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?”