storm the major’s coming would doubtless raise in my quarter of the heavens. By all the military canons I should presently have to go and present my duty to Arnold, and I thought it would be well to do this before Major Simcoe could precede me. Though as for this, I was like a hound in leash, with only so far to run before the cord should choke me, anyway.

Hitherto, I had always gone willingly enough into the den of the wild beast we were seeking to entrap, but now I had a curious chilling of reluctance. What if Major Simcoe had already come ashore? What if he had sent another boat, after I had left him, with a second message to the expedition commander? What if—but there was no end to the list of things that might have happened, and the only way to die was to do it quickly and have it over with.

So, packing my qualms into the smallest corner of my soul, I crossed swiftly to the house of threatenings, only to learn that Arnold had gone to an early conference with Sir Henry Clinton. Following him to the house next door, I was told by an orderly that he was closeted with the commander-in-chief, and was asked if I were the bearer of despatches.

I said I was not, and lingered upon the door-step to wait for my interview. When it was over-long in coming, I left word with Arnold’s orderly that I would return later, and went to make a brisk circuit around the fort by way of walking off the cold chill of apprehension that seemed to be freezing the very blood in my veins.

This walk brought me, in due time, to the water’s edge, and turning eastward I was led into that search for a boat which must precede all else in the plot we had devised. Some little distance up the shore, and well within range of the fort’s heavier ordnance, I placed the sailors’ groggery where Champe and I were to meet at the day’s end. It was a mere hovel on the hillside; a den where I thought a man would do well to go armed after nightfall. It was kept by a shock-headed Irishman, with foxy eyes and a fist like a rail-splitter’s. He served me with a can of grog, and when I asked him if he knew of any one who had a boat to sell, he gave me a cunning leer, and said the “other gentleman” was ahead of me. This told me that Champe had been before me; and thinking I might only direct suspicion toward him or myself, I paid for my drink and went back to see if Arnold had returned.

This time I did not have to wait. Arnold was in his office-room above-stairs, and when I reported to him, he told me briefly that I was at liberty for the forenoon. Whereupon I was going away with a lighter heart, and should have carried the same out at the street door if I had not just been in time to meet Major Simcoe entering.

There was clearly nothing to be done. The major was going up-stairs, and I did not see how I could stop him. If by any chance my shifty exploit of the night before should come in for mention, my race was run.

“One moment, Major,” I said hurriedly, halting him when his foot was on the first step of the stair; “have you seen Lieutenant Castner?”

He turned and said he had not, by which I inferred that he had not yet been to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters.

“He left me a little while ago, saying that he was going to the landing-place to meet you, or failing that, to send a boat off for you,” I went on calmly.

I was almost without the hope that it would turn him back, but it did—from the very threshold of my peril. He took it precisely as I had hoped he might; as a notice that Sir Henry wished to see him without delay. No sooner was he gone into the house next door than I ran up-stairs to present myself again to Arnold. As before, he was preoccupied with his work, but gave me his attention when I stood deferentially aside and waited.

“There was a little matter which I meant to mention and forgot, General,” I began, trying my best to be routine-like. “It has come in my way once to stand sponsor for a rascally fellow-colonist of mine, named Champe, and I’m sorry to have to do it again, or rather to report him. Last night you entrusted him with despatches for Major Simcoe, and I regret to say that I found him some time afterward in a condition totally unfit to be responsible for his duty. You will understand when I say that he had gone so far as to show his despatches and to boast of his errand. I promptly put him under guard, took your letter and delivered it myself to the major.”

“That was right,” he said approvingly; and then he asked the question I had hoped he would ask. “What did Major Simcoe say, when he saw you in Champe’s place?”

Here was my opportunity, and I seized it immediately.

“Major Simcoe was not over-courteous to me. For some reason or other he, and many of his fellow officers in the king’s service, seems very ready to put a slight upon us of the Loyal Americans, General, and when he began to question me dictatorially about Champe, I—well, for the honor of the legion I felt constrained to put him off, asking him in effect, if it were any of his business if you chose to send a sergeant of your own regiment on another errand.”

I saw before I was through that I was touching the proper chord. It was the gossip of the town that Arnold was practically ostracized by the officers of the regular army, and it was equally common talk that this was our traitor’s sorest point. So I was quite prepared to have him approve my course, as he did with his eyes glooming, and the furrows deepening in his brow.

“You did quite right, Captain Page,” he said, “though I doubt not you were too easy with the drunken sergeant. Have you Champe still under lock and key?”

“No,” I admitted; “he was so penitent this morning, and so anxious to get away before the story of his misbehavior should come to your ears, that I let him go to seek a boat in which he could return to his company. He can be disciplined later, if you so direct; though, as a fellow Virginian, I hope you will see how good a soldier he can be on the battle-field before you do it.”

He was looking past me before I had finished, with that absent gaze I was coming to associate with his milder moods, and when I had made an end he waved his hand and said: “You are a merciful man, Captain Page; which is rather to your credit if you do not carry it too far. If Major Simcoe complains to me, I shall know what to say to him.”

Now was my time to vanish, but as I was turning away, he broke in again: “I gave you leave for the forenoon, Captain, but I am tempted to ask you to do me a small personal favor, if you will. Mistress Arnold does not yet know of the delay in our departure, and if you can make it convenient to see her and to say to her that I shall be engaged until after midday—”

I bowed and said I should be only too glad to carry his message, which, for once in a way, was the truth in fact as well as in intention.

Being free to go, I went hastily, and before Major Simcoe could return to catch me in this business of pipe-laying. Not to have Arnold’s errand on my mind, I made it my first care to discharge it quickly. It was Mistress Margaret herself who met me at the door of the Vandeventer house, and it hurt me to see how glad she was at the news I brought; hurt me because if our plans should succeed, the delay would mean nothing but agony and life-long sorrow for her.

I did not go in, though she asked me very kindly if I would, but when I hung upon my leave-taking, she divined the cause and said: “Mistress Beatrix is quite well this morning, thank you, Captain Page, and I know she will be overjoyed to hear that you asked for her.”

It was surely a needed pin-prick, and I responded to it.

“It is truly wonderful, Mistress Margaret, how you are able to read a man’s inmost thoughts, and to set them in the words he is trying to find. Later in the day I trust the general may make me his letter carrier again, and if he does, may I hope—”

“Your privilege is always to hope, Captain Page, and I think I should be the last person in the world to rob you of it,” she said; then she gave me a loving message to her husband, and truly I felt more and more the despicable villain the deeper I was drawn into this playing of the go-between for husband and wife.

On my return to the lower end of the town, I made a détour to the western waterside with a view to familiarizing myself with the situation which would confront us when we should not have daylight to show us what we needed to see. The riverside was well guarded to a point far beyond the town, and the river itself was patrolled by small craft. I saw no rowing boats at all on that bank. It came to me now, that our greatest difficulty would lie in this finding of a suitable boat. Unless I could use my authority as an officer in seizing one, I fancied that we should look long before obtaining one in any other way. This would be an extra hazard, to be sure, but we were already so deep in hazards, that the addition of another could make little difference.

I had turned inland, and was passing the sugar-house prison in the corner of the churchyard, when I met Major Simcoe again; and this time it was he who halted me.

“Your fellow-countryman, the sergeant, seems to have got himself into trouble, Captain Page. Had you heard of it?”

My heart turned to lead at his words, but I was careful to keep the weight of it out of my face and voice.

“Our sergeant seems to trouble you much more than he does me, Major,” I said, trying to say it as lightly as I could. “What has he been doing now?”

The major laughed.

“That remains to be determined. He was found prowling about the waterside in citizen’s clothes a little while ago, and since he could give no reasonable account of himself to the officer of the guard, he was clapped into a cell.”

I was burning to ask if the news of this climaxing disaster had been carried to Arnold, but I dared not. So I escaped from the major as I could, and hurried down to Fort George, passing the door of Arnold’s house on the way, as one might take a morning’s saunter in front of a cannon loaded, and with the slow-match burning.

At the fort the commandant, a British officer of the bulldog type, was exceedingly brusk with me, paying his backhanded compliment to the uniform I wore, and at first would give me no satisfaction whatever.

“The man was first a deserter from the rebels, and now he has shed his regimentals, and was trying to desert from us,” he said sharply. “Of course, Mr. Arnold will do what he pleases with him, but if the matter lay with me, he would stretch a cord very promptly, Captain.”

“Fortunately, the matter does not lie with you,” I retorted, matching his sharpness. “You have blundered, as some of you gentlemen in the king’s service seem quite prone to do. Sergeant Champe was on duty when you arrested him, and that duty required that he should not appear in his regimentals, as it also required secrecy on his part, even under the questioning of so great a man as you are, Mr. Commandant. I’ll trouble you to set the sergeant at liberty, sir.”

“Upon order, certainly, Captain,” said my bulldog stubbornly.

“You have your order, sir,” I retorted, bristling back at him.

“I have not seen it,” he remarked.

“By heaven, sir, you are hearing it!” I cried. “Do you require me to go back to Sir Henry Clinton and General Arnold, with the information that you decline to take the word of the general’s aide?”

Now there are bullies who can not be bullied, but happily the commandant was not one of them. When I was turning upon my heel, as if in a passion, he called me back.

“I know you are Mr. Arnold’s aide, Captain,” he said, rather less truculently, “but duty is duty, and—”

“Oh, very well,” I said, “it is but a matter of walking up to Sir Henry’s house and telling him that your meddlesome interference has doubtless spoiled the service upon which the sergeant was engaged.”

That shot brought him down, and now he seemed as eager to give me my sergeant, and to be quit of us both, as, a moment before, he was reluctant. Champe was fetched from some dungeon underneath the battlements, and he was shrewd enough not to make much of seeing me with the commandant, who now followed me to the sally-port, with protestations of his guiltlessness in Champe’s arrest, and begging me not to make too much of it with Sir Henry Clinton. I set his mind at rest on this point, telling him that if he did not report the faux pas, I should not; a statement which was well within the bounds of truth.

Once free of the fort with my derelict, I hurried him around to the tavern and up to my room.

“Out of that masquerade and into your uniform quickly!” I commanded; and I would not let him tell his morning adventures until he had made the change.

When he was once more, in outward appearance, a soldier of the Loyal American Legion, he set his back against the wall and said:

“Well, Captain Dick, I’ve found the boat for us, though I don’t know but what I’ve had to kill a man to quiet our title to it.”

XII
HOW THE HOOK WAS BAITED

CHAMPE’S calm announcement that he had purchased a boat at the price of a man’s life was startling enough; but before I could ask for the particulars he had pushed the dreadful deed and all thought of it into the background with an ominous hint and a still more ominous query.

“The boat business isn’t the worst of it, by the value, much or little, of another man’s life,” he affirmed soberly. Then the query: “Is your standing still good over yonder, Captain Dick?” with a jerk of his thumb toward Sir Henry Clinton’s and Arnold’s headquarters.

“My standing was as sound as ever, up to an hour or two ago; though it had a pretty narrow margin when Major Simcoe came ashore and went within an ace of spilling all our fat into the fire. But why? Has anything happened that promises to make a breach in it?”

Champe took his back from the wall and sat down, locking his hands over one knee.

“Let me ask you first: did they tell you what I was doing when they put me under arrest?—but of course they didn’t; they couldn’t have guessed it.”

“They told me nothing save that you were a soldier out of uniform, that you were a skulker from the fleet, and that you were making for a boat with a pair of oars on your shoulder—preparing to run away, they supposed.”

“They got it all straight, as far as they went,” he responded, nodding his head sagely. “Only they didn’t go half far enough. I was doing my prettiest to make a chance to put the quietus on a second man; and I would have compassed it within the next quarter-hour, if the guard officer hadn’t clapped his good eye on me.”

“Heavens!” I exclaimed. “You surely missed your calling, Sergeant Champe. You should be the public hangman in some county where the court sits once a month.”

Champe’s grin was appreciative rather than reproachful.

“They do say some callings run in the blood, Captain Dick,” he allowed. “My father was the High Sheriff of Loudoun County before the war took him off—as his gaffer was before him. But that’s neither here nor there: wait and you shall say for yourself whether this man I speak of does not need a little wholesome killing.”

“Go on,” said I. “The present moment is ours, and that is all the luckiest soul alive can lay claim to. None the less, if any special danger is threatening—”

“It is either past the threatening point, or else it will not reach it while I’m telling you,” said the sergeant, with a return of his stolid indifference. “If that cursed guard officer had given me but the thinnest shaving of time: five minutes more was all I asked.”

“Oh, get on with your story!” I cut in impatiently.

“I’m coming to it, Captain Dick; rein your nag down and go easy on the spur: then you’ll get all the speed with all the bottom. But, as I was saying: after I had found the only boat that was to be had on all this waste of river front, and had put the owner of it well choked and gagged and bound into the cellar of his own house, with half the bricks of his Dutch oven piled on the trap-door to keep him safe—”

“You said nothing of all this,” I interrupted, “but no matter—let’s have the nib of it.”

“There you go again, Captain, tripping me up just as I’m taking the gallop. Where was I?—oh, yes; piling the good half of the Dutch oven on the trap-door to make all safe. Well, that done, I must needs go back a ways to buy the silence of the carrot-headed Irish grog-ladler who had put me in the way of finding the hidden boat. After I had let him rob me to the tune of three guineas where he had offered for two, I thought it might be well to take a round along the shore to that Dutch schnapps house where I had been meeting Mr. Baldwin, Major Lee’s letter carrier from the camp at Tappan.”

“A good thought,” I broke in. “I had forgotten that we may still have a line of communication open in that direction.”

“It was a lucky thought,” Champe went on. “When I found the Mynheer, I was told that Mr. Baldwin had been seeking me since daybreak, and while I was talking to the Dutchman, in Mr. Baldwin pops again, to give me a letter fresh from Major Lee.”

“Let me see it,” said I, holding out my hand; but the sergeant only laughed at me.

“Do you think I should have got through that fort guard-room yonder with the letter in my pocket, Captain Dick? No, no; I took no such risks, I promise you. The paper was well chewed and swallowed before it ever saw outdoor daylight. But I can tell you well enough what it said. We’re outflanked, foot, horse, and dragoons. There was a spy in the camp at Tappan the night you got your marching orders from Mr. Hamilton. You’ll know what that spells out for us?”

“I can guess; let’s have the worst of it.”

“I’m coming to that, too. This spy was caught, fragranty delictum, a few hours after you left the camp. Handily invited, with the turn of a cord around his two thumbs, he told what he could pick out of Mr. Hamilton’s talk to you heard from his hiding-place under Mr. Hamilton’s bed in the next room. He had it all down pat; your name and rank and mine, and the whole story of my plot and your cutting in to help me. But he protested to the last gasp that his knowledge was all of the ear; that he saw nothing—being under the bed—and wouldn’t know either of us by sight.”

“To the last gasp, you say—then they hanged him?” I said, feeling a great burden lifted.

“Unluckily, they didn’t. He had his drumhead trial, and was to stretch a cord at daybreak. Two hours before dawn they changed guard at the hut where he was in keeping, and the relief found the hut empty. The man was gone.”

“Oh, good lord!” I exclaimed. “We are not the only ones to tangle our feet and fall down over them, it seems. He’ll be here on top of us, next, I take it.”

“He is here,” said Champe impressively. “But to take things as they come: Major Lee’s first care, of course, was to send a warning to us. By good fortune, Mr. Baldwin chanced to be in Tappan, so the major had his letter carrier at hand. So down comes our warning, with a peremptory order at the tail of it. If the letter finds us still alive and at large, we are to throw down the tools and quit the job, evacuate the works, burn the baggage wagons—in other words, we are to save our necks if we can.”

“Humph!” said I. “If I’m guessing straight at the hinder end of your tale, Major Lee’s very excellent advice comes a good few hours too late, doesn’t it?”

“Right you are, Captain Dick,” asserted my news-bringer. “The spy is here in New York, and he has enough powder in his noddle to blow us both safely to Heaven if we had as many lives as the cat. Mr. Baldwin, who knows him, saw the man at his trial, and happily Mr. Baldwin is a good enough friend of ours to want to save our bacon. So, from the time when he crossed the river last night, he kept a sharp eye out for this Mr. James Askew, which is the name our man goes by.”

“Good! And he found him?”

“Found him early this morning, and followed him to his dodging-hole, which was the tavern of the Three Larks on the east shore road. His next care was to deliver the major’s letter to me, and, having done that, he put himself at our disposal in any helpful way that offered.”

I nodded. “Mr. Baldwin is trying fair to earn his fee of two hundred guineas, five hundred acres of land and three negroes, which, as Mr. Hamilton told me, was to be his reward for the letter carrying,” I said. “Did you retain him?”

“On the spot,” said Champe. “First I had him tell me all he knew about Askew. The man is not a Britisher; he is a free-lance, picking up information where he can and selling it in the best market. This gave me my lead. Such a man would be carrying his life in his hands in either camp, and he could never go boldly to either headquarters with his wares. With half a chance, I thought I might scare him off for a day or two, at any rate; and here Mr. Baldwin helped me again. We went to the Three Larks together, found our man, and Mr. Baldwin introduced me as a gentleman in the same line of business.”

“Excellent! You are a man in a thousand, Sergeant Champe.”

“We got on well enough after Mr. Baldwin left us. With my knowledge of things on our side of the Neutral Ground, I soon convinced Askew that I was an honest spy, like himself, and then, with a pot of ale or so to moisten the ropes, I began to pull gently on the dragnet. Askew’s a shy fish, and no gudgeon, but he finally let out that he had a piece of news he hoped would bring a good price. The sticking point was the risk he ran in delivering it, he said, by which I knew that he had been playing two games at the same time.”

“And you helped his fears to grow?” I put in.

“To the queen’s taste,” laughed the sergeant. “And at the trigger-pulling moment I made him a proposal. ‘How if we should go together to Sir Henry Clinton, and stand by each other?’ says I; and when I added that I had a bit of influence in that quarter, he took the bait at a gulp.”

“It is very clear that I am not the only daredevil in this company,” I remarked. “But you did not mean to do any such mad thing as that, did you?”

“Not to-day, Captain Dick; it is not my day for visiting Sir Henry Clinton; nor did I mean that it should be Mr. James Askew’s, either. But by this time I saw that I could not frighten him entirely off; he was too shrewd and too eager for the gold. So the only thing was to carry out Major Lee’s court-martial sentence on the body of the prisoner. He was as good as dead, anyway.”

“Surely, Sergeant Champe, if you escape the gallows here it will be only so that you may live to carry out your hereditary destiny of hanging other people,” I commented. “But go on: he consented to your plan?”

“Something cautiously, though he was now in the middle of his third cup of strong waters. Sifting him carefully again, I found that he was afraid to pass through the town in daylight, and here he played into my hands. I told him we might take a boat and pull around the water-front to the fort landing-place and so dodge all the curious eyes in the town.”

“But how would that help us?” I queried. I confess I was a little dull that morning.

Champe’s face lightened with his diabolical grin when he explained his purpose. When they were safely in the boat—a cockle-shell belonging to the Three Larks—he meant to upset it and drown the spy.

“It was all but done,” he went on regretfully. “I had bargained for the hiring of the boat, and we were on our way to the waterside with the oars when the guard relief came along. The one chance in a thousand rose up and kicked me. The guard officer was a line corporal I had quarreled with over a game of cards while the Loyal Americans were in barracks.”

“And he knew you—recognized you?”

“In two quacks of a duck. I had barely time to tip Askew the wink to sheer off, before the redcoat was calling me by my right name, and demanding to know why I was out of the fleet and masquerading ashore in citizen’s clothes. I had no answer ready for all this, so Askew and I were like the two women grinding at the mill—one was taken and the other left. The rest of the tale you know as well or better than I, Captain Dick.”

“I know that we are both no better than dead men if we can not lay hands on this spy of yours before he has screwed up courage to name his price to Sir Henry Clinton or Arnold,” I said gravely. “But doubtless he has already done so.”

Champe shook his head.

“I’m hoping not. He was well frightened by the fierceness with which the guard corporal bullied me; and when I had my last glimpse of him he was making off up the shore and evidently wishing with all his heart he dared break into a run.”

“Yet he will come to it,” I asserted. “The gold-greed will drive him, and his news is too big to keep. I’d give the best field of the Page tobacco lands to know if we are still in time to stop him.”

The sergeant rose and stretched his long arms over his head. Then he felt of his neck tenderly, saying with a touch of grim humor: “The cord isn’t knotted around it yet. Pass your orders, Captain Dick. What do we do?”

“Nay,” said I; “you’ve proved that your head is as good or better than mine. What do you say?”

“Being footloose, and having my regimentals on, I might go and have another look for Mr. James Askew. Then, if I could get him and my bully guard-relief corporal in the same crazy wherry—”

“You’d drown them both, I suppose,” I laughed. “Never mind the corporal; he’s harmless enough, while this man Askew holds your life in one hand and mine in the other. What will you do with him if you find him?—or when you find him?”

“I’ll keep him from spreading his sails to Sir Henry Clinton’s golden breeze, at all events,” said the sergeant meaningly. Then: “You don’t happen to have a bit of poison of any kind in your kit, do you?”

“Bah!” said I. “Do it soldierly, at least, Sergeant Champe.”

“So I will, then,” he agreed. After which he asked me if I would stay where I was and pray for his success.

“I’ll do better than that—being somewhat out of practice on my knees,” I told him. “It lies in my mind that I’ll go yonder to Sir Henry’s door and be at hand to stop our man if he should slip through your fingers and decide to ask an audience of Sir Henry Clinton without your help. Can you describe him so I would know him?”

“Why, yes,” said the sergeant, scratching his head with a meditative finger. “You’ll place him in the hollow half of a minute. He’s much like other men, neither very big nor very little; less tall than the tallest, and by no means as short as the shortest. You can’t well miss him.”

Sharp as our peril was, I had to laugh at Champe’s notion of a description. But time was pressing.

“Try it again, Sergeant,” I encouraged. “This time I’ll help you. Just answer my questions one at a time and we’ll have him. First, how old would you take him to be?”

Champe knitted his brows thoughtfully. “By grabs, Captain Dick, I never thought to ask him!”

“No, no; of course you couldn’t ask him. But fire a guess at it. Is he a young man?”

“No; I wouldn’t call him young; say thirty, or forty, or maybe fifty, or so.”

“Great Marlborough!” I raged. “Can’t you come any nearer to it than that? How about his eyes—what color are they?”

“Hum—his eyes; well, now, there you have me again, Captain. They are devilish sharp little eyes; I can tell you that. But lord! I couldn’t name you their color in a month of Sundays.”

“By all the blind pipers that ever twiddled a horn-pipe—I don’t believe you looked at him at all!” I broke out, annoyed beyond measure at this unexpected development of the sergeant’s weak point. “Is it any use to ask you how he was dressed?”

Champe’s face lightened now, and the frown of perplexity smoothed itself out.

“Surely; I can tell you that to the dotting of an ‘i.’ I remember noticing particularly that he was dressed quite like other folk—buckle-shoes, breeches, waistcoat, coat and hat. There you have him from head to foot.”

“Heavens and earth, man!” I exclaimed. “How in the devil’s name am I to help in this if you can’t give me the first living idea of the fellow I’m to look for? Think, Sergeant—think hard. Surely there must have been some noticeable thing about him that would serve to place him for me.”

Champe put his head in his hands and appeared to be making the mental effort of a lifetime. After a long minute he looked up to say: “I’ve got it, Captain Dick, I’ve got it. Come to think of it, I’m almost sure he wore a scratch-wig like a farmer’s.”

I shook my head in despair. Half the men in America wore scratch-wigs. Yet the edge of the necessity was in no wise dulled by Champe’s inability to visualize the spy for me.

“Try it again, Sergeant,” I entreated; and now he got up and began to walk the floor, cracking the joints of his big fingers and scowling ferociously in the throes of recollection. I venture to say he walked a full quarter-mile up and down the long room before he stopped to make his final dash at the impregnable barrier.

“I have it now,” he said, pleased as a child over the finding of a long-sought-for plaything. “His waistcoat was gray, Captain Dick; and he wore a black stock—aye, it was black, sure enough. But”—smiting fist into palm with a mighty thwack to make the climax—“the thing I noticed hardest was his watch-fob; a bunch of seals hanging at the end of a leather thong, and he twiddles them, so”—suiting the action to the word—“all the time as he talks or walks. Never tell me, Captain, that I haven’t got him down to the very parting of the hair for you.”

“Oh, you have,” I said ironically; “indeed you have. I could doubtless recognize Mr. James Askew in the dark, and with my eyes shut; or that way as well as any other. But the twiddling of the watch-fob seals may do. Now to the work. When you’ve succeeded—or failed—come back here and put a corner of your neckerchief in the window for a signal; right-hand if you’ve hit the mark, left-hand if you’ve missed.”

“You’ll be within call?” he asked, as I was unbarring the door.

“I shall be patrolling before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, ready to nip Mr. James Askew if he turns up on my beat—always providing that he twiddles his watch-seals at the proper instant.”

“One more word,” said the sergeant, when my hand was on the latch. “Major Lee’s order is to drop the hitch-rope and run for it. You’ve said nothing as to that, yet, Captain Dick.”

“And I say nothing now, save that Major Lee is not my commanding officer. He is yours, however—which may make a difference in your case. Does it?”

“No,” he said shrewdly; and we went out through the tap-room one at a time, and each to his own separate pool to fish for James Askew.

XIII
HOW A FISH WAS HOOKED AND LOST

THE talk in my tavern room with Champe had used up so much time that it was midday and beyond when I joined the group of orderlies and unattached officers lounging before Sir Henry’s door, and had a welcome in strict accordance with the freezing December weather and the uniform I was wearing—cool and contemptuous.

Now this was grateful to me, in a way, and in another way it made me spitefully savage. It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins.

So, when there were covert sneers and back-turnings enough to make a man sick, I began to strut and sneer in self-defense, twitting a lieutenant of Hetheridge’s whose line was the first to break at Monmouth, and a captain of Knyphausen’s whose Hessian devils had cut a troop of our horse to pieces at Tappan after it had surrendered.

This was all very hot-headed and rash, and would doubtless have involved me in trouble enough if a diversion had not come in the shape of Mr. Justice Smith’s new London-made hackney coach drawn by four horses which, for their postilions and trappings, might have been taken out of a crack artillery troop.

The coach came to a stand before Arnold’s door, and, as may be imagined, I left the quarreling Hessian captain without ceremony when I saw the faces of Margaret Shippen and Mistress Beatrix Leigh behind the window-panes.

“I have come to see the general, Captain Page,” said Mistress Arnold, when I had opened the coach door. “Will you be my avant coureur?”

“Most gladly,” I replied. And when I had found Arnold at his writing-table, and had his command to fetch his wife up to him, I went back to show Mistress Margaret the way.

“You will undertake to keep Beatrix from stagnating for the few minutes I shall need, Captain Page?” said this dear lady, when I was leaving her at Arnold’s office door; and I said I would try, and was thanking her when she bade me hasten before some of the other officers had cut me out.

I was minded to hasten fast enough, though not specially for the reason given by Mistress Margaret. I thought it would be a much more inclement day than this seventeenth day of December, Anno Domini, 1780, when I could not hold my own against a handful of redcoat popinjays who picked flaws in a man because he did not happen to be wearing a shoulder-knot to their liking.

But alas! pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction. When I reached the street here was my lady Beatrix laughing and chatting most amiably with the little ensign who had been one of her partners at Mr. Justice Smith’s rout, and there were only a cool little nod and a blank smile for my hasty return. All of which put me on my mettle so that I stayed at the ensign’s elbow, and trod on his toes, and apologized therefor, and was pleasantly rude and insulting until he finally gave me, though not without black looks and a smothered curse or two, my place at the open door of the hackney coach.

“Pray where did you learn your new boorishness, Captain Page; in the Dutch Highlands?” queried my lady, in the gentle tone she used when the lightning is about to flash.

“I learned to fight for my rights in Old Virginia,” I retorted gaily; “and I shall not soon forget the lessons you have taught me touching them.”

“I decline to be your sponsor—in that or in anything else, Captain Page,” she declared, regarding me critically.

Now here was a pretty change of climate, I thought. The night before, when she believed I was going off to the wars with Arnold, there were sympathy and anxiety and tenderness, and even a little love, perhaps. And now, merely because I had not gone quite so suddenly as the program called for, the wan December sunshine could not have held itself more chillingly aloof.

“What have I done to-day that I had not done before last night, Beatrix?” I asked, shifting my position at the coach step so that I could keep one eye on Sir Henry Clinton’s door—for the possible coming of the twiddler of watch-seals was sorely dividing my attention, or diverting it.

“You are wearing a coat that I do not like,” she announced, going back to the original cause of quarrel.

“It is as good a coat as the one Ensign Brewster is wearing,” I ventured.

“It is not!” she retorted. “He is wearing the coat of his king and country, and in his case it fits honestly.”

“Well, then; this is the same coat I wore last night,” I urged, presuming rashly where I should have had more sense.

“Last night is not to-day: and I have lived half a lifetime since last night.”

“Then you think more of a cause than you do of a man?” I asked; and I would never have said such a thing to her if I had not been hag-ridden by my responsibility for one James Askew.

“You are quibbling!” she returned. “The cause is much—God knows how much it is to our stricken country: but truth and faith and loyalty are more. I could honor you in spite of your colors, Dick, if you fought under them as honestly as Ensign Brewster does.”

“I may be fighting more honestly than you think,” I broke out, pushed to the wall, as I was likely to be in any controversy with her.

She took me up so quickly that I had no breathing space.

“You have hinted before that you could explain if you would, Dick,” she said with low-toned eagerness. Then, looking past me to see if any of the others were within earshot: “Tell me—is it a mask? Are you—”

I made a swift gesture for silence. There are times when the very stones in the pavement must not be trusted.

“You must not forget that you are speaking to a captain in Benedict Arnold’s Legion, or”—here I lowered my voice to mate it with her eager half-whisper—“that a word of what you have just hinted would hang that same captain higher than Haman!”

“But you do not deny—you do not deny!” she fluttered. “Oh, Dick! give me one little thread to cling to—one look to tell me that you are—”

I knew her bosom was heaving; that the quick tears had risen to quench the righteous indignation in the beautiful eyes. And yet I could not speak to her; could not even look at her. For here was Arnold coming down the house steps with Mistress Margaret on his arm; and, not fifty feet away, a smallish man in sober gray was standing before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, looking curiously up at the higher windows and absently toying with a great bunch of seals at his watch-fob as he stared.

There was no time to say a word to Beatrix, if I ever hoped to have time for any future word with her—time and the breath to say it with. The smallish man in gray, gazing in abstracted indecision at Sir Henry’s upper windows, was twiddling my life and Sergeant Champe’s at his fingers’ ends. Let him take but a single step within the door he was facing, and we two would be as water spilt on the ground, which can not be gathered up again.

I scarcely know how I left her; how, for one brief instant, I made way deferentially for Arnold and his wife, and in the next had come within gripping distance of the man in Quaker gray. But the thing was done in some fashion, and after this frenzied taking of the first step, the next came easily.

“Your name is Askew—James Askew?” I whispered in the spy’s ear; and if I had put the point of a knife between his ribs he could not have winced more palpably.

“No, no, Lieutenant—er—Captain, I should say; you are quite mistaken, sir. Duvall is my name; Harrison Duvall, of—of Pennsylvania.”

“One of your names, perhaps,” I qualified, smiling down on him meaningly, and now I noted the shifting ferrety eyes whose color Champe could not recall—the eyes, the black stock and the scratch-wig.

“We need not quarrel over a little matter of names, Mr. Askew,” I went on rapidly. “Let it be sufficient that I know you and know your business here. You are in great danger—as great as, or greater than, that which you were confronting in Mr. Washington’s camp at Tappan no longer ago than yesterday morning.”

If there had been any doubt as to the man’s double-dealing past, his carrying of water on both shoulders, his appearance now would have removed it. His colorless face became tallowy, and fine little beads of sweat were starting from his forehead. I followed up my advantage like a swordman who dares not give his antagonist time to gather and parry.

“We know a thing or two about you here,” I continued, speaking softly and edging between him and the group of officers at Clinton’s door. “Sir Henry would be most happy to lay eyes on you—happier than you would be, a few hours later. I say your danger is greater here than it was at Tappan: our prisoners do not break jail so easily as Mr. Washington’s do.”

His face was like parchment now, and he had to wet his lips before he could speak.

“I—I can make my standing good with Sir Henry,” he faltered. “There was a mistake about that affair of Major André’s. It was not I who told Paulding and Williams where they were to lie in wait for the major—I did not!”

Now I thought I had him! Paulding and Williams were two of the three men who had arrested Major André, and it was common talk in the patriot camps that some one had first told them where to look for André, though these two, as well as Isaac Van Wart, the third man, stoutly denied it.

“You will have trouble in proving that mistake, Mr. Askew,” I said; “great trouble, I fear. But that is for the future; your present risk is in standing here, where some one who knows you as well or better than I, may chance to come along.”

He had been casting furtive glances over his shoulder, as if picking out the way to run; but now that I had him at bay, the time was ripe for an escape from the dangerous neighborhood of the general headquarters.

“Come with me,” I commanded hurriedly, linking an arm in one of his. “You have a piece of news to tell—but not to Sir Henry Clinton. There is a better market, and a much safer one.”

He yielded, reluctantly, only because he had good reason to be afraid of every one. I could feel the fear tremor shaking him all the way to the tavern to which I led him, and a great contempt for the paltry villain made my gorge rise and the touch of his arm seem like pollution. He was silent and furtively watchful till I got him into the inn and up the stair. But on the threshold of my room he hung back and showed his teeth in a snarl.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you are taking me!” he burst out; and then he tried to twist his arm free, developing sudden and unlooked-for strength in the momentary struggle.

“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and followed to shut and bar the door.

He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat. For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever saw.

“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were saying that you had news to sell—”

“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or I—I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”

“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is your best assurance of safety.”

“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”

“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”

I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.

“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”

His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.

“Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from him.

“I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for his meddling; and the captain—”

“Well,” said I; “and the captain?”

His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning.

“You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?”

“Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.”

The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating.

“We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an impasse, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.”

“I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the fact,” I objected bluntly.

“Ah; that is another drawback—one which I overlooked at the moment. It would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of getting rid of the corpus delicti. But if I might offer a suggestion; the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your sergeant might compass the funeral—though not without a possible risk.”

His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.

“No,” he went on, in the same even tone, “the disposition of my poor body is not what deters you. It is that other thing I mentioned—your reluctance to premeditated blood-shedding. Now that is purely conventional, if I may say so. To kill is to take life; and the mere manner of its taking can make but little difference to the slayer, and none at all to the victim. Yet the traditions are strong; and I am relying quite confidently upon them, Captain Page.”

“You seem to be,” I muttered grimly. “But there is a point beyond which the traditions do not run. Setting aside the instinct of self-preservation—which is stronger than any blood or breeding—your life is justly forfeit. If you had your deserts, you would be lying in some shallow grave beside Major André at this present hour. If I am what you say I am, it is neither more nor less than my duty to carry out the sentence of the court-martial which condemned you to hang as a spy.”

“But if you put that sentence into execution, Captain Page, you have still failed to recapture your escaped secret,” he said.

“How is that? Who else besides yourself knows it?”

“The officer in the camp at Tappan who connived at my escape. I gave it to him as the price of his help.”

“Which is all the more reason why I should kill you, here and now, Mr. Askew,” I insisted.

“True; very true,” he rejoined musingly. “Yet you will not do it, Captain Page.”

“Why won’t I?” I demanded.

“Chiefly because of the traditions we speak of. I am an unarmed man—ah, my dear sir, you rashly lost a point in your own favor when you took my poor weapons away from me—I am unarmed, as I say, and can offer no more resistance to a man of your youth and weight than a harmless, necessary cat. No, you will not break with the time-honored code of your order—not even to save your life.”

Slowly it was borne in upon me that the man was coolly braving me; nay, more, he was daring me, taunting me. Yet all that he was saying was most bitingly true.

“What are you leading up to?” I asked shortly; and he spread his hands in polite deprecation.

“Did I not say that we were at the impassable point, Mr. Page?”

“Yes; but you did not believe it. You are not talking to hear the sound of your own voice.”

“No; nor am I talking to gain time, though it may appear so to you. Indeed, I fancy there is more safety in haste. If your black-faced sergeant should happen in.... Now there is your chance, Captain Page. Sit quietly where you are, with your bare sword to keep me where I am, until your man comes back. Then you can shirk all responsibility and the sergeant—lacking a gentleman’s traditions—will do the rest.”

I thought this was the subtlest thrust of all; to point out delicately that I should be responsible for what Champe might do. But there was no escaping the conclusion.

“Come to the point of your bargaining, Mr. Askew,” I commanded. “You see a way out, and I don’t—other than the bloody one.”

“Ah; now we are coming upon some more habitable ground. Outwardly, you are a Loyalist, Mr. Page, and inwardly, I doubt not, a true patriot. I am neither. I had thought of asking a hundred guineas for this news I carry—it is not too much, you would say?—and it doesn’t matter a boddle to me whose money it is. In other words, your gold will have as true a ring in my ears as Sir Henry Clinton’s, or even Mr. Arnold’s.”

“Bah!” I said; “you would take my money one minute and sell me to the highest bidder the next.”

He nodded slowly. “You have pointed out a risk—a certain risk to yourself. I might not keep faith with you. Still, the chances are somewhat in your favor. The matter you touched upon while we were together in the street—the calumny connecting me with Major André’s misfortune—would have its weight. Having sold you your timely lump of silence and pocketed my price—”

“You might be willing to let well enough alone and not try to double on me? I think that is most unlikely, Mr. Askew. Don’t you?”

“It is a nice point,” he said, as if deliberating on it. “On the one hand, I have my hundred guineas without the risk. On the other, since I was willing to take the risk to earn them from Clinton or Arnold, why should I hesitate to try the doubling? Ah, I have it! You have heard the saying that money is always cowardly, Mr. Page? With your hundred guineas in my pocket, each cowardly guinea of them will be persuading me to save its life—and yours.”

I laughed. The thing had risen to the plane of humor. Here was a man whose life lay in my hand, and he was trying, not to bribe me to spare him, but to persuade me to give him a handsome present for the privilege of sparing him!

But when the laugh was over, the dilemma still remained, with its horns as sharp as before. If I could not kill this scoundrel in cold blood, neither could I turn him loose, with or without a golden bid for his silence. I thought it out calmly and saw no middle way. The man must die, but I would give him an honester man’s chance to die fighting.

My saber was standing in the chimney corner where Champe had left it the night before. I drew it from the sheath and laid it on the table, with the hilt to my spy’s hand.

“Take it and do your best,” I said. “We have spent too many words and too much time.”

But he merely shook his head soberly and locked his hands over one knee.

“I should be a greater ninny than I hoped you took me for, to give you so good an excuse for pinking me, Captain Page. I am no swashbuckling horse-soldier, to tangle my legs in a sword, or to know how to use one.”

Here was the impasse again, with no way to circumvent it, that I could see. What was I to do? With the long Scots’ rapier for a walking-staff I began to pace the floor, cudgeling my brain to think of some expedient that would secure our safety, Champe’s and mine, without sinking one or both of us to the level of remorseless assassins. I had not dreamed it would be so hard. Thumbing it over with Champe, the one desirable thing seemed to be to get hold of this scoundrel before he could leak the news that would efface us. But now he was secured, the whole thing was to know what to do with him.

Askew never moved a muscle as I strode back and forth behind his chair. He sat perfectly still, staring into the blackened fireplace as if its soot-covered interior had fascinated him. A dozen times I passed him, and at each facing about he seemed to be staring the harder, with the thin fingers more tightly interlocked over the suspended knee. Then—

I do not know how it came about, or why I spun on my heel and threw the rapier up to guard my head. It was not for any warning either to eye or ear that he gave me, certainly. But when I wheeled, the heavy trooper’s sword was flashing in the air and my instinctive parry served only to break the force of the blow—to turn it flat-bladed when it was meant to be a cleaver-cut such as a butcher would aim at the meat on his block. Then the half-lighted dusk of the long room burst into a thousand scintillating stars, and I knew no more until I came back to life with John Champe kneeling beside me and sopping my head with icy water from the hand-basin.

“The man—Askew?” I gasped, when I could find the words. “Is he gone?”

“I don’t see him anywhere,” said the sergeant, making believe to peer into the gathering shadows. Then he chuckled. “So it was Askew who gave you this goose-egg on your skull, was it? But rest you easy, Captain Dick; he has had time to swim the Hudson corner-wise before this. The blood was dried in your hair when I found you lying here—and that was a good quarter-hour ago.”

I sat up on the floor, and the stars began to twinkle again.

“Help me,” I muttered. “We must get out of this—now—this minute! That double-faced fiend will be back again, with a file of soldiers at his heels. Stir yourself, man, for heaven’s sake! I tell you he knows us both—and knows us for what we really are!”

XIV
A CASK OF BITTERS

EXPECTING nothing less than the spy’s return at the head of an arresting party, we lost no time getting out of the tavern, Champe going first, and I following when he gave the prearranged signal that the coast was clear.

Being safely out-of-doors, our next care was to put distance between us and the threatening trap from which we had escaped. Taking the readiest way that offered we hurried eastward through the burned district, avoiding the barracks on one hand and the water-front on the other, having no particular destination in view at first, and no plan other than the simple one of losing ourselves as completely and speedily as possible.

In this dodging flight, on which we ran as the wicked do,—with no man pursuing,—the sergeant was the file-leader. Having been in the town for near two months, he knew its byways, and though the short winter day was drawing on to its early dusk, he seemed never to be at fault in our various windings and turnings.

We were a good distance from the fort, and had borne eastward and northward until the houses were growing far apart and scattering, when Champe led the way to the right and we pressed on until we could hear the waters of the East River lapping coldly on the shingle. By this time the stars were coming out, and a thin sickle of a moon in its first quarter hung in the western sky. In the chill, gray half-light a house, isolated by its situation, and still farther set apart from its neighbors by a high-fenced garden, loomed darkly before us, its windows shuttered and its chimney smokeless.

“Here is our burrow,” announced the sergeant, opening the garden gate to admit us. Then, as I reeled rather than walked into the enclosure: “Is Mr. Askew’s love pat still fretting you, Captain?”

I said it was, and made light of it, though my head was buzzing like a hive of angry bees. I had no notion of where Champe was taking me; and, what with the pain and the desire to be warmed and at ease, I was not curious enough to inquire.

Quite as if he were the owner of the house, Champe strode to the door, fitted a key in the lock, clicked it and bade me enter. But since the room to which the door gave ingress was as dark as a pocket, I let him show me the way. The interior was cold and discomforting, with the dead chill which goes with closed doors and windows and long-extinguished fires; and when the sergeant had shut and locked the door we were in darkness thick enough to be cut with a knife.

“Hold hard for a minute until I make a light, Captain Dick,” said the voice of my companion, muffled, as it seemed to me, by the tangible darkness. Then came the snicking of flint upon steel, a spark, a dull glow in the tinder, and, a little later, a flame for a candle which, when it was lighted, showed us a scantily furnished living-room in some disorder, a table with dishes and the remainder of a meal standing in the middle of the floor, and a hearth cold, but with the kindlings laid ready for lighting.

Champe thrust the candle flame among the dry pine splinters, and when the blaze began to murmur in the chimney, he filled a kettle from the water bucket bracketed on the wall and hung it on the crane. At this juncture my curiosity came to life.

“Give it a Dutch name, Champe; whose house is this you’re making so free with?” I demanded, drawing a chair up to the table and sitting down to hold my buzzing head in my hands.

“You’ve guessed it at the first word,” chuckled the sergeant. “It’s the Dutch boat-builder’s house, sure enough—or it was before I buried him in the cellar and took possession in the name of General Washington and the Continental Congress. That’s my dinner you’re looking at—or what remains of it. And there’s more where that came from—such as it is.”

“But the man?” I exclaimed in honest horror. “You didn’t murder him, Champe?”

“That’s as it may be. I wrapped him up in some of his own boat cordage, with a knotted turn of it between his teeth for quietness’ sake, and lowered him into the hold. Alive or dead, he’ll be there now, if the rats haven’t eaten him.”

“This won’t do at all, Sergeant!” I protested in shocked deprecation. “The fact that the man happened to own a boat which we needed is no reason why we should turn rawhead-and-bloody-bones pirates. Bring the candle and show me where you have put him.”

“Going to have him up for our supper guest, Captain Dick? He’ll be most awkwardly in the way, won’t he?”

“Never mind; bring the candle and show me the way. Why, good heavens, man! what has the poor devil done that we should treat him as if we were red Indians? He may be one of our friends, for aught we know!”

“He’s a Dutchman, and he builds small-boats for the king’s ships,” growled Champe stubbornly; but he took up the candle and piloted the way to a room in the rear, a bare shed of a place, with fire-wood stacked along two sides of it, a dismantled baking oven buttressing the chimney of the fore-room, and a great pile of the bricks heaped upon a huge square trap-door leading to the cellar. From a ceiling beam above the trap a stout iron hook depended, as if the cellar had been a ship’s hold to be filled and emptied with a block and tackle.

Champe put his candle on the oven ruins and addressed himself to the task of removing the door weightings. The uncovering revealed a ring sunk in the planking of the trap, and when the door was lifted, an ill-smelling black cavern, with rude steps leading down into it, came into view.

The sergeant swung into the dank pit and held up his hand for the candle.

“Give me the glim and I’ll fetch him out,” he said. “There’s no need for two of us.” And when the yellow glow of the candle disappeared in the liquor-smelling depths I was left in the dark.

It seemed a long time before the glow reddened again in the darkness below as Champe made his way back to the stair-head.

“Come down, Captain Dick, if your head’s steady enough,” he called. “I’m fairly stuck.”

I promptly lowered myself into the hole, with the sergeant lighting the way for me. The cellar was a curiously spacious underground store-room for so small a house, wide and to the full as high as the rooms above, and the liquor odor was amply accounted for by a double row of great casks, ranked against the walls. Then I saw the meaning of the trap-door’s size, and of the hook set in the beam above it.

“Your Dutchman is something both more and less than a boat-builder, Sergeant,” I commented. “This is a smuggler’s store-house. But where is he?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said my companion in a mystified tone; and presently he was showing me the cords with which the man had been bound—enough of them to have swathed the captive from neck to ankles.

The knots had been untied, not cut, and the ropes had evidently been tossed aside in haste. But there was no man entangled in their meshes, and nothing to point out his way of escape from the cellar.

We looked everywhere, as we thought, and carefully, for with this man at large there was an added danger to be faced. How he could have escaped from the cellar was a mystery which was still unsolved after we had examined as we thought, every foot of exposed wall surface for another outlet and had found none.

“We have missed it somehow,” I insisted, when we had made a second circuit of the place, peering behind the casks of liquor and probing, as we imagined, every nook and corner that would have hidden a cat. “There is a secret way out of here, somewhere, and your man has taken it. Let us hope he will stay away until we have borrowed what we need of food and shelter and transport.”

“I’ll drink to that hope,” said my sergeant, who had found an earthen pot and a cask up-ended with a spigot piercing it near its lower chime.

I told him to drink heartily and give the house a good name, but at the first mouthful he strangled and spat and spilled the potful of the liquor in the straw.

“Faugh!” he grimaced. “I thought I knew all the flavors that can come out of a barrel, but this is sure the major-general of them all for nastiness! Whoosh! it tastes as if all the old boots of the British Army had been steeped in it for a month!”

“And yet some other man would no doubt choose it before good, sound old Madeira,” I returned, climbing the steps to the cleaner air of the room above. And when Champe was up: “Shut the trap, Sergeant, so we may eat our suppers without the reminders. It would make a drunkard sick to stay within nose distance of that foul hole.”

Back at our fireplace in the fore-room, we found the kettle boiling merrily. Champe discovered a tea-chest among the boat-builder’s provisions, and a hot cup of tea, made strong enough to float an egg, speedily cleared my head of the bee-tangles, and let me punish, with as good an appetite as the sergeant’s, the black bread and cheesy butter, greased down with cuts from the haunch of boiled ham that Champe had spared from his midday meal.

Not to miss any of the comforts afterward, we rummaged a bit of tobacco out of the Dutchman’s closet, together with a couple of the long-stemmed china-bowled pipes of the Netherlands; and, could we have been assured that we should remain undisturbed for the hour or two that must elapse before it would be safe to take the to-be-borrowed boat out of the Dutchman’s shop at the river-end of the garden, and in it seek fresh adventures, there would have been nothing left to wish for.

But there are no assurances in this world of chance-takings. We did not know what moment our boat-builder might turn up, with a gang of smugglers or others at his elbow, and with a just cause of quarrel big enough to warrant anything he might do to us. Moreover, there was Mr. James Askew, also at large, and doubtless seeking for us as the woman of Scripture, who lit her candle and swept her house diligently until she found her lost piece of money. Moreover, again, there was the Irish grog-seller, whose silence, bought and paid for though it was, was worth little more than a perjurer’s oath.

“Well, let’s be doing,” I said, when we had wrought through a pipeful or two of the boat-builder’s tobacco, and the weight of the various “moreovers” was beginning to grow oppressive. “Will your Dutchman happen to have such a thing as a lantern about his house?”

The sergeant went to rummage in the outer room, coming back almost immediately to ask if I had heard a noise.

“Nothing but the wind in the chimney,” I said.

“I did,” said Champe, listening attentively. “It was like the soft slamming of a door, and I thought it was in here.”

“Not here, certainly. There is no door but the front one, and that is locked as you left it.”

“All right; then I didn’t hear it,” he contradicted, and went out again to continue the lantern hunt.

The next time it was I who heard the noise, which sounded like a blow struck upon an empty cask. Tip-toeing out, I laid a finger on Champe’s shoulder, and his nervous start was a measure of the pitch to which we were both keyed.

“Hist!” I whispered; “your Dutchman has come back to his cellar!”

The sergeant cocked an ear and we both listened intently. There were no more alarms, and the silence of the grave seemed to have settled on the lonesome house.

“What did you hear?” queried my companion, when the silence had become unendurable.

“Some one kicking an empty cask. Lift that trap again while I hold the light for you.”

Champe stooped and raised the heavy door, and again the rank smell of the liquor, more overpowering than before, rose into the room. None the less, Champe dropped into the vault, skipping the first half-dozen steps of the ladder-like stair; and when he was down I gave him the candle and followed.

To all appearances the spacious cellar was as we had left it an hour before, though I could not rid myself of the notion that the smell of the liquor was vastly stronger. We passed again between the rows of casks, the sergeant with the flaring candle held high. In the farthest corner the bunch of tangled cords still lay where the boat-builder, escaping from his bonds, had flung it down.

“Nothing different,” was Champe’s remark; and then some devil of suggestion put the idea into his head which was like to cost us more than we knew how to pay. “Sound the casks,” he said. “Maybe some of them are empty.”

I began it on my side with my sword-hilt, and the first resounding thwack brought the catastrophe. As if the blow had touched a hidden spring, the head flew out of the up-ended cask near the trap, and a dripping, reeking little man climbed agilely out of it and darted up the steep stair, with Champe and me knocking each other down in the effort to overtake him. Followed swiftly the crash of the trap-door falling into place, and intermittent thunder as of a brick wall tumbling into sections upon the floor above—thunder eloquent of the fact that the fugitive was taking a leaf out of Champe’s own book and weighting the trap for us as the sergeant had weighted it for him.

The wind, or the shock of the falling door, had extinguished our candle, and we were in total darkness. But Champe had his flint and steel and tinder box, and the tallow dip, for what small good it might do us, was soon flaring again.

“That was a master bright idea of yours, Sergeant Champe,” I commented grimly, when the noise overhead had ceased, and we were left to silence and our own thoughts. “If you had only added that we should begin with the cask which was most likely to hold our Jack-in-the-box—but it came wrong end foremost, like everything else in this wretched mission of ours!”

Champe was smacking his lips reminiscently and paying scant attention to my irony.

“Never say I can’t tell soaked boots when I taste them,” he broke out triumphantly. Then the disgust of it suddenly overcame him and he spat again. “Yah! when next I lay hands on that Dutchman, I’ll make him drink every drop of it he has left behind.”

“‘First catch your hare,’” I quoted. “As matters stand now, we are the trapped ones, and it was very neatly done. I think we are likely to stay here until this boat-builder can go and find some of his smuggler friends to help him collect his bill for damages. And it will be a pretty long score, too, wouldn’t you say?”

“Long enough,” was the reply; “though I didn’t mishandle him any more than I had to, to make sure of the boat for to-night. A boat we must have, says you; and orders are orders, for Jack Champe. But let’s try a push on that trap—until we find out if he’s piled the whole oven a-top of us.”

The lift from the steps was clearly impossible. Only one of us could stand to shoulder the door at once, and when we had both tried and failed, we rolled a cask under the opening and so got the double heave.

“Lift, Captain!” grunted Champe; “lift till your eyes hang out!” and so I did, and so did he; but the loaded door never stirred. The Dutchman had done his work faithfully and well.

The sergeant came down from the steps with the veins in his forehead swelled to great whipcords.

“I’ve put three hundred pounds of tobacco to the height of my shoulder with less wind-cutting,” he panted, scraping the sweat from his face with a crooked forefinger. And then: “I’ll never trap a rat again while I live, Captain Dick. I know now how it feels.”

“We won’t give up yet,” I cut in. “There must be some way out of this hole. If it were a common house-cellar, there would be no need; but as a store-house for smugglers ... they’d never leave themselves without a back door for emergencies. Take that side first, and we’ll sound every stone in the walls, if need be.”

This time we were made to know how carelessly we had searched in the former instance. Behind a tier of casks, which were ranked so closely against the wall as completely to conceal it, was a low arched opening closed by a stout door with neither lock nor hinges. With no tools heavier than our swords, we could not force it; and when we drummed upon it, it gave back the blows solidly, as if it were backed by a bank of earth or another wall.

“That is why our Dutchman hid in the cask and waited for his chance,” said Champe, when the low door had baffled us completely. “He couldn’t open this dodge-way, himself.”

After that, we left nothing untried for the time we had at our disposal. The walls were carefully sounded, stone by stone, the straw on the floor was swept aside and the flagging received the same unsparing scrutiny. Failing all else, we meant to try digging out the mortar joints around a stone in that part of the wall which Champe remembered as the highest above ground on the outside—this with our swords’ points. But we put that off until the last for the best of reasons. It was not unlikely that we should need the weapons for another purpose before long, and it would be an ill thing to have either of them broken or dulled.

We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.

“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?”

“An hour, maybe, if we don’t have to go too far a-sea to dodge the guard boats.”

“Good. Then we have something less than an hour in which to claw or fight our way out of this and get afloat. Work your brain with that end in view, John Champe: our lives are but a means to an end, which is to drag the greatest villain of his time back to justice. Don’t lose sight of that if we have to fight for it; but we’ll not fight if we can help it. Back to that dodge-door again, and we’ll see if we can’t hit upon some way to force it.”

XV
IN THE FOG

CHAMPE nodded and we passed together behind the row of casks concealing the low arched doorway. Wedging the candle in a niche of the stone wall we made another examination of the mysteriously fastened door. Common sense cried aloud that it must be openable in some way from the inside; that no door save that of a jail was ever built otherwise.

“Maybe it will be one of these jamb stones that will unlock it,” Champe suggested; so we laid hold and pushed and pulled on first one and then another of the stones framing the opening. At the third trial we found one that seemed slightly loose and gave a little, and after that, stuck fast and gave no more. But when we put our united strength to it again, it yielded slowly, leaving an angled opening to some dark space beyond, in which Champe was presently thrusting an exploring arm.

“I have it,” he declared. There was a sound as of wooden bolts leaving their sockets, and the door swung open to my shoulder-push, heavily because of a weighting of sand-bags with which it was hung, doubtless to deaden sounds from within or without, we did not know which.

“’Tis plain as a pikestaff now why the pickled Dutchman stayed till we came,” was Champe’s muttered comment. “He hadn’t the gizzard in him to move that stone by himself.”

We had crawled safely through the archway, and into a roomy underground passage beyond it, before we heard a squeaking of pulleys betokening a lifting of the kitchen trap-door by means of a block and tackle. Champe was for hurrying, having an outdoor man’s horror of being forced to fight in an underground burrow, but while I shared this reluctance with him to the full, I delayed long enough to close the weighted door for the halt it might impose upon our pursuers. When he saw what I was about, Champe quickly lent a hand, and what was still more to the purpose, his mechanical head. Slipping one of the wooden bar-bolts from its sockets, he braced it angle-wise against the door so that nothing short of a battering-ram could force an opening from the cellar-side.

Our chasers, whoever they were, were down the stair and at the barrier wall by this time, and a bolt-sliding hand was reaching through the jamb-stone hole while we were hammering our brace into place. Champe grinned ferociously and held the candle flame for a single instant to the back of the groping hand, grinning again at the snatched withdrawal and the yell of pain that went with it; whereupon we fled, praying that the underground tunnel might lead us to the boat-house at the foot of the garden, or if not there, at least to the water side.

It did end, as we hoped it might, in the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge, and now there was little question but that the boat-house and the cellar served the purpose of a gang of smugglers. Our craft, the light ship’s tender for the acquiring of which we had like to have paid the price of our lives, lay on the launching ways. A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge.

The shapely little craft shot well out from the shore, clearing the beach by a long pistol-shot before it lost headway. For some minute or so we lay motionless and kept silence. There was a light in the house out of which we had just burrowed, but we heard no sounds of a fresh alarm. The sergeant chuckled as if he had just come from a merrymaking.

“I think they’ll be all muddle-headed Dutchmen in that smuggling brotherhood, Captain Dick!” he scoffed gently. “To think they wouldn’t leave a few stout fellows to guard the boat-shop when they knew that rabbit-burrow would take us straight to it!”

“We’ll not quarrel with any muddle-headedness of that sort,” I said; and thereupon we shipped the oars noiselessly and pulled softly away from the shore, turning the boat’s head southward and westward only when we felt sure we had gained an offing which would carry us outside of the line of guard ships.

Our guess was good this time. We had pulled cautiously for full half the distance we had to go, and had safely passed three of the coast-guarding vessels, dim bulks lying between us and the shore, when a fog came creeping up from the lower bay. Champe saw it first and pointed out the hazard it would bring.

“We must pull smarter for it, Captain Dick,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’ll be no better than blind men in a strange town if that floating cloud catches up with us.”

So he said, and so I thought, and so it presently proved when the fog closed in about us. We had no compass, and could only hold on as nearly as we could guess in the direction we thought we ought to go. Once we made sure we heard the tramp of the sentry on the battlements of the fort, and the low-voiced challenge of guard-relieving,—which would make the time eleven o’clock,—but before we could be certain of these sounds we were tangled again as to our directions, and the next sounds that came to us were the bumping of our boat’s bows against the side of a ship, and a hoarse voice shouting, “Avast there, you lubbers! Unship your oars and lie still or I’ll fire into you!”

XVI
THE CUP OF TANTALUS

TAKING it all in all, it seems that we should have come promptly to the conclusion that, on this raw night of the seventeenth of December, the stars in their courses were fighting against us; that our own lucky star, if we had any, was a million miles below the horizon.

At the gruff hail from the ship we had collided with, there was nothing for it but to lie on our oars, and to take what was coming to us. I expected a peremptory command to come aboard; but instead, a boat-hook was reached down to hold us as we were, a lantern was lowered in our direction, and the officer of the watch demanded to know who we were and what we were doing.

Here was a chance for the exercising of my most promising gift, and I improved it instantly.

“If this is a king’s ship, we are wearing his majesty’s colors. If not, you may go to the devil with your questions,” I made answer, with all the coolness I could muster.

“Your names, your business, and the night password!” roared our questioner, losing patience, as I thought he would.

“We don’t yield any of the three to every jack-in-a-box ensign who bobs up to ask them,” I retorted blandly. “Go and call your captain, my friend.”

Judging by the choking and spluttering going on in the upper dimnesses I thought our officer, a little man with bullet eyes and a turned-up nose, would have a fit. When he had sworn himself into some atmosphere of coherence he commanded us to tumble aboard, or by all the sea-gods he would keelhaul us first and hang us at the yard-arm afterward. Whereupon I laughed pleasantly, and told him we should do well enough as we were if he would let us have a compass by which to find our way ashore.

That brought him down to us, hand-under-hand on the first rope he could lay hold of; and when he dropped into our cockle-shell we had much ado to keep him from swamping it or himself.

“Up the side, the pair of you!” he blustered, lugging out a huge pistol; and then the light of the lantern showed him our Loyal American facings and my captain’s shoulder-knot, and he changed countenance.

“Sit down, Ensign,” said I, “and be at ease. You’ll spill us if you’re not careful.” And when Champe had slyly rocked the boat to emphasize the invitation: “Now, perhaps, you will be good enough to tell us which way to steer to make the landing at Fort George.”

“Your pardon, Captain,” he said, the bluster all gone out of him. “You are but a cable’s length from the fort. But the orders are strict. You have the password?”

I gave it.

“And your rank and standing?”

“Captain in the Loyal American Legion, and acting aide to General Arnold, detailed for this night on special duty. And my companion is a sergeant in the same service, pulling an oar for me. Is there anything else you would like to know, Ensign?”

“H’m,” he said reflectively. “A lieutenant and a sergeant was what they said to be on the lookout for, but that may have been a mistake.” And then, with a furtive glance at the priming of his great pistol: “I’m sorry to insist, Captain, but I shall have to ask you to come aboard with me. Orders are orders, and they must be obeyed.”

“But why?” I protested. “If you detain me it is at your own risk. My affair is General Arnold’s, and it does not admit of delay.”

“If you are really General Arnold’s aide, you will know more than I can tell you,” he made answer. “It is rumored that two men, an officer and a soldier from Mr. Washington’s army, are here for the purpose of abducting Benedict Arnold, and the rumor says that they came as deserters from the rebels and enlisted in Mr. Arnold’s legion. Be that as it may, two men of the Loyal Americans, a lieutenant and a sergeant, are reported missing, and we have orders to look out for them. You see the situation, Captain?”

Truly, I did; and it was a very sorry situation, indeed. There could be but one explanation. James Askew had sold his news to Clinton or Arnold, and the orders were out to apprehend us. It was but a slip that the missing “captain” figured as a lieutenant on the lips of our ensign; and the sergeant’s rank was correctly stated. So far as I knew, we two, Champe and I, were the only stragglers from the legion; Champe was known to have left his transport ship, and neither of us knew what had transpired after mid-afternoon, when I had left Arnold putting his wife into the hackney coach with Beatrix, and had gone to sink my hook into Mr. Askew’s gills.

As far as I could see, we were fairly netted. Once aboard the schooner under whose counter we were lying, and it was but a step to Fort George and its dungeons, and another, and still shorter one, from the prison to the gallows.

The red-faced little ensign had dropped into the stern-sheets of our boat, and so he sat facing us. I guessed now that he had no captain; that he was the ranking officer of the small guard-ship. Otherwise, his superior would have been on deck long before this, hurling questions at us. If we could but win the red-faced one—

I could not see Champe, who was behind me on the forward thwart. But when the ensign stood up and called to the boat-hook man to haul us amidships, I felt the grim sergeant’s determination in the thrill of the light craft under me. Catching the one fortuitous moment when the ensign was extending a hand to fend us off from the schooner’s side, Champe entangled his oar between the boat and the ship’s bilge, made an awkward effort to disengage it, and clumsily lost his balance, careening the boat with such a sudden jerk that the red-faced little officer went overboard in a clean, sharp headlong plunge.

Whether it was Champe’s intention to drown the officer, offhand, or merely to make a diversion out of which something might grow to our benefit, I never knew. But the diversion was a fact accomplished, beyond doubt. With lusty sailor shouts, the man with the boat-hook gave the alarm, and to the watch on deck was added the watch below, which came tumbling up at the cry of “Man overboard!” Naturally, with no lights, and with the fog thickening on every fresh breath of the sea wind, the men on the schooner did nothing but get in one another’s way; and the ensign who, like many another sailor, could swim no more than a stone, would have drowned a dozen times before they got their tender down from the davits at the stern.

But now I had my small inspiration, and with a quick word to Champe to secure his intelligent help, it was put into effect. It was a simple expedient, namely, to keep our boat within easy snatching distance of the drowning officer, and then to haul him aboard when he was too well soaked and frozen to remember his orders—all of which we did in the proper sequence, and with the desired result.

The pug-nosed little man was no longer red-faced when we passed him up the side of the schooner and into the hands of his excited crew, and no one said us nay when we sheered off silently into the fog afterward, and diligently lost ourselves once more.

That was no joke. We did lose ourselves beautifully this second time, and when, after what figured to us as two or three of the longest hours ever measured by falling sand grains, our boat took ground with a sidelong lurch, we had no more idea than a pair of innocents what land it might be.

Here came our first disagreement. Champe was for sheering off again and waiting for the fog to lift: I said no; that the fog might not lift until dawn, and, in any event, we must land somewhere, sometime. The sergeant gave way, finally, but not without many misgivings openly expressed. Luck was not with us, he said, and it would be our unblest, crooked hap to walk straight into the arms of some of those who were looking for us.

In divided counsels, therefore, we took our stiffened limbs out of their boat crampings, and stamped and beat our arms and got the sluggish blood in motion before we dragged our craft high and dry, and set out to scramble up the steep bank fronting our landing-place. At the top, to our astonishment, we were above the thin skim of fog that lay like a veil on the surface of the water, and could see dimly the surrounding objects.

The first of these was a man, walking slowly and with measured steps toward us on the bank’s edge.

“A sentry,” muttered the sergeant, and we flattened ourselves silently where we were till the soldier passed us, creeping swiftly forward to cross the line a minute later.

Not above a stone’s throw from the waterside we were brought to a stand by a barrier of some sort which, to the sense of touch, proclaimed itself to be a high wooden fence. It was here that Champe gripped my arm and drew me down beside him.

“The luck’s turned, Captain Dick!” he whispered excitedly. “Of all the thousand places where we might have landed, we’ve drifted blindly to the one we were aiming for! This is our garden, and here is the board you kicked loose when you were walking with Sir Judas night before last!”

It was as true as it was blankly incredible. The board pointed out by Champe lay just as it had fallen, and peering through the gap it had left, we could see the dark bulk of Arnold’s house, with Sir Henry Clinton’s shouldering it on the right.

There were no lights in any of the windows, and the garden, when we had entered it through the gap in the fence, was silent and deserted, as might be expected at such an hour. We were in the shadow of the house itself when I bade Champe strike a spark into his tinder box to let us tell the time. It was past two o’clock, though how much past I could not tell, since I had forgotten to wind my watch and it had stopped exactly on the hour.

Determining this, we held a whispered consultation. It was terribly late to press our plan to its conclusion, and Champe urged this, arguing most sensibly that, if we had all good fortune from this on, we could not hope to row far on the way to Tappan before the daylight would show us to all who cared to see; that with the tide against us we would not be past the British boat patrols by sunrise.

On the other hand, I contended that it might very well be now or never.

“You heard what the guard-ship ensign said: if daylight finds us in New York, this day’s sun will be the last we’ll ever see, for they tell me they hang their caught spies at midnight. Our alternative is to take to the boat again and try to escape as we can. But if we try to do this, we may as well take Arnold with us. If we are caught, we hang, anyway, and none the less certainly if we are caught empty-handed.”

Champe saw the force of this, as I was sure he would; and if his teeth were chattering when we set about breaking into the house, why so were mine for that matter, and I protest it was from the raw chill of the morning and not from fear.

Our breaking and entering was easily accomplished. A window in a rear room gave to the cautious prying of Champe’s saber point; and from that room, which, as I knew, was used for stores, to the lower corridor, or entrance hall, we came by forcing the lock of the communicating door.

I half expected to find an aide or an orderly sleeping in this lower hall, if, indeed, there should not be a sentry, awake and on guard. But there was neither nor none of these. The hall was deserted and silent; and when we drew the curtains of the side-lights at the front, there was no sentry outside, save the one whose footfalls we could faintly hear as he marched back and forth before Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters.

Here again, then, fortune appeared to be favoring us most astoundingly. It was almost unbelievable that the man we meant to seize and carry off was sleeping quietly, and wholly at our mercy, in the room above. But, unless his guard was in the room with him, there was none in the house; of this we made sure as a condition precedent to our creeping silently up the stairs.

Before the closed door of the office-bedroom I gave the sergeant final whispered instructions; this after we had softly tried the door and found, to our greater astonishment, that it was unlocked.

“When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute; once awakened, Arnold will fight—no man more desperately. But you know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. Do your work quickly and thoroughly, and use this door-key in your knotted handkerchief for a gag. Are you ready?”

“Ready and waiting, Captain Dick,” was the muttered reply; and we swung the door slowly on its hinges.

Though there were ample windows in both ends of it, the long room was dark. But now our eyes had become somewhat accustomed to these inner glooms, and we could make out the dim shapes of the furnishings nearest to us; the writing-table, the chairs, the clumsy, cushioned settle drawn out before the cold hearth.

Groping our way by slow inchings along the opposite wall, we finally came to the alcove holding the bed, a high, canopied contrivance of the older fashion, with heavy curtains to shut it in. I could have sworn I heard the traitor’s gentle breathing when I laid a cautious hand on the curtains to draw them aside. “Now!” I whispered; and as the curtains parted, Champe sprang like a tiger through the opening and I felt quickly for the man’s face on the pillows to guide the rapier’s point for the silencing.

There was no face on the pillows; no human figure outlined beneath the covers; which were drawn up smoothly as the traitor’s chamber-man, or -woman, had left them. We had struck our blow and it had missed!

Champe sat up on the edge of the bed, and I heard his low chuckling laugh.

“Shall I bind and gag the pillow, Captain Dick?” he asked sardonically; and then he burst out in a soft-voiced torrent of the most fearsome curses. “The devil takes choice care of his own,” he gritted, at the far end of the outburst. “Four times have I had this Judas fairly in my hands, and four times he has whipped out of them! Not once before in all these two months has he slept away from here, Captain Dick—I’d swear it! And now, on this one night of all the sixty-odd.... Well, shall we go down to the fort and turn ourselves over to the provost-guard?”

For the moment it seemed as reasonable as anything else that remained for us to do. But youth dies hard; and youth with the Page blood jumping in its veins the hardest of all.

“They call me a daredevil, at home, John Champe,” I said evenly, “and Mr. Hamilton named me so when he asked me to go to help you. I have a mind to do the maddest thing you ever dreamed of, which has its one chance in a million of saving our necks only because it is mad. Do you try it with me?”

“Lord, yes,” said the sergeant wearily, “even if it’s to crawl in here between Arnold’s blankets and let him find us so when he comes.”

“You may say it is quite as sure a road to Gallows Hill as that would be,” I assented. “But come on: first we must leave the bed and this house exactly as we found them. Can you straighten and smooth the covers without a light?”

He said he could, and when he was through we drew the curtains, and took our route in reverse, misplacing nothing, and even staying to put the forced store-room lock back as we had found it. Once more in the garden, we kept to the graveled walk to show no tell-tale foot-prints; and at the fence we were careful to place the fallen board precisely as it had lain before we had kicked it aside to gain our entrance.

Five minutes later, we had dodged the sentry again, and had lowered ourselves cautiously to the river brink, where our boat was drawn out. Watching our chance against the pacing sentry, we floated the little craft silently, loaded it with stones enough to kill its buoyancy, and filled it almost to the gunwale with water. Then we made the painter fast to a rock at the river’s edge, pushed the boat out into deep water, and sank it with a quick jerk on the rope.

“I should have sent it adrift, and no more said,” commented the sergeant. “And I don’t see yet why you didn’t, Captain Dick,” he said.

“Never mind,” I rejoined. “You’re calling yourself a dead man, now, and so you needn’t worry with the ‘whys’—though I don’t mind explaining the present one. We’ve been at a good bit of trouble getting hold of that boat, and if we can make shift to keep the breath in our bodies for a few hours longer, we may need it again. That’s all. Now come with me, and obey your orders to the letter.”

Once again we scrambled up the bank, dodged the sleepy sentinel, passed to the street by a détour, and so came boldly to the front of the house we had broken into. Then I told Champe what we were to do.

“Make a complete soldier of yourself, now, Sergeant, and follow two steps behind me. We shall pace a sentry-beat up and down before the house from this on, until Arnold returns and finds us here. When he comes, you will salute and stand at parade, and look as weary as you can to back what I shall say to him. Mark time—march!”

XVII
MASKED BATTERIES

WITHOUT a word, Champe fell in two paces to the rear and caught the step, and thus began the weariest and I do think the most forlorn-hope vigil that was ever kept. For its patient keeping the sergeant deserves the greater credit, for I at least knew how I meant to try a desperate cast to bring us out of our looped gallows ropes, but Champe knew nothing save that I had formed a peg of some sort to hang a hope upon.

Tired and hungry, cold and cramped from our long confinement in the small boat as we were, the disappointment of the empty bed and bedroom had crushed and benumbed us. It was a dead wall from which courage refused to rebound; a pit to swallow the bravest resolution; a clog for our feet and shackles for our wrists. I do not speak for Champe; but for myself, if the meanest soldier in the British garrison had come to tell me I was his prisoner, I think his bare word would have made me tag along after him like a cowed spaniel.

And the dreadful length of it! While we were fighting our way up the ladder of the hours, with midnight and the accomplishment of our purpose for the goal, time passed us on the wing. But now the minutes dragged leaden-footed. It seemed as though the dawn would never come. Fort George, looming grim and forbidding in the darkness no more than a musket-shot from the seaward end of our pacing sentry-beat, might have been a citadel of the dead; a huge mausoleum with never a living soul to tenant it. Even the tavern, where you would suppose some one would be stirring at any hour in the twenty-four, was silent and dark and apparently deserted.

It was an ill time for good thoughts, and, conversely, the very pick and choice of times for the tormenting kind. What masked batteries, trained to blow us into eternity, would the rising sun reveal? We had the little red-nosed navy ensign’s word for it that we had been missed and that the hue and cry had been raised; that the hunt headed, no doubt, by the spy Askew, was already up. Would we be taken before I could try the last brazen-faced throw of the dice? Just here, before this door we were making a mock of guarding, I had parted from my loved one with the heart of gold only a few short hours ago: should I ever see Beatrix Leigh again?—or the men about our own troop fires in the Hudson hills?—or the old home in tidewater Virginia? It seemed altogether unlikely.

And Beatrix; what would she say and do when she should hear the news and realize that, while I was no such despicable traitor as she had believed me to be, I was, none the less, to die a traitor’s death with a cord around my neck? Or, rather, was it not most unlikely that she would ever hear of it at all until after the eternal gulf had opened its abysmal chasm between us?

Over and again I tried to break away from these thought-furies; to set calm reason on her seat, and to gather resolution for the impending battle of the wits upon the outcome of which our two lives depended. Never had I striven so hard for calmness and self-control; never was the need greater, and never did the attainment seem more blankly impossible. I was unutterably fagged and exhausted; our antagonist would be fresh from a night’s rest, clear-eyed, with every faculty sharpened and alert. I must fight defensively on the slippery ground of deceit and dissimulation, while my opponent had all the advantages of the attack.

By some strange good fortune I had been able hitherto to deceive Arnold, by nature the most wary and suspicious of men; but sooner or later there must come a turn in the longest road, and I was racked and tormented by the fear that we were now approaching it. Conned over in its details, the expedient I had hit on seemed foolhardy to a degree and most pitifully unconvincing. Yet it was the only one, and I must try it at all hazards. And as often as I came into collision with the stern necessity, the despairing cry rose up out of the underdepths, “Oh, that the morning would come and let us be at the end of this!”

Champe never spoke to me once in all that doleful marching back and forth, nor I to him. I mistrusted that he had his own personal kettle of fish to fry, and that his cooking fire was smoldering evilly or blazing too high as often as mine. But he was not a man to vocalize his soul-wrestlings; and, besides, he had a soldier’s choicest gift—complete reliance on his commanding officer, and a blind confidence that the brain which was paid to do the thinking would somehow contrive to think to some good purpose.

I shall always remember with reminiscent thrillings how welcome were the first signs of approaching day; the lifting of the fog over the river, and beyond that, its graying and thinning to transparency; the long roll of the drums sounding the reveille in the fort; the slamming open of shutters as the houses awoke; the cheerful clatter of Hetheridge’s horse as the young orderly rode up to Sir Henry’s door and dismounted.

After a little the fog soared aloft to transform itself into wisp-like clouds high overhead, and the eastern sky reddened, and a horse-boy, whistling André’s Cow Chase lately set to music, came out in front of the tavern and began to take down the shutters. Then a housemaid, with her bucket of steaming water and cloths and brushes, opened the door and knelt to scrub the steps. And still the sergeant and I tramped heavily to and fro and waited; and still the man who had slept away from his house did not return.

It was now that the delay began to eat like acid into our very bones. Preparation, a stout bracing for the plunge, is all well enough in its way; but too much of it will curdle the blood in the bravest veins and make a trembling coward of the biggest hero that ever wore laurel. Champe never knew or suspected it, I hope, but for me there were moments after that dawn-breaking when a desire to fly to any sand heap big enough to dig me a burrow in, was almost overpowering.

The suspense came to an end at length, as all things in a world of meetings and partings must. I saw Arnold first. He was coming down the street, walking soberly with his head down and his hands behind him; a habit dating, they said, from the day when he had put it forever out of his power to hold his head up among honest men. So walking, he was almost up to us before he saw us; and I could feel Champe’s eyes fairly boring into the back of my neck for fear I should be giving him his cue and he would miss it.

I gave the cue at the instant when Arnold looked up and saw us. As one man, we both halted, faced right, and made the formal salute. Then, throwing every faculty of my exhausted soul into the effort to appear the living mirror of shocked surprise, I exclaimed: “Why, General!—Good heavens, sir! You—you did not sleep at home?”

There was a look in his gloomy eyes that made me shiver when he confronted me calmly and said, “No, Captain Page; I did not sleep at home.”

“Then—then we have been standing our long guard over an empty house?” I faltered; and the faltering was no more than half insincere, if it were that.

“Why should you stand guard at all, Captain Page?” he asked, never relaxing the accusing eye-grip.

“Surely you must have heard?” I protested. “You might well say that no man holding his commission from you could do less than to try to guard your person at such a time as this, General Arnold!”

“Ah? And what have you heard?”

“Only what all the town is whispering: that two of Washington’s emissaries, masking as deserters from the rebel army, are here for the purpose of abducting you, sir; that these men—the better to cover their designs—are enlisted in the Loyal Americans; and that these two, a rank and a warrant officer, are missing.”

“You heard all this?” he queried slowly. “And in the face of it you come here to stand a night guard over my house?”

“Surely, sir; and why not? It seemed a moment when loyalty might do well to assert itself; the more since some suspicious occurrences—”

“You are either a very brave and true man, or a very rash one, Captain Page,” he said, breaking in upon me. “Did they not whisper you the names of these two suspected men?”

“No.”

He frowned and looked away.

“I could almost find it in my heart to wish they had,” he said, half to himself, I thought. And then, more pointedly to me: “There is an order out for the arrest of these men—an order issued last night by Sir Henry Clinton, himself. It specifies the names:—Captain Richard Page and Sergeant John Champe.”

Now that the worst had come, the burden tumbled suddenly from my shoulders and I became a man again.

“That is indeed most unfortunate, General Arnold,” I said calmly; “not for us, but for you.”

“Ah? Possibly you will tell me why.”

“Because justice, in pursuing us, may perchance be even a little blinder than she is usually portrayed; and while we are getting our trial and acquittance, the real criminals will go free. But that is neither here nor there. Will you take our swords, General? or shall we go and surrender them to the commandant at Fort George?”

He nailed me up again with the sifting, probing eyes, and I could almost fancy I saw a lurking smile in their farthest underdepths.

“Are you really the true man that Mistress—ah—the person who vouches for you—insists that you are? Or are you the shiftiest, hardiest daredevil villain that ever lived, Captain Page? I confess I don’t know.”

“The court-martial may or may not answer that question for you, General Arnold,” I said coldly. “For myself it matters little, so long as I have the consciousness of duty well done, or well attempted; and I think Sergeant Champe would say the same. Have we your permission to go and surrender ourselves?”

He stopped and paced a step or two, his frown deepening. When he spoke, he took a new tack and a little ray of hope began to glimmer in the murk of doom.

“I have been officiously ignored in this matter, as in many others,” he complained, in the manner of one who lets his inner thought slip into speech. “The hearsay word of some spy, whom I have never been permitted to see and question, is taken, and an order goes out to apprehend two of my own men—men who are responsible to me for their actions, and to no one else. Tell me, Captain Page, have you ever given Lieutenant Castner special reason to dislike you?”

“Never to my knowledge,” said I, wondering what was coming.

“He is at the bottom of all this,” snapped Arnold harshly. “It was he who saw the spy; it was he who carried the story to Sir Henry Clinton and procured the order for your arrest. By heaven, sir! for this one time I shall show them that I am at least the colonel in command of my own regiment! Get you into the house—you and the sergeant—and we shall see if their order for your arrest runs this far.”

Surely, this was mirth for the gods; that the man who should have been most eager to see us hanged was interposing his own authority against Sir Henry Clinton’s to balk the hangman! It was like robbing a blind man to take such a gross advantage of his vanity and pride, but there was no alternative. Now that he had told us what we had to fear, there was no other hand or house in all New York that could shield us.

So we followed him through the door of the house which we had lately broken into, and were told curtly to rest ourselves as we could in the orderly-room; and that Arnold’s man would later bring us our breakfast. At the last, when he was leaving us, I ventured to cast a small anchor to windward.

“One word, General Arnold, before you go. I spoke, a few moments since, of certain suspicious occurrences of the night. If, as I have good cause to fear, you shall find yourself overruled in this matter—if you are compelled to turn us over to our accusers—I beg you will not do it until you have heard what we have to tell you of last night’s doings in the town.”

“You shall have your hearing, never fear,” he asserted, frowning again at the hint that he would be forced to yield us up, whether he wanted to or not; and so he left us.

“Pull yourself together once more, Sergeant,” I commanded, shaking Champe awake when we were alone together. “We are no more than fairly across the threshold of the peril. We shall doubtless be questioned separately, and God help us if we are not letter-perfect able to tell the same tale! Listen, now, and get your lesson by heart.”

At this I gave him the meat and marrow of the story I meant to tell Arnold on my cross-examination, drilling him patiently until every nerve of him save the receptive was fast asleep. Yet I think he had it all line by line before Arnold’s serving man came with the breakfast, though he afterward went to sleep in his chair with the gulping of his third dish of tea; a good example which I presently followed with the chimney-corner settle for a bed.

Something to my surprise, for I had fancied our business would scarcely wait so long, the day was half spent when an orderly—a new little man I had never seen before—came to rout me out and tell me that General Arnold commanded my presence in the room overhead. I could have wished for a little space in which to set a sleep-befuddled brain in order, but it was not given me. So far from it, I was still yawning foolishly behind my hand when I stumbled into Arnold’s presence, trying to look soldierly, and making a rather shameful failure of it, I fear.

But the man behind the little writing-table gave no heed to my gapings. “Sit down, Captain Page,” he said briskly. “While you have been sleeping, we have come to some better understanding of this business—better for you and Champe, at all events. The order for your arrest has been suspended—or at least, made discretionary with me.”

I saw how his vanity and self-esteem had been propitiated, and was glad, since therein lay our only hope.

“We owe you much more than we have yet been able to pay, General—the sergeant and I,” I said, which was the truth masquerading as a lie. “So long as you are our judge-advocate, we don’t fear the drumhead court. But now, if it is permitted, I should like to inquire how suspicion fell specially on us.”

When he answered, his frown was not for me.

“There is a mystery about it, Captain. Castner claimed to have had speech with a spy, who incriminated you and Champe on a direct charge; and upon that information the order for your arrest was issued—without my knowledge or approval, as I have said. Now, when I go to demand an explanation, the spy has disappeared and Castner is missing. No one else has seen the spy, and even his name is carefully suppressed.”

I put on an air of surprise which I was far enough from feeling. Mr. James Askew’s tenderness about that whispered story of his part in the André betrayal accounted for everything but Castner’s disappearance.

“You are looking for some motive under all this, General?” I inquired.

“To be sure; and it is not far to seek. Lieutenant Castner is my personal enemy, and he has been at no pains to conceal that fact, Captain Page.”

“You astonish me!” I exclaimed; and this, at least, was a pure falsehood.

“It is true,” he asserted bitterly. “He has not scrupled to say openly that Sir Henry would do the king’s cause a worthy service if he would send me to Mr. Washington in chains!”

“Then,” said I, smoothly, “you would rather expect to find him conniving at the crime I was charged with, than to find him striving to prevent it.”

“It is a myth—this kidnapping tale,” said the traitor hotly. “He merely wished to deprive me of your services, Captain—at the expense of your life, if need be!”

Was ever a man so misled? Here was the arch-plotter of his century, the man who had been able for months to hold a trusted station in the patriot army, and at the same time to carry on a constant and treasonable correspondence with his country’s enemies, unable to keep from falling into the simplest of plots laid for him! It was weighing pretty heavily upon Castner, who was merely an honest soldier trying to do his duty as he saw it, but I could hardly afford to defend the lieutenant.

“Whatever the lieutenant’s object may have been, I think that I have had a narrow escape,” I said, which was truth of the truth. “But you spoke of mysteries: I think you will say there are more and greater ones when you hear what I have to tell you, General Arnold. You missed me yesterday afternoon?”

“I did. And that gave more color to Castner’s charges. Also, it was reported that Sergeant Champe had not rejoined his ship, and that you had been seen together, earlier in the day. Also, again, that neither of you could be found, though the order for your arrest went straight to the outposts as soon as it was issued. I take it you are prepared to explain all these seemingly suspicious coincidences, Captain?” He said it almost anxiously, though the anxiety was more for the humbling of Castner than for any other reason, I thought.

“I am, fully,” I replied. “To begin at the beginning, Sergeant Champe did not return to his ship yesterday morning because he failed to find a boat going down to the fleet in the lower bay. Quite naturally, he drifted into a tap-room, the bar of a sailor’s groggery at the waterside. While he was there, and still sober enough to have his wits about him, a man in citizen’s clothes stood at the bar trying to make a bargain with the tavern-keeper for a boat. The sergeant heard all that was said. A boat was required which would carry three men, two of them would row, and it must be exceedingly light and speedy.”

“Ha!” said my listener; “three men, and only two to row. The third man might be a prisoner, eh, Captain Page?”

“Possibly,” I answered, smiling inwardly at the readiness with which he followed me. Then I went on, keeping as scrupulously within the bounds of fact as if I expected to be called to account for every word—not because I was afraid to lie, but because nothing but the point of view needed to be concealed.

“When the man left the tavern, the sergeant, as you may say, trod in his very footsteps. The long jaunt ended at the house of a Dutch boat-builder on the eastern shore. The man in citizen’s clothes went in, and, a little later, the sergeant thought he heard sounds of a struggle. Be that as it may, the man came presently out of the house and made his way back to the neighborhood of Fort George, where he disappeared. Whereupon the sergeant dutifully hunted me out and told me his story.”

“This was in the morning, you say?” queried Arnold, most deeply interested, as I could see.

“In the forenoon,” I went on, and now I saw that I must begin to invent. “Later on, after Mistress Arnold’s visit to you here, I learned through Champe that the man who had worn citizen’s clothes in the forenoon had turned up at the tavern in the uniform of a British private soldier, and that he had been seen in company with an officer wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans. This, in itself, seemed a little suspicious, and as the plot you speak of was, by that time, becoming a tavern rumor—”

“I see,” said Arnold, anticipating me. “You sallied out to find this officer and his boat-requiring companion?”

I bowed.

“We had little difficulty in placing them, the officer and his masquerading comrade, in the lane beyond the tavern; and when they went eastward, you may imagine that we, as you might say, tracked them step for step. They took a most roundabout way, but finally reached and entered the boat-builder’s house.”

“Ah; but you did not drop it there, Captain Page. You are far too enterprising, I am sure.” By this time the traitor was up and walking the floor, his eyes flashing, and his entire manner reminding me of nothing so much as of a hound roving to find a scent.

“No; we did not drop it. But what followed was still more mysterious. You must know that by this time it was black dark. The two men locked themselves in the house, struck a light, made a fire on the hearth, and, by the sounds, filled a kettle and put it on to boil.”

“You could see them—see their faces?” was the eager question.

“I saw the face of the soldier, but not that of the officer,” I replied, skipping around the eager query. “The man who had been boat-seeking in the forenoon was tall and dark; something on Sergeant Champe’s order. The other was also tall, with square shoulders, and he was fair.”

Arnold stopped abruptly, and wheeled to face me. Some sudden emotion had transformed him. His eyes were blazing, and the thin nostrils were quivering with rage or excitement, I could not tell which.

“I can name one of those men—possibly both of them!” he cried. “But go on, Captain Page; go on, sir!”

“They made tea and ate,” I went on, wondering what new pool of disturbment I had unconsciously troubled. “Afterward they sat before the fire and smoked. Later, the soldier rose and went into another room, coming back directly to say something which made the officer spring up and go with him. They took the candle, and, as the fire had died down, the house was dark; dark and silent. But after a time there came muffled cries, and a crash like that of a falling trap-door followed by a bedlam of thunderings as if a cataract of bricks were pouring upon the floor. Then a strange little man, dripping and reeking as if he had been soaked in a cask of liquor, dashed out of the house and disappeared in the darkness.”

I paused to give him his chance to lead me. It was a perilous road that I was traversing, but I meant to draw him so far afield this time that he would never get back to any suspicion of Champe or me.

“Well?” he said sharply. “That was not the end of your adventure, Captain Page?”

“No,” I rejoined. “The little man was gone but a short time before he came running back with a mob at his heels—sailors, armed with guns and cutlasses. It did not take us long to understand that the little man was the boat-builder, and that he had contrived to pen his two housebreakers in the cellar.”

Arnold nodded with apparent satisfaction.

“A troublesome friend of yours and mine will probably trouble us no more, Captain Page,” he commented. “The boat-builder’s house is a hiding-place for smugglers—one of a number in the locality you have described. And your armed sailors were a smuggler’s crew. There was a fight?”

“We could not be sure; there was a great deal of noise. But it ended in a fiasco. There was a loophole of escape, and the two cellar prisoners must have found it—we guessed it would be an underground passage leading from the cellar to the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge. At any rate, a dim light flickered for a minute or two in the shop, and then a boat was run down the launching ways, with two men scrambling into it at the final instant.”

Again I paused, and once more he gave me my lead.

“They escaped?—got off? But surely you did not give up, Captain?”

“No. The sergeant and I put to sea the moment we could find a boat and launch it—which seemed to be before the mob in the house had discovered the escape. But when we manned the oars and began to look about us, ours was the only boat in sight. We pulled down the shore, keeping the sharpest lookout, but we saw nothing save the fog, which presently made us lose ourselves, and a guard schooner whose commanding ensign wished to arrest and detain us—chiefly, as I gathered, because we were wearing the uniforms of the Loyal Americans.”

For a long time Arnold walked back and forth in deepest meditation, and I feared he was not going to give me the chance to put the capstone on my carefully built pyramid of dissimulation. But he did.

“And after your encounter with the young cub who did not like your uniforms, Captain Page—what then?”

“We could do nothing in the fog, and we landed, a little way from the fort, and came here to mount guard. Now for the confirmation of all this fairy tale, General: the groggery-keeper can testify to the boat-seeker’s disguise; the smugglers, or their ally, the boat-builder, can be interrogated; and doubtless the discontented navy ensign will remember our visit, our explanations, and our request for the loan of a compass—which he most churlishly refused.”

He sat down at his writing-table and put his head in his hands. After another interval of silence, he looked up to say: “You have sufficiently accounted for yourself and Sergeant Champe, Captain; now I shall try to account for the two men who escaped in the stolen boat. Come with me.”

I followed to the other end of the long room, mystified in my turn. But my heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer when he snatched the bed-curtains aside and pointed to the unmistakable mud stains on the coverlet—traces left by Champe: traces which, in the darkness, we had not seen, and which we could not have removed if we had seen.

“Those men whom you found and lost, Captain Page: they came here, either before or after you mounted guard in the street. Their purpose is plain. They entered the house through a window in the rear, leaving these mud stains all the way along. They came here to abduct me, sir, and but for the fortunate circumstance of my absence, they might have succeeded.”

My expression of horrified surprise did not need to be feigned.

“What a frightfully narrow escape!” I exclaimed, but I was thinking of ours rather than his.

“It was,” he said impressively. “But the plot was even subtler than you think. Have you guessed why its execution was delayed until last night? The time was chosen when the Loyal Americans—my own legion—was well out of the way; only two of my own men were known to be ashore, and these two—yourself and Sergeant Champe—were to be frightened by this carefully spread rumor and threat of arrest so that you would both run away, disappear, and so lend color to the later story that you two had surprised me in my bed and carried me off.”

“Good heavens!” I ejaculated. “But that inculpates—”

“Quite true,” he agreed gravely. “It inculpates a British officer; a man who has been forced upon me as an aide; a man who hates and despises me as heartily as Mr. Washington does. Captain Page, if you could have seen the face of the officer, who sat before the fire last night in the boat-builder’s house, you would have seen the face of Lieutenant Charles Castner!”

XVIII
IN WHICH THE WIND KEEPS REVELS

WHEN Arnold gave me his climax by pronouncing Castner’s name, I saw at once to what conclusion he had been working all through my story of the night’s happenings. He had imagined Castner and some accomplice of his under my figuring of the two who were really Champe and myself.

It must not be set down as hypocrisy if I say that I was sorry. While it was doubtless true that Castner was doing his best to convict us of treachery, I knew that he believed Askew’s story, and that in seeking to have us apprehended he was merely doing what appeared to be—and what certainly was—his plain soldier duty. For that reason it pained me to see him involved, even in a traitor’s imaginings; but there was no help for it.

Having shown me his mind, Arnold next proceeded to lay his commands upon me; and now I saw how his good angel, if he ever had one, had deserted him entirely.

“With Sergeant Champe for your subordinate, you will constitute yourself my bodyguard from this time on until we join the army in the fleet, Captain Page,” he said, when we had thrashed out the matter of the attempt upon his liberty to the final straw. “The convoy frigate will return in two or three days at the farthest, but until I go aboard, I wish to be assured of the presence of men upon whom I can rely.”

If I bowed very low at this, it was only because I feared he might see and read the exultation in my face. Now, indeed, I thought, the Lord had delivered this traitor helpless into my hands. Alone in the house with him at night, and with the sunken boat raised and fitted for service, it would go hard with us now if we could not wring complete success out of all the foregone failures.

Conning all this over afterward, it seemed passing strange that no hint of a rising obstacle, bigger than any we had yet encountered, came to me at that time. War and its cruel necessities are frightful levelers, breaking down many ideals and brushing aside all the finer scruples. Though I was far from recognizing it at the moment, the desire to carry out the kidnapping purpose had come to be a purely brutal obsession, recking nothing of the common humanities, and completely losing sight of the fact that Arnold, by his misguided trusting of us, no less than by his many kindnesses to me, was making an unconscious appeal too strong to be disregarded. But at that moment there was nothing in me to which the appeal could address itself; nor could there be until an angel from heaven should bring me the fire to re-light the candle which the war-winds had blown so gustily into extinguishment.

When I was released and suffered to go below-stairs, I could scarcely wait to get Champe thoroughly awake before beginning to coach him in the new part he must play. But when he sensed the astounding turn things had taken, his loud guffaws made me clap a hand over his mouth.

“Silence, you oaf!” I commanded. “One unguarded word—one lifting of an eyelid too few or too many—and the balance tips the other way. I tell you, John Champe, I have been through the valley of the hot plow-shares itself since I left you snoring here!” And then I told him of Arnold’s discoveries, and how, in our breaking and entering, we had left a trail a blind man could follow when we thought we were leaving none at all.

He was sober enough when I finished, and, soldier-like, asked for his orders. I told him he might sleep again till I called him; that he must be fresh for the night.

“Then you are still for trying it on, Captain Dick?—in spite of everything?”

“It would be flying in the face of Providence not to try, and keep on trying until we succeed. We are many miles nearer the goal by what I have just told you, Sergeant.”

But now he was shaking his head dubiously.

“We shall never do it,” he objected; “never, in this world, Captain Dick. I saw that written out on the walls of his room last night. Something will stop us; I feel it in my bones.”

“But you won’t leave the plow in the furrow?” I protested. “We are equals in this, Champe: I can not command you against your convictions, or even against your wish.”

“You can command me, and you shall,” he rejoined. “You will tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. But we shall fail.”

That set me to thinking how far I was justified in involving another man in a desperate affair for which he had apparently lost his stomach; an affair in which my responsibility as his superior officer would be doubled. I did not wish to shirk, God knows, or even to divide the responsibility with my companion. But his new attitude of dejection made me tenderer of his safety than I had been before. In the last resort, I thought it might be possible to let one bankrupt pay the total cost of failure.

“I’ll take you up on that, Sergeant Champe,” I said calmly. “From this time forth you will consider yourself a mere machine. Will you obey me to the letter?”

“As I would Light Horse Harry Lee, himself, Captain Dick,” was his answer.

“Then listen: we will discuss ways and means, and work together, as heretofore, straight through to our end. But if anything happens—if, say, we should be taken in the act—you must not scruple to turn against me; to save yourself if you have to catch and hold me while they tie my hands. Will you promise to do this?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I could never do that, Captain Dick. There is only one thing that would ever make me an enemy of yours—and then there would be no feigning about it: if you should turn softhearted of a sudden, and spare Sir Judas—”

“Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Have I shown a soft heart, thus far?”

“No; but—but—your pardon, Captain Dick, but there is a woman in this tangle of ours; two of them; and one of them would willingly die in this man’s place, and the other—”

“Never say it, John Champe!” I interposed. “When it comes to that, I shall want you for my enemy; and you must not spare me the shrewdest blow you can strike. But in the other event, you must save yourself if you can, remembering this one thing—that I shall hang a great deal the easier and more comfortably if I hang alone.”

“I’m too sleepy still to argue that point out with you,” he protested; and I think he was nodding again, to make up the arrears of the night, before I had ascended the stair to take my place at Arnold’s door.

The traitor never left his house all that afternoon, and when I was not dozing in my chair in the corridor, I could hear his pen scratching steadily, hour upon hour. For a brevet-commander who was, in truth, no more than the colonel of a regiment, Arnold did more writing than any lawyer’s clerk, and sometimes I have wondered if his treasonable correspondence did not have its first beginnings in his insatiable thirst for letter-writing. But no: it was his vanity again, which ever loves to dribble from a pen’s point, that made him such a slave of the ink-pot.

The house darkened early in the afternoon, and when I went to the corridor window to look at the sky, there were promises of a storm. Here was Champe’s prophecy of further obstacles on its way to fulfillment hours ahead of any possible move we could make. Inclement weather, rain, snow or cold, we might brave, but not a wind which would raise a sea.

I looked at the heavens long and earnestly. There was a gray sky, but the clouds were lower than I liked to see them. Rain or snow it would be, I decided, with a chance of wind from the southeast. That was nothing, so long as it did not blow too hard.

It was near about dusk, and the serving man had brought me my supper on a tray, when Arnold opened the door for the first time and found me at my post.

“Lord, Captain Page!” he said. “Have you been here all the afternoon? You took me too literally. Go down to the dining-room and have yourself served in some comfort. Afterward, you may come and get a letter for Mistress Arnold, leaving Sergeant Champe on duty in the lower hall. We are in no such peril as to need a death watch.”

That matter of carrying another letter to Margaret Shippen set me to blowing hot and cold in the same instant; elate with the thought that I might see Beatrix again, and apprehensive from the fear that if I should see her, I must be put to it harder than ever to defend my secret. Also, there was another thing to add a chill, if not of apprehension, at least of decent reluctance. How could I brazenly face the dear lady, who was so good to Beatrix and me, with a lie in my eyes and false words on my lips, carrying her husband’s love-billets on the very eve of a deed which would crush her into the dust of affliction?

I was half minded to ask Arnold to make Champe his messenger, pressing the resolve so far as to inquire of the sergeant if he could find the way in the dark to a certain house across the open square from Mr. Justice Smith’s. When he was doubtful about it, I braced myself and said I would go; which, when I had posted Champe in the lower hall, and had got the letter from Arnold, I did.

The promise of a bad night weather-wise was beginning to come to pass when I set out—a bit warily for the sake of Lieutenant Castner’s shrewd and watchful enmity—to thread the poorly lighted streets. A cold rain was falling and the wind off the bay was sharp-edged, with a threat of more to follow.

Though it was not the shortest way to my destination, I went, for a purpose of my own, up Broad Way, past the wretched, makeshift shelters that were taking the place of many fair homes destroyed in the great fire of ’76, past Trinity Church standing as a ghostly ruin on the left, its walls only partly down and a corner of its bell tower still rearing itself high above the fire-killed trees in the churchyard. Beyond the church I made a détour to the westward to get a glimpse of the river. It was not very rough as yet, but a heavy swell was running up with the tide to tell of rough weather to the southward. I recalled the light craft which must be our dependence. It would do very well in a seaway, always provided there was not enough wind to make the waves break over its low gunwale. There were as yet no white-caps to show their teeth on the black and heaving expanse, so I turned back to my errand with rising hope.

As on the former occasion, it was the old negro servant who admitted me to the Vandeventer house and took Arnold’s letter above-stairs; and almost before I had had time to feel the cheer of the fire in the luxurious little reception-room whither I went to await whatever answer there might be, the door opened to show me, not Mistress Margaret, nor yet Beatrix, but Mistress Julianna Pettus, Jack’s aunt, and Beatrix’s cousin, once removed.

Now, truly, Beatrix had told me very plainly that she was expecting “Cousin Ju”; was delaying her departure for Virginia only until that good lady should come over from Philadelphia to accompany her. But this fact, like some others, had gone completely out of my mind, else I think I should never have had the courage to come within speaking distance of the Vandeventer house that night. For Cousin Julianna was fair, fat and forty, with a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than any whip-lash; and being my own second cousin on my mother’s side, she had a sense of proprietorship in me which she had exercised impartially since she stood godmother for me in the old church in Williamsburg.

“Well, Dick Page!” she cried. “So you have come to show me your new clothes, have you? Was there no other ditch that you could wallow in, but you must be the first to disgrace a long line of honorable Virginia gentlemen? Merciful suz! Shame, hot shame on you, boy—to make us all hide our heads this way! Beatrix Leigh will never marry you now; her father would disinherit her flat, and so, too, would I. And you’ve fairly thrown her into Howard Seytoun’s arms, brute beast as he is! No, don’t try to explain it; there is no explanation—there can’t be!”

What could I do, other than bow my head to the righteous storm and let it exhaust itself, if it would? It raged—oh, how scathingly it raged!—for a full quarter of an hour, I believe, during which time I could scarcely get a word in edgewise; but when the hurricane had blown itself out, my cousin sat down and condescended to ask me news of Jack, and of the doings in the camps on the Hudson, remembering herself now and then to flay me afresh for the coat I was wearing.

I told her all she asked to know, and was as meek as mush, hoping she would come finally to telling me something of her plans and Beatrix’s, as she did. And it was very comical, too, if I had been in any laughing mood, for, when she had told me that the rescued Leigh tobacco had been put aboard of a certain coasting schooner named the Nancy Jane, Captain Elijah Sprigg, and that her passage to the James River, and Beatrix’s, had been taken on board the same vessel, she remembered suddenly that she was telling all this to a king’s officer, and her threatenings of me, and her alarm for the safety of the tobacco, were equally matched.

“You’ll never go and tell on us, Dick Page!” she half pleaded, half commanded. “You wouldn’t be such an abandoned and despicable villain as that!”

“Why,” said I, teasing her a little, “haven’t you just been telling me that nothing was too hang-dog and mean for me to do, since I am wearing the king’s coat? Isn’t it my duty—my new duty—to go straight down to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters with the news that you mean to run the blockade with a contraband cargo of tobacco?”

“Oh, you’d never, never do that, Dickie Page!” she protested, wringing her hands in distress. “Mr. Vandeventer says we are ‘winked at’; that because Beatrix is a brave girl, and the friend of Margaret Shippen, she will be allowed to take her tobacco and go home. But I don’t trust them—any of them. They’ll stop us; send us to prison! Dick, you’ll never be so cruel?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Ju,” I laughed. “Get me speech with Beatrix, and I’ll promise you never to lisp a syllable to a living soul about the tobacco.”

“Oh, but Dick! she protests she will never look on your face again—and serve you right, too! She’ll never come down to you for my urging.”

“Yes, she will. Tell her it’s the price of her cargo of tobacco.”

“You promise?”

“Most faithfully, I assure you.”

Cousin Julianna went away in haste, and I was still laughing over her absurd fears when the door opened to admit Beatrix. And I do think she was more beautiful and winsome and alluring than I had ever seen her, as she stood in the doorway, trying to make me believe she was angry—as she was not.

“So you threaten me, do you, Mr. Page? If I don’t dance when you pipe, you will turn informer. Did Cousin Ju tell me straight?”

“If Cousin Ju told you that I was ready to put my soul in pawn for another sight of you, she had the straight of it. I owe you an apology for—”

“You owe me ten thousand of them—and more. You ran from me yesterday afternoon when I was waiting in the coach for Margaret as if I had had the plague!”

“I was on duty and was obliged to go. It was imperative. I might say that the lives of two men hung in the balance of my haste at that particular moment.”

She was leaning against the door-post and regarding me steadily.

“Dick,” she said; “what has come over you since the days when we were children together? Then you were as truthful and transparent as they say Mr. Washington used to be when he was a little lad and would rather be punished than lie; but now.... Listen, sir. Our carriage did not move for five full minutes, and I saw you: you talked easily with a little gentleman in gray, and afterward took his arm and walked away with him to the tavern—and the tap-room, I suppose—without so much as another look in our direction. And now you would tell me—”

“I have told you the exact truth, as far as it went, Beatrix,” I interrupted. “The man in gray held two men’s lives in the hollow of his palm. If I had not caught him on the instant—well, no matter; that was Sir Henry Clinton’s door he was meaning to enter.”

“More mysteries,” she complained, though not so impatiently now, I fancied. “What would have happened if he had gone to see Sir Henry?”

“An almost certain chance that the Gallows Hill squad last night would have been increased by two more unfortunates.”

“How terrible!” she murmured. “Is it possible that you live from day to day in the midst of such frightful perils, Dick? These two endangered men—are they friends of yours?”

I grinned. “One of them I may call my friend: the other—well, there are those who will tell you that the other has always been Dick Page’s own dearest enemy.”

Her keen wit pounced instantly upon the truth before I could bite my tongue for its foolish rashness.

“Yourself? Oh, Dick! what is this wretched web you have become entangled in? Tell me—tell me!”

“I can not,” I said, realizing too late that I had brought all this upon myself.

“You mean you will not: then you do not love me, Dick Page!”

“Perhaps it is because I love you too well, sweetheart. Can’t you believe that?”

“No, I can not. Where there is love, there is confidence and trust. You don’t trust me!”

“I do trust you. But this you are asking me to tell you is not my own secret and, besides, it would only add to your burdens without lightening mine; indeed, it would make mine immeasurably heavier—too heavy to be borne, I fear.”

She sat down and began to look into the heart of the crackling fire on the hearth, as she had done that other night.

“How little you know of women, Dick,” she said musingly. “You ask my love, and yet you deny that love its first privilege—the right to share your dangers and perplexities. More, you would even lie to it—by implication. But you have not succeeded wholly in doing that. Some things I have found out for myself, and one of them is—that you are not the traitor you seem to be, Richard.”

“Hush—for heaven’s sake!” I interposed. “One whisper of that overheard in this house where Margaret Shippen is a guest—”

“Poor, dear Margaret!” she said, and now she was all sympathy and pity. “I doubt if even she would betray you, Dick; and all the others in this house are secretly our friends. But what could have tempted you, a Page and an officer, to become a—a spy?”

“That is what I can not—dare not—tell you, Beatrix,” I protested. “And that is not for my sake, but for your own. Won’t you believe me, heart of mine?”

“I’ll never believe you love me as you say you do until you are willing to let me share your hazard, whatever it is,” she retorted.

“You would not be sharing the hazard; you would merely be miserable, Beatrix dear.”

“Then I claim the privilege of being miserable for your sake, Dick: please!” and her arms went out to me in a pleading gesture that no lover could withstand—for long.

It was Cousin Julianna who saved me. There was a light tap at the door, and she entered in a fluster of alarm.

“A lot of redcoat soldiers have just come into the yard and are surrounding the house!” she announced. “Is this some of your doing, Dickie Page?”

I told her it was not, but I did not add that it would probably prove my eternal undoing. I could think of but one explanation: by some means Castner had prevailed upon Sir Henry Clinton to reestablish the order for my arrest, and the lieutenant had traced me hither. But I had no intention of letting the two women know what was awaiting me.

“I’ll go out and see what is preparing to happen,” I offered lightly. “So much my red coat may do for you, Cousin Ju.”

But now Beatrix sprang up and threw her arms around my neck and clung to me, protesting that I should not go—that I must not go; and I do think our good cousin was more deeply scandalized than I ever saw her. The little hubbub gave me a chance to whisper in my loved one’s ear: “You must let me go, Beatrix; it may be nothing. And if they have come for me, I could not escape. Be brave, dear, for my sake—and for the honor of the Leighs!”

She loosed me, and though Mistress Pettus was looking on, I took the sweet face between my hands and kissed the trembling lips. Then I went out quickly to live or die, as it might befall, caring little, just at that moment, for the worst that any one could do to me.

It was a false alarm, as I was able to assure the two women after I had spoken to the sergeant in charge of the detail. Properly counted, Cousin Julianna’s “lot of redcoat soldiers” dwindled to a half-dozen men, sent out by Arnold to guard the house where his wife lay—this in view of the disturbing rumors which might reach her ears. It was to advise her of this that he had sent the letter by my hands, as Margaret Shippen, herself, came down to tell us.

I take no shame for saying that I made haste to leave when Mistress Arnold came upon the scene; and as it was, her sweet patient face, as reproachful to me as an accusing angel’s, went all the way with me in the storm-breasting return to the lower part of the town, with the wind howling overhead and a sleety rain driving in level stinging volleys.

Champe was alone in the lower hall when I gave the password to the sentry at the door and entered.

“It is a bad night?” he said, most grimly.

“It is,” I admitted, struggling out of my dripping watchcoat.

“There will be shipping lost, think you?” he queried meaningly.

“No small craft will venture out,” I returned, matching his hyperbole. “Anything sitting less deeply than a fifty-four would founder in the launching.”

“I thought so,” he said gloomily; and after that we sat in silence before the fire, listening to the wind yelling in the huge chimney.

It was still early in the evening when Arnold came down to us, treading the stair so lightly that his appearance was all but a surprise. His brow was clouded, but there was a dull glow in the depths of his eyes to tell of the passions slumbering in his heart.

“A word with you privately, Captain Page,” he said, drawing me aside. “Make your dispositions for the night so that the house will seem unguarded. If our intruders return, I would wish them to find the way to my bedside unhindered—but with two good men close behind them and ready to act at the critical moment. You understand me?”

I bowed. “You think there will be another attempt made—to-night? And if so, you desire to have the kidnappers taken in the very act?”

“There will be another attempt, Captain; of that I am sure,” he answered. “I told you this morning that Lieutenant Castner was missing—absent without leave. He is still unheard of. When he returns, I wish to see him a prisoner in your hands, Mr. Page.”

With that, he left us and went up-stairs; and when I looked at Champe, the sergeant was scowling fiercely at our handful of fire.

“You heard him?” I asked, when Arnold’s door had closed; and Champe nodded.

“We are more likely to be Castner’s prisoners, than he ours, don’t you think, Captain Dick?” he said.

“Much more likely,” I admitted; adding: “I don’t like this mysterious disappearance of Mr. Charles Castner just at this time.”

“What does it argue, think you?”

“Trouble for us. He was not able to get James Askew’s story fully believed, though he believes it himself. If you were Castner, what would you do under the circumstances, Sergeant Champe?”

“Get the proof, if it were to be had,” said Champe.

“Exactly. And that is probably what Castner is trying to do. It has become a point of honor with him. If he can find any one who will vouch for the spy’s story, or for some part of it, or for the spy, himself—”

“I see,” said the sergeant, rising and reaching for his sword-belt. “Which means that the present moment is ours—and it is all we are sure of. With your good leave, Captain Dick, I’ll go down and have a look at the river.”

He was back in a short while, shaking his head and slinging the water from his hat.

“No boat as small as ours would live a minute in it,” he said briefly; and so, with hope lying dead again, we sat down to wait for morning; for the breaking of another day and the probable return of Lieutenant Castner.

XIX
MINE HONOR’S HONOR

THE rain had abated by morning, but the wind was still blowing rather more than half a gale out of the southeast when the watery sun rose over the housetops.

With the reporting of the first orderly for the day, a young man from Clinton’s staff-family whom I had not seen before, I went out, ostensibly for a breath of fresh air, but really for news—news of Castner. The tap-room of the tavern offered the most promising source, and thither I went to hobnob with the barman.

There was no news—which was good news. Castner had not been in his room or at the inn since his morning meal there of the day before the yesterday; though the barman had seen him later that same day, crossing the green in company with a smallish man in citizen’s clothes. Pressed more closely, my tap-turner was sure he had seen the smallish man in gray at some other time; and after more brain cudgellings: “Sure, then! ’twould be the same man you’d be taking up to your room, either befoor or afther—I’d not be remimbering which.”

This was explicit, as far as it went, though it was anything but reassuring. I had known Castner but a little while, yet one of his characteristics, patient pertinacity, was written out large in his sturdy jaw and steadfast gray eyes for the merest passer-by to read. I thought he would hang on to whatever clue he had found, and pull and tug at it until he had drawn it out to some workable length. And, according to the barman’s story, the clue—James Askew by name—was fairly in his hands.

One other bit of news the barman gave me that was also disconcerting. The night gale, which had blown too hard for our enterprise, Champe’s and mine, had blown the war-ships back to New York from whatever port they had been calling at; and now, my news-vendor told me, the sailing of the fleet waited only on a favorable shift of the wind.

“Two chances against us—Castner and the fleet-sailing,” I said to myself, faring back to my prison cell in Arnold’s house, and breakfast, “both of them more than likely to ripen before we see another night. Truly, the devil fights for his own!”

It was Arnold himself who gave me leave to go out again after the morning meal had been despatched, coming down to us in one of his kindly moods, and saying that we need not confine ourselves so closely to the house during the day. I hated him most cordially when he gave himself the air of a simple-hearted, kindly gentleman, as he very well could. It seemed unfair that he should so often remind me of the thorn of reluctance that was pricking me; a hurt that went deeper with every gentlemanly thing that he did, and every fresh trust he reposed in me.

For, charge it to what account of self-love, or pride, or vanity, I would in the man, he had assuredly been indulgent to us and had unquestionably saved our two lives; and while he was a traitor and false to his oath and his soldier honor, a vague and disquieting wonder was beginning to stir in me, asking if I supposed that, with all his oath-breakings, he would consent to do what I was doing.

So, when he told me I was free to go abroad in the town, I replied, rather churlishly, as I remember, that I knew my duty and would try to do it; after which I spent the better part of the day before the fire in the orderly-room, going to the windows now and again to see if there were any signs of Castner coming to hang me, and behaving so sourly to Champe that the sergeant finally took the privilege Arnold had given us, and went out.

He had been gone something over an hour when he returned with a piece of news. Hanging about the waterside, and keeping an eye out for anything that might bring grist to our mill, Champe had been accosted by a man, a stranger and a sailor, as the sergeant described him, and a New Englander by his speech. This man had asked for me by name, and had pitched upon the first soldier he saw wearing the Loyal Americans’ uniform for information of me. He claimed to have urgent business, going so far as to say to Champe that I would rue it smartly if I denied him an interview.

“Where did you leave him?” I asked, when the sergeant had finished his tale.

“In the tap-room of the tavern. And I made sure he had no following.”

“Damn his following!” I growled, well-nigh desperate from the day-long grinding of the mill of reflection; “I’ll fight him, or any dozen of him, at the dropping of a handkerchief, if that is what he wants!” And with that snappish word of thanks for Champe’s loyal forethought, I strode off to the tavern.

For once in a way, Champe’s description personal had been accurate enough. The man who was awaiting me was a sailor, and he hailed from Massachusetts. What the sergeant had omitted to mention was that he was as curst and crabbed by nature as I was at that moment by my mood.

For the first few minutes, as I recall it, we merely bickered at each other, snarling like a fair of unfriendly dogs. Then some shrewd, dry, verbal slap of his jarred a laugh loose in me; after which we got on better.

“I want no truck with ye, nor with any of your kind, Captain,” he warned me, when the ice was broken, “but I was told to come and find ye, and so I have. You’re from Virginia, and they tell me that ye have no schoolmasters in those parts: would it be too much to wonder if ye could read a smitch o’ writing?”

“Give me the letter,” I said, ignoring the gibe and knowing now that he was somebody’s messenger.

The missive was from Beatrix, and it voiced—somewhat formally, lest the letter should fall into the wrong hands—a plaintive little call for help. It ran:

“Dear Captain Page: We are in deep trouble, and since none of our friends can help us, we turn to our enemies. The bearer of this is the captain of the ship we had chartered to take us home. He tells us now that he is required to hold his vessel at the disposal of Major Simcoe, of the Queen’s Rangers, for transport service in the expedition soon to sail, and, for reasons sufficiently known to you, we are in despair. What do you suggest?”

I turned to the crabbed mariner.

“You are Captain Sprigg, of the Nancy Jane?” I asked.

“I’m nobody, of nothing,” he answered. Then he began spitefully to accuse Beatrix of bad faith. “It’s an ill thing to trust a woman: she promised me there should be no naming of names, and—”

I crossed over to where he stood and chucked him under the chin to make him hold up his head and pay attention.

“One word derogatory to the good name, the birth, breeding, beauty or discretion of that lady, Captain Sprigg, and I shave off your ears, and split your nose, and otherwise improve your personal appearance till your own cabin-boy won’t know you. The lady wrote no names in her letter—having given you her word that she wouldn’t.”

It seems that I had somewhat mistaken my man. While I was bullying and staring him down, something cold began to press against my stomach, namely, the muzzle of a huge horse pistol that the captain had fished out of the folds of his loose coat.

“Keep your chin-chuckin’s for the women-folks; they like it better,” he said, quite without heat. And then: “I’ve done my errand; what are you going to do?”

“First tell me a few things,” I suggested, wisely ignoring the pistol which he rather ostentatiously concealed under the coat flap. “You know the purport of this letter?”

“Bein’ as I told her how she might fix it, I guess maybe I do.”

“You have the tobacco aboard?”

“All aboard and safe under hatches.”

“Where is your ship?”

He waved a gnarled and tarry hand in the general direction of the East River.

“She’s hangin’ in the stream, ready to trip her anchor.”

“But you’ve had orders to join the fleet in the lower bay?”

“No; I’ve had orders to hold the schooner ready to take on twenty men of Major Simcoe’s troop.”

“You have no idea when they’ll come aboard?”

“No more’n a cat with six blind kittens.”

“You are a good sailor and a daring one. Captain Elijah Sprigg, and the Nancy Jane is not afraid of any weather that blows; so much I know of you and your ship. Could you get to sea in spite of the gale, the guard ships, and the fleet, if it were needful?”

“Not in daylight, with women-folks aboard. And you wouldn’t want me to try it, neither, Captain Page.”

“No,” I agreed thoughtfully. “A chance shot might make me poorer than any beggar that lives, Captain Sprigg. We must not take that risk.”

“I thought ye wouldn’t want to. But if them soldiers ever get aboard of me, Miss Leigh’s charter goes glimmering, and so does her daddy’s tobacco, I guess.”

Again I studied the awkward situation and a possible solution of it began to take some shape in my mind.

“You could get under way after dark and crawl out of the harbor, do you think, Captain Sprigg?” I asked; “even if the weather does chance to be pretty bad?”

“The weather will be no worse to-night than it is now,” he asserted. “But the frigate has come back, and the fleet will most likely get sailing orders. That means that my redcoat passengers will be atop of me sometime to-day.”

At this I gave him some notion of what was in my mind. Champe had told me that the greater part of Major Simcoe’s command, the mounted Rangers, was still in the barracks, Sir Henry being reluctant to part with his best cavalry force until the last moment. Twice within the last two days the Rangers had been ordered out on the Tarrytown road to meet and repel incursions from our camps on the Hudson. Possibly a false alarm might be raised that would send them out again; and when I got this far, Sprigg interrupted me.

“You’re a man of ideas. Captain Page, I’ll say that for ye, and a dum’ sight loyaler to your little girl than ye be to the coat you’re wearin’. I’ve got a man in my crew who lives up Tarrytown way; a good sharp fellow without any wool in his brains. He’s just back from home this morning, and I shouldn’t be at all s’prised if he c’d tell some sort of a yarn about Baylor’s Horse ’r Major Lee’s Legion a-swoopin’ down this way. If we only had a dollar ’r so to kind o’ stimulate his mem’ry—”

I gave the captain two guineas.

“Will that be enough?”

“More’n enough; you make me recollect that old sayin’ about a fool and his money, Captain Page.”

“Never mind: this is no time for half-measures. Get your man into action swiftly, and let him do what he has to without reference to me. A word to some under officer at the fort will be sufficient; it will reach Sir Henry Clinton as fast as an orderly can run with it.”

“All right; so far, so good. What next?”

I thought for a moment, and then asked how many men he mustered in his crew, and if they were dependable.

“We’re full-handed; ten—countin’ the mate and the cook—and I’ve tried ’em, every one.”

“Good. They’ll fight, if they have to?”

“For me and the Nancy Jane—yes; but in the war, we’re neutrals, Captain Page,” he answered warily.

“Like the devil you are!” I retorted, laughing at him. And then in low tones: “You weren’t so precisely neutral that night when you hung off and on in the river and dropped a dinghy to ferry two men and a prisoner across to Jersey, Captain Sprigg.”

If I had given him an inch of a dagger between the ribs as I bent over to whisper this to him, he would not have jumped back any more quickly.

“Sufferin’ Jehoshaphat!” he ejaculated thickly. “Who be you, anyway?”

“Never mind me, Captain Elijah; we were talking about the schooner and her crew. Good men and true, you say: and have you any arms aboard?”

He blew out his lips like a dying man gasping for breath. “Would I be tellin’ it to a redcoat officer if I had?” he demanded.

“That is enough,” I laughed. “Now we can come to the arrangements for the day and night. You are footloose and can go where you please in the town. Watch the Queen’s Rangers’ barracks, and if the men are ordered to the northern road, do you come back here and stand before this tavern door. I’ll see you, and be with you promptly, to tell you what next.”

I said nothing of all this to Champe when I went back to Arnold’s house and found the sergeant dozing before the fire in the orderly-room—which was possibly a mistake. But Champe had not invited my confidence in any matter remotely concerning Beatrix and her venture, and I think I was a little afraid of his tongue.

So, while he dozed in his chair, I paced a nervous sentry-beat between the door and the window which commanded a view of the tavern, fearful lest the plan of sending Major Simcoe afield would not work; fearful also, lest Arnold might find some service for me which would interfere with my keeping of the appointment with Captain Sprigg.

As it happened, however, the strain on my patience was the only one I was called on to bear. It was exactly four o’clock, as I noticed—having pulled my watch out of its pocket so many times during the long interval that it had grown bright from the handling—it was four to the minute, I say, when I saw Sprigg standing in front of the tavern door. There was nothing in the way to stop me from hurrying across to him, but I had a sudden access of caution and did not hurry.

“Well?” said I, when I had lounged most leisurely up to my sour-faced tryst-keeper, and there was a whole world of impatience in the single word.

“You’re a master hand at plotting,” he commented. “Thing worked” (he said “wukked”) “like a charm. Hull clamjamfrey of Simcoe’s men trotted out on the north road ’bout half an hour ago. Now what?”

“For you, Captain Sprigg, a small thing first, and a bigger one afterward. Have a dinghy at the foot of Amsterdam lane by eight o’clock to-night, and make sure of just one thing—that it waits until its passengers come, if that shall not be until midnight. With the ladies on board, the game is yours, to play out as you can.”

“Then I won’t have to go back and see Miss Leigh?”

“No; I’ll see her and bring her and my—the other lady, down to the boat to-night.”

“No need for you to go. I guess I c’n see to all that,” he said slyly. Then he added: “Might get you into trouble—with that red coat o’ yours, Captain Page.”

I did not mean to delegate this last service I might ever render Beatrix to him or to any one. But now, upon second thought, his jesting after-word sank in: it might be an added risk—not for me, as he had hinted, but for the women. So I reluctantly changed the order and told him to go to the Vandeventer house to serve as an escort for the ladies, when all was ready.

He promised; and when I had seen him on his way down to the waterside, I once more returned to Arnold’s house. For the time had now come when boldness must take the place of caution. I dare not run the risk of arousing the traitor’s suspicions by going clandestinely to the house where Margaret Shippen was; and on the other hand I could not dodge the necessity for telling Beatrix in person that her plea had been received and acted on, and that Sprigg would come for her and Cousin Ju at the fortunate moment.

Arnold bade me come in, when I had climbed the stair and tapped on his door, and, as always, I found him writing like a scrivener.

“A cousin of mine is in town, and I am told she is leaving before long, General,” I began. “Have I your permission to go and bid her good-by?”

He looked up, and so far forgot his dignity as to make a wry face.

“I have had the pleasure—in deference to your relationship, Captain Page, I call it a pleasure—of meeting Mistress Pettus; also of taking at her hands the blame for your leaving of the other army. I should think you would be glad to have a fair duty excuse for omitting your leave-takings.”

“So I might, under other circumstances,” I began; “but—”

“But Mistress Pettus has a traveling companion, you would say. Strange that I should overlook, even for a fleeting moment, so charming a fact. Ah, Captain, I can guess very well what has made you such a willing letter carrier for me. I know of but one dear lady who is more beautiful than Mistress Beatrix Leigh—which you may take for high praise, since I have been permitted to see only the scornful curve of Mistress Leigh’s lips and an unfriendly light in her eyes.”

I can not tell how it ground me to have him talking thus of Beatrix, in the kindly familiarity of a friend—this man with whom, come what might, I meant to close in a death-grapple a few hours further on. It is said that all the world loves a lover, and surely this applies to that part of the world which is itself in the sweet toils. With all his hideous faults, Arnold was still the devoted husband-lover of Margaret Shippen; let him have the credit for that. And since he was—but I saw that I must get away speedily.

“I have your permission, then, General?” I asked; and he gave it in a courtly bow, and turned back to his writing.

I confess I had a most evil turn when the orderly on duty in the lower hall saluted and let me out into the open air. From force of habit—the habit of the hunted—I glanced up and down the street before venturing beyond the shelter of the doorway. It was well that I did, for just past the tavern, three men were coming on abreast, two of them plainly recognizable as Lieutenant Charles Castner and the spy, James Askew; and the third was strangely familiar in his gait and carriage, though for the down-drooped hat-brim I could not see his face.

My first impulse was to warn Champe; the next to stand still and see what form the catastrophe threatened to take. If the trio was coming on to Arnold’s door, I would step inside, call the sergeant to his duty, and we would die as soldiers should.

But this test of last-ditch courage was not made. At the door of the hostelry the three men turned in and disappeared, and a few minutes later, Castner came out alone and made straight for Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters. That was my cue, and going to the orderly-room, I roused Champe from his nap before the hearth.

“Castner is back,” I said hastily. “He came down the street just now with Askew and another man, left his companions at the tavern, and has gone alone to Sir Henry Clinton’s house.”

The sergeant yawned and felt tenderly of his throat, a gesture that was growing into a habit with him.

“Orders, Captain Dick,” he said, parrot-like.

“There are none. I am going into the town for an hour or more, and you may do as you think best: stay here and face it out when it comes, or cut and run for it. You may have an hour’s grace, or two or three, or no time at all.”

“And you,” he said; “what will you do?”

“I shall come back here and see the grist put through the mill, as I may be allowed to.”

“Then here I stay,” he announced calmly, sitting down; and so I left him, hoping little ever to see him again as a free man.

There was no corporal’s guard waiting to seize me at the outer door, as I more than half expected there would be; and taking advantage of the gathering dusk, I got away from the dangerous neighborhood as swiftly and unobtrusively as possible, arguing that it would take some little time for Castner to spread a net that would reach over any very wide area of the town.

Fifteen minutes later I was rattling the knocker on Mr. Vandeventer’s door; and this time it was Beatrix who opened to me.

“Oh!” she gasped; “I thought you would never come!” And when I stepped within: “Something has happened—your face tells me. Oh, Dick! is there—are you in danger?”

Her eager solicitude was a balm to my soul, and just at that moment I was needing balms. But I had no notion of adding my burdens to hers, since hers were surely heavy enough as they lay.

“There is no day or hour without its danger for a soldier,” I told her evasively, and not to delay the chief matter—which was the getting of her and my cousin safely a-sea before my coup de grace—or Benedict Arnold’s—should fall—I asked if we might have privacy absolute for a few moments while I should instruct her what she was to do.

At this, she led me into the little room that I was coming to know as the chamber of mingled bliss and torment, and carefully closed the door.

“Cousin Ju is sleeping,” she said. “I persuaded her, expecting that our night’s rest would be sadly broken. It will be, I know, Dick; I can read that in your face, too.”

I laughed, and said I must have a face like a large-print book; whereat she came to me and took the face in question between her soft palms, and for the moment I forgot everything save the loving, tender eyes that were gazing into mine, and the sweet lips with the tiny Cupid’s-bow curve at the corners of the sensitive mouth, and the perfect oval of their setting, and the masses of lustrous hair to frame the oval—but this would not do!

“Yes; your rest is likely to be disturbed,” I told her, and thereupon gave her an outline of the plan for the evasion of the order making a potential troopship of the Nancy Jane.

Her eyes were shining when I explained how Major Simcoe’s troop had been got out of the way.

“How like your cool daring that was, Dick! No one else would have thought of trying to move a whole regiment to get a score of men delayed in their embarking,” she commented.

“I would have undertaken to move Sir Henry’s army in the mass to serve you, dear,” I replied. Then I rehearsed the simple details again, so there might be no misunderstanding. “You are to make yourselves ready and stay here quietly until Captain Sprigg comes for you, no matter how late that may be. He will take you by the quieter streets to the river, and his boat will be in waiting. Once on board the schooner, you must obey the captain in everything. He may have to fight his way out of the harbor; I hope he may not, but it is possible. If he does—”

“If he does, I shall not forget that I am a Leigh, and that my lover is the handsomest, bravest soldier that ever drew sword,” she said, making me blush again. Then she passed suddenly to my affair. “But you have been talking altogether of us and our safety, Dick, and I am much more concerned for yours. I know now that you are a true man and no traitor, and the knowledge makes me shiver and cringe for every passing moment: you’ll be taken—and—I shall not be here. Oh, Dick! when will it be over? How long must you stay here under the shadow of that dreadful thing on Gallows Hill?”

“It will be over—to-night,” I prophesied, comforting her as I could.

“But you do not say that you will escape!” she returned, her quick intuition penetrating behind the masking words.

“No; I can not say that, Beatrix. The thing I am pledged to do is a most desperate thing: and the promise of success is not great. Yet, as I say, it will be over to-night.”

“Dick,” she said, coming close again, “what is this mission of yours that puts your life in jeopardy every hour, that has made you lay aside your dignity as an officer, that has been great enough to bring you here as a deserter and to take a service, every step in which must be a wretched lie? We may well be parting for the last time in our two lives, Dick, dear: don’t deny me this time.”

If she had not said that word about the parting—a word which was all too likely to be true—I think I might still have withstood her. But that one word broke down the barrier of my resolve, and so, flinging my soldier promise to Mr. Hamilton to the winds, I told her all, in tones that grew more and more the tones of shame when I realized what it meant to spread the harsh, brutal, military necessity of the kidnapping plan upon the tables of a pure woman’s mind and heart.

She heard me through without interruption, sitting, as she had sat that other night, gazing steadfastly into the heart of the embers on the hearthstone. But when I had made an end, she began to speak in a low voice, never letting her eyes meet mine.

“I do not at all understand these things, Dick: no woman ever can, I fear. We are taught at our mother’s knees that a lie is wrong; a thing to shudder at, to turn away from in loathing. We are taught that the finest things in those we love are truth and honor, and that the finest of all is the high honor’s honor that rises above the most binding necessity, or seeming necessity, that can constrain us. Yet you tell me that all this must go down at the bidding of a thing called military duty; that one must lie, cheat, steal, swear false oaths—”

“No,” I interposed. “By some curious oversight I have not yet been required to take the oath of allegiance to King George.”

She put the excuse aside with a little gesture of patient weariness.

“What does it matter whether or not you have missed the chance of saying over the formal words? By every act and word and the breath you draw, you are protesting that you are a true man in your present standing. The man you will strike down to-night has had no hint of warning; miserable traitor as he is, he still believes you are his friend—not only his captain servant, but his friend. He trusts you with his love-letters to his wife; he takes you fully into his confidence. Is it not so?”

“It is,” I confessed. And then I broke out passionately: “But my word is passed; I must not give this up, Beatrix! You must not make me give it up!”

“And I shall not try, Dick, dear,” she went on in the same low tone. “I shall merely try to fit myself into this new, this terrible scheme of things: for I must believe in you: I must believe that you are doing the right and honorable thing, though every fiber of me shudders in horror at it. Oh, Dick, dear—don’t you see what a woman’s love must be?”

God of love, but I did see! I saw that her ideal had fallen into ruins at her feet, and that she was trying to gather up the poor fragments, calling them precious, still! How swift and sure her stroke had been! How unerringly her keen unsullied sense of the higher right and wrong had set its arrow quivering in the very heart of the target! Yet in very shame I could not yield without a struggle.

“The man is the basest of traitors; he has put himself beyond the pale of mercy,” I insisted.

“I am not speaking for the man: God knows how I detest and fear him, though, for Peggy’s sake, I have tried to see only that humaner side of him she would have me see. Nor do I say one word for poor heart-broken Margaret, whom your deed will condemn to a living death. But for yourself ... for your honor’s honor: oh, Dick, dear; is it too late to save that?”

I rose and went to stand beside her chair, knowing now that the angel I spoke of a while back had indeed come with the saving heavenly fire to light my poor candle that the vindictive blast had blown out.

“No, Beatrix, love; it is not too late to stop, though it may well be too late to turn back in safety. There is another involved in this with me: a man from Major Lee’s Legion. He will be furious; but if I recant, he at least, must be saved.”

“For so generous a thing as that, Dick, your own good heart will answer; you would never leave a subordinate to pay the score, of course,” she said with the air of one who knows full well that blood and breeding have their responsibilities that may not be pushed aside.

From that I went a little deeper into the confessional pool, telling her how Seytoun had harried me, knowing that he was safe behind my promise to her, and how, if I should be happy enough ever to return alive to the Tappan camp, I should be branded from end to end of it if I should still refuse to fight Seytoun for his satisfaction.

At this she wished to know particularly the cause of quarrel and how Seytoun had offended; and when I told her that, too, and how he had cast the slur not only upon the women of my own house, but also upon hers, she bit her lip and I saw the beautiful eyes kindle.

“I would have saved his miserable life for him, Dick, if I could. That was why I made you promise—I knew you would remember his killing of your kinsman and slay him without mercy if you ever got him at your sword’s point. And now, my lover, I release you. If he pushes this quarrel on you—”

It was enough, and I took her in my arms and kissed her, saying, because it had to be said, sooner or later:

“Good-by, dearest. The parting time has come. In the larger matter I can’t promise; but I’ll do what lies in me. If I am strong enough to rise to your high plane, I’ll come to you, if I can—when I can—with clean hands. But if I am not great enough, I shall not ask you to marry the fragments.”

“But I love the fragments,” she said simply; and this was her word of leave-taking.

Once more out in the keen cold air of the December night and I was face to face with the moment of decision. Love, duty, honor, and vindictive hatred of Benedict Arnold all dragged me their several ways; but when at last I won back unhindered to the house of doom, and to the guard-room where John Champe was pacing moodily back and forth before a cold hearth, the decision was no longer trembling in the balance. As if a veil had been swept aside I saw into what depths vindictive rage and soldier patriotism had plunged me. Mr. Hamilton, himself, I felt sure, would be the first to call me back if he could know that I must sink myself neck-deep in a mire of perfidy too foul to be borne if I were to accomplish now the thing he had sent me to do.

XX
TRAITORS ALL

IT WAS still early in the evening when I reentered the ground-floor room of Arnold’s house—the room of the cold hearth—on my return from the soul-searching, but most heart-warming interview with Beatrix Leigh. Champe wheeled quickly to face me at the door-closing, and I saw that his day-long moodiness had vanished to give place to suppressed excitement.

“My God!” he said grittingly. “I thought you’d never come!—or that the provost-guard with the handcuffs would get here first. Sir Judas has played fairly into our hands at last. For a good half-hour past he has been walking in the garden—alone!”

“Ah?” said I, seeing how poignantly the matter had climaxed in my short absence, and not seeing, in the suddenness of it, what course I ought to steer. “So you think our chance has come?”

“Think?” he echoed; “think? Why, Captain Dick, isn’t it the very bone and marrow of the thing we’ve been praying for? We’ve but to go quietly and raise the boat from the river-bottom where we sank it, to make all ready, nab him, and away up-river in the darkness. The very night belongs to us—black dark, and with the wind quartering right to blow us where we wish to go. Come; we are wasting the precious minutes!” And while he was struggling into his watchcoat he kept on saying over and over again: “Good God—if he will only give us time!”

He was out and away before I could say more to him, and I followed more leisurely, turning over in my mind a dozen expedients which might serve in the last resort to make this climaxing broadside flash in the pan. For now there was no more hesitation. In the open field, or even with the poor chance that the hunted fox has, after he has heard the dogs baying at his heels, I would have flung myself upon the traitor to take him, or let him kill me as I tried. But to win his confidence, as I had, and then to steal up and garrote him like a wretched footpad was no longer among the possibilities for an officer and a gentleman—and a Virginian.

None the less, there was a thing to be done, and done quickly. Champe had no such scruples as these I had so lately admitted, and I must swiftly invent a way to stop him from putting his neck solus, as you might say, into the hangman’s halter. For I made no doubt that, lacking my help or countenance at the pinch, my dour-faced sergeant would thrust me aside, with a saber slash if no other means offered, and fling himself madly into the kidnapping breach single-handed and alone.

You are to figure these reflections flashing themselves upon the mental mirror as I stepped from the fireless guard-room into the broad entrance hall which was used as a lounging place indifferently by Arnold’s aides or Sir Henry Clinton’s. When I passed through there were three young fellows with their feet to the fire; young Hetheridge, Ensign Brewster, and an aide of General Phillips’ whose name I had heard but had promptly forgotten.

“Good evening to you, Captain Page,” said Hetheridge; “are you off after your black-faced sergeant? What ails the beggar that half the time he forgets to salute his betters in passing?”

I was about to make some indifferent rejoinder and go on to the door when the thought struck me that here was a chance to drive a small nail for Champe against the day of need.

“The sergeant is a law to himself, like one of the old Cromwell Ironsides,” I replied lightly. “He should have been born in the other century, when we should have seen him going about with a Bible in one hand and a two-edged slaughter sword in the other. I advise you young gentlemen to walk straight: otherwise he’ll be denouncing you as traitors, some fine day when you least suspect it.”

Brewster laughed.

“He looks like a man who would denounce his own blood brother if the occasion should arise. For the last half-hour he has been raging up and down in that cold guard-room muttering and cursing to himself like a madman, and I dare swear I heard your name mingled in his maledictions, Captain Page.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I agreed readily. “The sergeant has had a suspicious eye on me for some little time past. He is a grim devil of a fellow, I promise you, and no man’s good company. I begged the general’s permission to keep him by me as a soldier-servant, but lord! he’d sour the milk before the milkmaid could get it strained into her crocks.”

“Being such a devil, I wonder he didn’t stay with the other devils—saving your presence, Captain,—on the far side of the Neutral Ground,” young Hetheridge put in.

Now all this talk was a cruel wasting of most critical time, but I paused to drive the saving nail yet a little farther into the wood.

“Champe may be like some others of that devilish rank and file you speak of, Mr. Hetheridge; one who has been constrained against his will to go barefoot and empty-bellied in a cause that meant nothing to him. At any rate, you can find no fault with his present loyalty. You may believe it or not, as you please, but when he first saw me here in New York he took me for a spy, broke into my room at the tavern and all but had me choked to death before I could get the better of him.”

There was a laugh at this, and then the young fellow whose name I could not remember, said: “I wish you joy of such a soldier-servant as that; I do, indeed.” And, as I laid a hand on the door-latch; “Drink an extra posset for me, while you’re about it, Captain Page, if that’s what you are going after. My throat is as dry as a desert.”

It was well that they should think I was on my way to the tavern, and I vanished while the notion lay uppermost in their minds. Champe was waiting for me at the corner of the house, and he was fairly shaking with fierce impatience.

His greeting of me took the form of a raging oath directed at my time-killing with the young fellows at the house fire; and then: “While you were dallying I got a glimpse of him—he’s there yet, tramping up and down the walk. Hell and furies—if he’ll only give us time—time!” And again, before I could have any speech with him, he was dragging me by a roundabout way to come at the back of the garden enclosure and to the place where our sunken boat was lying.

While we were waiting for our chance to dodge the pacing sentry on the river bank, speech was still impossible, but in the interval I began to get some glimmerings of a plan which would solve the wretched tangle, and at the same time give Champe his leave to escape.

We both saw Arnold through the gap in the fence, which was still open. Once he extended his walk on the garden path to come and stand almost within touching distance of us as we lay crouching in the shadows. He seemed to be staring out over the river which the gale was lashing into yeasty foam-crests. I marveled at his indifference to danger, the more since he had not seemed at all indifferent hitherto. And now he had more cause to fear, knowing by the broken lock and the muddy foot- and finger-marks that at least one desperate attempt had been made to abduct him. But, as I have said before, cowardice in any real pinch of danger was not among his many faults.

Nothing would have been easier than for us to seize and bind and gag him there and then, leaving him so fettered and silenced to wait on the issues of our boat recovery. Champe was hot for doing this, and I had much ado to hold him back. When we had our opportunity to pass the sentry, Arnold had gone back to his tramping of the garden path and I felt that the worst of the crisis was now safely passed.

Reaching the water’s edge we groped for our mooring rock and found the boat’s painter fastened as we had left it. In the task of raising the boat, Champe worked like a demon, wading in the icy water to tug and haul, and when the little craft finally showed her nose, plunging his arms shoulder deep to remove the weighting stones. Since the pacing sentinel passed and repassed on the bank above us every five minutes or so, silence and caution were prime necessities; and again and again I had to warn my companion on the score of his reckless and frantic haste.

So working and halting, the task was accomplished at last; and when the final stone was removed and we had rocked and rolled the boat gently on the beach to free it of some of the water, Champe got in to bail while I held the gunwale and kept an ear alert for the sentry’s comings and goings.

“All ready, Captain Dick,” muttered the frenzied one when he had finished the bailing and had carefully pulled the oars from their anchorings under the thwarts. “Make fast, and hold her so until I get out.”

The time was come for striking the deadly blow, and it fell upon poor Champe without warning.

“Stay where you are, Sergeant,” I commanded in low tones. “The game is up, and we shall not do this thing which we set out to do. Take the oars and let the tide and your two arms get you safely back to Major Lee’s camp at Tappan while you have the chance.”

I could not see his face in the darkness, but my imagination could very well picture the fierce rage which was distorting it.

“What’s that you say?” he choked. “You are giving it up?—now, when the devil himself couldn’t balk us? In God’s name, what do you mean, Captain Dick?”—this last in an agonized whisper.

“I mean precisely what I say; you can not take him alone, and I shall not help you.”

“You are turning your back upon it, and you are staying here?” he muttered, as one half dazed. Then he came suddenly alive to the full meaning of my words: “You are a foul traitor, Captain Richard Page! Curse you, curse you, curse you!—that Judas and the women have won you over! I’ll see you hanged for this, if so be I have to hang with you! Out of my way, or I’ll kill you where you stand!”

He had started up, and was clambering over the thwarts to get at me, when I stooped and gave the boat a mighty shove out into the stream. The sudden lurch made him lose his balance and come down with a noisy crash among the unshipped oars. As quick as thought, the sentry on the bank above cried out his challenge of “Halt! Who goes there?” but Champe, furious as he was, was yet wary enough to lie still, letting the wind and tide carry him on. The sentry did not climb down the bank to investigate, as I made sure he would; and better still, he did not fire his piece to give the alarm. I thought surely that Arnold must have heard his shout, in which case my capture would be certain.

That the shouted challenge had been heard, I had proof presently in a wind-blown muttering of voices at the top of the bank overhead. I figured that the sentry had stopped to speak to Arnold, but I could make no move to escape. Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness, but I could not tell whether it had gone up or down the river or was drifting with wind and tide out toward the Jersey shore. It was enough that it had gone, as I fondly hoped, beyond the possibility of a return. Champe, I fancied, would come to his senses shortly and make his way to safety. Surely he would know that it would be nothing short of suicide for him to land again within the enemy’s lines.

When all was quiet again on the bank above I still had to wait some little time before venturing to cross the sentry’s path on my retreat. There was good hope in the interval since I neither heard nor saw more of the sergeant and was thus convinced that he was making the best of his way out of the peril. More than once, however, while I waited, I could distinguish the sound of Arnold’s footsteps on the gravel walk in the garden, so I knew that the traitor had not been frightened away by whatever talk he had had with the bank-pacing sentry.

Since boldness is often the truest kind of caution, it was in my mind that I should snatch my chance to pass the sentry and so slip through the gap in the fence to join Arnold in the garden, trusting to my wit to frame a plausible excuse for the intrusion. Though for honor’s sake I had turned my back on the purpose of betraying our chief deserter, I meant to delay my own escape long enough to make sure that Champe was safely out of the way. Try as I might, I could not rid myself of the fear that he might yet be retaken, and in that case he would sorely need a friend at court to save him from the rope. You will say that I might have cut this knot by going with him in the boat, but I confess frankly that I had no stomach for such an enterprise. Indeed, as matters stood at our parting, it was plainly evident that I should have had to kill him or let him kill me to patch up a peace between us.

It was with a mind strangely confused by the sudden turn which I had forced our fortunes to take that I climbed the bank and dodged the sentry and made my way by the roundabout route Champe and I had taken, back to the street. I went this way, not because I was afraid to carry out that purpose of going through the garden, but because, in passing the gap in the fence, I found the garden walk untenanted, and a light showing in the upper windows of the house to tell me that Arnold had gone back to his office workroom.

With my feet pressing the familiar pavements in front of the house, it came to me suddenly and with a curious little shock that I had lighted upon an entirely new world; a world in which I was at the same moment a man of rejuvenated honor and a hunted fugitive. I say it without shame that for the moment my eyes were dimmed and a rush of emotions too varied to be analyzed came swiftly over me. It is no light thing to fling one’s self, heart and soul, into the accomplishment of a certain purpose and then to turn short and take the path of renunciation at the very climax of success.

Yet I felt strangely light-hearted, and as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that all was over, I could realize very clearly that neither General Washington nor Mr. Hamilton could possibly have foreseen any such wading in the pool of duplicity for me as that into which my emprise had pushed me. Also, I understood that when they should be made aware of all the circumstances they would be the first to approve this final step of withdrawal which, lacking Beatrix Leigh’s gentle promptings, I might never have taken.

So my conscience was clear at last and yet all this had little bearing upon things present and pressing. When all was said, I was to the full as likely to pay the spy’s penalty now as I should have been had I been taken red-handed in the very act of abducting Arnold. The facts of my mission were all known to Castner, and it was upon these facts, and not upon the accomplishment, that I should be tried and condemned. Why Castner had waited so long before springing his trap I could not guess. Now that he was back from wherever he had been and with the spy Askew safely in tow, a word to Sir Henry Clinton and another to Arnold were all that were needed. And, surely, Castner had had time to preach an entire sermon to either or both of them since I had seen him passing the tavern with his two companions.

I had a part answer to this puzzling question of the reason for Castner’s delay when, while I was as yet hanging upon my heel and not knowing which way to turn, I saw an officer with the shoulder-straps of a general descending Sir Henry Clinton’s steps; a man walking slowly and with his head bowed and his hands tightly locked behind him. The man was Benedict Arnold; and they had just been giving him the undeniable proof of my treachery. I knew it as well as if I had been an eavesdropper at the conference behind Sir Henry Clinton’s closed door.

Now you may scoff, if you will, but this discovery, the clinching of the nail, as you may say, hurt me unspeakably for the moment. Deny it as we may, we do all live more or less upon the good opinions of our fellow creatures; and surely I had painted myself as a villain of the deepest dye for this man who was coming on with his head bowed and carrying in his heart a bitter disappointment to go with him back to his quarters in the adjoining house.

I turned away, immeasurably saddened in spite of the strange and most welcome heart-lightening; and I do think I would have given much at that moment to be able to tell Arnold that I had spared him at the final crisis. He would never know, and perhaps that was best; yet I thought it was a needless twist of the thumb-screws of fate both for him and for me that he could not know.

But there was no time for repining. I had no thought of taking the first step in an effort to secure my own safety until after I should have made sure of Beatrix’s embarkation and departure; indeed, it was this, as much as anything else, that had made me miss the chance of fighting it out with the saturnine sergeant in the boat. By every lover’s obligation it was my first duty to see Beatrix and my Cousin Ju on board the Nancy Jane, with the staunch little schooner plunging on its way down the bay; and after that I could make my flight—if Champe should not have turned up again to need a friend, and if all the avenues should not be closed to me.

But the more I thought of the seaward venture for the two women the less I liked it. It was a rough night, with the wind in the wrong quarter and the lower bay still cluttered with the waiting ships of Arnold’s expeditionary fleet. Again, Sprigg’s vessel might be detained; at any hour it might be boarded by the harbor patrols, and its contraband lading—the recovered tobacco—turned up to the light. In that case I knew that the military authority which had winked at the ransoming of the tobacco cargo could not, and would not, openly intervene.

Worse than all, Major Simcoe’s troop might return from its wild-goose chase on the Tarrytown road in time to claim passage rights for its twenty-man quota on the Nancy Jane. Perhaps the Rangers had returned already!

With that threatening possibility in mind I resolved to go at once to the barracks on a spying reconnaissance, and if I should find that Simcoe’s troop had returned, to press quickly on to the Vandeventer house to hasten the embarkation. But first I yielded to a madman’s prompting that had been fretting at me ever since Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness and I had realized that I was once more a free man. It was no less than a foolish notion that I should like to show myself to Beatrix at the parting moment in my true colors—the same patriot homespun I had worn when she had given me God-speed at the door of her father’s house in Virginia, and which I had exchanged so unwillingly for these cursed facings of Arnold’s Loyal Americans.

Now that I had cut loose once and for all from the tanglings of chicanery and deceit, this uniform of Arnold’s Legion was hateful—doubly hateful. To every eye that saw me in it, it told an added lie; and I was sick and nauseated with lying. Could I not slip into the tavern and find my portmanteau and make the change?

It seemed feasible enough; and a stealthy peering through the windows of the lighted tap-room showed me a measurably clear field. A Quaker in a drab long-coat and broadbrim sat at one of the tables smoking a thin-stemmed church-warden. Two Hessians of Knyphausen’s were guzzling ale at another; and the Irish barman was nodding sleeping behind his wicket.

I opened the door and entered, passing quickly to the stair and reaching it before the aproned Irishman at the bar could do more than rouse himself and say, “Och, ’tis yourself, then, is it, Captain Page?” and straightway fall to nodding again.

Coming to the barn-like room above-stairs which had apparently lain undisturbed since Champe and I had forsaken it to become fugitives two days before, I found flint, steel and tinder box, and a candle-end to flare gustily in the cold drafts of the place while I made the swift change from red and green to homespun blue. Flinging the badges of disgrace into the corner, I replaced the Scots’ rapier in its belt, thinking that I must, after all, be beholden to King George for this much of my equipment. For Champe still had my horse-saber, and I would not go on Beatrix’s business weaponless.

Being now ready to run the gauntlet of the tap-room again I sallied out and groped my way to the stair-head. A hubbub of voices was rising from the room below and when I had stepped cautiously down to the landing turn I saw that my fate had already outrun me. In the few minutes which had elapsed since my passing through it, the tap-room had filled with soldiers and a crowding throng of riff-raff from the street; and by the light of the bar candles I saw Castner. He was questioning the Irish barman sharply and the good pot-filler was trying his best to shield me.

“Arrah, now, Liftenant, dear! is it Captain Page you’d be asking for? Shure I haven’t seen the smilin’ face av him these four hours. Would he be comin’ here widout me knowin’ ut?”

At this point there was a stir in the crowd and a tail man, soaked and dripping, pushed his way rudely up to Castner’s elbow. I looked and looked again, and gasped. By all the lunatics that ever filled a Bedlam, it was John Champe!

“Don’t believe that lying Irishman, Lieutenant Castner!” he cried out hoarsely. “I tell you I saw him enter here—no longer ago than the time it took me to run and fetch you, sir!”

I saw Castner’s involuntary shrinking from the man who was thus betraying one who at least held the claim of being a fellow-countryman, a fellow-soldier, and a fellow-deserter. I confess that, at first, it seemed blankly incredible to me that Champe should be doing this. If the spy Askew’s story was to be taken as a whole, the sergeant from Major Lee’s Legion was involved no less deeply than the captain from Baylor’s Horse. But there was no mistaking his intention. There were black circles around his eyes and he was so drunk with passion that he could scarcely stand without leaning against the barman’s wicket.

My first impulse was to steal back up the stair to try a drop from one of the windows. But when I would have translated the impulse into action, another man, a small rattish man in gray clothes and with a great bunch of seals dangling at his watch-fob, thrust himself forward out of the mob of onlookers and I heard his whispered word to Castner.

“On the stair landing, Lieutenant. Look for yourself, and let the Irishman spare his lying evasions!”

Castner looked as directed, bowing gravely when he saw me.

“Come down, Captain Page, and surrender your sword,” he commanded, soberly stern; and the brabble of voices ceased and a sudden hush fell on the room. Also, I noticed when Castner spoke and all eyes were turned to my landing, Champe drew back behind the more forward ones in the crowd and I saw him no more.

Now that the suspense was ended and open war was declared, I felt better and could even lean over the stair-rail and laugh down upon these king’s bush-beaters.

“You want my sword, Lieutenant?” I retorted. “I’ll give it to you, or to any man whose need is greater than my own—always provided that you or he will take it point foremost.”

“I make the demand in the king’s name,” said Castner, refusing to be either joked or jarred out of his even-toned soberness. And then he added, out of the heart of friendliness, I do think: “I wouldn’t make it harder for you than I must, Captain Page. You should see that resistance is madness.”

“I see that you may order your men to train their muskets on me and bring me down bird-wise, Mr. Castner. I do assure you it will be far more merciful than those other designs you have on me.”

He took me at my word with a soldierly disregard for further parleyings. In a trice he had cleared the space to the stair-foot, and had given the order to five of his musketeers. When their pieces were leveled he gave me one more chance.

“Once more, and for the last time, will you come down and render yourself, Captain Page?”

“With pleasure!” I cried; and whipping the rapier from its sheath I vaulted over the stair-rail and fell upon him so heartily that he was driven fairly back among his musket men before he could bare steel and defend himself.

Lord! but there was a scattering among those gaping lookers-on! Never have I seen buyers in the eagerest market so anxious to get to the front—only their front was the rear. With an onset so vigorous and unexpected, I might have cut and thrust my way to the door, if it had not been for the cursed little gray-coated spy, James Askew. But at the charging instant he dodged to get behind me, and I knew better than to leave an enemy of his temper unaccounted for in the rear. My foining to get a side-thrust at the spy gave Castner his chance to draw; and in another breath we were at it, hammer and tongs, Castner striving manfully to press me to the wall, and Dickie Page fighting as a man fights when he knows that his hours are strictly numbered, and who asks no more of this world and his enemies therein than the chance to die while his blood is leaping battle-warm.

It was the cur Askew who ended it, after all, though not as he meant to, I’ll dare swear. In our stamping rushes and thrustings and parryings, Castner and I had him penned in a corner, and at length, in a wide flanconade, my sword’s point touched him on the outward sweep to line. With a yelp like that of a pricked dog, he darted out of his corner and made to get away, rushing blindly into the zone of whistling sword blades.

It was the end of him, as well as of the sword play. He was just in time to catch the swift following thrust with which Castner replied to my attack, and the lieutenant’s blade passed clean through him; through his heart, I think, for he dropped like a stone, and gave only a shiver before his eyes glazed and his jaw fell.

This was my fair chance to kill Lieutenant Charles Castner, of the King’s Own; but I hope we Pages are something better than assassins, even when the blood is hot and we are fighting for our lives. My point went to the floor, and I stepped back to let Castner disengage; then the musketeers flung their pieces aside and made their smothering rush, and I was done.

The lieutenant was considerably out of breath when he pulled his sword from the spy’s body and fell fiercely upon his men, who were mishandling me pretty cruelly.

“Your word that you will not try to escape, Captain Page!” he panted; but I would not give it.

“No; ‘safe bind, safe find,’ is your motto, my good friend,” I said cheerfully, holding out my wrists for the cord.

It galled him to do it, but he would not fail in any part of his duty.

“I have had too much trouble in overtaking you,” he said in extenuation, when the soldiers were tying my hands; with all the riff-raff of idlers turned back now to look on, gaping.

“What a pity you have lost your witness,” I remarked, indicating the dead spy.

“The less valuable of my witnesses,” he corrected curtly. “Unhappily for you, there is another and more credible one.”

This remark of his set me to wondering. Then I remembered the third man who had walked with Castner and the spy in the afternoon—the man whose face I could not see, but whose gait and figure had been singularly familiar. Was this the “more credible” witness? I should soon know.

We stayed no time at all in the tavern after the hand-tying. With a word to the inn people about the disposition of the body of James Askew, Castner disciplined his corporal’s guard and we took the open air for it, pointing not for Sir Henry Clinton’s house, as I supposed we should, but on past it toward Fort George.

Within the walls of the fort, we marched silently to the house of the commander, a long low structure of Dutch brick, facing the parade ground. Two rooms of it were well lighted, and when the door was opened and I was thrust in, I saw that the court-martial was sitting and waiting for me, and that I was confronting my judges.

XXI
THE DRUMHEAD COURT

SOME of the British officers gathered in the fort commandant’s room to hold the court-martial were known to me by name, but that which gave me the greatest shock was the sight of Major Simcoe, sitting stern and thoughtful behind the up-ended drum. For his presence argued the return of the Queen’s Rangers from their wild-goose chase up the Tarrytown road, and their return promised the collapse of my care-taking plot to insure the escape of Beatrix and my cousin on the Nancy Jane.

But they gave me little time for the anxious lover-thought, these stern gentlemen who were holding an inquest rather than a trial. With a haughty nod, to indicate my place in the prisoner’s dock, I suppose, General Phillips, who sat as judge-advocate, signed to Simcoe, and the major cleared his throat. I saw the burly Knyphausen tilting in his chair; the two Hessian captains sitting on either side of him; the commandant of the fort; a major; and a lieutenant-colonel of Sir Henry’s staff: saw, also, that neither Clinton nor Arnold was present. And then Major Simcoe began to recite the charges against me, Castner bending over to untie my hands as the reading went on.

It was evident, before the charges were half read, that I had been tried and condemned beforehand; that whatever I should say or do would in no wise modify the sentence which had already been determined on. That conviction broke the final thread of prudence in me; and when the major came to that part of his manuscript where it was set forth that I had entered the British lines as a spy and an emissary of General Washington’s, with the premeditated purpose of kidnapping General Benedict Arnold, I laughed hardily, and said I should like to be confronted with the proofs, if there were any.

“You shall be accommodated, Mr. Page,” returned Simcoe gravely. And then to Castner: “Bring in the man, James Askew, if you please, Lieutenant.”

At this I laughed again, and said, most impertinently: “Having run his sword through the body of the said James Askew a few minutes ago, Lieutenant Castner makes his apologies to the court, and—”

“Silence, sir!” thundered Phillips, frowning me down; and I held my peace while Castner explained, rather shamefacedly, how the spy had come to his end.

“Then we will take your testimony, Mr. Castner,” said Simcoe; whereupon the lieutenant told in a straightforward way how the spy Askew had first informed him of my purpose; how, when the story, second-handed on to Sir Henry Clinton, had resulted only in an order for my arrest and detention, which order had been suspended, he, Castner, had gone with Askew to meet an officer of Major Henry Lee’s Legion—one who knew the facts from the rebel side, and who, for the sake of common honor, would substantiate Askew’s story.

Much more the lieutenant said, and doubtless the court listened to him. But I did not. My senses had gone blank to all outward happenings at that mention of an officer of my own fellowship who had made an appointment with Castner and the spy to insure my undoing. Admitting that Mr. Hamilton’s secret had leaked out, what man in all the patriot army hated me cordially enough to do this despicable thing? There was but one answer to that query: I had come between Howard Seytoun and the woman of his desire. For no lighter cause would any man turn his back upon his country, his honor as a soldier, his loyalty to the brotherhood of the army.

When I listened again, Major Simcoe was saying: “Your word is sufficient, of course, Mr. Castner. But for the sake of the formalities, a statement from this officer you speak of would sit well on the records of this court.”

“I anticipated that,” said Castner promptly. “Under an assurance of safe-conduct back to his own lines, the officer has accompanied me to New York.” Then, to one of his men: “Warnock, bring the Continental captain in.”

The man went out, and when next the door was opened, I saw what I was fully expecting to see. Seytoun came in, blinking at the lights, his bloated face flushing purple, and his shifty eyes looking anywhere save in my direction.

“Will you be good enough to answer a few questions, Captain Seytoun?” said Simcoe, taking a most gentlemanly tone with this double-dyed renegade and villain. “You have offered Lieutenant Castner a corroboration of the charge against Captain Richard Page; namely, the fact set forth by the man James Askew: that Captain Page came to New York as a spy and a kidnapper. Is this true?”

“It is,” muttered my accuser in a low tone.

“Upon what grounds do you assert this, Captain Seytoun?” cut in one of Knyphausen’s aides.

“It is the common talk in our camps.”

“You lie, Captain Seytoun—like the father of lies after whom you are named,” I said coolly; for now I remembered Askew’s story of his escape from the guard house at Tappan, and could easily add two and two together.

Simcoe would have put me down with harsh bluster; but now Phillips, cold-eyed and haughty, intervened suddenly.

“Can you impeach the witness, Captain Page?” he demanded.

“I can. By his own confession, James Askew lay under sentence of death in General Washington’s camp at Tappan. He escaped by the connivance of the officer of the guard. The bribe he offered and paid was the sharing of a certain secret with that villain who stands there, and the secret was this highly incredible story upon which you have convicted me, General Phillips. This man knows nothing but that which the spy, Askew, told him, and for aught that can be proved now, the story may well have been nothing more than a tissue of falsehoods, made up for the spy’s own purpose,” I answered boldly.

Seytoun might have outfaced me in this, if he had been endowed with the right kind of brazen courage: it was but my word against his. But his face was an open confession of guilt, and I think they all saw it, though, as I say, his testimony was a mere matter of court-martial routine—my fate had been predetermined long before.

A silence fell upon the room, and it was Major Simcoe who broke it.

“Captain Page, your conviction,”—I remarked that he used the word,—“does not turn upon these preliminaries, which serve merely to show premeditation and design. Whether you came as Mr. Washington’s emissary, or upon your own initiative, matters not: the fact remains that you not only intended to kidnap General Arnold; you have actually made the attempt. Do you deny that, sir?”

I did not see what good could come of adding lies to lies, at least, in my own behalf. By this time it must be known that Champe and I were the two who had eaten our suppers in the Dutch boat-builder’s house, the two who had stolen the boat, and, quite as inevitably, the two who had broken into Arnold’s house to find the empty bed. If I hesitated, it was only because I was striving to devise some way of saving Champe.

“I do not deny it,” I said, when the pause had grown to an impossible length.

“Ah!” said the major; and the exclamation was echoed in an audible sigh of relief on all sides. Then, fixing me with a look that was not all unkindly, Simcoe went on. “Your opportunities for carrying out your desperate enterprise have been all that you could ask; you have so won upon General Arnold’s confidence that he has trusted you fully, and even now, he yields only to the incontestable facts, and would shield you if he could. You must have had more than one chance of carrying out your design.”

“I had,” I broke in. “No more than an hour ago, Mr. Arnold was walking in his garden, alone. Once he came and stood within an arm’s reach of me; and I had a boat at the river’s edge in which to make my escape.”

“Ah!” he said again, and this time the exclamation was a sharp indrawing of the breath. “You spared him; will you tell us why, Captain Page? It can make no difference for or against you, now.”

“It is easily explained,” I said, smiling to give dissimulation the proper mask. “There were two of us; and at the crucial instant one of the two could not, or rather would not, rise to his opportunity—when he found out what that opportunity really meant.”

Simcoe nodded, and I marked the swift glance of intelligence that passed from one to another of my judges. Once more I had been able to impose upon them. They were saying to themselves that at the crisis the loyal sergeant had refused to be dragged into the kidnapping—which was as I had hoped. After which, Phillips took me up.

“Add a little more to your frankness, Mr. Page, and earn the satisfaction that comes from doing a worthy deed at the last,” he said austerely. “Do you confess that you have made a tool of Sergeant Champe in all this conspiracy?”

“I confess it,” I said, striving to keep the keen joy of the success of my stratagem out of the words. “In all the twistings and turnings of the last three days, the sergeant has been merely a well terrified common soldier acting under compulsion coupled with threats to have him hanged for a spy if he refused to obey me. It was I who plotted to keep him ashore when he came as your letter carrier, Major Simcoe; and in all subsequent matters, he has straitly obeyed my orders, doing what he was told to do in the fear of death, and disobeying me only in the final critical moment I have just been telling you about.”

It was here that I was made to feel the curious prickings that come upon getting the credit for a good deed when the credit is not fairly earned.

“You know that the sergeant denounced you, and pointed out the place of your concealment to Lieutenant Castner?” queried the major of Sir Henry’s staff.

“I do, and I applaud his resolution, sir. That is the kind of loyalty I should be rejoiced to discover in my own men. He but did his duty, as he saw it.”

Then this major, whose name I have never known, rose up in his place and gripped my hand most heartily.

“You are a true man and a gentleman, Captain Richard Page, notwithstanding the fact that we shall have to hang you presently,” he said, with bluff good nature; and I thanked him gravely, with that curious prickling that I speak of tingling in my finger-ends.

After this, Major Simcoe asked if I had anything further to say before I should be remanded under guard, and I rose and said I had, if the gentlemen present would bear with me. At General Phillips’s nod, I went on.

“One thing I wish to say is this: as Lieutenant Castner has explained, the spy, James Askew, went to his long account by an accident. But Mr. Castner’s sword has merely saved your hangman an item in his day’s work. I had speech with Askew two days since, as he may or may not have confessed to Lieutenant Castner. In the course of that interview he admitted to me, inadvertently, that he was the man who sold Major André to those who took him.”

The effect of this little shot was quite what I had expected. There were deep and bitter oaths of satisfaction at Askew’s death, and more than one word of thanks to me for setting this matter, which had been in doubt, finally at rest. This emboldened me to go on, for I had a boon to ask.

“That is one thing, General Phillips,” I said, addressing the highest authority I could reach. “Another is in the nature of a condemned man’s final request. I have an unfinished engagement with Captain Howard Seytoun, an engagement entered into before I left the camp at Tappan, and I pray you to grant me a short quarter-hour with him on the fort parade or in a guarded room, under such restrictions as you may see fit to impose.”

I don’t know what might have come of this request if Seytoun had held his peace. The British officers of Sir Henry Clinton’s military family were great sticklers for the point of honor, notwithstanding the well-known opposition of the knight himself to the common practise of dueling. But Seytoun must needs draw himself up scornfully and say that he had no cause of quarrel sufficient to make him wish to give satisfaction to a condemned spy.

At this, I went rage-mad, of course, like a hot-headed fool, and sprang across the intervening space and struck him; after which I was hustled off under guard, as I deserved to be for so greatly offending the dignity of the court; hustled out, and across the parade ground, and into a cold, bare barracks room, where Castner came to find me a few minutes later.

“Well?” I said, rightly guessing that he was the bearer of news.

“Your sentence has been passed, Captain Page, and now that I know you better, I am truly sorry to be General Phillips’s messenger. You are to be confined in a cell under the battlements of the fort until midnight, at which hour you will be taken to Gallows Hill and hanged. It is a terrible short road for you, Captain, and I begged them to make it a little longer, but—”

He choked, and could say no more; and truly, I think I may say without boasting that I was sorrier for this clean-hearted, noble young fellow than I was for myself, just at the moment. But that sorrow, and my own, and all things else were quickly swept out of my mind by a most miserable anxiety for Beatrix. Had Simcoe’s troopers been ordered to the ships? There was one chance in a thousand that Castner might know, and I put the question to him as he was turning me over to the fort prison guard.

“Tell me, Lieutenant,” I said hurriedly; “do you chance to know if the Queen’s Rangers have been given their embarking orders yet? You will betray no trust in telling a dead man.”

He answered without hesitation.

“They have been embarking this evening since supper,” he said, little thinking what a stone he rolled upon my soul in these few words. And then: “Is there anything else, Captain Page?”

“Yes. From what was said in the court room yonder you doubtless gathered how much, or rather how little, Sergeant Champe has been to blame in all that he was made to bear a part in. Because you are a soldier and a gentleman, Lieutenant Castner, I know you have small respect for Benedict Arnold; but for the same reason I am sure you will say a word to him for this poor fellow who, after all, was your best means of bringing me to book. Will you say that word?”

But now Castner swore savagely and said he would not—to Arnold, though if any move were made to question Champe he would come between as he could.

“That is all I ask,” I interposed. “Champe is but an unlettered fellow, and if you were to put him upon the rack, he would be helpless. I shall hang the easier if you promise that he will be spared.”

“Champe will be sent to the fleet to-night to rejoin his legion: I’ll see it done, myself,” was Castner’s promise, and that promise, which was carried out some hours later, did, indeed save Champe from the hangman’s halter, though it sent him with Arnold’s legion to the Virginia ravaging and was, besides, the father to all of the poor sergeant’s wanderings and perils through the weary weeks and months which were to intervene before he could make good his escape and rejoin our army, a ragged, half-starved fugitive, in far-away Georgia.

XXII
IN THE POWDER-ROOM

WHEN Castner turned me over to the guard I was taken to a high-arched, brick-walled chamber buried in the battlements of the fort beyond the barracks. By its location I took the cell to be the powder-room of the old Dutch fortress antedating Fort George by a century or more; guessing at this because the place was too spacious to figure as a dungeon, and much too gloomy to be put to any other use.

By all the obligations of a decent upbringing at the hands of godly parents, I suppose I should have gone down on my two knees to spend the few hours that were left in making my peace with God. Certain it is that there were sins enough to be repented of, though I hope and trust they were chiefly soldier sins, and not the kind that make a sniveling craven of the sinner at the last. As to this, however, these death-hour penitences have always seemed to me to be a rather pitiful and unworthy begging of the Great Question; and, besides, hope dies hard in vigorous youth, especially when it is fed by anxiety for the unknown fate of a loved one.

So, when I heard the big key grate in the lock at the outgoing of Corporal Warnock, my jailer, I took the candle which Warnock’s, or Castner’s, kindness allowed me, and began a searching review of my dungeon.

From the furnishings, a blanketed bunk-bed in one corner, a small table untidy with candle drippings, and a heavy three-legged stool, I judged that the place had been lately used by the British occupiers as a guard-room for the detention of petty military offenders. Beyond this there was little to be remarked save that the bricks in the walls were old and crumbling, that the arch of the ceiling had fallen out in several places to litter the earthen floor with débris, and that the door was strong and new and solid enough to stop a battering-ram.

After a careful scrutiny of the door and its massive lock there seemed to be little left for hope to build upon. Having been designed for a magazine, the brick-lined cavern had no window or other outlet; as, indeed, it could not well have, being sunk in the earthwork. Hence, a second tour of the place, in which I made use of the heavy little stool to sound the walls, promised nothing, you would say. Yet to this seemingly fruitless proceeding hope owed the fresh lease of life which was to carry it in some fashion over the high crisis of despair.

It was in that end of the oblong cell directly opposite the door that I came upon a section of the wall which seemed to give back a hint of hollowness to judicious thumpings with the stool. This set me to examining that part of the brickwork with greater care. In this area the bricks were newer, and by passing the candle back and forth I found the reason for the fresher brickwork. A low doorway in the original wall had been filled up and its outlines were plainly traceable.

On my knees before this bricked-up door I sought to recall all I had ever heard of the earlier fortalice—the old Fort Amsterdam of the Dutch. Somewhere, in some Dutch settler’s house on the upper Hudson, I had once seen a sketch plan of Fort Amsterdam; in that plan there were outworks shown beyond the walls, though they were not so extensive as those constructed later by the British rebuilders. Had the Dutchmen used this tunnel passage to supply their outer works with ammunition? It seemed altogether logical and reasonable to assume that they had.

Having reasoned thus far, the next step was clearly obvious. Beyond the bricked-up door there would be a passage leading to what was now the southeastern ravelin. True, the passage might have been filled up when the doorway was stopped; but the hollow sound given back by the newer wall encouraged the more hopeful conclusion. Taking the existence of the passage for granted, the next thing in order was—or should have been—a tool to dig with. But a cat with clipped claws could scarcely have been more helpless in this respect than I was. The most painstaking search of the littered floor revealed nothing in the way of a bit of metal that would scratch the mortar of the joints in the later masonry, much less a practicable digging tool.

I was sitting on the edge of the bunk-bed with my chin in my hand and fairly at the end of any fruitful invention, when there came muffled sounds beyond the door to warn me of an approaching intrusion. Presently the key squeaked in the rusty lock and the door swung open to admit a visitor. By the light of the one poor guttering candle on the table I did not make him out at first, though I supposed, of course, it would be Castner. But when I looked again I found myself staring in astonishment into the gloomy eyes of Benedict Arnold. I knew what he had come for, or thought I did; and once more I strung myself up to the task of deceiving him yet further—for John Champe’s sake.

“So,” he said, and his voice was so low that it was almost gentle; “the long road of equivocation has found its fatal turn at the last, has it, Captain Page?”

I thought he had come to gloat over me, as would have been most natural, but never was a prefiguring worse mistaken. Coming closer until I could almost feel the auger-boring of the moody eyes, he went on in the same low monotone.

“You doubtless think that you, of all living men, are the most to be pitied, Captain. You are young; you have scarcely tasted of life; you have been permitted to look into the eyes of love with the good hope that in the days to come there would be happy fruition; you have an honorable name and forebears to whom your children might look back with honest pride; and in a few short hours all this will be blotted out for you forever. Tell me, sir; was it worth this stupendous sacrifice—the bare chance of taking a broken, disappointed fellow-man back to die this same death which is now confronting you?”

I saw now that he was not meaning to rejoice in my downfall, and I took time for my answer.

“A good soldier should not measure the weight of sacrifice in a question of duty.”

His hands went apart in a sudden gesture of impatience.

“What is duty? A man, by some blunderings of chance or perhaps by his own crafty chicanery, becomes your superior officer. Are you to lay aside all your convictions of justice and mercy and common manly honor merely because he holds up before you a fetish of soldierly obedience? Remember, he is but a man, as you are. Stripped of his rank and all the artificial contrivances which have made him for the moment figure as your superior, he becomes only a fellow human being, standing high or low in your estimation only as his heart is sound or depraved.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Arnold,” I put in; “pardon me if I say that you are beclouding the issue. The matter of duty, as I have conceived it, does not rest upon the question of obedience to a ranking superior. It has a better foundation in the love of country. I will be very plain with you. It seemed to me to be for the best good of my poor distracted country that you should be made to go back and pay the penalty for the blow you have struck it. Acting upon that conviction, I came here—voluntarily, you must understand, and not upon the command of any superior whomsoever.”

He took another step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“You did this from your own conception of your duty, and yet when the chance came you spared me. Captain Page. Why did you change your mind? Was it because you found me something less than the despicable piece of gallows-meat you had been told I was?”

I could not tell if this were merely the undying vanity of the man fishing for compliments on the edge of the grave, or some better prompting; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“I found you as I expected to find you, a most misguided man, as I still hold you to be; but yet a man, and neither greatly better nor worse than others, Mr. Arnold. The discovery that I made—or rather that was made for me—was in myself.”

“Ah? And that was—?”

“It was the discovery that there are lengths to which a man and a gentleman may not go, even to compass the greatest apparent benefit to his fellow-men and his country. You put it within the truth when you say that I spared you. At this very moment, had I willed it so, you might be lying bound and gagged in the bottom of a rowboat and well on your way to the camp at Tappan. I have told you the simple truth, Mr. Arnold; I assumed the task of kidnapping you voluntarily, and voluntarily I relinquished it.”

“I know,” he rejoined abruptly, and then he turned from me and began to pace the floor as if in a repressed passion. After a time he broke out bitterly.

“Like others, you know nothing of the conditions. You saw only a man turning his back upon a cause to which he had given as much or more than any, and straightway you set him down as the basest traitor, measuring the depth of his depravity, it may be, by that very standard of loyal service which he himself had set. What can you know of the slights and evasions, the refusal to recognize just claims, the spite and envy of those who drag others down so that they themselves may climb the higher?” Then, stopping suddenly to face me: “Captain Page, they even put a cloud upon my honesty in money matters!”

Now I had heard that there had been charges of irregularity in his official reports; it was common talk in the army, though I think none went so far as to charge dishonesty. His repute had been that of a high-stomached officer who could as little bear criticism as he could a rebuff to his ambition. But I said nothing. I could do no less than pity a man who felt that he must come and try to justify himself to a condemned spy whose confessed object was, or had been, a most deadly one. But he fell to pacing again without waiting for my reply.

“You did not believe that scandal about the regimental accounts, Captain Page?” he said, after another pause.

“No; I did not believe it, and I think there are few in our army who do. But that is nothing, Mr. Arnold; you are well hated for a much greater thing.”

“What is done, is done,” he broke in moodily. “I did not come here to argue with you, Captain; I came to ask what I may do to make your fate more easily met. Your life I can not save; that matter has gone beyond me now, however much I might wish to intervene. But any last request you may have to make—”

There were two, and on one of them, the safe departure of Beatrix, my lips were sealed. But of the other I spoke freely.

“You have not mentioned Sergeant Champe in all this, and I would not have my sins charged to his score,” I began: “I do not know how much or how little you are involving him—”

He interrupted with gesture expressive of complete understanding and appreciation.

“Champe is but a common soldier, and a most fanatical patriot, like yourself, Captain Page. I have known this last, or suspected it, from the beginning. There will be no punishment for him greater than that which will be the greatest for a man of his stamp—to be obliged upon a warrant of life or death to make good his lately sworn oath of allegiance in battle. He rejoins the legion to-night, and when the fleet sails he will go with it, to live or die as he fights or refuses to fight.”

I stood up, hoping he would take it as a hint that I desired to be alone.

“There is nothing more, then, I believe,” I said. “Due report of this night’s doings will be sent to Colonel Baylor, I trust; and I shall be glad if the charge against me shall stand without reference to my self-appointed errand. I ask this as much for your sake as for my own, Mr. Arnold. Others might not understand why I found my mission impossible at its final turning point.”

“You mean that the report shall go out that you were executed merely as a spy caught within the enemy’s lines?”

“That was my meaning; yes.”

In a flash he held out his hand, and I forgot that he was a traitor to the cause I loved and grasped it heartily.

“You are a man in all your inches, Captain Page,” he declared warmly; and then: “I would to God I could do you a real service, sir! You think there will be only one woman to be broken-hearted, but I assure you there will be two. I shall ill know how to face the second one when I have to tell her that you spared me of your own free will, and that yet you had to die!”

“Let your gratitude to the other woman nerve you to that task, Mr. Arnold,” I put in quietly. “It was Mistress Beatrix Leigh who showed me my duty to her—and to myself.”

“Ah, these women!” he said gently. “A man never sees himself as he ought to be until he looks into the crystal mirror of a good woman’s soul. You are prodigiously to be pitied, Captain Page—but not more than you are to be envied. A little respite—time granted you for a meeting and a parting with this young woman who hates me well but hates dishonor more—possibly my word to Sir Henry Clinton would run thus far. Shall I try it, sir?”

I shook my head and said, no. Apart from the added agony of such a meeting and parting, I hoped against hope that the good fates and Captain Elijah Sprigg had already made it impossible by putting Beatrix safely a-sea, though I feared the New Englander might wait to get word of me first.

“Then I can only bid you farewell, Captain, and wish with all my heart that I might put a sword in your hand and tell you to fight your way to death like a soldier!”

With that he gripped my hand again and went quickly to the door; and I think Warnock or another must have been waiting for him, for when I looked again the door had opened and closed, and I was alone.

Call it a weakness if you will, but after he was gone I wasted some precious minutes sitting on the bunk-bed with my head in my hands and my heart mellowing in a sudden rush of meliorating softness. It is so easy to fall into the rut of the harsh rigidities, judging all humankind by unbending formulas of right and wrong and making no allowances for the thousand and one battling influences which are always dragging the human atom hither and yon. This man whose name had become a hissing and a reproach was neither an angel nor a devil; he was merely a human being, swayed now by the good and now by the evil. If he had shown himself capable of the basest political treachery, he here and now had also shown that he could be magnanimous and truly generous to a fallen enemy.

It was another key-grating in the door-lock that roused me from the softening reverie and I sprang up, shocked for an instant by the thought that I had spent all my little respite and that midnight was come. That shock was followed by another when the door opened and Champe, with a face so haggard and wrought upon that I scarcely recognized him, came stumbling in to fall upon his knees at my feet.

“Champe!” I cried, thinking nothing but that they had sifted the truth out of him in some way, and that he was to die with me.

“Aye,” he mumbled, “I’ve come, Captain Dick. Strangle me with your bare hands—burn my eyes out with the candle—do what you will to me and I’ll never cheep nor whimper nor lift a finger. They’ve told me what you did; how you stood up and took it all upon yourself, after I had gone crazed with rage and disappointment and betrayed you like another Judas! Let me hang in your place; or if I can not, I’ll hang with you—I swear it!”

“Hush!” I commanded harshly, for I could not trust myself to speak otherwise. And then: “You need not reproach yourself. They would have caught me anyway before the night was over, and there is no sense in two hanging where one will serve. But tell me: how did you get here?”

“Warnock is corporal of the guard, and one night I saved him from being found asleep at sentry post. He told me what you said to General Phillips; how you—” his voice broke and again I had to be rough with him to save my own self-possession.

“Name of the devil!” I cut in snappishly. “Dry your eyes, Sergeant, and take the crack out of your voice. You are the man of all others who can do me a service, and here you come to me whimpering and crying like a whipped dog!”

“Say it, Captain Dick,” he pleaded. “Give me my orders, and I’ll—”

“—And you’ll carry them out: of course, you will,” I finished for him. “Now listen, and I’ll tell you what you are to do.”

A plan had been shaping itself with lightning-like swiftness in my brain since he had told me enough to make it plain that he was still free to go and come in the town; that he had not yet been put under guard to be sent to the ships, as Arnold had said he would be.

First I plied him with questions which he answered with rare intelligence, giving me the exact location of the powder-room prison cell in relation to its surroundings, and telling me what lay beyond the fortress walls behind it—a ravelin, a ditch, outworks, and then the beach. Then I gave him his instructions.

“You remember the sea-captain who sent you to fetch me to the tavern?”

Champe nodded.

“He is with us, though he claims to be a neutral and is allowed to go and come as a trader, under some surveillance. His schooner lies in the East River, ready to put to sea, if it has not already sailed. Your task is to find the ship and the man, if they are within finding distance. Tell the captain what has befallen me, and you may add that I’m going to try to break jail. If I succeed, a few stout friends, to be waiting on the beach at the southeastern angle of the fort at half an hour before midnight, might turn the scale for me.”

“I’ll find him if I have to go to hell to make the search a thorough one. But what hope have you of breaking out of this, Captain Dick?”

I dragged him across the room and showed him the outlined door in the earthward wall.

“You are to smuggle me something to dig with,” I told him, and instantly he searched in his pockets and found a huge clasp-knife.

“Will that do, think you?” he asked.

“I’ll make it do for the brickwork, though, the good Lord knows, I may need a pick and shovel for anything this bricked-up door tells me of what is beyond it. But never mind; go you and do your part, Sergeant. And one other thing: Captain Sprigg has either gone to sea, or is about to go, as I have told you, and his errand is to convey two women home to Virginia. One of those women is my cousin, and the other—”

“The other will be somewhat more than a cousin, if you live to get free of this: I take you, Captain.”

“Good. Then you will see to it yourself that whatever may be done toward helping me, there must be a sufficient guard left to protect the women. That is all, I believe, though I would give much for a weapon of some sort bigger than this pocket-knife to even me with those who will seek to stop me after I burrow out.”

At that Champe unbuttoned his great watchcoat and showed me my good Scots rapier hanging by a thong around his neck; and I could have shouted for joy.

“Where did you find it?—and how could you pass the guard with it?” I demanded.

“I found it in the barracks, where one of Warnock’s men had flung it aside,” he explained. “I thought first to bring your own horse-saber, which I was wearing, but Warnock made me put it away before he would let me see you. I did put it away, but I hid this other in my coat at the same time.”

With midnight coming nearer at every breath we drew, I gave Champe his final word.

“Do your errand quickly, Sergeant,” I adjured him. “On two counts you have little time to spare: Sprigg’s vessel, if it be not already gone, will be ready to go at any minute; and after all you may be too late. The other count is your own. You will be ordered to rejoin the legion before the night is out; I have Arnold’s own word for that.”

“They’ll not take me down the bay alive before my errand is done; I promise you that, Captain Dick.”

While he was hammering at the door for Warnock to come and let him out, I hid the rapier in the blankets of the bed; and no sooner was the door opened for Champe, and closed behind him with the bolt shot, than I fell to work with the great clasp-knife, digging as for dear life.

It took no little time to loosen the first brick, toil as I would, and when it was withdrawn, the thrust-in candle showed nothing but a shallow, earth-smelling burrow behind the wall, with its farther extremity stopped up by a stout wooden boarding.

This was sufficiently discouraging, since it indicated that the old sally-port through the powder-room to the outworks had been sealed up at both ends. How thick the outer barrier might be, I had no means of determining; and before I could remove any more bricks, I heard the key rattling in the lock again, and there was barely time to stand the clumsy little table before the tell-tale breach beginnings, to kick the floor rubbish over the mortar powderings that whitened it, and to slip the clasp-knife into my pocket, when the bolt was shot and Castner marched in.

Now was the time when it took the final ounce of fortitude in the good old Page reserves to make me face him and say carelessly, “Is it midnight, at last, Lieutenant? By all the hours that ever struck, I thought it would never come!” For, truly, and for the second time that night, I made sure that my short respite had slipped away unheeded, and that he had come for me.

“No, Captain Page,” he rejoined soberly; “it wants two good hours of midnight yet, and I’ve come on a different errand. You have spoken twice in my hearing of a postponed engagement with your—with this Captain Seytoun who has come so far out of his way to do you an ill turn: are you still wishing it might be kept?”

I made my laugh sound as lightly as it should have sounded if the meeting with my cousin Devlin’s slayer were the last unfulfilled desire of a man who was about to die.

“You saw how hard I tried to make him wish it. My dear Castner, he is little better than a brute beast. I doubt if the rope stout enough to drag him to a fair field of honor has ever been twisted.”

The lieutenant’s eyes were fixed upon one of the holes in the ceiling masonry.

“It would be little loss to the reb—to the American cause if he should never return to Tappan?” he suggested.

“It would be small loss, as you say. Though you will not look at it in that light, the man is a traitor at heart; a man who, to satisfy a purely personal grudge, does not scruple to betray his trust, his cause and his commanders.”

Castner looked me full in the eyes.

“He hates you well, Captain Page. I had no thought save to have James Askew’s story confirmed by some one in authority. I was astounded when the spy told me that, upon a few hours’ notice, an officer of Major Lee’s Legion would meet us at a certain spot on the Tarrytown road and confirm his information word for word. We rode out to the Neutral Ground to the place indicated by Askew, and there we met this precious troop-captain. He not only did all that Askew had promised for him; he was anxious to come and testify in person. I had little choice but to give him the safe-conduct necessary.”

“No, no,” I hastened to say. “I’m never blaming you, my dear Lieutenant. Don’t think it for a moment.”

“Thank you,” he returned. “Duty is a hard schoolmaster at times; never harder for me than in the present instance, Captain Page. But to return to this poltroon captain of horse; I am beginning to suspect that he had another object in asking for his safe-conduct, eager as he is to see you effaced. He has been making inquiries of me about a lady.”

“Ah?” said I; and then: “I’ll name her for you—Mistress Beatrix Leigh, of Virginia?”

“The same. She is here on some business for her Virginia estates—a tobacco cargo that fell into the hands of our Philistines. Some influence has been brought to bear upon Sir Henry Clinton to make him wink at the blockade-running of this confiscated cargo, provided it can be done without bringing it to public notice. Seytoun tells me of this, lodges an information against one Elijah Sprigg, captain of Mistress Leigh’s ship, and urges me to lay the affair by the heels.”

“You mean to do it, Lieutenant Castner?” I demanded angrily.

“Not upon that cur’s prompting, you may be sure,” was the hearty rejoinder. “But this is all far beside the mark. One other request Seytoun makes of me, and that is that he be permitted to see you, alone, before you—before your—”

“Before my hanging, you would say; don’t boggle at so harmless a little word, my good friend: I don’t. You’ll let him come?”

“That rests with you,” he announced quietly. “Do you still wish to keep your—that broken engagement with him?”

I fear my smile at this was cynical.

“You needn’t approach it so cautiously, Lieutenant. He merely wishes to come and triumph over a fallen enemy. I know him. I’m beginning to think there is no fight in him.”

“By heavens! I’d make him fight!” burst out my quiet lieutenant, in a most unprecedented upflash of rage. “See here, Captain Page; by all the gods, I’m going to take the chance of having my commission canceled, and send him to you! Here is my sword”—he drew it and flung it upon the bed. “You’ll promise me that you will not use it in a way to make me sorry that I trusted you?”

“Most willingly,” I replied, smiling at his sudden ardor, and added: “But he won’t fight, Mr. Castner.”

“Then kill him!” he snapped vindictively; and turned to kick hotly at the door for the guard to come and let him out.

Not to lose any of the precious minutes I fell into furious labor on the hole in the wall as soon as the door clanged behind Castner. When at length the aperture was large enough to let me squeeze through, nothing was revealed save the crumbling sides of a damp earth-tunnel, with the wooden bulkhead stopping its farther end.

I did not dare to creep into the tunnel for a better investigation of the cul de sac. If Seytoun had not changed his mind, he might be admitted at any moment, and remembering this, I hastily replaced the loosened bricks, and moved the table, with the candle on it, against the wall. Happily, I had made the breach so low that the table hid it; which was more by hit than good wit, since I had not thought of having to conceal it.

These preparations were barely completed when the door-bolt clicked, and my enemy was come. Between the bolt shooting and the swinging of the door, I had time to drop down upon the edge of the bunk-bed, and to put my face in my hands; so Seytoun found me as I wished he should find me—in an attitude of the deepest dejection.

He took instant advantage of it, as I made sure he would, laughing harshly and slapping his leg, and saying it was as good as a comedy to see me sniveling like a whipped schoolboy because, forsooth, I was going to be choked presently with a bit of cord!

At first I took no notice of him, wishing to see him climb the ladder of triumph so high that the fall, when it should come, would jar his teeth loose. He climbed fast enough, in all conscience, pouring out the most obscene imprecations upon me, telling me how he should live to see me dancing upon nothing; how he would marry Beatrix now in spite of hell and all the base-born, light-mothered Pages that ever mewled in their nurses’ arms; how, in one stroke, he would be avenged for all that I had ever done to him.

When he had run the full gamut of abuse, and was fairly at a stand for fresh epithets, I took him up, not angrily, for, strange as it may seem, I could not for the life of me stir the hot rage that had twice or thrice made me so eager to kill him.

“You say I am a coward, Seytoun, and that is a harsh word to fling at a dying man. What have I ever done to you, more than to post you in the tidewater country for killing my cousin Devlin Page over a game of cards without giving the poor lad a tenth of a chance to defend himself?” I asked.

“You posted me, and you have struck me twice without giving me a chance to kill you!” he raged. “On top of that you have eaten insults that would have made a horse-boy fight!”

“Um,” said I. “If I have eaten at your table, I have also made you eat at mine. And I had a much better cause than you, Wolf Seytoun,” I added, giving him the name he went by in Virginia. “The woman who loves me, and who will loathe and despise you to her dying day for this night’s work, begged me to spare you—for the sake of our common country—and I gave her my promise.”

“By heaven!” he shouted, “you’ll taunt me with that? I tell you, Beatrix Leigh will—”

“Hold on,” I warned, raising a hand in deprecation. “That makes twice you have used her name to me within five minutes. Don’t do it again!”

“What’s to stop me if I name her a hundred million times?” he bellowed.

“This,” I said, taking up the sword that Castner had flung upon the bed. And still I was not angry.

His first act was the craven cur’s: a swift glance over his shoulder to see if haply the door had been left ajar to let him run; his next was the trapped wolf’s: a whipping-out of his saber, and a lightning-like launching of his great body in a rush that was meant to slay me before I could get upon my feet.

The attack failed only because I was fully expecting it; but the warding of the murderous saber cut snapped my borrowed weapon short off at the hilt. It was here that John Champe’s devotion surely saved my life. But for his smuggling of the Scots rapier under his coat, I should have been left unarmed and helpless, and Seytoun would certainly have slain me like a dog.

But the rapier was at hand, and I made shift to snatch it out of its hiding-place beneath the blankets, to spring aside from the second saber sweep, and to face my antagonist in some equality.

Then began a battle the like of which I hope never to have part in again. Seytoun’s face was the face of a demoniac, and he fought with the coward’s courage, the frenzy of a madman. For a time I could do nothing but strive to keep out of his way, and never before had I been made to feel the bitter inadequacy of the lighter weapon when opposed to the heavier troop saber. I dared not try to parry his sweeping slashes, and my only hope lay in winding him.

This result came in time, helped on by his reckless wasting of his strength, and by the heavy coat he was wearing. Then it was my turn, and I began to press him slowly backward, changing my defense into an attack, and crowding him to make good before he should recover and catch his second wind. Round and round the narrow cell we went, and still the heavy saber rose and fell, and the slender rapier darted in and out, and never a drop of blood was drawn.

“End it!” I cried; “why don’t you end it, you brute beast?”

He took me at my word, or tried to. In a fierce rush he backed me all across the room, and when he had me in a corner, stooped, caught up the heavy stool in his left hand and hurled it at my head. It was a base advantage to take of a lighter-armed antagonist, but I forgave him. For at the instant of missile-hurling I found my opening, and the rapier flashed in over the momentarily neglected guard; darted in and found its mark and pierced it.

I did not thrust a second time; did not need to. While the clock could tick twice, he stood looking at me with a sort of shocked wonder in his bloodshot eyes. Then he turned away slowly, and fell face downward across the bunk-bed, and I think he never stirred afterward.

XXIII
OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD

I  CONFESS, with some prickings of remorse, that I did not stay to help Seytoun live or die. Fiercely swift as the fight had been, it had cut deeply into the little time I could count on, and no sooner was it ended than I was down on my knees under the table, and burrowing out through the breach in the wall.

Once in the earth kennel, with the candle, and my sword and the clasp-knife, I replaced the bricks hurriedly in the breach and began to sound the wooden bulkhead. To my dismay, it seemed as solid as the earth itself, and I saw nothing for it but to try to dig a passage around it. This might well be the work of hours; but after the moment of despair it gave me, I fell upon the task furiously, digging with the knife, with my hands, and at last with the rapier, boring it around to cut out futile little cones of the crumbling clay.

I was stabbing thus feverishly at the stubborn earth bank, and accomplishing little, as I thought, when sounds in the powder-room behind me made me stop and listen. I heard the door clang back against the wall; heard footsteps and voices, and then the shout of surprise when they found Seytoun. I did not need to look at my watch to see the time: it was midnight and my gallows guard was come for me.

I think it must have been my good angel whispering at my ear—the prompting to make a last despairing push with the thin-bladed sword in the clay at the back of the shallow excavation. To my joy the steel went through, and by wriggling it about I quickly had a hole through which the keen salt air of the December night poured to refresh me.

Luckily, I was still cool enough and sane enough to be certain that I should never have time to enlarge the hole so that it would serve to let me out. I knew it must be only a matter of seconds until those in the powder-room would find the breach in the wall, and I should be like a trapped rat. But now my brain was working swiftly and clearly. The wooden bulkhead stopping the passage was merely covered with a bank of earth in the ravelin ditch to conceal it. Would my strength suffice to overturn it?

Dropping the sword, I put my shoulder to the bulkhead and heaved. It gave—sprung outward at the top and let a little rain of loosened dirt trickle down upon my head. Again I heaved, lifting until the veins in my forehead seemed about to burst; and I could hear the men in the powder-room dragging the table aside, and pulling the loose bricks out of the breach. Another moment, and—

But that moment was mine. With the final heave the bulwark tilted outward and fell into the outworks ravelin with a smothered crash, carrying me with it. There was a shout from behind to follow me out, and a sentry, pacing his beat on the breast-high banquette beyond the ravelin, stopped, gave a great cry as if he had seen a ghost, and let his musket off.

At the musket-fire and the shouts of those who were wriggling through the breach in the wall of the powder-room, there was a rush of the outworks sentinels from both directions. Seeing at once that my only way lay straight before me, I leaped afoot, dragged the dazed gun-firer from the banquette by his legs, and, with another bound, went over the breast-height and tumbled into the moat.

Here the palisade, a closely set fence of upright stakes driven into the ditch-bottom, balked me, but only until I could spring and reach the top and clamber up. It was here that I nearly got my quittance. If I should drop into the V-shaped ditch beyond the palisade, there was an even chance that I should not be able to climb out to the top of the abattis breast beyond. But if I could balance on the stakes for the single instant necessary, the gulf could be leaped. I drew myself up, balancing precariously on the stake tops; there was a roar of musketry behind me, a sharp twinge in my right shoulder, and I hurled myself outward into space.

I remember vaguely the fall among the sharpened tree-branch spines of the abattis, and, more dimly still, a frenzied effort to roll out of the tangle toward the edge of the sea-slope. After this I knew nothing till I came back to life at the bidding of a tossing and wrenching that seemed to be tearing me limb from limb.

The figure was no figure, as I soon discovered. I was in the thick of a group of men who were running swiftly along the beach, four of them carrying me. Somewhere in the background of the night, other men were running, and now and then muskets barked and there came a whining of bullets overhead.

While I was yet no more than half at myself, a voice I should recognize anywhere gasped a question.

“How much farther, Captain Sprigg?” the voice said; and I reached out and laid my hand on the arm of the big fellow running with my bearers.

“Jack!” I shouted feebly.

“The same, Dickie-lad,” he panted back. And then: “Hold the life in you by main strength, Dick; get a tail-twist on it and hang to it! Beatrix and Aunt Ju are waiting for us in the boats!” And again to Sprigg: “How much farther, in God’s name, Captain?”

It was no farther, as it chanced. At Pettus’s eager repetition of his anxious question, the running group swerved sharply to the waterside, and my bearers plunged thigh-deep into the icy water and lifted me gently over the side of a small boat; over the side and into the keeping of a pair of loving arms that clasped themselves quickly about me.

“Beatrix!” I cried in utter weakness; and then I felt her tears drop like warm rain on my face, and heard sounds as of a hand-to-hand struggle on the beach, in the midst of which our smaller boat put off and was pulled swiftly to the side of a schooner lying out of musket range from the shore.

Here again, helping hands were ready to lift me to the deck, where a spare sail was quickly folded to make a bed for me under the lee of the high bulwarks, and a ship’s lantern was brought, and loving womanly hands, four of them now, began to search anxiously for my wound.

In the thick of it I heard the other boat come bumping against the side of the ship, and the men, a half-dozen or more of them, trooped aboard, bringing a prisoner. Following quickly there was a medley of shouted sailor orders in the harsh nasal twang of Elijah Sprigg’s best voice; and then Jack came to kneel beside me, beseeching Beatrix to tell him I was not dead.

The white canvas was snapping and crackling overhead, and the Nancy Jane was heeling to the fair half-gale and racing down the harbor, before they would let me speak; and then all I could say was “Tell me—tell me.”

And they told me, Beatrix and Jack, with Cousin Ju to stroke my forehead and to break in with tearful self-reproachings for the tongue-lashing she had given me in Mr. Vandeventer’s parlor: told me how Jack had got Major Lee’s leave to follow Seytoun to the meeting-place on the Tarrytown road with Askew and Castner; how he had overheard enough to make him disguise himself as a farmer, and dog the three back to New York; how he had accidentally stumbled upon Sprigg and the women as they were making their way to the waterside, and so had been present when Champe brought the news of me.

“But—but how did you come to be so late in starting?” I said, holding my loved one close with the arm they had not bandaged.

“It was God’s Providence, no less, in a thing we took for the greatest disaster that could befall,” said Beatrix gently, taking up the narrative where Jack broke off. “Major Simcoe returned with his troop, and the twenty men of the Nancy Jane’s allotment were sent down to embark. Captain Sprigg claimed to have only the little boat, and he fetched the troopers aboard two or three at a time, and the sailors made prisoners of them, putting them in the hold as fast as they came over the side. All this took so much time that the captain was but just bringing us to the shore when Sergeant Champe came with your message.”

“Lord, lord!” cried I, laughing weakly. “And you’ve got twenty men of the Queen’s Rangers in the hold?”

“Twenty men and the tobacco,” Jack boasted; adding: “and one other fine young fellow—an officer, who was so forward in his pursuit of you that he got tangled up in a hand-to-hand mellay with the long-boat’s crew and we brought him off with us. He says his name is Castner, and he was most anxious to inquire about you, when I told him you were winged.”

Again I laughed, as I should have laughed with my last breath, I think.

“Castner—Castner a prisoner? Treat him well, I do beseech you,” I begged. “He is my friend and one of God’s own gentlemen. But you tell me nothing of Champe.”

“Because there is nothing to tell,” said Pettus sorrowfully. “He went back to the fort to try to get word to you; to tell you that if you failed to dig out, we meant to fall upon your gallows guard for a rescue when they brought you out. They will hang poor Champe, I’m thinking.”

“No,” said I, “they will not hang him. But he may wish they had before he ever hears the old troop call again, Jack,” and I was far indeed from knowing at the moment how true a prophecy I was making.

At this Pettus stood up, and looking back over the schooner’s foaming wake told us how they were displaying signal lanterns on the battlements of Fort George, and how a Bengal light was burning on a ship near the shore to show the sailors heaving up the anchor and making ready to chase us.

“But they’ll never catch us, dear heart!” said my loved one bravely, and again her arms went about my neck.

And so they did not; though to tell of how we ran the gauntlet of the fleet in the lower bay, and of what befell us and our one-and-twenty British captives on a voyage that ended far enough from the Capes of Virginia, would take a livelier pen than mine. For this, as you will see, is but a tale of a few landward days, while that other is of storm and shipwreck, of perilous weeks and weary months, before we saw the tidewater homeland again.

So, then, with the Nancy Jane dancing down the harbor with a bone in her teeth and her canvas straining to the gale; with Cousin Ju beginning to feel the coming sickness and begging Jade to take her to the cabin; and with my dear heart whispering to me between her kisses to know if my shoulder pain was more than I could bear, this pen need add no more to a tale which, brief as its measuring was in days and hours, has already grown over-long.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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Table of Contents

- MR. ARNOLD
- CONTENTS
- I HOW WE DRANK A TOAST
- II A VOICE IN THE NIGHT
- III IN WHICH I SHED MY RANK
- IV HOW MY RANK WAS REGAINED
- V A KISS AND A MAN’S LIFE
- VI DARK NIGHT
- VII AND AN UNBLEST DAWN
- VIII A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL
- IX IN WHICH I PAY A DUTY CALL
- X IN WHICH A WALL HAS EARS
- XI OUT OF THE NETTLE, DANGER
- XII HOW THE HOOK WAS BAITED
- XIII HOW A FISH WAS HOOKED AND LOST
- XIV A CASK OF BITTERS
- XV IN THE FOG
- XVI THE CUP OF TANTALUS
- XVII MASKED BATTERIES
- XVIII IN WHICH THE WIND KEEPS REVELS
- XIX MINE HONOR’S HONOR
- XX TRAITORS ALL
- XXI THE DRUMHEAD COURT
- XXII IN THE POWDER-ROOM
- XXIII OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE