and when we were above-stairs, and he had lighted the candles, the
maps were spread on the table and I had to quibble afresh, giving him
anchorage depths in the Virginia roadways where a fishing-smack would
go aground, and otherwise discrediting the makers of the finest set of
navigation charts I had ever seen.
It encouraged me not a little that he was restless while this
map-undoing was going on, walking up and down the room and coming now
and then to bend over the table to keep the question and answer alive.
I say it encouraged me, for the thing I feared was that he would settle
down for the night’s work and tell me to leave him. But so long as he
stayed afoot and restive there seemed room for the hope that he might
be going out again.
The hope was not unfounded, as the event proved. Right in the midst
of the map talk he broke off to ask me if I were leg-weary, and if I
would favor him by accompanying him to the garden in the rear of the
house, where, as he said, it was his nightly custom to walk off the
perplexities and brain fatigues of the day.
Anything was better than being hived up in the house with him, I
decided, and while the garden promised little, it had the advantage of
being out-of-doors and a few paces nearer to the river which must be my
highway to success and freedom, if any highway were to be found.
So we tramped down the stair again, and I had my first unsatisfactory
sight of the garden at the back. As well as I could make out in the
starlight, it was a long and rather narrow area, enclosed within a high
wooden fence, with a graveled walk running down the middle of it, and
with a few shrubs and stunted trees growing in the neglected flower-
and vegetable-beds; as safe a place against any desperate kidnapping
purpose as any that could be found outside of the garrison prison yard.
Arnold was still harping upon the Virginia coast and its anchorages
when we began to pace a weary sentry-beat side by side up and down the
graveled walk, and he kept it up with a great persistence, inquiring
minutely into the navigating particulars, and keeping me so busy
misleading him that I could not get a moment for the consideration of
any plotting plan at all.
But as for that, the whole heavens and earth and all the universe were
blankly void of suggestion. I could think of nothing that offered the
slightest chance of success. To drop a step behind, to give him a
sudden wrestler’s back-throw and afterward to bind and gag him were
all simple enough. My six feet of good, sound, country-bred Virginia
bone and muscle would answer for these primitive beginnings. But having
trussed my fowl, I should be like the man who stole a hobbled horse,
which he could neither carry nor ride. I could never hope to escape
out of the high-fenced garden with my captive, or to reach the river
unhalted, or, reaching it, to have the fairy luck of finding a boat
with oars shipped and waiting for me to pull away in.
One of these difficulties--the least of them--overcame itself as we
were wheeling to make one of our face-abouts at the lower end of the
walk. A board in the high fence paling had been displaced, and when I
touched it with my foot it fell outward with a dry clatter and left a
gap in the enclosure.
“Your boundaries are tumbling down, General Arnold,” I remarked
carelessly; and he replied that it mattered little, since they would
be another’s boundaries very shortly. After which he paid no more
attention to the gap opened by the falling board; but I did, and every
time we made the turn at the walk’s end it tempted me. If I only knew
what lay beyond: how far it was to the river’s edge, and what one of a
thousand chances I might have of finding a boat unlocked and with oars
in it!
But I did not know, could not know; and thus the irresolute “I dare
not,” waited upon the “I would,” and I was alternately fever-hot with
excitement and shivering in depression, the thing to be desired being
so near and yet so inimitably far.
It was some time after the incident of the gap-opening, and while we
were passing a point midway between the house and the garden end, that
Arnold stopped short in his questioning about the Portsmouth harbor to
hold up a finger for silence.
“What was that?” he asked, and I saw his other hand disappear into one
of the pistol-hiding pockets.
“I heard nothing,” I made answer, which was the truth.
“It was a sneeze or a cough,” he commented; “I am certain of it.”
The pause gave me time to look around more precisely than I had
been able to while he was holding me in talk. The scrubby trees and
evergreens might possibly have sheltered an eavesdropper, but not
safely. Besides these there was nothing in the garden that would have
concealed a cat.
“It was the sentry in front of Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters,” I
suggested.
“No,” he objected; “it was nearer at hand. Make a circuit of that
shrubbery, Captain Page, while I cover this side.” And I heard the
click of a pistol-lock as he pulled the weapon from his pocket.
I ran around the larger clump of evergreens, sword in hand, and found
nothing--the more readily since I was not expecting to find anything.
When I came up with him again, he appeared to be satisfied, and we went
on walking and talking as before, though now I observed that he kept
his right hand in the pocket of the greatcoat, and I could feel rather
than see that his eyes were roving watchfully from side to side as we
paced up and down.
It must have been nearly midnight when the long forced march back
and forth in the garden walk ended, and with its ending all hope of
carrying off the traitor by main strength and awkwardness bade me
farewell, for that night at least. I took it hard, not knowing if there
would ever be another night more promising; and when Arnold had put me
through the house and out at the front door, telling me to go to my inn
quarters and to be prepared for an early reveille, I hung about in the
street and made friends with the sentry at Sir Henry Clinton’s door as
if I were still on duty, killing time for another full hour until I saw
the lights go out in the traitor’s upper room; all this on the barest
chance that he might come down again and so re-open the book of fate.
When all was over I went to my tavern, railing at Sir Judas, at John
Champe, and most of all at myself for the futile fizzling out of a
thing that looked so simple on the face of it. Also, I had a hard word
or two for Mr. Hamilton for waiting until the clock had fairly struck
before he turned the failing failure over to me.
This is how it looked to me, sober and chilled. But after I had got
warm before the blazing fire of logs in the tavern bar, and was the
better for a hearty swig of fresh-mulled wine, things took on a
cheerfuller hue; and when I lighted my tallow dip and went above-stairs
to the great barn-like room which had been assigned me, I was turning
over in my mind a wild plan of how I might smuggle in a dozen of my
fellows from Baylor’s Horse, snatch the traitor out of his bed, and
mount and ride and cut the way out to freedom. By which it would appear
that the hot wine, poured into an empty stomach, had straightway
climbed to the upper story--a thing quite possible, even when one is
twenty-two past, a Virginian, and a well-seasoned soldier, to boot.
I had no more than struggled out of my watchcoat, and was making ready
to tumble into bed, when there came a trampling of heavy feet up the
stair and along the corridor. Somewhere about opposite my door the
footsteps paused, and I paused, too, with my waistcoat half off and the
wine fumes clearing from my brain as swiftly as if a cold north wind
were blowing them aside.
And, in good truth, I needed to be sobered suddenly, for the next
instant the door sprang open as from a lusty kick, and Sergeant-Major
John Champe, his saturnine face a devil-mask of furious and frenzied
rage, charged in upon me.
VII
AND AN UNBLEST DAWN
THERE was murder in Champe’s bloodshot eyes, and for the moment I was
helpless, having the waistcoat bridged across my arms like a hangman’s
shackles. Luckily for me, he had no weapon, else it is to be feared I
should have quit this troubled scene there and then.
As it was, he flung himself upon me like a wild beast, all claws to
grip and teeth to tear, and I went down as if I had been a ten-pin, and
he a bowl twirled by the hand of the Giant Grim. Also his clutching
fingers were at my throat before I could rip and rend that cursed
manacling waistcoat into rags; so, by the time my arms were free, the
cold dead air of the big room was no longer mine to breathe, and this
fickle world, or what little I could see of it, was turning red and
green and black and back to red again before my eyes which seemed to be
sticking out of my head on a pair of horns like a snail’s.
But Baylor’s Horse, or any fraction of it, does not die without a
struggle. With my hands free, I got a grip of the black-faced maniac’s
wrists, held it, tightened it until I could feel the joints crack
and his big fingers relax because there was no longer any living
connection between them and the pounding heart and maddened brain.
After that it was simpler, though he was the heavier man. With a quick
bending of the strangled wrists, I rolled him off of me, holding him
so until the red lights stopped their dancing and I could get up with
some assurance that I should not be entirely helpless on my feet. Then
I loosed him, and staggered upright, reeled across to the door and shut
and barred it.
“That’s for you, as well as for myself, you addle-headed idiot!” I
panted; and then I swore at him heartily as he sat on the floor nursing
his helpless hands.
He was not much behind me in the cursing, his tongue being still
uncrippled. What he called me is not in any gentleman’s word-book,
but I did not lay it up against him. “You have reason, my friend,” I
allowed him, and sat down on the bed’s edge to rest my throat while he
eased the burden of his soul.
“Well, have you said it all?” I asked, after he had sworn himself out
of breath and doubled up every epithet in the vocabulary of abuse.
“Damn you for a--” he began again, taking a fresh start; and I laughed
till my strained eyes ran over with the tears and my throat ached
again. The figure of the man, with his darkly ferocious face, sitting
hunched upon the floor, his benumbed hands crossed upon his knees and
his loose-hung jaw wagging like a panting dog’s in a vain effort to
keep pace with the outpouring flood of vituperation, was inexpressibly
mirth-provoking to me, though another might not have found it so.
But there finally came an end, alike to his ravings and to my laughter,
and we arrived at some better understanding; though not all at once,
you may be sure.
“Curse you for a deserting traitor, Captain Richard Page! I’ll kill you
for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was
his closing volley.
“Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no
more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him
again.
“What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter;
Middleton saw me come off.”
“No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s
watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I
am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse.
Moreover, I deserted for the same identical cause that you did.”
“You lie, Captain Page,” he said quite brutally; but I forgave him.
“I wouldn’t be above it, Champe--to an enemy, and if there were any
good end to be subserved. But in this instance I am talking to a
friend--you see I can be generous, in spite of your having just tried
to choke the life out of me. You’ll understand when I tell you that I
know your business in New York, and that I am here solely to help you
forward it.”
That was the moment when I thought he would go chittering crazy with
rage and despair. Disappointment, mad wrath, sharp remorse, bitter
curses directed now at everything he could lay tongue to, boiled out
of him as if he had been a pot hung above the hottest fire that ever
crackled on a housewife’s hearth.
“Hell and zounds!” he foamed, when he became a little coherent again.
“All the devils in the pit fight for that man! Listen, Captain Page:
this night was our final chance, and on this night of all others
everything was at last in readiness. Major Lee, with a picked troop
from the legion, was in hiding in the wood across the river, and a
boat from the schooner Nancy Jane was to be hanging off and on to come
ashore and take us to the Jersey side.”
“Go on,” I commanded sharply, though the sharpness was not for poor
Champe; it was for what I foresaw was coming.
“It was trimmed to the last shaving of a toothpick,” he continued
fiercely. “I knew his custom--to walk late o’ night in the garden. I
had loosened a board in the fence, and we--the one who was to help, and
I--were to seize and bind and gag him, whip him out through the hole in
the fence, and so to the river and the boat.”
“I see,” I said; and certainly I did see--far more than was pleasant to
contemplate.
“When it was told me he was going to a rout, I thought our cursed luck
had tripped us again,” Champe went on. “Then I got the order to follow
him, as a guard of honor, I suppose, and here you thrust yourself in,
Captain Page.”
“No,” I denied; “I was thrust in; but, like yourself, I take it, I was
not sorry to have the chance of keeping him in view. Go on with your
tale.”
“It is soon told,” he rejoined. “At the mansion house up yonder, having
no orders to wait for his coming out, I ran back to set the trap. Two
freezing hours we lay under the cedars in that hell-fired garden, and
then we saw the lights, and a little farther on we heard the old fox
walking into the trap. But he was not alone, as you know, Captain Page.”
“How many of you were there?” I asked.
“Two: one other and myself. The third was on the river bank, signaling
the boat.”
“You should have killed me out of your way, Sergeant Champe. It was
your plain duty to your country. If we ever get out of this and back to
our own horse-ropes, I shall see you court-martialed for that slip, my
good man.”
“There were but the two of us, Captain Dick,” he said, giving me the
name my own troop used.
“Well? How many would you ask for, to put the quietus on one man, and
he armed only with a sword that you did not need to let him lug out of
its sheath?”
His scowl, which was the natural fashion of his forbidding face,
broadened into a sardonic grin.
“My fellow under the cedars might have chanced it, since he didn’t know
you. But not I, my bully captain. I know you too well, sir. Before we
could have said ‘Jack Robinson’ you would have had one or both of us
wondering how we came there with so many skin rents to be sewed up.”
“Not at all,” said I. “I should have been fighting on your side. But,
of course, you couldn’t know that.”
“No; we couldn’t and didn’t. You know what happened afterward; how
we hid and watched you two going back and forth so near to us that
any time you passed I could have touched you. Once my fellow sneezed,
though he well-nigh burst a blood-vessel trying to stop it. You didn’t
hear it, but Arnold did. Then I thought we should have to run the risk
of your frog-sticker, Captain Dick, whether we liked it or no.”
“Were you under the evergreens?”
“Sure enough. You made the circle completely around us. But for my
taking in a leg, you would have stumbled over me.”
I held up a hand for silence.
“You are fluenter than I am with the soldier-curses, Champe. Will you
say over a few of the choicest of them for me? All through those two
hours while you were freezing under the evergreens, I was hammering my
brain to invent some way by which I could take Sir Judas with my two
unaided hands. I knew nothing of Major Lee’s dispositions, or of the
boat, or of what you had done; which is pointedly my own fault, since
I should have left everything else to wait and hunted you out before
I ventured to stick my oar in. Certainly you missed the fool-killing
chance of a lifetime, Sergeant, when you failed to run me through with
your bayonet this night!”
But at this the humaner side of the dark-faced sergeant-major came to
the fore.
“No, Captain Dick,” he said quite civilly. “It was our crooked luck
again, and some of it was my fault. I took you for what you seemed to
be--this morning, and more than ever, this afternoon and evening when
you had the colors on. But it’s done and over, and there are two of us
to pay the piper instead of one. It’s the devil’s own pickle we are in,
sir, with these coats of ours to tell what we’ll have to do and where
we’ll have to go to-morrow.”
I thought so, too, and for a little time could do nothing better than
to prop my face in my hands and grill it over back and forth in all its
bitterness. But finally out of the grilling came that fuddle-headed
thought of mine builded on the fumes of the warmed wine and concerning
itself with an assault on Arnold’s house, with men enough to make it
somewhat less than madness.
Now my own men were far enough away, but, by Champe’s tale, Major Lee
was in hiding somewhere on the Jersey shore; and I knew the mettle of
the major and of the men he commanded.
“There is hope yet, Sergeant!” I cried, when the idea had fully taken
shape. “Are you hot-blooded enough to go with me where I shall lead?”
Champe wagged his hands back and forth and stretched the fingers.
“The feeling is coming back to them,” he said, and then he got up and
signified his readiness.
I explained my plan to him in low tones, remembering, at this late
dealing of the cards, that Castner had rooms somewhere on this same
floor with us.
“You say Major Lee has a force in hiding across the river. Good; we’ll
slip out of this, one at a time, scud for the river, and steal a boat.
When we find the major, I shall beg him to lend me a dozen of his
men. If he will do it--and you know him better than I do--we’ll steal
another boat and come back.”
Champe’s dark eyes were blazing.
“And we’ll sack the house and take the traitor in his bed!” he
exclaimed. “Captain Dick, if you can put that through, I’ll lie down
and let you walk on me for that neck-wringing I gave you a few minutes
back.”
“Never mind the choking-match, Jack Champe; get you out of here, and
wait for me in the street. I’ll join you when I’ve pieced my clothes
together on me,” I said; and so it was settled.
I found Champe waiting when I had sneaked out of the tavern so quietly,
I hoped, as to make my going pass unnoticed. Together we sought the
river bank, and craftily dodging a sleepy sentinel, crept down to the
water’s edge. Luck was with us this time, for before we had gone a
dozen paces along the shore we came upon a small boat riding by a long
chain, and, searching in likely hiding-places under the overhanging
bank, we found the oars. Pieces of my torn waistcoat answered for the
muffling; and in the next passing of the sleepy sentry on the bank
above, we pushed off and rowed lustily for the opposite shore.
But that one piece of good luck in finding the boat and getting
off unseen exhausted our allotment for the night. Champe’s two
confederates, the one who had been with him in the garden, and the
other who had been standing guard at the river’s edge, had both
disappeared and we knew not where to look for them. In due time we made
a landing on the Jersey side; whereupon we became as helpless as a pair
of babes in the wood. We had no more idea where to look for Major Lee
and his troopers than we should have had if we had been born blind, the
third man in Champe’s plot, the river-edge watcher who was to signal to
the _Nancy Jane’s_ dinghy, and who was afterward to guide the captors,
being the only one who knew.
None the less, we sought and searched, as those who have lost their
all, using the time recklessly in exploring every stretch of woodland
we could locate in the darkness, and even going so far as to inquire
when we found any one stirring at any of the isolated farm houses.
It was just before day that we got our clue. A countryman, looking
first askance at our uniforms as his lantern showed us to him, told us
that a troop of dragoons had been all day in the wood above his house,
but that an hour or more ahead of us they had galloped furiously away
on the northward road.
Champe and I exchanged discouraged glances. That settled it for us,
and when we were out of sight and hearing of the farmer we made some
hurried discussion of what came next on our bill of fare.
“You must take to the road, worn out as you are, and make your way back
to your regiment, Sergeant,” I said, settling Champe’s course for him
as if I had been his own captain.
But now his dogged courage seemed to have oozed away. “I can never make
it, Captain Dick. I’d be overhauled as soon as daylight comes, and that
would mean dancing upon nothing for me. They wouldn’t even give me a
soldier’s death.”
“Pshaw, man!” said I, half angrily. “Being safely out of the town and
this far on the road, you have little to fear.”
But he only shook his head gloomily, and would not be persuaded,
breaking in upon me, while I was trying to urge him, with a question as
to my own designs.
I laughed. “I came out to snare Sir Judas,” I told him. “That, and
nothing less, is what I shall do, John Champe, if I follow him to the
ends of the earth.”
“You’ll be taken and hanged,” said Champe.
“Not if I can help it, you may be sure. But come; you must decide.
I’m going back, and there is little enough time to do it in, the Lord
knows.”
He hesitated yet another minute or two and then rose up stiffly from
the log on which he had been sitting. “I’ll go back with you and see it
through,” he declared moodily.
I tried once again to dissuade him, showing him how he was likely to
have miseries enough as a common soldier in any regiment commanded by
Arnold; showed him further how he would certainly be required to choose
between death at the last and fighting against his country in very deed
and fact.
But it was all to no purpose. Say what I would, his only reply was a
stubborn repetition: “I’ll go back with you and see it through.” And
when I could get nothing more out of him, we made our way as swiftly
as possible back to our stolen boat, taking to the water a short
half-hour, I should say, before dawn-breaking.
Our luck, which had left us so promptly after the boat-stealing,
gave us a little glimpse of itself again when we approached the New
York shore. By the merest chance, we took ground within a few feet of
the dangling boat chain, and by chance again, our sleepy sentinel, or
another in his place, was at the other end of his beat when we climbed
cautiously up the bank.
Once more safely in the town, we separated; Champe to go to his
barracks, and I to steal unobserved into my tavern and up the stair and
so to my room with the unrumpled bed.
I rumpled the bed duly, in less than two minutes after I had dropped
the door-bar, being fully nine-tenths dead for the want of sleep and
rest. But I had scarcely pulled the covers up before there came a
mighty thundering at the door; and when I went to answer it, I was told
that my general commanded my attendance on the moment--and he had sent
a soldier to do the summoning.
VIII
A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL
IT nettles me to think that one carrying the name of Page should be
a prey to senseless terror, but the sight of that sour-faced soldier
standing, with his musket at parade, before my door, made me ill.
Weighing it evenly in a calmer moment, it was not so greatly to be
wondered at. A spy’s life always hangs by the slenderest thread, with
all the world that touches him a den of wild beasts ready to tear him
limb from limb. Besides, I was in the last ditch of weariness and
fatigue and a tired body is next to an empty belly for sapping the
courage.
But, after all, my soldier caller did not put me under arrest when I
was dressed and ready to go with him. On the contrary, he preceded me
to Arnold’s house, and when I went in, took up his sentry stand before
the entrance, pacing in step with Sir Henry Clinton’s man next door.
When I climbed the stair and met the man whose escapes of the night
past might have been measured in thicknesses of a hair, the unreasoning
terror gripped me again. Arnold was standing with his back to the door
when I entered, and when he turned to face me he was scowling darkly
and his first question made my heart turn a somersault within me.
“Where did you go last night, after you left me, Captain Page?”
“Nowhere,--at once,” I asserted, meaning to stay in the boat of truth
as long as any two planks of it would hold together. “Your thought that
you heard some one in the garden set me to thinking; so I hung off and
on here before the house until I saw your lights go out.”
“You saw nothing?--heard nothing?”
“No. The town was as quiet as I dare say it used to be when the
Mynheers snored their nights away in it.”
“And afterward?”