of certain suspicious occurrences of the night. If, as I have good
cause to fear, you shall find yourself overruled in this matter--if you
are compelled to turn us over to our accusers--I beg you will not do
it until you have heard what we have to tell you of last night’s doings
in the town.”
“You shall have your hearing, never fear,” he asserted, frowning again
at the hint that he would be forced to yield us up, whether he wanted
to or not; and so he left us.
“Pull yourself together once more, Sergeant,” I commanded, shaking
Champe awake when we were alone together. “We are no more than fairly
across the threshold of the peril. We shall doubtless be questioned
separately, and God help us if we are not letter-perfect able to tell
the same tale! Listen, now, and get your lesson by heart.”
At this I gave him the meat and marrow of the story I meant to tell
Arnold on my cross-examination, drilling him patiently until every
nerve of him save the receptive was fast asleep. Yet I think he had it
all line by line before Arnold’s serving man came with the breakfast,
though he afterward went to sleep in his chair with the gulping of his
third dish of tea; a good example which I presently followed with the
chimney-corner settle for a bed.
Something to my surprise, for I had fancied our business would scarcely
wait so long, the day was half spent when an orderly--a new little man
I had never seen before--came to rout me out and tell me that General
Arnold commanded my presence in the room overhead. I could have wished
for a little space in which to set a sleep-befuddled brain in order,
but it was not given me. So far from it, I was still yawning foolishly
behind my hand when I stumbled into Arnold’s presence, trying to look
soldierly, and making a rather shameful failure of it, I fear.
But the man behind the little writing-table gave no heed to my
gapings. “Sit down, Captain Page,” he said briskly. “While you have
been sleeping, we have come to some better understanding of this
business--better for you and Champe, at all events. The order for your
arrest has been suspended--or at least, made discretionary with me.”
I saw how his vanity and self-esteem had been propitiated, and was
glad, since therein lay our only hope.
“We owe you much more than we have yet been able to pay, General--the
sergeant and I,” I said, which was the truth masquerading as a lie. “So
long as you are our judge-advocate, we don’t fear the drumhead court.
But now, if it is permitted, I should like to inquire how suspicion
fell specially on us.”
When he answered, his frown was not for me.
“There is a mystery about it, Captain. Castner claimed to have had
speech with a spy, who incriminated you and Champe on a direct charge;
and upon that information the order for your arrest was issued--without
my knowledge or approval, as I have said. Now, when I go to demand an
explanation, the spy has disappeared and Castner is missing. No one
else has seen the spy, and even his name is carefully suppressed.”
I put on an air of surprise which I was far enough from feeling. Mr.
James Askew’s tenderness about that whispered story of his part in the
André betrayal accounted for everything but Castner’s disappearance.
“You are looking for some motive under all this, General?” I inquired.
“To be sure; and it is not far to seek. Lieutenant Castner is my
personal enemy, and he has been at no pains to conceal that fact,
Captain Page.”
“You astonish me!” I exclaimed; and this, at least, was a pure
falsehood.
“It is true,” he asserted bitterly. “He has not scrupled to say openly
that Sir Henry would do the king’s cause a worthy service if he would
send me to Mr. Washington in chains!”
“Then,” said I, smoothly, “you would rather expect to find him
conniving at the crime I was charged with, than to find him striving to
prevent it.”
“It is a myth--this kidnapping tale,” said the traitor hotly. “He
merely wished to deprive me of your services, Captain--at the expense
of your life, if need be!”
Was ever a man so misled? Here was the arch-plotter of his century,
the man who had been able for months to hold a trusted station in
the patriot army, and at the same time to carry on a constant and
treasonable correspondence with his country’s enemies, unable to keep
from falling into the simplest of plots laid for him! It was weighing
pretty heavily upon Castner, who was merely an honest soldier trying
to do his duty as he saw it, but I could hardly afford to defend the
lieutenant.
“Whatever the lieutenant’s object may have been, I think that I have
had a narrow escape,” I said, which was truth of the truth. “But you
spoke of mysteries: I think you will say there are more and greater
ones when you hear what I have to tell you, General Arnold. You missed
me yesterday afternoon?”
“I did. And that gave more color to Castner’s charges. Also, it was
reported that Sergeant Champe had not rejoined his ship, and that you
had been seen together, earlier in the day. Also, again, that neither
of you could be found, though the order for your arrest went straight
to the outposts as soon as it was issued. I take it you are prepared to
explain all these seemingly suspicious coincidences, Captain?” He said
it almost anxiously, though the anxiety was more for the humbling of
Castner than for any other reason, I thought.
“I am, fully,” I replied. “To begin at the beginning, Sergeant Champe
did not return to his ship yesterday morning because he failed to find
a boat going down to the fleet in the lower bay. Quite naturally,
he drifted into a tap-room, the bar of a sailor’s groggery at the
waterside. While he was there, and still sober enough to have his wits
about him, a man in citizen’s clothes stood at the bar trying to make a
bargain with the tavern-keeper for a boat. The sergeant heard all that
was said. A boat was required which would carry three men, two of them
would row, and it must be exceedingly light and speedy.”
“Ha!” said my listener; “three men, and only two to row. The third man
might be a prisoner, eh, Captain Page?”
“Possibly,” I answered, smiling inwardly at the readiness with which he
followed me. Then I went on, keeping as scrupulously within the bounds
of fact as if I expected to be called to account for every word--not
because I was afraid to lie, but because nothing but the point of view
needed to be concealed.
“When the man left the tavern, the sergeant, as you may say, trod
in his very footsteps. The long jaunt ended at the house of a Dutch
boat-builder on the eastern shore. The man in citizen’s clothes went
in, and, a little later, the sergeant thought he heard sounds of a
struggle. Be that as it may, the man came presently out of the house
and made his way back to the neighborhood of Fort George, where he
disappeared. Whereupon the sergeant dutifully hunted me out and told me
his story.”
“This was in the morning, you say?” queried Arnold, most deeply
interested, as I could see.
“In the forenoon,” I went on, and now I saw that I must begin to
invent. “Later on, after Mistress Arnold’s visit to you here, I
learned through Champe that the man who had worn citizen’s clothes in
the forenoon had turned up at the tavern in the uniform of a British
private soldier, and that he had been seen in company with an officer
wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans. This, in itself, seemed
a little suspicious, and as the plot you speak of was, by that time,
becoming a tavern rumor--”
“I see,” said Arnold, anticipating me. “You sallied out to find this
officer and his boat-requiring companion?”
I bowed.
“We had little difficulty in placing them, the officer and his
masquerading comrade, in the lane beyond the tavern; and when they went
eastward, you may imagine that we, as you might say, tracked them step
for step. They took a most roundabout way, but finally reached and
entered the boat-builder’s house.”
“Ah; but you did not drop it there, Captain Page. You are far too
enterprising, I am sure.” By this time the traitor was up and walking
the floor, his eyes flashing, and his entire manner reminding me of
nothing so much as of a hound roving to find a scent.
“No; we did not drop it. But what followed was still more mysterious.
You must know that by this time it was black dark. The two men locked
themselves in the house, struck a light, made a fire on the hearth,
and, by the sounds, filled a kettle and put it on to boil.”
“You could see them--see their faces?” was the eager question.
“I saw the face of the soldier, but not that of the officer,” I
replied, skipping around the eager query. “The man who had been
boat-seeking in the forenoon was tall and dark; something on Sergeant
Champe’s order. The other was also tall, with square shoulders, and he
was fair.”
Arnold stopped abruptly, and wheeled to face me. Some sudden emotion
had transformed him. His eyes were blazing, and the thin nostrils were
quivering with rage or excitement, I could not tell which.
“I can name one of those men--possibly both of them!” he cried. “But go
on, Captain Page; go on, sir!”
“They made tea and ate,” I went on, wondering what new pool of
disturbment I had unconsciously troubled. “Afterward they sat before
the fire and smoked. Later, the soldier rose and went into another
room, coming back directly to say something which made the officer
spring up and go with him. They took the candle, and, as the fire
had died down, the house was dark; dark and silent. But after a time
there came muffled cries, and a crash like that of a falling trap-door
followed by a bedlam of thunderings as if a cataract of bricks were
pouring upon the floor. Then a strange little man, dripping and reeking
as if he had been soaked in a cask of liquor, dashed out of the house
and disappeared in the darkness.”
I paused to give him his chance to lead me. It was a perilous road that
I was traversing, but I meant to draw him so far afield this time that
he would never get back to any suspicion of Champe or me.
“Well?” he said sharply. “That was not the end of your adventure,
Captain Page?”
“No,” I rejoined. “The little man was gone but a short time before he
came running back with a mob at his heels--sailors, armed with guns
and cutlasses. It did not take us long to understand that the little
man was the boat-builder, and that he had contrived to pen his two
housebreakers in the cellar.”
Arnold nodded with apparent satisfaction.
“A troublesome friend of yours and mine will probably trouble us no
more, Captain Page,” he commented. “The boat-builder’s house is a
hiding-place for smugglers--one of a number in the locality you have
described. And your armed sailors were a smuggler’s crew. There was a
fight?”
“We could not be sure; there was a great deal of noise. But it ended in
a fiasco. There was a loophole of escape, and the two cellar prisoners
must have found it--we guessed it would be an underground passage
leading from the cellar to the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge.
At any rate, a dim light flickered for a minute or two in the shop, and
then a boat was run down the launching ways, with two men scrambling
into it at the final instant.”
Again I paused, and once more he gave me my lead.
“They escaped?--got off? But surely you did not give up, Captain?”
“No. The sergeant and I put to sea the moment we could find a boat
and launch it--which seemed to be before the mob in the house had
discovered the escape. But when we manned the oars and began to look
about us, ours was the only boat in sight. We pulled down the shore,
keeping the sharpest lookout, but we saw nothing save the fog, which
presently made us lose ourselves, and a guard schooner whose commanding
ensign wished to arrest and detain us--chiefly, as I gathered, because
we were wearing the uniforms of the Loyal Americans.”
For a long time Arnold walked back and forth in deepest meditation, and
I feared he was not going to give me the chance to put the capstone on
my carefully built pyramid of dissimulation. But he did.
“And after your encounter with the young cub who did not like your
uniforms, Captain Page--what then?”
“We could do nothing in the fog, and we landed, a little way from
the fort, and came here to mount guard. Now for the confirmation of
all this fairy tale, General: the groggery-keeper can testify to the
boat-seeker’s disguise; the smugglers, or their ally, the boat-builder,
can be interrogated; and doubtless the discontented navy ensign will
remember our visit, our explanations, and our request for the loan of a
compass--which he most churlishly refused.”
He sat down at his writing-table and put his head in his hands.
After another interval of silence, he looked up to say: “You have
sufficiently accounted for yourself and Sergeant Champe, Captain; now
I shall try to account for the two men who escaped in the stolen boat.
Come with me.”
I followed to the other end of the long room, mystified in my turn. But
my heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer when he snatched the
bed-curtains aside and pointed to the unmistakable mud stains on the
coverlet--traces left by Champe: traces which, in the darkness, we had
not seen, and which we could not have removed if we had seen.
“Those men whom you found and lost, Captain Page: they came here,
either before or after you mounted guard in the street. Their purpose
is plain. They entered the house through a window in the rear, leaving
these mud stains all the way along. They came here to abduct me, sir,
and but for the fortunate circumstance of my absence, they might have
succeeded.”
My expression of horrified surprise did not need to be feigned.
“What a frightfully narrow escape!” I exclaimed, but I was thinking of
ours rather than his.
“It was,” he said impressively. “But the plot was even subtler than you
think. Have you guessed why its execution was delayed until last night?
The time was chosen when the Loyal Americans--my own legion--was well
out of the way; only two of my own men were known to be ashore, and
these two--yourself and Sergeant Champe--were to be frightened by this
carefully spread rumor and threat of arrest so that you would both run
away, disappear, and so lend color to the later story that you two had
surprised me in my bed and carried me off.”
“Good heavens!” I ejaculated. “But that inculpates--”
“Quite true,” he agreed gravely. “It inculpates a British officer;
a man who has been forced upon me as an aide; a man who hates and
despises me as heartily as Mr. Washington does. Captain Page, if you
could have seen the face of the officer, who sat before the fire last
night in the boat-builder’s house, you would have seen the face of
Lieutenant Charles Castner!”
XVIII
IN WHICH THE WIND KEEPS REVELS
WHEN Arnold gave me his climax by pronouncing Castner’s name, I saw at
once to what conclusion he had been working all through my story of the
night’s happenings. He had imagined Castner and some accomplice of his
under my figuring of the two who were really Champe and myself.
It must not be set down as hypocrisy if I say that I was sorry. While
it was doubtless true that Castner was doing his best to convict us of
treachery, I knew that he believed Askew’s story, and that in seeking
to have us apprehended he was merely doing what appeared to be--and
what certainly was--his plain soldier duty. For that reason it pained
me to see him involved, even in a traitor’s imaginings; but there was
no help for it.
Having shown me his mind, Arnold next proceeded to lay his commands
upon me; and now I saw how his good angel, if he ever had one, had
deserted him entirely.
“With Sergeant Champe for your subordinate, you will constitute
yourself my bodyguard from this time on until we join the army in the
fleet, Captain Page,” he said, when we had thrashed out the matter of
the attempt upon his liberty to the final straw. “The convoy frigate
will return in two or three days at the farthest, but until I go
aboard, I wish to be assured of the presence of men upon whom I can
rely.”
If I bowed very low at this, it was only because I feared he might see
and read the exultation in my face. Now, indeed, I thought, the Lord
had delivered this traitor helpless into my hands. Alone in the house
with him at night, and with the sunken boat raised and fitted for
service, it would go hard with us now if we could not wring complete
success out of all the foregone failures.
Conning all this over afterward, it seemed passing strange that no hint
of a rising obstacle, bigger than any we had yet encountered, came to
me at that time. War and its cruel necessities are frightful levelers,
breaking down many ideals and brushing aside all the finer scruples.
Though I was far from recognizing it at the moment, the desire to carry
out the kidnapping purpose had come to be a purely brutal obsession,
recking nothing of the common humanities, and completely losing sight
of the fact that Arnold, by his misguided trusting of us, no less than
by his many kindnesses to me, was making an unconscious appeal too
strong to be disregarded. But at that moment there was nothing in me
to which the appeal could address itself; nor could there be until an
angel from heaven should bring me the fire to re-light the candle which
the war-winds had blown so gustily into extinguishment.
When I was released and suffered to go below-stairs, I could scarcely
wait to get Champe thoroughly awake before beginning to coach him
in the new part he must play. But when he sensed the astounding turn
things had taken, his loud guffaws made me clap a hand over his mouth.
“Silence, you oaf!” I commanded. “One unguarded word--one lifting of an
eyelid too few or too many--and the balance tips the other way. I tell
you, John Champe, I have been through the valley of the hot plow-shares
itself since I left you snoring here!” And then I told him of Arnold’s
discoveries, and how, in our breaking and entering, we had left a trail
a blind man could follow when we thought we were leaving none at all.
He was sober enough when I finished, and, soldier-like, asked for his
orders. I told him he might sleep again till I called him; that he must
be fresh for the night.
“Then you are still for trying it on, Captain Dick?--in spite of
everything?”
“It would be flying in the face of Providence not to try, and keep on
trying until we succeed. We are many miles nearer the goal by what I
have just told you, Sergeant.”
But now he was shaking his head dubiously.
“We shall never do it,” he objected; “never, in this world, Captain
Dick. I saw that written out on the walls of his room last night.
Something will stop us; I feel it in my bones.”
“But you won’t leave the plow in the furrow?” I protested. “We are
equals in this, Champe: I can not command you against your convictions,
or even against your wish.”
“You can command me, and you shall,” he rejoined. “You will tell me
what to do, and I’ll do it. But we shall fail.”
That set me to thinking how far I was justified in involving another
man in a desperate affair for which he had apparently lost his stomach;
an affair in which my responsibility as his superior officer would be
doubled. I did not wish to shirk, God knows, or even to divide the
responsibility with my companion. But his new attitude of dejection
made me tenderer of his safety than I had been before. In the last
resort, I thought it might be possible to let one bankrupt pay the
total cost of failure.
“I’ll take you up on that, Sergeant Champe,” I said calmly. “From this
time forth you will consider yourself a mere machine. Will you obey me
to the letter?”
“As I would Light Horse Harry Lee, himself, Captain Dick,” was his
answer.
“Then listen: we will discuss ways and means, and work together, as
heretofore, straight through to our end. But if anything happens--if,
say, we should be taken in the act--you must not scruple to turn
against me; to save yourself if you have to catch and hold me while
they tie my hands. Will you promise to do this?”
“No,” he said bluntly. “I could never do that, Captain Dick. There is
only one thing that would ever make me an enemy of yours--and then
there would be no feigning about it: if you should turn softhearted of
a sudden, and spare Sir Judas--”
“Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Have I shown a soft heart, thus
far?”
“No; but--but--your pardon, Captain Dick, but there is a woman in this
tangle of ours; two of them; and one of them would willingly die in
this man’s place, and the other--”
“Never say it, John Champe!” I interposed. “When it comes to that, I
shall want you for my enemy; and you must not spare me the shrewdest
blow you can strike. But in the other event, you must save yourself if
you can, remembering this one thing--that I shall hang a great deal the
easier and more comfortably if I hang alone.”
“I’m too sleepy still to argue that point out with you,” he protested;
and I think he was nodding again, to make up the arrears of the night,
before I had ascended the stair to take my place at Arnold’s door.
The traitor never left his house all that afternoon, and when I was not
dozing in my chair in the corridor, I could hear his pen scratching
steadily, hour upon hour. For a brevet-commander who was, in truth,
no more than the colonel of a regiment, Arnold did more writing than
any lawyer’s clerk, and sometimes I have wondered if his treasonable
correspondence did not have its first beginnings in his insatiable
thirst for letter-writing. But no: it was his vanity again, which ever
loves to dribble from a pen’s point, that made him such a slave of the
ink-pot.
The house darkened early in the afternoon, and when I went to the
corridor window to look at the sky, there were promises of a storm.
Here was Champe’s prophecy of further obstacles on its way to
fulfillment hours ahead of any possible move we could make. Inclement
weather, rain, snow or cold, we might brave, but not a wind which would
raise a sea.
I looked at the heavens long and earnestly. There was a gray sky, but
the clouds were lower than I liked to see them. Rain or snow it would
be, I decided, with a chance of wind from the southeast. That was
nothing, so long as it did not blow too hard.
It was near about dusk, and the serving man had brought me my supper on
a tray, when Arnold opened the door for the first time and found me at
my post.
“Lord, Captain Page!” he said. “Have you been here all the afternoon?
You took me too literally. Go down to the dining-room and have yourself
served in some comfort. Afterward, you may come and get a letter for
Mistress Arnold, leaving Sergeant Champe on duty in the lower hall. We
are in no such peril as to need a death watch.”
That matter of carrying another letter to Margaret Shippen set me
to blowing hot and cold in the same instant; elate with the thought
that I might see Beatrix again, and apprehensive from the fear that
if I should see her, I must be put to it harder than ever to defend
my secret. Also, there was another thing to add a chill, if not of
apprehension, at least of decent reluctance. How could I brazenly face
the dear lady, who was so good to Beatrix and me, with a lie in my eyes
and false words on my lips, carrying her husband’s love-billets on the
very eve of a deed which would crush her into the dust of affliction?
I was half minded to ask Arnold to make Champe his messenger, pressing
the resolve so far as to inquire of the sergeant if he could find the
way in the dark to a certain house across the open square from Mr.
Justice Smith’s. When he was doubtful about it, I braced myself and
said I would go; which, when I had posted Champe in the lower hall, and
had got the letter from Arnold, I did.
The promise of a bad night weather-wise was beginning to come to pass
when I set out--a bit warily for the sake of Lieutenant Castner’s
shrewd and watchful enmity--to thread the poorly lighted streets. A
cold rain was falling and the wind off the bay was sharp-edged, with a
threat of more to follow.