[Illustration]
“Mais j’y suis, et, mes bons camarades, par tous les dieux, j’y
reste!”
CHARLES K. JOHNSTON.
[Illustration]
MR. ARNOLD
[Illustration]
MR. ARNOLD
A ROMANCE OF THE REVOLUTION
_By_
FRANCIS LYNDE
_Author of_
THE GRAFTERS, THE MASTER OF APPLEBY,
THE QUICKENING, ETC.
_Frontispiece by_
JOHN WOLCOTT ADAMS
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1923
BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I HOW WE DRANK A TOAST 1
II A VOICE IN THE NIGHT 13
III IN WHICH I SHED MY RANK 32
IV HOW MY RANK WAS REGAINED 50
V A KISS AND A MAN’S LIFE 73
VI DARK NIGHT 85
VII AND AN UNBLEST DAWN 93
VIII A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL 104
IX IN WHICH I PAY A DUTY CALL 114
X IN WHICH A WALL HAS EARS 131
XI OUT OF THE NETTLE, DANGER 146
XII HOW THE HOOK WAS BAITED 163
XIII HOW A FISH WAS HOOKED AND LOST 176
XIV A CASK OF BITTERS 192
XV IN THE FOG 205
XVI THE CUP OF TANTALUS 209
XVII MASKED BATTERIES 221
XVIII IN WHICH THE WIND KEEPS REVELS 239
XIX MINE HONOR’S HONOR 256
XX TRAITORS ALL 277
XXI THE DRUMHEAD COURT 296
XXII IN THE POWDER-ROOM 307
XXIII OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD 329
MR. ARNOLD
MR. ARNOLD
I
HOW WE DRANK A TOAST
IF THERE were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14,
1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my
twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and
I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck
van Ditteraick’s pot-house tavern at Nyack.
The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously
bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in
wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long
pull down the river from Teller’s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the
four miles from General Washington’s headquarters at Tappan to keep
the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill
whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or
either of us.
“I’m telling you, Dick, we’re miles deeper in the ditch than we’ve
been any year since this cursed war began!” he summed up gloomily,
when we had chafed in sour impatience, as all men did, over the
sorry condition of our rag-tag, starving patriot army. “Four months
ago we had eight thousand men fronting Sir Henry Clinton here in the
Highlands; to-day we couldn’t muster half that number. Where are all
the skulkers?”
“Gone home to get something to eat,” I laughed. “We need to hang a few
commissary quartermasters, Jack.”
“It isn’t all in the commissary,” he contended, “though I grant you
there are empty bellies enough among us. But above the belly-pinching,
it’s the example set by that thrice-accursed traitor, Arnold, in his
going over to the enemy. Not a night passes now but some troop breaks
the number of its mess by losing a man or two to the southward road.”
“But not Baylor’s,” I qualified. Pettus was a lieutenant in Major Henry
Lee’s Light Horse Legion, and I a captain in Baylor’s Horse, at the
moment posted at Salem on scouting duty.
“Our record is broken,” he confessed, staring soberly at his wine-cup.
“Some time back, John Champe, our sergeant-major, took the road at
midnight, beat down the vidette with the flat of his sword, and
galloped off, with Middleton and his troop in hot pursuit. They rode
till dawn, and were in good time to see Champe take to the river at
Bergen and swim out to a king’s ship anchored off-shore.”
“We of Baylor’s are whole yet, thank God, save for the potting of a man
or so now and then by the Cow-boys,” I boasted.
“The Light Horse is stirred to the very camp-followers by Champe’s
desertion,” Pettus went on, with growing bitterness. “It’s the honor of
the South.” Then, Van Ditteraick’s vile vintage getting suddenly into
his blood, he clapped bottle to cup again and sprang to his feet. “A
toast!” he cried. “Fill up and drink with me to the honor of Virginia!”
“Always and anywhere, and in any pot-liquor, however bad,” said I; and
when he let me have the bottle I filled the cup, and was glad to note
that my hand was still steady.
“Now, then--standing, man, standing!” he bellowed, waving me up:
“Here’s to the loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian
who smirches it, though that man be you or I, Dick Page, live to lose
the woman he loves, and then die by inches on a gibbet, with crows to
pluck his eyes out!”
If I smiled in my cup it was at the naming of a woman in the curse,
and not at Jack’s extravagance, nor at the savage sentiment. For we
of Baylor’s had privately agreed and sworn to flay alive and burn the
first man caught deserting the colors, no matter what his name should
be nor how high his standing.
After drinking his terrible toast, Jack dropped into his chair and
relapsed into silence; whereat I had a chance to look about me, and to
gather myself for the question which, more than the mere drinking of
a birthday bottle with Pettus, had brought me to the point of asking
Colonel Baylor’s leave to ride and row from our camp at Salem to Nyack
on this raw December day.
“Jack,” I began, when the silence had sufficed, “are you sober enough
to thread a needle for me in that matter of Captain Seytoun’s?”
“Try me and see, Dick,” he said promptly, sitting up and pushing the
bottle aside.
“Word came to me yesterday, through Martin, the orderly who rode with
despatches from the commander-in-chief to Colonel Baylor, that Seytoun
had been talking again,” I went on, trying to keep the rage tremor out
of my voice. “Martin had it that he had been revamping that old lie
about the Pages and the ship-load of loose-wives sent over to Virginia
in Charles II’s time. Is this true?”
Pettus shook his head, not in denial, I made sure, but in deprecation.
“This is no time to be stirring up past and gone private quarrels,
Dick,” he said. “The good cause needs every sword it has; Bully
Seytoun’s, as well as yours.”
“You’re not answering my question, Jack,” I retorted, fixing him with
hot eyes. “I heard this of Captain Seytoun, and more: it was said
that he cursed me openly, and that he dragged in the name of Mistress
Beatrix Leigh, swearing that he would take her from me if I were thrice
wedded to her.”
“A mere pot-house tongue-loosing when he was in liquor, Dick,” said my
friend placably. “It was here, in this very den of Van Ditteraick’s.”
“Then you heard him?”
Pettus nodded. “And can testify to his befuddling.”
“He shall answer for it some day, drunk or sober,” I vowed; and then I
stood my errand fairly upon its rightful feet. “That is what fetched me
to Nyack to-day, Jack. There must be some accommodation brought about
with Captain Seytoun. I am not made of sheepskin like a drumhead--to be
beaten upon forever without breaking.”
“‘Accommodation’?” Jack queried, with a lip-curl that I did not like.
“Yes. You are near to Major Lee, who is your very good friend, Jack; a
word from you to the major, and from the major to Captain Seytoun----”
Pettus never knew what it cost me to say this, or he would not have
countered upon me so fiercely.
“Good heavens, Dick Page! Has it come to this?----are you asking me
to go roundabout to Seytoun to cry ‘Enough!’ for you? Where is your
Virginia breeding, man!--or have you lost it campaigning in this cursed
country of the flat-footed Dutch?”
I smiled. This, you may notice, was my cool-blood Jack Pettus, who, but
a moment earlier, had been telling me that the present was no time to
be stirring up private quarrels. But my word was passed--as I knew only
too well, and as he could not know.
“I can’t fight Captain Seytoun, Jack; but neither can I brook his
endless tongue-lashing,” I said, moodily enough, no doubt.
“‘Can’t’ is no gentleman’s word, Dick,” he insisted, still fiercely
emphatic upon the point of honor.
“But just now you said that private quarrels----”
“I was drunk then, on this vinegar stuff of Van Ditteraick’s; but I’m
sober now. This thing that you propose is simply impossible, Dick.
Can’t you see that it is?”
I must confess that I did see it as a miserable choice between two
evils. But my chance to win the love of Mistress Beatrix Leigh had not
been lightly earned, and though it was but a chance, I dared not throw
it away.
“But if I have a good reason--the best of reasons--for not fighting
Captain Seytoun at the present time,” I began.
Pettus flung up his hand impatiently.
“You are the judge of that; also of how far a gentleman from Virginia
may go in the matter of eating dirt at his enemy’s hands. But don’t
ask me to carry your apologies for his insults to this bully-ragging
captain, Dick. I’m your friend.”
I made the sign of acquiescence. The war would end, one day, and then
I should be free of my fetterings. Since our legion had been sent
across the river, I had had no opportunity of collision with Captain
Seytoun--the opportunity which had recurred daily while the two
legions, Baylor’s and Major Lee’s, had been quartered together below
Tappan. If the gossiping orderly had only kept a still tongue in his
head--but he had not, and here I was at Nyack, on Seytoun’s side of
the river, with my finger in my mouth, like a schoolboy caught putting
bent pins on the master’s seat, mad to have it out once for all with my
tormentor, but more eager still to get away with a whole conscience.
Matters were at this most exasperating poising-point, with the two of
us sitting on opposite sides of the slab drinking-table and glowering
at the half-emptied wine-bottle, when the choice was suddenly taken
from me. There was a medley of hoof-clinkings on the stones of the inn
yard, a great creaking of saddle leather and clanking of accouterments
to go with the dismounting, and some four or five officers of Lee’s
Horse tramped into Van Ditteraick’s bar and called for refreshment.
Being fathoms deep in an ugly mood, I did not look up until I felt Jack
calling me with his eyes. Then I saw that one of the in-comers was none
other than this same Captain Howard Seytoun; that his red face and
pig-like eyes spoke of other tavern visits earlier in the day; and that
the ostentatious turning of his back upon me was merely the insulting
preface to what should follow.
What did follow gave me no time to consider. As if he were resuming a
conversation that moment interrupted, Seytoun turned to the man next at
hand--it was Cardrigg, of his own troop--and began to harp on the old
out-worn lie; of how Richard Page, first of the name, had got his wife
out of that ship-load of women gathered up by the London Company from
God knows where and sent out to Virginia to mate with our pioneers, and
how the taint had come down the line to make cowards of the men, and----
I think he was going, on to tell how it wrought in the women of our
house when my hand fell upon his shoulder and he was made to spin
around and face me. I do not know what I said; nor would Jack Pettus
tell me afterward. I know only that there was a hubbub of voices, that
the murky candlelight of the dismal kennel had gone red before my eyes,
that Seytoun’s fat hand was lifted, and that before it could fall I had
done something that brought sudden quiet in the low-ceiled room, like
the hush before a tornado.
Seytoun was dabbling his handkerchief against the livid welt across
his cheek when he said, with an indrawing of the breath: “Ah-h! So you
_will_ fight, then, after all, will you, Mr. Page? I had altogether
despaired of it, I do assure you. To whom shall I send my friend?--and
where?”
Pettus saved me the trouble of replying; saved me more than that, I
think, for the red haze was rising again, and Seytoun’s great bulk was
fast taking the shape of some loathsome thing that should be throttled
there and then, and flung aside as carrion.
“Captain Page lodges with me to-night at Tappan,” I heard Jack say, and
his voice seemed to come from a great distance. And then: “I shall be
most happy to arrange the business with your friend, Captain Seytoun,
the happier, since my own mother’s mother was a Page.” After which I
was as a man dazed until I realized that we were out-of-doors, Pettus
and I, in the cold frosty mist, and that Jack was pitching me into the
saddle of a borrowed horse for the gallop to the camp at Tappan.
“I’ve taken it for granted that your leave covers to-night and
to-morrow morning,” said this next friend of mine, when we were fairly
facing southward.
“It does,” I replied; and then with the battle murmur still singing in
my ears, and the hot blood yet hammering for its vengeful outlet: “Let
it be at daybreak, in the grass cove at the mouth of the creek, and
with trooper swords.”
It was coming on to the early December dusk when we rode through the
headquarters cantonments below Tappan village, and the four miles had
been passed in sober silence. I know not what Jack Pettus was thinking
of to make him ride with his lips tight shut; but I do know that my own
thoughts were far from clamoring for speech. For now a certain thing
was plain to me, and momently growing plainer. By some means Seytoun
had learned that I was under bond not to fight him, and he knew what
it would cost me if I did. Wherefore, his repeated provocations had an
object--which object would be gained, and at my expense, whichever way
the morning’s weather-cock of life and death should veer.
Hot on this thought came the huge conviction that I had merely played
into my sworn enemy’s hands. If he should kill me, I should certainly
be the loser; if I should kill him, I should still be the loser, with
the added drawback of being alive to feel my loss.
We were walking the horses, neck and neck, up the low hill leading to
the legion cantonments when I asked Jack what I had said and done in
Van Ditteraick’s, and if it were past peaceful, or at least postponing,
remedy.
“Never tell me you don’t know what you said and did, Dick,” he laughed.
“But I don’t,” I asserted, telling him the simple truth. “I saw things
vaguely, as if the place were filled with a red mist, and there was a
Babel of voices out of which came a great silence. Then I saw Seytoun
with his handkerchief to his face.”
“You saw and heard and did quite enough,” he replied, and his smile was
grim. “And there is no remedy, save that which the doctors--and sundry
hot-blooded gentlemen of our own ilk--are fond of; namely, a bit of
blood-letting.”
“Yet, Jack,” I stammered, “if I say that some remedy must be found;
that it is worse than folly for me to fight this man at this time?”
He stopped his horse short in mid-road and swore at me like the good
friend he was.
“If you could turn your back on this now, Dick Page,” he raged, when
the cursing ammunition was all spent, “I could believe at least
one thing the captain says of you. He called you a coward,--as I
remember,--and put a scurrilous lie on all the Pages since the first
Richard to account for it. Great heavens, Dick! can’t you see that this
lie must not go uncontradicted?”
“You are altogether right, Jack,” I acquiesced; and then, telling the
simple truth again: “This day I seem to have lost what little wit I
ever had. As you say, there is no remedy, now; so we fight at daybreak.”
“Of course you do,” said Pettus; and so we rode on to the horse-rope
where the legion mounts were tethered.
It was at the door of Pettus’s quarters, one of the rude log cabins
chinked with clay that the army had been throwing up for winter
shelters, that a surprise was awaiting me in the greeting of Melton, a
young Pennsylvanian who was acting-orderly for General Washington.
“Good evening, Captain Page,” he said pleasantly. “You have despatches
from Colonel Baylor for the general?”
“No, Mr. Melton,” I replied, wondering a little. “I am on leave until
to-morrow. This is my birthday.”
“Ah,” said he, taking my hand most cordially, “allow me to wish you
many happy returns.” Then he went back to the matter of the despatches
I was supposed to be carrying. “It is very singular; Mr. Hamilton
seemed quite sure, and he was certainly advised of your coming to
Tappan headquarters. Perhaps you will be good enough to report to
him--after supper?”
I said I should be honored, and he went his way and left us to our
frugal evening-bread--how the Dutch speech clings when once you have
washed your mouth with their country wine!--prepared for Pettus by his
scout and horse-holder.
It was not a very social meal, that supper in Pettus’s hut before the
cheerful open fire--fire being the one thing unstinted in that starving
camp. My thoughts were busy with the meshings of the net into which I
had stumbled; and as for Jack, I think he must have been eager to get
me out of the way before Seytoun’s second should call. At any rate,
it was he who reminded me of Melton’s hint that I would be expected
at General Washington’s headquarters, and I do him no more than fair
justice when I say that he sped the parting guest quite as heartily as
he had welcomed the coming.
So it came about that it was still early when I set out in the
starlight for the low tilt-eaved farm-house a half-mile farther up the
road, passing on the way the field where poor Major André had paid his
debt and where he now slept in his shallow grave; passing also, a scant
hundred yards from the great chief’s headquarters, the fortress-like
stone house where André had heard his sentence and spent his last night
upon earth.
II
A VOICE IN THE NIGHT
I FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room
of the De Windt house which served as an outer office in the
commander-in-chief’s suite. It was my first visit to our army’s brain
and nerve center since the execution of Major André, and I saw, in the
posting of double sentries and by the many times I was halted before I
could come to the door of Mr. Hamilton’s room, one of the consequences
of Arnold’s treason. Our general was no longer free to go and come and
be approached as simply as he had been in former times.
Mr. Hamilton’s greeting was as pleasant as Melton’s had been, though
few ever saw him otherwise than cordial and suave. A slender fine-faced
stripling, with the deep-welled eyes, short upper lip and sensitive
mouth of his French mother, a man but little, if any, older than I, he
had the manner of a true gentleman gently bred, and few as were his
years, he carried a wise head on his shoulders.
“Good evening, Captain Page. Come in and stretch your legs before
my fire,” he said; “you have the first requisite of a good soldier,
Captain; you come promptly when you are called.”
At first I thought he was rebuking me gently because I had stopped
to sup with Jack before reporting myself, but a quick glance at his
smiling eyes showed me that I was wrong. Yet without that explanation I
was left in the dark as to his meaning.
“A soldier’s call is apt to be an order, Mr. Hamilton,” I said, giving
him the lead again.
“So was yours,” he announced. “But we scarcely looked for you to come
before midnight, ride as you would.”
“I was sent for?” I asked.
“Surely; didn’t you know it?”
“I did not. I left Salem at daybreak, with two days’ leave from Colonel
Baylor.”
“In that case,” he said reflectively, “you should have met Halkett on
the road, riding with letters to you and to Colonel Baylor.”
“I did not come by the main road to King’s Ferry. I had agreed to meet
Lieutenant Pettus at Nyack, and----”
“Ah,” he said, smiling again; “a drinking bout at Van Ditteraick’s in
honor of your birthday, I take it. You are sad roisterers--you Virginia
gentlemen”--a thing he could say and carry off, since he was himself
West-Indian born.
“It was but a single bottle, I do assure you, Mr. Hamilton,” I
protested; “and such wine as would make one vow never to be caught
under the shadow of a grape-vine again.”
“Still, you are sad roisterers,” he persisted quietly. “And it was
precisely because you are the saddest of them all, and, besides, the
greatest daredevil in your own or any other troop, that you were sent
for at this particular time, Captain Page.”
I hope I was not past blushing at the left-handed compliment,
well-meant as it seemed to be. Some few passages there had been in
my captaincy where foolhardy daring had taken the reins after wise
caution had dropped them hopelessly upon the horse’s neck, and the
event on each occasion had had the good luck to prove the wisdom of the
foolishness. But as for being a daredevil--why, well, that is as it may
be, too. The veriest sheep of a man will often fight like the devil
if you can corner him and get him well past caring too much for the
precious bauble called life.
But I was killing time, and Mr. Hamilton was waiting.
“Don’t count too greatly upon a roisterer’s courage,” I laughed. “But
what desperate venture does his excellency wish to send me on, Mr.
Hamilton?”
He held up a slim hand warningly.
“Softly, Captain Page, softly: the commander-in-chief is not to be at
all named in this. You will take your orders from me--if you take them
from any one; though as to that, there will be no orders. And you have
hit on the proper word when you call the venture ‘desperate.’”
“You are whetting my curiosity to a razor-edge,” I averred, laughing
again. “By the time you reach the details I shall be ripe for anything.”
He sat staring at the blazing logs for a long minute before he began
again; not hesitating, as I made sure, but merely arranging the matter
in orderly sequence in his mind.
“First, let me ask you this, Captain Page,” he began at the end of
the forecasting minute. “You come of a long line of gentlemen, and no
one knows better what is due to a keen sense of honor. How far would
that sense of honor let you go on a road which would lead to Sir Henry
Clinton’s discomfiture and possible overthrow?”
“There need be little question of honor involved in dealing with Sir
Henry Clinton,” I replied promptly. “When he bought Benedict Arnold
for a price, and sent his own adjutant-general into our lines as a
spy, he set the pace for us. I’d keep faith with any honest enemy, to
the last ditch, Colonel Hamilton; but on the other hand, I’d fight the
devil with fire, most heartily, if need were, and take no hurt to my
conscience.”
“Then I may go on and tell you where we stand. You know very well,
Captain Page, the ill effects of Arnold’s treason and desertion; how
the infection is spreading in the rank and file.”
I said that I did know.
“This infection is like the plague; it must be stamped out at any
cost,” he declared, and the deep-welled eyes flashed angrily. “It is
a double evil, sapping the honor of our army on the one hand, and
bringing us into contempt with the enemy on the other. The remedy must
be a sharp lesson, no less to Sir Henry Clinton than to the traitors.
Do you see any way in which it can be administered, Captain Page?”
“If you could once lay hands on Benedict Arnold,” I suggested.
Hamilton nodded slowly.
“You have put your finger most accurately on the binding strand in the
miserable knot. If the chief traitor could be apprehended and brought
to justice, it would not only stay the epidemic of desertion, it might
also convince Sir Henry that we are not to be treated as rebels beyond
the pale of honest warfare.”
“Truly,” I agreed. “I wonder it hasn’t been done before this.”
“It has been tried, Captain Page. Let me tell you a thing that is thus
far known only to our general, to Major Lee and myself. You have heard
of the desertion of a certain sergeant from our army?”
I bowed, saying that I had and knew the man’s name.
“This sergeant posed as a deserter only for the better concealment of
his purpose; he went upon this very errand we are speaking of. He is in
New York now, and is not only unable to accomplish his object, but is
in hourly danger of apprehension and death as a spy.”
“Pardon me, Colonel Hamilton,” I broke in, “but you should not have
sent, as they say, a boy to mill. This man would be helpless if only
for the reason that he comes from the ranks. Arnold was always a
stickler for the state and grandeur of his office; a common soldier
could never get near enough to plot against him.”
“Again you have touched upon the heart of the matter, Captain Page.
The commander-in-chief suffered the sergeant to go in the first
instance (he volunteered for the enterprise, you understand) because he
was only a sergeant, and it was not thought to be an errand upon which
a commissioned officer could honorably go. But now the affair is all in
confusion. The enterprise promises to fail, and our man may easily lose
his life on the gallows.”
I rose to terminate the interview.
“Are there any special instructions for me, Colonel Hamilton?” I asked.
The general’s aide laughed like a pleased child and bade me sit down
again.
“What a hot-headed firebrand you are, to be sure, Captain!” he said
warmly. “I was certain you would not fail us. Have you no curiosity to
learn how the choice fell upon you?”
“None whatever,” I replied. “I’m vastly fonder of action than of the
whys and wherefores.”
“Then I need only say that you have me to thank for the choice. When
it was decided to seek for a stronger head than the sergeant’s seems
to be, the choice of the man was left to me, and it was agreed that no
one else should know. So this is strictly between us two, as it should
be. Colonel Baylor merely knows that you have been detailed for special
duty.”
“Good,” I commented. It was best so. By this means I should stand or
fall quite alone, as the leader of a forlorn hope should be willing to
do.
“As for your instructions, there can be none at all. Our information
from the sergeant is most meager; and if it were not, we should not
hamper you. Haste and success are your two watchwords. Have you money?”
I had. The Page tobacco of the year before had escaped the clumsy
British blockade, and when we Pages sell our tobacco, we lack for
nothing in reason.
“That is a comfort,” he smiled. “Our sergeant begged for five
guineas in one of his letters, and I promise you we had to scratch
painstakingly before we found them. Now for your plan: have you any?”
“The first move is simple enough,” I rejoined. “I shall desert, as
the sergeant did, and throw myself into the arms of the enemy. After
that--well, sufficient unto the moment will be the evil thereof. I must
be guided wholly by conditions as I find them.”
“So you must. And for your communications with me, you may use the same
channel the sergeant is using--a Mr. Baldwin, of Newark, who will carry
your letters. How will you reach New York?”
I thought a moment upon it.
“The river is the quicker. I have a boat at Nyack; the one in which I
pulled from Teller’s Point to-day.”
There was a little pause after this, and I saw that my companion was
staring thoughtfully into the fire.
“We have been going at too fast a gallop, Captain Page,” he said at
the end of the pause. “We must go back a moment to that point that was
raised in the beginning. If you could go with your troop at your back
and cut the traitor out and bring him home that would be one thing--and
I know of no man fitter to attempt it. But to go as you must go, and
use guile and subterfuge ... truly, Captain Page, you must sort this
out for yourself; to determine how far in such a cause an officer and a
man of honor may go. I lay no commands upon you.”
I put the scruple aside impatiently.
“Benedict Arnold has put himself beyond the pale, Colonel Hamilton.
There can be no question of honor in dealing with such as he.”
“Perhaps not,” was the low-toned reply; “though that word of yours is
most sweeping and far-reaching. I mean only to leave you free, Captain
Page. Our desires, keen as they are, shall not run farther than your
own convictions of an honorable man’s duty.” Then he looked at his
watch. “The tide serves at eleven, and you have the borrowed horse to
return to Nyack. It is best so, since in that way you will seem to be
returning to your troop at Salem.”
His mention of the borrowed horse first set me to wondering how he came
to know that I had borrowed a horse; but a moment later the wonder went
out in a blaze of sudden recollection. As I am a living man, up to that
instant I had clean forgotten that I was pledged to meet Captain Howard
Seytoun at dawn-breaking in the grass cove at the river’s edge!
I was on my feet and breathing hard when I broke out hotly: “Good
heavens, Colonel Hamilton! I can not go to-night; it is impossible! A
thing I had forgotten----”
He rose in his turn and faced me smiling.
“Tell me where she lives, Captain Page,” he said slyly, “and I’ll
promise to go in person to make your excuses. Nay, no cunningly devised
fables, sir, if you please; it is always a woman who hangs to our
coat-skirts at the plunging moment. But seriously,” and now his face
was grave, “there should not be an hour’s delay. Not to mention our
sergeant’s safety, which seems to be hanging in a most precarious
balance, there is a sharp chance of your missing the target entirely.
Word has come that Arnold is embodying, or has embodied, a regiment
with which he may take the field at any moment. No, you must go
to-night, if you go at all.”
“But you were not expecting me here from Colonel Baylor’s camp until
midnight,” I protested, trying to gain time for the shaping of some
excuse that would hide the truth and still seem something less than
childish.
“For the anticipating of which expectation by some hours, we are
discussing this matter here in comfort before my fire, instead of on
horseback and on the southward road, Captain Page. I had planned to
ride with you to our outposts, enlisting you as we went.”
“Yet--good lord, Mr. Hamilton! if I could tell you--if I only dared
tell you what it will cost me to go to-night....”
He spread his slender hands in a most gentlemanly way.
“I have laid no commands upon you for the services, Captain Page; as I
have said, your going rests entirely with yourself. Nor must you think
I am trying to bribe you when I point out that the man who carries
the enterprise through will have earned much at the hands of his
country and of the army. It is for you to decide whether this obstacle
of yours is great enough to weigh against the arguments for instant
despatch--remembering that these arguments may well include the life of
the worthy soldier who has piloted out the way for you.”
It has always been my failing to omit to count the personal cost of
anything until the day of reckoning rises up to slap me in the face.
“I’ll go--to-night,” I said grittingly. “But if I could leave an
explanatory word with Pettus----”
Again he stopped me in mid-career with a hand laid affectionately on my
shoulder.
“You would cancel my permission with your own sober second thought, my
dear Captain. That second thought will tell you that there must be no
hint, no word or whisper that could remotely point toward your purpose.
Further, you must go back to Pettus, smooth over as best you can your
visit to me here, and lull his curiosity, if he have any. Then, if you
can not tell him point-blank the lie about your returning northward
to-night, wait until he is asleep, and make your escape as you can.”
We went somewhat beyond this, but not far; Hamilton telling me of his
sergeant’s present besetment, and of how all his plans had come to
naught. When I had it all he went with me to the door and I was out of
the ante-room when he took leave of me and bade me God-speed; out under
the stars and with only the half-mile walk between me and Jack Pettus
for the cooking up of all these raw conditions thus thrust masterfully
upon me. I saw well enough what I must face; how, when I should turn up
missing, Seytoun would lose no time and spare no pains in black-listing
me from one end of the army to the other. Yet if I could go quickly and
return alive, dragging our Judas with me as the result of the endeavor
... well, then Seytoun would still say that I had deliberately provoked
a quarrel which I knew I could not carry out to the gentlemanly
conclusion.
It was the cursedest dilemma, no matter how I twisted and turned it
about. And to cap the pyramid of misery, there was a lurking fear that
Mistress Beatrix Leigh might come to hear some garbled misversion of
it, even in far-away Virginia, and would not know or guess the truth.
Up to the very present moment, Seytoun owed his immunity solely to
her, or rather to a promise I had made her the year before when I
came out of the home militia to join Colonel Baylor’s new levies.
When she should know the provocation, she might generously forgive
the duel, though she had exacted the promise that I would not fight
him; but would any explanation ever suffice to gloze over the fact
that I had struck the man, and afterward had run away to escape
the consequences?--for this is how the story would shape itself in
Seytoun’s telling of it.
I saw no loophole of escape, no light on the dark horizon, save at one
uncertain point. Seytoun was brave enough on the battle-field; all men
said that for him. Yet he was a truculent bully, and bullies are often
weak-kneed where the colder kind of courage is required. What if he had
pocketed my affront?--had failed to send his friend to Jack Pettus?
The slender chance of such a happy outcome sent me on the faster toward
the legion cantonments; and when I saw the scattering of tents and log
shelters looming in the starlight I fell to running.
Pettus was waiting for me when I kicked open the door of the low-roofed
shelter and entered, and it was my good genius that prompted me to sit
by the fire and ask for a pipe and a crumbling of Jack’s tobacco, and
otherwise to mask the fierce desire I had to put my fate immediately to
the touch. For my Jack was as quick-witted as a woman, and I remembered
in good time that I had to deceive him. So my first word was not of
Seytoun, or of the quarrel, but of Colonel Alexander Hamilton and the
despatches I had been supposed to bring from my colonel.
“Curious how a rumor breeds out of nothing,” I commented, when we were
comfortably befogged in the tobacco smoke. “Melton seemed to be sure
that I must be the bearer of despatches; and Colonel Hamilton accused
me of having ridden over from Nyack on a borrowed horse.”
“The which you did, despatches or no despatches,” laughed Pettus. “But
how did you get on with Mr. Hamilton?”
“As one gentleman should when he meets another for a joint
shin-toasting before a blazing fire of logs. We chatted amicably, after
Mr. Hamilton learned that I brought no word from Colonel Baylor; and
when I could break off decently I came away.”
After this silence came and dwelt with us for a while, and when the
fierce desire could be no longer suppressed I said, as indifferently as
I could: “You have news for me, Jack?”
“If you call that news which we were both expecting--yes. Lieutenant
Cardrigg has been here, in Captain Seytoun’s behalf.”
My gasp of disappointment slipped out--or in--before I could prevent
it, and it did not go unremarked by Pettus.
“What’s that, Dick? You sigh like the furnace of affliction itself.
Twice, already, you have changed your mind about this little riffle
with Seytoun. It is far too late to change it again. I warn you as a
friend.”
“Truly, it is indeed far too late,” I echoed, agreeing parrot-wise.
Then: “You arranged the business as we talked?----to-morrow morning, in
the grass cove at the mouth of the creek?”
“How else would I arrange it?” said Pettus querulously. “You were as
precise in your instructions as any girl prinking herself for a rout.”
“It is well to be precise,” I offered half absently. The worst had
befallen now, and my brain was busy with the shameful consequences
which must ensue.
“Cardrigg haggled a little over the trooper’s swords,” Pettus went
on reflectively, after a moment. “He is a chip of the same upstart
block out of which our red-faced captain was hewn. He said you might
have chosen rapiers, if only out of consideration for the captain’s
standing; meaning to imply thereby that the captain, at least, was a
gentleman, and should be allowed to fight with a gentleman’s weapon.”
“You yielded him the point?” I questioned, trying to show an interest
which I could not feel.
“Not I, damn him. I gave him to understand flatly that we stood upon
our rights, and that the trooper’s sword was good enough for his
principal--or for him and me, if it came to that.”
“It is a small matter,” I said, thinking bitterly that Pettus could
not vaguely guess how small a matter this dispute over the weapons
had suddenly become. Then I saw how I might perhaps fend off the last
and worst of the consequences of the morrow’s revealments; but it was
necessary first to pave the way cautiously and carefully.
“The captain is a good swordsman, whatever else may be said of him,” I
began after another interval of silence. “It may easily happen that the
man who fights with him will cross a wider river than this Hudson of
ours, Jack.”
“Bah!” Pettus spat the word out contemptuously. Then he added the
friendly smiting, as I expected he would. “Don’t try to make me see you
in any other light than that of a true man, Dick.”
“I would not willingly do that, Jack, believe me. But there are always
chances, and the wise man, though he were the bravest that ever drew
steel out of leather, will provide against them. If I should not come
off from this night’s--from to-morrow morning’s work with a tongue to
speak for itself, will you carry a word for me?”
“Surely I will. But to whom?”
“To Beatrix Leigh. Tell her she must go down to her grave believing
that I was no craven. Tell her----”
“I’m listening,” said Pettus, when the pause had grown to an impossible
length.
My lips were dry, and I moistened them and swallowed hard. After all,
what word was there that I could send to the woman I loved without
taking the risk of betraying my trust as an officer and the confidant
of Mr. Hamilton?
“It isn’t worth the trouble,” I went on, when the hopelessness of it
became plain. “She will understand without my message; or she will
refuse to understand with it.”
Jack laughed boisterously. “I’m no good at conundrums, Dick. I’ll tell
her the captain challenged you for brushing a fly from his face. Will
that do?”
I smiled in spite of my misery. There would be nothing to tell Beatrix
Leigh or any one else about the meeting which was already impossible
for one of the combatants.
“Let it go, Jack, and pinch the candle out. Didn’t you hear the
drum-roll? We’ll have the patrol in upon us presently. Do you turn in,
and catch your few hours of beauty sleep. It’s one of my notions to
sit alone before the fire on my birthday night, casting up the year’s
accounts. You’ll indulge me, won’t you?”
Jack did it, grumbling a little at what he was pleased to call my
churlishness. It was weary work killing the time till he should be
safely asleep. I was young, vigorous, and for all my youth, somewhat
of a seasoned veteran, but that lonely hour or more spent before Jack
Pettus’s fire went nearer to sapping my determination than any former
trial I could recall.
I might have made my exit sooner, I suppose. Though he tossed
restlessly in his bunk, Jack was asleep before I had filled my second
pipe. But there was no object in my reaching Nyack before tide-turning,
and I stayed on, dreading the moment which would set the wheels fairly
a-grind on my hazard of new fortunes.
It was the hour of guard-changing when I rose noiselessly, struggled
into my watchcoat, slung my sword around my neck so that it should not
drag and waken Jack, and cautiously secured the little portmanteau
which held all the impedimenta I had brought with me from the camp at
Salem.
I was carefully inching the door ajar to let me out when Pettus stirred
afresh and threw his arms about, muttering in his sleep. I waited till
he should be quiet again, and while I stood and held the door, the
mutterings took on something like coherence.
“I say you shall drink it! Up, man, up! Now, then; here’s to the
loyalty of the Old Dominion, and may the next Virginian who smirches
it----”
I whipped through the half-closed door and closed it behind me, softly.
It was sobering enough to do what I had to do, without staying to
listen to such a word of leave-taking from the dearest friend I owned.
I found the borrowed horse where I had left him at the hitching-rope,
and had the saddle on, and the portmanteau strapped to the cantle, when
Middleton came up with the guard relief.
“Ho, Captain Page!” he chuckled, when the patrol had thrown the lantern
light into my face, “I thought I had caught another deserter in the
very act. Has your leave expired so soon?”
I forced a laugh and said it had, more was the pity. And then he asked
how I expected to get across the river at that hour; whereupon I told
him a part of the truth, saying that I should ride back to Nyack, and
from there take the small boat in which I had drifted and rowed down
from Teller’s Point.
At this he had the saddle flung upon his own beast, and mounted and
rode with me to put me past the sentries on the Nyack road; and now I
was enough recovered to grin under cover of the darkness and to picture
his rage and astonishment when, within a day or so, he should learn
that he had been setting another deserter safely on his way to the
British lines. For I made no doubt that the camp, and all the others in
the Highlands, would presently be ringing with the news that a captain
of Baylor’s Horse had been the latest to go over to the enemy--as,
indeed, I hoped they would, since my best guaranty of safety in New
York would be in the hue and cry I might leave behind me.
Lieutenant Middleton bade me God-speed at a turn in the road about
a mile from his cantonments, and from this on to Nyack I pushed the
borrowed nag smartly. At Van Ditteraick’s stable there was only a
sleepy horse-boy to rouse up and meet me, and when I had paid the
horse’s hire, I made him go with me to the waterside to help me embark,
so there might be a witness of the way I went and the manner of my
going.
It was the boy himself who pushed me off and saw me lay the boat’s head
up the river. And, sleepy as he was, he had wit enough to mumble in
broken Dutch that the dunderhead captain had taken the wrong turn of
the tide for a pull up the stream.
I headed upward and currentward only until I had made sure that my
small boat could not be seen from the western shore. Then I turned the
boat’s bow down-stream and pulled lustily for half an hour to warm me,
for the gray and cloudy day had cleared into a night of bitter cold.
It was near midnight, as I judged, when I made out by the configuration
of the shore lines my passing from the great lake of the Tappan Zee
to the narrower channel of the river proper. Here, where King’s Ferry
crossed from bank to bank, lay my greatest chance of danger; and taking
the mid-channel for it, I unshipped the oars and let the boat drift as
it would in the tideway. So floating, when I was well past the line of
the ferry, past all hazard of being discovered by one of our patrol
boats, as I imagined, I ventured to step the mast and to hoist the
little leg-of-mutton sail with which the boat was provided. The showing
of the small triangle of white cloth was my undoing. The little craft
had scarcely felt the wind-pull, when a dark shape shot swiftly out
from the shadow of the western shore and a voice came bellowing at me
across the water.
“Ahoy, there! Spill your wind and come to, or we’ll fire upon you!”
My answer was to ship the oars as silently as possible, and to settle
down to the long lifting stroke old Uncle Quagga, our black boatman,
had taught me on the quiet waters of the James River in the peaceful
days before the war began. It promised to be a hopeless flight, with
only my two arms against a dozen; but what disquieted me most was the
stentorian voice that came booming once again across the gap, cursing
me and commanding me to heave to. For the yell was Seytoun’s; and now
I remembered that Jack had told me something about Seytoun’s being on
boat duty for the middle watch of the night.
III
IN WHICH I SHED MY RANK
IT IS little less than marvelous how the mind’s eye sweeps all the
horizons instantly at the apexing point of a crisis. Seytoun’s
cursing hail, the sheering cut-water hiss of the well-manned boat as
it drove out to head me off, the panic helplessness of my attempt to
escape--none of these was distracting enough to cloud the picture of
the frightful consequences which would follow my overtaking.
Mr. Hamilton might save me from a deserter’s death; I supposed he would
find means to do that much, though all the army would be clamoring for
vengeance on me. But every other humiliation the wrath of man could
devise would be mine; and in all the mad hurry of the moment one grim
determination stood apart in my brain and held itself in readiness to
act. I would never be taken alive. If the bullets which would presently
begin to spit from the muskets in the watchboat should not put me out
of misery, I could at least go overboard with the skiff’s anchor stone
to hold me under for the necessary choking time.
The bullets came quickly enough, a ragged fire of them buzzing high
overhead to emphasize Seytoun’s second warning. If the marksmen in
the watchboat had been my men, I thought I should have a word to say
to them about holding well down on a target when powder and lead were
worth their weight in gold--as they were with us in that winter of
1780. They wasted a dozen shots on me, I think, before a long drum-roll
boomed across the water to tell me that now the camp was aroused and
more boats would be coming.
That was only an incident, however. My business was to put my heart and
soul into the oars and to keep the narrow gap between me and Seytoun’s
boat from closing any more swiftly than it had to. It was closing
certainly enough, and by leaping boat-lengths, when my straining ears
caught the sound of other oars rolling in muffled row-locks, and a
guarded hail came from somewhere in the darkness just ahead of me.
I dared not turn around to try to descry the fresh peril. Seytoun’s
marksmen were doing better now, and coincident with the low-toned
hail ahead a bullet struck the stern of my shallop and neatly stuck a
splinter in the calf of my leg.
Another volley from the guardboat would have settled matters, but the
volley was never fired--at me. At the flint-snapping crisis my boat’s
bow crashed in among banked oars, dark shapes loomed suddenly all
around me, and a gruff voice shouted, “Avast there, you lubber! Heave
to, or we’ll sink you!”
I needed no command to stop me. The collision with the banked oars,
and a dozen hands gripping the gunwales of my shallop, did that for
me. What I most needed was the discretion to throw myself flat in the
bottom of my boat to escape the storm of lead that was promptly hurled
at my pursuers--and that I had, too.
When it was all over, and Seytoun’s boat had turned tail to claw out
of harm’s way in frantic haste, I learned to what I owed my opportune
deliverance. I had pulled straight into the midst of a British boat
expedition (one of the many since Admiral Sir George Rodney had come
to Sir Henry Clinton’s aid), sent up from New York to take a chance
of surprising some one of our outpost camps. I was rejoicing secretly
that my ill-luck had killed the chance of such a surprise, when I was
brought roughly to book by the officer in command of the expedition.
“Now, sir, who the devil are you, and what are you doing here?” were
his shot-like questions, when my craft had been passed back to the
long-boat which served as the flag-ship of the flotilla.
I gave my name and standing briefly, and was adding a hypocritical word
of thanks for my rescue when he cut me off abruptly.
“A deserter, eh?” he rasped. “It’s a thousand pities we didn’t let them
take you. An officer, too, you say? Then the pities are ten thousand. I
would to God some of your fellows in that boat had shot straighter!”
His sentiments were so soldierly and worthy that I loved him for them,
and was able to pull the splinter from my leg and laugh.
“You don’t follow your commander-in-chief’s lines very closely, sir,”
I ventured. “We gentlemen who are sick of our bargain with General
Washington and the Congress get a warmer welcome from Sir Henry Clinton
than you are giving me. But there are deserters and deserters; some who
are traitors in fact, and some who are merely coming to a better sense
of their duty as they see it. My conscience is clear, sir.”
I hoped he would not suspect the double meaning in my answer; as,
indeed, he did not. As well as I could make him out in the darkness, he
was a bluff, hearty bully of a man; a sea officer, I took it.
“We’ll take you back with us, since that is what you want,” he rejoined
crustily; adding: “And I’d hang you to a yard-arm when we get there,
Captain Page--as Sir Henry Clinton doubtless will not. To the rear
with you, and consider yourself a prisoner. Pass the captive astern,
Bannock, and take the oars out of his boat,”--this last to the ensign
in command of the long-boat.