Chapter I: FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room (5)

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.