be but one explanation. James Askew had sold his news to Clinton or
Arnold, and the orders were out to apprehend us. It was but a slip
that the missing “captain” figured as a lieutenant on the lips of our
ensign; and the sergeant’s rank was correctly stated. So far as I knew,
we two, Champe and I, were the only stragglers from the legion; Champe
was known to have left his transport ship, and neither of us knew what
had transpired after mid-afternoon, when I had left Arnold putting his
wife into the hackney coach with Beatrix, and had gone to sink my hook
into Mr. Askew’s gills.
As far as I could see, we were fairly netted. Once aboard the schooner
under whose counter we were lying, and it was but a step to Fort George
and its dungeons, and another, and still shorter one, from the prison
to the gallows.
The red-faced little ensign had dropped into the stern-sheets of our
boat, and so he sat facing us. I guessed now that he had no captain;
that he was the ranking officer of the small guard-ship. Otherwise, his
superior would have been on deck long before this, hurling questions at
us. If we could but win the red-faced one--
I could not see Champe, who was behind me on the forward thwart. But
when the ensign stood up and called to the boat-hook man to haul us
amidships, I felt the grim sergeant’s determination in the thrill of
the light craft under me. Catching the one fortuitous moment when the
ensign was extending a hand to fend us off from the schooner’s side,
Champe entangled his oar between the boat and the ship’s bilge, made
an awkward effort to disengage it, and clumsily lost his balance,
careening the boat with such a sudden jerk that the red-faced little
officer went overboard in a clean, sharp headlong plunge.
Whether it was Champe’s intention to drown the officer, offhand, or
merely to make a diversion out of which something might grow to our
benefit, I never knew. But the diversion was a fact accomplished,
beyond doubt. With lusty sailor shouts, the man with the boat-hook gave
the alarm, and to the watch on deck was added the watch below, which
came tumbling up at the cry of “Man overboard!” Naturally, with no
lights, and with the fog thickening on every fresh breath of the sea
wind, the men on the schooner did nothing but get in one another’s way;
and the ensign who, like many another sailor, could swim no more than
a stone, would have drowned a dozen times before they got their tender
down from the davits at the stern.
But now I had my small inspiration, and with a quick word to Champe to
secure his intelligent help, it was put into effect. It was a simple
expedient, namely, to keep our boat within easy snatching distance of
the drowning officer, and then to haul him aboard when he was too well
soaked and frozen to remember his orders--all of which we did in the
proper sequence, and with the desired result.
The pug-nosed little man was no longer red-faced when we passed him up
the side of the schooner and into the hands of his excited crew, and no
one said us nay when we sheered off silently into the fog afterward,
and diligently lost ourselves once more.
That was no joke. We did lose ourselves beautifully this second time,
and when, after what figured to us as two or three of the longest hours
ever measured by falling sand grains, our boat took ground with a
sidelong lurch, we had no more idea than a pair of innocents what land
it might be.
Here came our first disagreement. Champe was for sheering off again
and waiting for the fog to lift: I said no; that the fog might not
lift until dawn, and, in any event, we must land somewhere, sometime.
The sergeant gave way, finally, but not without many misgivings openly
expressed. Luck was not with us, he said, and it would be our unblest,
crooked hap to walk straight into the arms of some of those who were
looking for us.
In divided counsels, therefore, we took our stiffened limbs out of
their boat crampings, and stamped and beat our arms and got the
sluggish blood in motion before we dragged our craft high and dry, and
set out to scramble up the steep bank fronting our landing-place. At
the top, to our astonishment, we were above the thin skim of fog that
lay like a veil on the surface of the water, and could see dimly the
surrounding objects.
The first of these was a man, walking slowly and with measured steps
toward us on the bank’s edge.
“A sentry,” muttered the sergeant, and we flattened ourselves silently
where we were till the soldier passed us, creeping swiftly forward to
cross the line a minute later.
Not above a stone’s throw from the waterside we were brought to a stand
by a barrier of some sort which, to the sense of touch, proclaimed
itself to be a high wooden fence. It was here that Champe gripped my
arm and drew me down beside him.
“The luck’s turned, Captain Dick!” he whispered excitedly. “Of all the
thousand places where we might have landed, we’ve drifted blindly to
the one we were aiming for! This is our garden, and here is the board
you kicked loose when you were walking with Sir Judas night before
last!”
It was as true as it was blankly incredible. The board pointed out by
Champe lay just as it had fallen, and peering through the gap it had
left, we could see the dark bulk of Arnold’s house, with Sir Henry
Clinton’s shouldering it on the right.
There were no lights in any of the windows, and the garden, when we had
entered it through the gap in the fence, was silent and deserted, as
might be expected at such an hour. We were in the shadow of the house
itself when I bade Champe strike a spark into his tinder box to let us
tell the time. It was past two o’clock, though how much past I could
not tell, since I had forgotten to wind my watch and it had stopped
exactly on the hour.
Determining this, we held a whispered consultation. It was terribly
late to press our plan to its conclusion, and Champe urged this,
arguing most sensibly that, if we had all good fortune from this on,
we could not hope to row far on the way to Tappan before the daylight
would show us to all who cared to see; that with the tide against us we
would not be past the British boat patrols by sunrise.
On the other hand, I contended that it might very well be now or never.
“You heard what the guard-ship ensign said: if daylight finds us in New
York, this day’s sun will be the last we’ll ever see, for they tell me
they hang their caught spies at midnight. Our alternative is to take to
the boat again and try to escape as we can. But if we try to do this,
we may as well take Arnold with us. If we are caught, we hang, anyway,
and none the less certainly if we are caught empty-handed.”
Champe saw the force of this, as I was sure he would; and if his teeth
were chattering when we set about breaking into the house, why so were
mine for that matter, and I protest it was from the raw chill of the
morning and not from fear.
Our breaking and entering was easily accomplished. A window in a rear
room gave to the cautious prying of Champe’s saber point; and from that
room, which, as I knew, was used for stores, to the lower corridor, or
entrance hall, we came by forcing the lock of the communicating door.
I half expected to find an aide or an orderly sleeping in this lower
hall, if, indeed, there should not be a sentry, awake and on guard. But
there was neither nor none of these. The hall was deserted and silent;
and when we drew the curtains of the side-lights at the front, there
was no sentry outside, save the one whose footfalls we could faintly
hear as he marched back and forth before Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters.
Here again, then, fortune appeared to be favoring us most astoundingly.
It was almost unbelievable that the man we meant to seize and carry
off was sleeping quietly, and wholly at our mercy, in the room above.
But, unless his guard was in the room with him, there was none in the
house; of this we made sure as a condition precedent to our creeping
silently up the stairs.
Before the closed door of the office-bedroom I gave the sergeant final
whispered instructions; this after we had softly tried the door and
found, to our greater astonishment, that it was unlocked.
“When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of
the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute;
once awakened, Arnold will fight--no man more desperately. But you
know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind
him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. Do your
work quickly and thoroughly, and use this door-key in your knotted
handkerchief for a gag. Are you ready?”
“Ready and waiting, Captain Dick,” was the muttered reply; and we swung
the door slowly on its hinges.
Though there were ample windows in both ends of it, the long room was
dark. But now our eyes had become somewhat accustomed to these inner
glooms, and we could make out the dim shapes of the furnishings nearest
to us; the writing-table, the chairs, the clumsy, cushioned settle
drawn out before the cold hearth.
Groping our way by slow inchings along the opposite wall, we finally
came to the alcove holding the bed, a high, canopied contrivance of
the older fashion, with heavy curtains to shut it in. I could have
sworn I heard the traitor’s gentle breathing when I laid a cautious
hand on the curtains to draw them aside. “Now!” I whispered; and as the
curtains parted, Champe sprang like a tiger through the opening and I
felt quickly for the man’s face on the pillows to guide the rapier’s
point for the silencing.
There was no face on the pillows; no human figure outlined beneath the
covers; which were drawn up smoothly as the traitor’s chamber-man, or
-woman, had left them. We had struck our blow and it had missed!
Champe sat up on the edge of the bed, and I heard his low chuckling
laugh.
“Shall I bind and gag the pillow, Captain Dick?” he asked sardonically;
and then he burst out in a soft-voiced torrent of the most fearsome
curses. “The devil takes choice care of his own,” he gritted, at the
far end of the outburst. “Four times have I had this Judas fairly
in my hands, and four times he has whipped out of them! Not once
before in all these two months has he slept away from here, Captain
Dick--I’d swear it! And now, on this one night of all the sixty-odd....
Well, shall we go down to the fort and turn ourselves over to the
provost-guard?”
For the moment it seemed as reasonable as anything else that remained
for us to do. But youth dies hard; and youth with the Page blood
jumping in its veins the hardest of all.
“They call me a daredevil, at home, John Champe,” I said evenly, “and
Mr. Hamilton named me so when he asked me to go to help you. I have a
mind to do the maddest thing you ever dreamed of, which has its one
chance in a million of saving our necks only because it is mad. Do you
try it with me?”
“Lord, yes,” said the sergeant wearily, “even if it’s to crawl in here
between Arnold’s blankets and let him find us so when he comes.”
“You may say it is quite as sure a road to Gallows Hill as that would
be,” I assented. “But come on: first we must leave the bed and this
house exactly as we found them. Can you straighten and smooth the
covers without a light?”
He said he could, and when he was through we drew the curtains, and
took our route in reverse, misplacing nothing, and even staying to put
the forced store-room lock back as we had found it. Once more in the
garden, we kept to the graveled walk to show no tell-tale foot-prints;
and at the fence we were careful to place the fallen board precisely as
it had lain before we had kicked it aside to gain our entrance.
Five minutes later, we had dodged the sentry again, and had lowered
ourselves cautiously to the river brink, where our boat was drawn out.
Watching our chance against the pacing sentry, we floated the little
craft silently, loaded it with stones enough to kill its buoyancy, and
filled it almost to the gunwale with water. Then we made the painter
fast to a rock at the river’s edge, pushed the boat out into deep
water, and sank it with a quick jerk on the rope.
“I should have sent it adrift, and no more said,” commented the
sergeant. “And I don’t see yet why you didn’t, Captain Dick,” he said.
“Never mind,” I rejoined. “You’re calling yourself a dead man, now, and
so you needn’t worry with the ‘whys’--though I don’t mind explaining
the present one. We’ve been at a good bit of trouble getting hold of
that boat, and if we can make shift to keep the breath in our bodies
for a few hours longer, we may need it again. That’s all. Now come with
me, and obey your orders to the letter.”
Once again we scrambled up the bank, dodged the sleepy sentinel, passed
to the street by a détour, and so came boldly to the front of the house
we had broken into. Then I told Champe what we were to do.
“Make a complete soldier of yourself, now, Sergeant, and follow two
steps behind me. We shall pace a sentry-beat up and down before the
house from this on, until Arnold returns and finds us here. When he
comes, you will salute and stand at parade, and look as weary as you
can to back what I shall say to him. Mark time--march!”
XVII
MASKED BATTERIES
WITHOUT a word, Champe fell in two paces to the rear and caught the
step, and thus began the weariest and I do think the most forlorn-hope
vigil that was ever kept. For its patient keeping the sergeant deserves
the greater credit, for I at least knew how I meant to try a desperate
cast to bring us out of our looped gallows ropes, but Champe knew
nothing save that I had formed a peg of some sort to hang a hope upon.
Tired and hungry, cold and cramped from our long confinement in the
small boat as we were, the disappointment of the empty bed and bedroom
had crushed and benumbed us. It was a dead wall from which courage
refused to rebound; a pit to swallow the bravest resolution; a clog for
our feet and shackles for our wrists. I do not speak for Champe; but
for myself, if the meanest soldier in the British garrison had come to
tell me I was his prisoner, I think his bare word would have made me
tag along after him like a cowed spaniel.
And the dreadful length of it! While we were fighting our way up the
ladder of the hours, with midnight and the accomplishment of our
purpose for the goal, time passed us on the wing. But now the minutes
dragged leaden-footed. It seemed as though the dawn would never come.
Fort George, looming grim and forbidding in the darkness no more than a
musket-shot from the seaward end of our pacing sentry-beat, might have
been a citadel of the dead; a huge mausoleum with never a living soul
to tenant it. Even the tavern, where you would suppose some one would
be stirring at any hour in the twenty-four, was silent and dark and
apparently deserted.
It was an ill time for good thoughts, and, conversely, the very pick
and choice of times for the tormenting kind. What masked batteries,
trained to blow us into eternity, would the rising sun reveal? We had
the little red-nosed navy ensign’s word for it that we had been missed
and that the hue and cry had been raised; that the hunt headed, no
doubt, by the spy Askew, was already up. Would we be taken before I
could try the last brazen-faced throw of the dice? Just here, before
this door we were making a mock of guarding, I had parted from my
loved one with the heart of gold only a few short hours ago: should I
ever see Beatrix Leigh again?--or the men about our own troop fires in
the Hudson hills?--or the old home in tidewater Virginia? It seemed
altogether unlikely.
And Beatrix; what would she say and do when she should hear the news
and realize that, while I was no such despicable traitor as she had
believed me to be, I was, none the less, to die a traitor’s death with
a cord around my neck? Or, rather, was it not most unlikely that she
would ever hear of it at all until after the eternal gulf had opened
its abysmal chasm between us?
Over and again I tried to break away from these thought-furies; to set
calm reason on her seat, and to gather resolution for the impending
battle of the wits upon the outcome of which our two lives depended.
Never had I striven so hard for calmness and self-control; never was
the need greater, and never did the attainment seem more blankly
impossible. I was unutterably fagged and exhausted; our antagonist
would be fresh from a night’s rest, clear-eyed, with every faculty
sharpened and alert. I must fight defensively on the slippery ground of
deceit and dissimulation, while my opponent had all the advantages of
the attack.
By some strange good fortune I had been able hitherto to deceive
Arnold, by nature the most wary and suspicious of men; but sooner or
later there must come a turn in the longest road, and I was racked and
tormented by the fear that we were now approaching it. Conned over in
its details, the expedient I had hit on seemed foolhardy to a degree
and most pitifully unconvincing. Yet it was the only one, and I must
try it at all hazards. And as often as I came into collision with the
stern necessity, the despairing cry rose up out of the underdepths,
“Oh, that the morning would come and let us be at the end of this!”
Champe never spoke to me once in all that doleful marching back
and forth, nor I to him. I mistrusted that he had his own personal
kettle of fish to fry, and that his cooking fire was smoldering
evilly or blazing too high as often as mine. But he was not a man
to vocalize his soul-wrestlings; and, besides, he had a soldier’s
choicest gift--complete reliance on his commanding officer, and a blind
confidence that the brain which was paid to do the thinking would
somehow contrive to think to some good purpose.
I shall always remember with reminiscent thrillings how welcome were
the first signs of approaching day; the lifting of the fog over the
river, and beyond that, its graying and thinning to transparency;
the long roll of the drums sounding the reveille in the fort; the
slamming open of shutters as the houses awoke; the cheerful clatter of
Hetheridge’s horse as the young orderly rode up to Sir Henry’s door and
dismounted.
After a little the fog soared aloft to transform itself into wisp-like
clouds high overhead, and the eastern sky reddened, and a horse-boy,
whistling André’s _Cow Chase_ lately set to music, came out in front
of the tavern and began to take down the shutters. Then a housemaid,
with her bucket of steaming water and cloths and brushes, opened the
door and knelt to scrub the steps. And still the sergeant and I tramped
heavily to and fro and waited; and still the man who had slept away
from his house did not return.
It was now that the delay began to eat like acid into our very bones.
Preparation, a stout bracing for the plunge, is all well enough in its
way; but too much of it will curdle the blood in the bravest veins and
make a trembling coward of the biggest hero that ever wore laurel.
Champe never knew or suspected it, I hope, but for me there were
moments after that dawn-breaking when a desire to fly to any sand heap
big enough to dig me a burrow in, was almost overpowering.
The suspense came to an end at length, as all things in a world of
meetings and partings must. I saw Arnold first. He was coming down the
street, walking soberly with his head down and his hands behind him; a
habit dating, they said, from the day when he had put it forever out
of his power to hold his head up among honest men. So walking, he was
almost up to us before he saw us; and I could feel Champe’s eyes fairly
boring into the back of my neck for fear I should be giving him his cue
and he would miss it.
I gave the cue at the instant when Arnold looked up and saw us. As
one man, we both halted, faced right, and made the formal salute.
Then, throwing every faculty of my exhausted soul into the effort
to appear the living mirror of shocked surprise, I exclaimed: “Why,
General!--Good heavens, sir! You--you did not sleep at home?”
There was a look in his gloomy eyes that made me shiver when he
confronted me calmly and said, “No, Captain Page; I did not sleep at
home.”
“Then--then we have been standing our long guard over an empty house?”
I faltered; and the faltering was no more than half insincere, if it
were that.
“Why should you stand guard at all, Captain Page?” he asked, never
relaxing the accusing eye-grip.
“Surely you must have heard?” I protested. “You might well say that no
man holding his commission from you could do less than to try to guard
your person at such a time as this, General Arnold!”
“Ah? And what have _you_ heard?”
“Only what all the town is whispering: that two of Washington’s
emissaries, masking as deserters from the rebel army, are here for the
purpose of abducting you, sir; that these men--the better to cover
their designs--are enlisted in the Loyal Americans; and that these two,
a rank and a warrant officer, are missing.”
“You heard all this?” he queried slowly. “And in the face of it you
come here to stand a night guard over my house?”
“Surely, sir; and why not? It seemed a moment when loyalty might do
well to assert itself; the more since some suspicious occurrences--”
“You are either a very brave and true man, or a very rash one, Captain
Page,” he said, breaking in upon me. “Did they not whisper you the
names of these two suspected men?”
“No.”
He frowned and looked away.
“I could almost find it in my heart to wish they had,” he said, half to
himself, I thought. And then, more pointedly to me: “There is an order
out for the arrest of these men--an order issued last night by Sir
Henry Clinton, himself. It specifies the names:--Captain Richard Page
and Sergeant John Champe.”
Now that the worst had come, the burden tumbled suddenly from my
shoulders and I became a man again.
“That is indeed most unfortunate, General Arnold,” I said calmly; “not
for us, but for you.”
“Ah? Possibly you will tell me why.”
“Because justice, in pursuing us, may perchance be even a little
blinder than she is usually portrayed; and while we are getting our
trial and acquittance, the real criminals will go free. But that is
neither here nor there. Will you take our swords, General? or shall we
go and surrender them to the commandant at Fort George?”
He nailed me up again with the sifting, probing eyes, and I could
almost fancy I saw a lurking smile in their farthest underdepths.
“Are you really the true man that Mistress--ah--the person who vouches
for you--insists that you are? Or are you the shiftiest, hardiest
daredevil villain that ever lived, Captain Page? I confess I don’t
know.”
“The court-martial may or may not answer that question for you, General
Arnold,” I said coldly. “For myself it matters little, so long as I
have the consciousness of duty well done, or well attempted; and I
think Sergeant Champe would say the same. Have we your permission to go
and surrender ourselves?”
He stopped and paced a step or two, his frown deepening. When he spoke,
he took a new tack and a little ray of hope began to glimmer in the
murk of doom.
“I have been officiously ignored in this matter, as in many others,” he
complained, in the manner of one who lets his inner thought slip into
speech. “The hearsay word of some spy, whom I have never been permitted
to see and question, is taken, and an order goes out to apprehend two
of my own men--men who are responsible to me for their actions, and to
no one else. Tell me, Captain Page, have you ever given Lieutenant
Castner special reason to dislike you?”
“Never to my knowledge,” said I, wondering what was coming.
“He is at the bottom of all this,” snapped Arnold harshly. “It was he
who saw the spy; it was he who carried the story to Sir Henry Clinton
and procured the order for your arrest. By heaven, sir! for this one
time I shall show them that I am at least the colonel in command of
my own regiment! Get you into the house--you and the sergeant--and we
shall see if their order for your arrest runs this far.”
Surely, this was mirth for the gods; that the man who should have been
most eager to see us hanged was interposing his own authority against
Sir Henry Clinton’s to balk the hangman! It was like robbing a blind
man to take such a gross advantage of his vanity and pride, but there
was no alternative. Now that he had told us what we had to fear, there
was no other hand or house in all New York that could shield us.
So we followed him through the door of the house which we had lately
broken into, and were told curtly to rest ourselves as we could in the
orderly-room; and that Arnold’s man would later bring us our breakfast.
At the last, when he was leaving us, I ventured to cast a small anchor
to windward.