Chapter I: FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room (6)

“I don’t know who you are, or where you are taking me!” he burst out; and then he tried to twist his arm free, developing sudden and unlooked-for strength in the momentary struggle.

“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and followed to shut and bar the door.

He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat. For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever saw.

“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were saying that you had news to sell--”

“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or I--I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”

“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is your best assurance of safety.”

“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”

“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”

I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.

“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”

His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.

“Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from him.

“I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for his meddling; and the captain--”

“Well,” said I; “and the captain?”

His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning.

“You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?”

“Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.”

The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating.

“We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an _impasse_, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.”

“I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the fact,” I objected bluntly.

“Ah; that is another drawback--one which I overlooked at the moment. It would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of getting rid of the _corpus delicti_. But if I might offer a suggestion; the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your sergeant might compass the funeral--though not without a possible risk.”

His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.

“No,” he went on, in the same even tone, “the disposition of my poor body is not what deters you. It is that other thing I mentioned--your reluctance to premeditated blood-shedding. Now that is purely conventional, if I may say so. To kill is to take life; and the mere manner of its taking can make but little difference to the slayer, and none at all to the victim. Yet the traditions are strong; and I am relying quite confidently upon them, Captain Page.”

“You seem to be,” I muttered grimly. “But there is a point beyond which the traditions do not run. Setting aside the instinct of self-preservation--which is stronger than any blood or breeding--your life is justly forfeit. If you had your deserts, you would be lying in some shallow grave beside Major André at this present hour. If I am what you say I am, it is neither more nor less than my duty to carry out the sentence of the court-martial which condemned you to hang as a spy.”

“But if you put that sentence into execution, Captain Page, you have still failed to recapture your escaped secret,” he said.

“How is that? Who else besides yourself knows it?”

“The officer in the camp at Tappan who connived at my escape. I gave it to him as the price of his help.”

“Which is all the more reason why I should kill you, here and now, Mr. Askew,” I insisted.

“True; very true,” he rejoined musingly. “Yet you will not do it, Captain Page.”

“Why won’t I?” I demanded.

“Chiefly because of the traditions we speak of. I am an unarmed man--ah, my dear sir, you rashly lost a point in your own favor when you took my poor weapons away from me--I am unarmed, as I say, and can offer no more resistance to a man of your youth and weight than a harmless, necessary cat. No, you will not break with the time-honored code of your order--not even to save your life.”

Slowly it was borne in upon me that the man was coolly braving me; nay, more, he was daring me, taunting me. Yet all that he was saying was most bitingly true.

“What are you leading up to?” I asked shortly; and he spread his hands in polite deprecation.

“Did I not say that we were at the impassable point, Mr. Page?”

“Yes; but you did not believe it. You are not talking to hear the sound of your own voice.”

“No; nor am I talking to gain time, though it may appear so to you. Indeed, I fancy there is more safety in haste. If your black-faced sergeant should happen in.... Now there is your chance, Captain Page. Sit quietly where you are, with your bare sword to keep me where I am, until your man comes back. Then you can shirk all responsibility and the sergeant--lacking a gentleman’s traditions--will do the rest.”

I thought this was the subtlest thrust of all; to point out delicately that I should be responsible for what Champe might do. But there was no escaping the conclusion.

“Come to the point of your bargaining, Mr. Askew,” I commanded. “You see a way out, and I don’t--other than the bloody one.”

“Ah; now we are coming upon some more habitable ground. Outwardly, you are a Loyalist, Mr. Page, and inwardly, I doubt not, a true patriot. I am neither. I had thought of asking a hundred guineas for this news I carry--it is not too much, you would say?--and it doesn’t matter a boddle to me whose money it is. In other words, your gold will have as true a ring in my ears as Sir Henry Clinton’s, or even Mr. Arnold’s.”

“Bah!” I said; “you would take my money one minute and sell me to the highest bidder the next.”

He nodded slowly. “You have pointed out a risk--a certain risk to yourself. I might not keep faith with you. Still, the chances are somewhat in your favor. The matter you touched upon while we were together in the street--the calumny connecting me with Major André’s misfortune--would have its weight. Having sold you your timely lump of silence and pocketed my price--”

“You might be willing to let well enough alone and not try to double on me? I think that is most unlikely, Mr. Askew. Don’t you?”

“It is a nice point,” he said, as if deliberating on it. “On the one hand, I have my hundred guineas without the risk. On the other, since I was willing to take the risk to earn them from Clinton or Arnold, why should I hesitate to try the doubling? Ah, I have it! You have heard the saying that money is always cowardly, Mr. Page? With your hundred guineas in my pocket, each cowardly guinea of them will be persuading me to save its life--and yours.”

I laughed. The thing had risen to the plane of humor. Here was a man whose life lay in my hand, and he was trying, not to bribe me to spare him, but to persuade me to give him a handsome present for the privilege of sparing him!

But when the laugh was over, the dilemma still remained, with its horns as sharp as before. If I could not kill this scoundrel in cold blood, neither could I turn him loose, with or without a golden bid for his silence. I thought it out calmly and saw no middle way. The man must die, but I would give him an honester man’s chance to die fighting.

My saber was standing in the chimney corner where Champe had left it the night before. I drew it from the sheath and laid it on the table, with the hilt to my spy’s hand.

“Take it and do your best,” I said. “We have spent too many words and too much time.”

But he merely shook his head soberly and locked his hands over one knee.

“I should be a greater ninny than I hoped you took me for, to give you so good an excuse for pinking me, Captain Page. I am no swashbuckling horse-soldier, to tangle my legs in a sword, or to know how to use one.”

Here was the _impasse_ again, with no way to circumvent it, that I could see. What was I to do? With the long Scots’ rapier for a walking-staff I began to pace the floor, cudgeling my brain to think of some expedient that would secure our safety, Champe’s and mine, without sinking one or both of us to the level of remorseless assassins. I had not dreamed it would be so hard. Thumbing it over with Champe, the one desirable thing seemed to be to get hold of this scoundrel before he could leak the news that would efface us. But now he was secured, the whole thing was to know what to do with him.

Askew never moved a muscle as I strode back and forth behind his chair. He sat perfectly still, staring into the blackened fireplace as if its soot-covered interior had fascinated him. A dozen times I passed him, and at each facing about he seemed to be staring the harder, with the thin fingers more tightly interlocked over the suspended knee. Then--

I do not know how it came about, or why I spun on my heel and threw the rapier up to guard my head. It was not for any warning either to eye or ear that he gave me, certainly. But when I wheeled, the heavy trooper’s sword was flashing in the air and my instinctive parry served only to break the force of the blow--to turn it flat-bladed when it was meant to be a cleaver-cut such as a butcher would aim at the meat on his block. Then the half-lighted dusk of the long room burst into a thousand scintillating stars, and I knew no more until I came back to life with John Champe kneeling beside me and sopping my head with icy water from the hand-basin.

“The man--Askew?” I gasped, when I could find the words. “Is he gone?”

“I don’t see him anywhere,” said the sergeant, making believe to peer into the gathering shadows. Then he chuckled. “So it was Askew who gave you this goose-egg on your skull, was it? But rest you easy, Captain Dick; he has had time to swim the Hudson corner-wise before this. The blood was dried in your hair when I found you lying here--and that was a good quarter-hour ago.”

I sat up on the floor, and the stars began to twinkle again.

“Help me,” I muttered. “We must get out of this--now--this minute! That double-faced fiend will be back again, with a file of soldiers at his heels. Stir yourself, man, for heaven’s sake! I tell you he knows us both--_and knows us for what we really are_!”

XIV

A CASK OF BITTERS

EXPECTING nothing less than the spy’s return at the head of an arresting party, we lost no time getting out of the tavern, Champe going first, and I following when he gave the prearranged signal that the coast was clear.

Being safely out-of-doors, our next care was to put distance between us and the threatening trap from which we had escaped. Taking the readiest way that offered we hurried eastward through the burned district, avoiding the barracks on one hand and the water-front on the other, having no particular destination in view at first, and no plan other than the simple one of losing ourselves as completely and speedily as possible.

In this dodging flight, on which we ran as the wicked do,--with no man pursuing,--the sergeant was the file-leader. Having been in the town for near two months, he knew its byways, and though the short winter day was drawing on to its early dusk, he seemed never to be at fault in our various windings and turnings.

We were a good distance from the fort, and had borne eastward and northward until the houses were growing far apart and scattering, when Champe led the way to the right and we pressed on until we could hear the waters of the East River lapping coldly on the shingle. By this time the stars were coming out, and a thin sickle of a moon in its first quarter hung in the western sky. In the chill, gray half-light a house, isolated by its situation, and still farther set apart from its neighbors by a high-fenced garden, loomed darkly before us, its windows shuttered and its chimney smokeless.

“Here is our burrow,” announced the sergeant, opening the garden gate to admit us. Then, as I reeled rather than walked into the enclosure: “Is Mr. Askew’s love pat still fretting you, Captain?”

I said it was, and made light of it, though my head was buzzing like a hive of angry bees. I had no notion of where Champe was taking me; and, what with the pain and the desire to be warmed and at ease, I was not curious enough to inquire.

Quite as if he were the owner of the house, Champe strode to the door, fitted a key in the lock, clicked it and bade me enter. But since the room to which the door gave ingress was as dark as a pocket, I let him show me the way. The interior was cold and discomforting, with the dead chill which goes with closed doors and windows and long-extinguished fires; and when the sergeant had shut and locked the door we were in darkness thick enough to be cut with a knife.

“Hold hard for a minute until I make a light, Captain Dick,” said the voice of my companion, muffled, as it seemed to me, by the tangible darkness. Then came the snicking of flint upon steel, a spark, a dull glow in the tinder, and, a little later, a flame for a candle which, when it was lighted, showed us a scantily furnished living-room in some disorder, a table with dishes and the remainder of a meal standing in the middle of the floor, and a hearth cold, but with the kindlings laid ready for lighting.

Champe thrust the candle flame among the dry pine splinters, and when the blaze began to murmur in the chimney, he filled a kettle from the water bucket bracketed on the wall and hung it on the crane. At this juncture my curiosity came to life.

“Give it a Dutch name, Champe; whose house is this you’re making so free with?” I demanded, drawing a chair up to the table and sitting down to hold my buzzing head in my hands.

“You’ve guessed it at the first word,” chuckled the sergeant. “It’s the Dutch boat-builder’s house, sure enough--or it was before I buried him in the cellar and took possession in the name of General Washington and the Continental Congress. That’s my dinner you’re looking at--or what remains of it. And there’s more where that came from--such as it is.”

“But the man?” I exclaimed in honest horror. “You didn’t murder him, Champe?”

“That’s as it may be. I wrapped him up in some of his own boat cordage, with a knotted turn of it between his teeth for quietness’ sake, and lowered him into the hold. Alive or dead, he’ll be there now, if the rats haven’t eaten him.”

“This won’t do at all, Sergeant!” I protested in shocked deprecation. “The fact that the man happened to own a boat which we needed is no reason why we should turn rawhead-and-bloody-bones pirates. Bring the candle and show me where you have put him.”

“Going to have him up for our supper guest, Captain Dick? He’ll be most awkwardly in the way, won’t he?”

“Never mind; bring the candle and show me the way. Why, good heavens, man! what has the poor devil done that we should treat him as if we were red Indians? He may be one of our friends, for aught we know!”

“He’s a Dutchman, and he builds small-boats for the king’s ships,” growled Champe stubbornly; but he took up the candle and piloted the way to a room in the rear, a bare shed of a place, with fire-wood stacked along two sides of it, a dismantled baking oven buttressing the chimney of the fore-room, and a great pile of the bricks heaped upon a huge square trap-door leading to the cellar. From a ceiling beam above the trap a stout iron hook depended, as if the cellar had been a ship’s hold to be filled and emptied with a block and tackle.

Champe put his candle on the oven ruins and addressed himself to the task of removing the door weightings. The uncovering revealed a ring sunk in the planking of the trap, and when the door was lifted, an ill-smelling black cavern, with rude steps leading down into it, came into view.

The sergeant swung into the dank pit and held up his hand for the candle.

“Give me the glim and I’ll fetch him out,” he said. “There’s no need for two of us.” And when the yellow glow of the candle disappeared in the liquor-smelling depths I was left in the dark.

It seemed a long time before the glow reddened again in the darkness below as Champe made his way back to the stair-head.

“Come down, Captain Dick, if your head’s steady enough,” he called. “I’m fairly stuck.”

I promptly lowered myself into the hole, with the sergeant lighting the way for me. The cellar was a curiously spacious underground store-room for so small a house, wide and to the full as high as the rooms above, and the liquor odor was amply accounted for by a double row of great casks, ranked against the walls. Then I saw the meaning of the trap-door’s size, and of the hook set in the beam above it.

“Your Dutchman is something both more and less than a boat-builder, Sergeant,” I commented. “This is a smuggler’s store-house. But where is he?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said my companion in a mystified tone; and presently he was showing me the cords with which the man had been bound--enough of them to have swathed the captive from neck to ankles.

The knots had been untied, not cut, and the ropes had evidently been tossed aside in haste. But there was no man entangled in their meshes, and nothing to point out his way of escape from the cellar.

We looked everywhere, as we thought, and carefully, for with this man at large there was an added danger to be faced. How he could have escaped from the cellar was a mystery which was still unsolved after we had examined as we thought, every foot of exposed wall surface for another outlet and had found none.

“We have missed it somehow,” I insisted, when we had made a second circuit of the place, peering behind the casks of liquor and probing, as we imagined, every nook and corner that would have hidden a cat. “There is a secret way out of here, somewhere, and your man has taken it. Let us hope he will stay away until we have borrowed what we need of food and shelter and transport.”

“I’ll drink to that hope,” said my sergeant, who had found an earthen pot and a cask up-ended with a spigot piercing it near its lower chime.

I told him to drink heartily and give the house a good name, but at the first mouthful he strangled and spat and spilled the potful of the liquor in the straw.

“Faugh!” he grimaced. “I thought I knew all the flavors that can come out of a barrel, but this is sure the major-general of them all for nastiness! _Whoosh!_ it tastes as if all the old boots of the British Army had been steeped in it for a month!”

“And yet some other man would no doubt choose it before good, sound old Madeira,” I returned, climbing the steps to the cleaner air of the room above. And when Champe was up: “Shut the trap, Sergeant, so we may eat our suppers without the reminders. It would make a drunkard sick to stay within nose distance of that foul hole.”

Back at our fireplace in the fore-room, we found the kettle boiling merrily. Champe discovered a tea-chest among the boat-builder’s provisions, and a hot cup of tea, made strong enough to float an egg, speedily cleared my head of the bee-tangles, and let me punish, with as good an appetite as the sergeant’s, the black bread and cheesy butter, greased down with cuts from the haunch of boiled ham that Champe had spared from his midday meal.

Not to miss any of the comforts afterward, we rummaged a bit of tobacco out of the Dutchman’s closet, together with a couple of the long-stemmed china-bowled pipes of the Netherlands; and, could we have been assured that we should remain undisturbed for the hour or two that must elapse before it would be safe to take the to-be-borrowed boat out of the Dutchman’s shop at the river-end of the garden, and in it seek fresh adventures, there would have been nothing left to wish for.

But there are no assurances in this world of chance-takings. We did not know what moment our boat-builder might turn up, with a gang of smugglers or others at his elbow, and with a just cause of quarrel big enough to warrant anything he might do to us. Moreover, there was Mr. James Askew, also at large, and doubtless seeking for us as the woman of Scripture, who lit her candle and swept her house diligently until she found her lost piece of money. Moreover, again, there was the Irish grog-seller, whose silence, bought and paid for though it was, was worth little more than a perjurer’s oath.

“Well, let’s be doing,” I said, when we had wrought through a pipeful or two of the boat-builder’s tobacco, and the weight of the various “moreovers” was beginning to grow oppressive. “Will your Dutchman happen to have such a thing as a lantern about his house?”

The sergeant went to rummage in the outer room, coming back almost immediately to ask if I had heard a noise.

“Nothing but the wind in the chimney,” I said.

“I did,” said Champe, listening attentively. “It was like the soft slamming of a door, and I thought it was in here.”

“Not here, certainly. There is no door but the front one, and that is locked as you left it.”

“All right; then I didn’t hear it,” he contradicted, and went out again to continue the lantern hunt.

The next time it was I who heard the noise, which sounded like a blow struck upon an empty cask. Tip-toeing out, I laid a finger on Champe’s shoulder, and his nervous start was a measure of the pitch to which we were both keyed.

“Hist!” I whispered; “your Dutchman has come back to his cellar!”

The sergeant cocked an ear and we both listened intently. There were no more alarms, and the silence of the grave seemed to have settled on the lonesome house.

“What did you hear?” queried my companion, when the silence had become unendurable.

“Some one kicking an empty cask. Lift that trap again while I hold the light for you.”

Champe stooped and raised the heavy door, and again the rank smell of the liquor, more overpowering than before, rose into the room. None the less, Champe dropped into the vault, skipping the first half-dozen steps of the ladder-like stair; and when he was down I gave him the candle and followed.

To all appearances the spacious cellar was as we had left it an hour before, though I could not rid myself of the notion that the smell of the liquor was vastly stronger. We passed again between the rows of casks, the sergeant with the flaring candle held high. In the farthest corner the bunch of tangled cords still lay where the boat-builder, escaping from his bonds, had flung it down.

“Nothing different,” was Champe’s remark; and then some devil of suggestion put the idea into his head which was like to cost us more than we knew how to pay. “Sound the casks,” he said. “Maybe some of them are empty.”

I began it on my side with my sword-hilt, and the first resounding thwack brought the catastrophe. As if the blow had touched a hidden spring, the head flew out of the up-ended cask near the trap, and a dripping, reeking little man climbed agilely out of it and darted up the steep stair, with Champe and me knocking each other down in the effort to overtake him. Followed swiftly the crash of the trap-door falling into place, and intermittent thunder as of a brick wall tumbling into sections upon the floor above--thunder eloquent of the fact that the fugitive was taking a leaf out of Champe’s own book and weighting the trap for us as the sergeant had weighted it for him.

The wind, or the shock of the falling door, had extinguished our candle, and we were in total darkness. But Champe had his flint and steel and tinder box, and the tallow dip, for what small good it might do us, was soon flaring again.

“That was a master bright idea of yours, Sergeant Champe,” I commented grimly, when the noise overhead had ceased, and we were left to silence and our own thoughts. “If you had only added that we should begin with the cask which was most likely to hold our Jack-in-the-box--but it came wrong end foremost, like everything else in this wretched mission of ours!”

Champe was smacking his lips reminiscently and paying scant attention to my irony.

“Never say I can’t tell soaked boots when I taste them,” he broke out triumphantly. Then the disgust of it suddenly overcame him and he spat again. “Yah! when next I lay hands on that Dutchman, I’ll make him drink every drop of it he has left behind.”

“‘First catch your hare,’” I quoted. “As matters stand now, we are the trapped ones, and it was very neatly done. I think we are likely to stay here until this boat-builder can go and find some of his smuggler friends to help him collect his bill for damages. And it will be a pretty long score, too, wouldn’t you say?”

“Long enough,” was the reply; “though I didn’t mishandle him any more than I had to, to make sure of the boat for to-night. A boat we must have, says you; and orders are orders, for Jack Champe. But let’s try a push on that trap--until we find out if he’s piled the whole oven a-top of us.”

The lift from the steps was clearly impossible. Only one of us could stand to shoulder the door at once, and when we had both tried and failed, we rolled a cask under the opening and so got the double heave.

“Lift, Captain!” grunted Champe; “lift till your eyes hang out!” and so I did, and so did he; but the loaded door never stirred. The Dutchman had done his work faithfully and well.

The sergeant came down from the steps with the veins in his forehead swelled to great whipcords.

“I’ve put three hundred pounds of tobacco to the height of my shoulder with less wind-cutting,” he panted, scraping the sweat from his face with a crooked forefinger. And then: “I’ll never trap a rat again while I live, Captain Dick. I know now how it feels.”

“We won’t give up yet,” I cut in. “There must be some way out of this hole. If it were a common house-cellar, there would be no need; but as a store-house for smugglers ... they’d never leave themselves without a back door for emergencies. Take that side first, and we’ll sound every stone in the walls, if need be.”

This time we were made to know how carelessly we had searched in the former instance. Behind a tier of casks, which were ranked so closely against the wall as completely to conceal it, was a low arched opening closed by a stout door with neither lock nor hinges. With no tools heavier than our swords, we could not force it; and when we drummed upon it, it gave back the blows solidly, as if it were backed by a bank of earth or another wall.

“That is why our Dutchman hid in the cask and waited for his chance,” said Champe, when the low door had baffled us completely. “He couldn’t open this dodge-way, himself.”

After that, we left nothing untried for the time we had at our disposal. The walls were carefully sounded, stone by stone, the straw on the floor was swept aside and the flagging received the same unsparing scrutiny. Failing all else, we meant to try digging out the mortar joints around a stone in that part of the wall which Champe remembered as the highest above ground on the outside--this with our swords’ points. But we put that off until the last for the best of reasons. It was not unlikely that we should need the weapons for another purpose before long, and it would be an ill thing to have either of them broken or dulled.

We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.

“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?”

“An hour, maybe, if we don’t have to go too far a-sea to dodge the guard boats.”

“Good. Then we have something less than an hour in which to claw or fight our way out of this and get afloat. Work your brain with that end in view, John Champe: our lives are but a means to an end, which is to drag the greatest villain of his time back to justice. Don’t lose sight of that if we have to fight for it; but we’ll not fight if we can help it. Back to that dodge-door again, and we’ll see if we can’t hit upon some way to force it.”

XV

IN THE FOG

CHAMPE nodded and we passed together behind the row of casks concealing the low arched doorway. Wedging the candle in a niche of the stone wall we made another examination of the mysteriously fastened door. Common sense cried aloud that it must be openable in some way from the inside; that no door save that of a jail was ever built otherwise.

“Maybe it will be one of these jamb stones that will unlock it,” Champe suggested; so we laid hold and pushed and pulled on first one and then another of the stones framing the opening. At the third trial we found one that seemed slightly loose and gave a little, and after that, stuck fast and gave no more. But when we put our united strength to it again, it yielded slowly, leaving an angled opening to some dark space beyond, in which Champe was presently thrusting an exploring arm.

“I have it,” he declared. There was a sound as of wooden bolts leaving their sockets, and the door swung open to my shoulder-push, heavily because of a weighting of sand-bags with which it was hung, doubtless to deaden sounds from within or without, we did not know which.

“’Tis plain as a pikestaff now why the pickled Dutchman stayed till we came,” was Champe’s muttered comment. “He hadn’t the gizzard in him to move that stone by himself.”

We had crawled safely through the archway, and into a roomy underground passage beyond it, before we heard a squeaking of pulleys betokening a lifting of the kitchen trap-door by means of a block and tackle. Champe was for hurrying, having an outdoor man’s horror of being forced to fight in an underground burrow, but while I shared this reluctance with him to the full, I delayed long enough to close the weighted door for the halt it might impose upon our pursuers. When he saw what I was about, Champe quickly lent a hand, and what was still more to the purpose, his mechanical head. Slipping one of the wooden bar-bolts from its sockets, he braced it angle-wise against the door so that nothing short of a battering-ram could force an opening from the cellar-side.

Our chasers, whoever they were, were down the stair and at the barrier wall by this time, and a bolt-sliding hand was reaching through the jamb-stone hole while we were hammering our brace into place. Champe grinned ferociously and held the candle flame for a single instant to the back of the groping hand, grinning again at the snatched withdrawal and the yell of pain that went with it; whereupon we fled, praying that the underground tunnel might lead us to the boat-house at the foot of the garden, or if not there, at least to the water side.

It did end, as we hoped it might, in the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge, and now there was little question but that the boat-house and the cellar served the purpose of a gang of smugglers. Our craft, the light ship’s tender for the acquiring of which we had like to have paid the price of our lives, lay on the launching ways. A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge.

The shapely little craft shot well out from the shore, clearing the beach by a long pistol-shot before it lost headway. For some minute or so we lay motionless and kept silence. There was a light in the house out of which we had just burrowed, but we heard no sounds of a fresh alarm. The sergeant chuckled as if he had just come from a merrymaking.

“I think they’ll be all muddle-headed Dutchmen in that smuggling brotherhood, Captain Dick!” he scoffed gently. “To think they wouldn’t leave a few stout fellows to guard the boat-shop when they knew that rabbit-burrow would take us straight to it!”

“We’ll not quarrel with any muddle-headedness of that sort,” I said; and thereupon we shipped the oars noiselessly and pulled softly away from the shore, turning the boat’s head southward and westward only when we felt sure we had gained an offing which would carry us outside of the line of guard ships.

Our guess was good this time. We had pulled cautiously for full half the distance we had to go, and had safely passed three of the coast-guarding vessels, dim bulks lying between us and the shore, when a fog came creeping up from the lower bay. Champe saw it first and pointed out the hazard it would bring.

“We must pull smarter for it, Captain Dick,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’ll be no better than blind men in a strange town if that floating cloud catches up with us.”

So he said, and so I thought, and so it presently proved when the fog closed in about us. We had no compass, and could only hold on as nearly as we could guess in the direction we thought we ought to go. Once we made sure we heard the tramp of the sentry on the battlements of the fort, and the low-voiced challenge of guard-relieving,--which would make the time eleven o’clock,--but before we could be certain of these sounds we were tangled again as to our directions, and the next sounds that came to us were the bumping of our boat’s bows against the side of a ship, and a hoarse voice shouting, “Avast there, you lubbers! Unship your oars and lie still or I’ll fire into you!”

XVI

THE CUP OF TANTALUS

TAKING it all in all, it seems that we should have come promptly to the conclusion that, on this raw night of the seventeenth of December, the stars in their courses were fighting against us; that our own lucky star, if we had any, was a million miles below the horizon.

At the gruff hail from the ship we had collided with, there was nothing for it but to lie on our oars, and to take what was coming to us. I expected a peremptory command to come aboard; but instead, a boat-hook was reached down to hold us as we were, a lantern was lowered in our direction, and the officer of the watch demanded to know who we were and what we were doing.

Here was a chance for the exercising of my most promising gift, and I improved it instantly.

“If this is a king’s ship, we are wearing his majesty’s colors. If not, you may go to the devil with your questions,” I made answer, with all the coolness I could muster.

“Your names, your business, and the night password!” roared our questioner, losing patience, as I thought he would.

“We don’t yield any of the three to every jack-in-a-box ensign who bobs up to ask them,” I retorted blandly. “Go and call your captain, my friend.”

Judging by the choking and spluttering going on in the upper dimnesses I thought our officer, a little man with bullet eyes and a turned-up nose, would have a fit. When he had sworn himself into some atmosphere of coherence he commanded us to tumble aboard, or by all the sea-gods he would keelhaul us first and hang us at the yard-arm afterward. Whereupon I laughed pleasantly, and told him we should do well enough as we were if he would let us have a compass by which to find our way ashore.

That brought him down to us, hand-under-hand on the first rope he could lay hold of; and when he dropped into our cockle-shell we had much ado to keep him from swamping it or himself.

“Up the side, the pair of you!” he blustered, lugging out a huge pistol; and then the light of the lantern showed him our Loyal American facings and my captain’s shoulder-knot, and he changed countenance.

“Sit down, Ensign,” said I, “and be at ease. You’ll spill us if you’re not careful.” And when Champe had slyly rocked the boat to emphasize the invitation: “Now, perhaps, you will be good enough to tell us which way to steer to make the landing at Fort George.”

“Your pardon, Captain,” he said, the bluster all gone out of him. “You are but a cable’s length from the fort. But the orders are strict. You have the password?”

I gave it.

“And your rank and standing?”

“Captain in the Loyal American Legion, and acting aide to General Arnold, detailed for this night on special duty. And my companion is a sergeant in the same service, pulling an oar for me. Is there anything else you would like to know, Ensign?”

“H’m,” he said reflectively. “A lieutenant and a sergeant was what they said to be on the lookout for, but that may have been a mistake.” And then, with a furtive glance at the priming of his great pistol: “I’m sorry to insist, Captain, but I shall have to ask you to come aboard with me. Orders are orders, and they must be obeyed.”

“But why?” I protested. “If you detain me it is at your own risk. My affair is General Arnold’s, and it does not admit of delay.”

“If you are really General Arnold’s aide, you will know more than I can tell you,” he made answer. “It is rumored that two men, an officer and a soldier from Mr. Washington’s army, are here for the purpose of abducting Benedict Arnold, and the rumor says that they came as deserters from the rebels and enlisted in Mr. Arnold’s legion. Be that as it may, two men of the Loyal Americans, a lieutenant and a sergeant, are reported missing, and we have orders to look out for them. You see the situation, Captain?”

Truly, I did; and it was a very sorry situation, indeed. There could be but one explanation. James Askew had sold his news to Clinton or Arnold, and the orders were out to apprehend us. It was but a slip that the missing “captain” figured as a lieutenant on the lips of our ensign; and the sergeant’s rank was correctly stated. So far as I knew, we two, Champe and I, were the only stragglers from the legion; Champe was known to have left his transport ship, and neither of us knew what had transpired after mid-afternoon, when I had left Arnold putting his wife into the hackney coach with Beatrix, and had gone to sink my hook into Mr. Askew’s gills.

As far as I could see, we were fairly netted. Once aboard the schooner under whose counter we were lying, and it was but a step to Fort George and its dungeons, and another, and still shorter one, from the prison to the gallows.

The red-faced little ensign had dropped into the stern-sheets of our boat, and so he sat facing us. I guessed now that he had no captain; that he was the ranking officer of the small guard-ship. Otherwise, his superior would have been on deck long before this, hurling questions at us. If we could but win the red-faced one--

I could not see Champe, who was behind me on the forward thwart. But when the ensign stood up and called to the boat-hook man to haul us amidships, I felt the grim sergeant’s determination in the thrill of the light craft under me. Catching the one fortuitous moment when the ensign was extending a hand to fend us off from the schooner’s side, Champe entangled his oar between the boat and the ship’s bilge, made an awkward effort to disengage it, and clumsily lost his balance, careening the boat with such a sudden jerk that the red-faced little officer went overboard in a clean, sharp headlong plunge.

Whether it was Champe’s intention to drown the officer, offhand, or merely to make a diversion out of which something might grow to our benefit, I never knew. But the diversion was a fact accomplished, beyond doubt. With lusty sailor shouts, the man with the boat-hook gave the alarm, and to the watch on deck was added the watch below, which came tumbling up at the cry of “Man overboard!” Naturally, with no lights, and with the fog thickening on every fresh breath of the sea wind, the men on the schooner did nothing but get in one another’s way; and the ensign who, like many another sailor, could swim no more than a stone, would have drowned a dozen times before they got their tender down from the davits at the stern.

But now I had my small inspiration, and with a quick word to Champe to secure his intelligent help, it was put into effect. It was a simple expedient, namely, to keep our boat within easy snatching distance of the drowning officer, and then to haul him aboard when he was too well soaked and frozen to remember his orders--all of which we did in the proper sequence, and with the desired result.

The pug-nosed little man was no longer red-faced when we passed him up the side of the schooner and into the hands of his excited crew, and no one said us nay when we sheered off silently into the fog afterward, and diligently lost ourselves once more.

That was no joke. We did lose ourselves beautifully this second time, and when, after what figured to us as two or three of the longest hours ever measured by falling sand grains, our boat took ground with a sidelong lurch, we had no more idea than a pair of innocents what land it might be.

Here came our first disagreement. Champe was for sheering off again and waiting for the fog to lift: I said no; that the fog might not lift until dawn, and, in any event, we must land somewhere, sometime. The sergeant gave way, finally, but not without many misgivings openly expressed. Luck was not with us, he said, and it would be our unblest, crooked hap to walk straight into the arms of some of those who were looking for us.

In divided counsels, therefore, we took our stiffened limbs out of their boat crampings, and stamped and beat our arms and got the sluggish blood in motion before we dragged our craft high and dry, and set out to scramble up the steep bank fronting our landing-place. At the top, to our astonishment, we were above the thin skim of fog that lay like a veil on the surface of the water, and could see dimly the surrounding objects.

The first of these was a man, walking slowly and with measured steps toward us on the bank’s edge.

“A sentry,” muttered the sergeant, and we flattened ourselves silently where we were till the soldier passed us, creeping swiftly forward to cross the line a minute later.

Not above a stone’s throw from the waterside we were brought to a stand by a barrier of some sort which, to the sense of touch, proclaimed itself to be a high wooden fence. It was here that Champe gripped my arm and drew me down beside him.

“The luck’s turned, Captain Dick!” he whispered excitedly. “Of all the thousand places where we might have landed, we’ve drifted blindly to the one we were aiming for! This is our garden, and here is the board you kicked loose when you were walking with Sir Judas night before last!”

It was as true as it was blankly incredible. The board pointed out by Champe lay just as it had fallen, and peering through the gap it had left, we could see the dark bulk of Arnold’s house, with Sir Henry Clinton’s shouldering it on the right.

There were no lights in any of the windows, and the garden, when we had entered it through the gap in the fence, was silent and deserted, as might be expected at such an hour. We were in the shadow of the house itself when I bade Champe strike a spark into his tinder box to let us tell the time. It was past two o’clock, though how much past I could not tell, since I had forgotten to wind my watch and it had stopped exactly on the hour.

Determining this, we held a whispered consultation. It was terribly late to press our plan to its conclusion, and Champe urged this, arguing most sensibly that, if we had all good fortune from this on, we could not hope to row far on the way to Tappan before the daylight would show us to all who cared to see; that with the tide against us we would not be past the British boat patrols by sunrise.

On the other hand, I contended that it might very well be now or never.

“You heard what the guard-ship ensign said: if daylight finds us in New York, this day’s sun will be the last we’ll ever see, for they tell me they hang their caught spies at midnight. Our alternative is to take to the boat again and try to escape as we can. But if we try to do this, we may as well take Arnold with us. If we are caught, we hang, anyway, and none the less certainly if we are caught empty-handed.”

Champe saw the force of this, as I was sure he would; and if his teeth were chattering when we set about breaking into the house, why so were mine for that matter, and I protest it was from the raw chill of the morning and not from fear.

Our breaking and entering was easily accomplished. A window in a rear room gave to the cautious prying of Champe’s saber point; and from that room, which, as I knew, was used for stores, to the lower corridor, or entrance hall, we came by forcing the lock of the communicating door.

I half expected to find an aide or an orderly sleeping in this lower hall, if, indeed, there should not be a sentry, awake and on guard. But there was neither nor none of these. The hall was deserted and silent; and when we drew the curtains of the side-lights at the front, there was no sentry outside, save the one whose footfalls we could faintly hear as he marched back and forth before Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters.

Here again, then, fortune appeared to be favoring us most astoundingly. It was almost unbelievable that the man we meant to seize and carry off was sleeping quietly, and wholly at our mercy, in the room above. But, unless his guard was in the room with him, there was none in the house; of this we made sure as a condition precedent to our creeping silently up the stairs.

Before the closed door of the office-bedroom I gave the sergeant final whispered instructions; this after we had softly tried the door and found, to our greater astonishment, that it was unlocked.

“When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute; once awakened, Arnold will fight--no man more desperately. But you know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. Do your work quickly and thoroughly, and use this door-key in your knotted handkerchief for a gag. Are you ready?”

“Ready and waiting, Captain Dick,” was the muttered reply; and we swung the door slowly on its hinges.

Though there were ample windows in both ends of it, the long room was dark. But now our eyes had become somewhat accustomed to these inner glooms, and we could make out the dim shapes of the furnishings nearest to us; the writing-table, the chairs, the clumsy, cushioned settle drawn out before the cold hearth.