Chapter I: FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room (3)

“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.