Chapter I: FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room (9)

It was with a mind strangely confused by the sudden turn which I had forced our fortunes to take that I climbed the bank and dodged the sentry and made my way by the roundabout route Champe and I had taken, back to the street. I went this way, not because I was afraid to carry out that purpose of going through the garden, but because, in passing the gap in the fence, I found the garden walk untenanted, and a light showing in the upper windows of the house to tell me that Arnold had gone back to his office workroom.

With my feet pressing the familiar pavements in front of the house, it came to me suddenly and with a curious little shock that I had lighted upon an entirely new world; a world in which I was at the same moment a man of rejuvenated honor and a hunted fugitive. I say it without shame that for the moment my eyes were dimmed and a rush of emotions too varied to be analyzed came swiftly over me. It is no light thing to fling one’s self, heart and soul, into the accomplishment of a certain purpose and then to turn short and take the path of renunciation at the very climax of success.

Yet I felt strangely light-hearted, and as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that all was over, I could realize very clearly that neither General Washington nor Mr. Hamilton could possibly have foreseen any such wading in the pool of duplicity for me as that into which my emprise had pushed me. Also, I understood that when they should be made aware of all the circumstances they would be the first to approve this final step of withdrawal which, lacking Beatrix Leigh’s gentle promptings, I might never have taken.

So my conscience was clear at last and yet all this had little bearing upon things present and pressing. When all was said, I was to the full as likely to pay the spy’s penalty now as I should have been had I been taken red-handed in the very act of abducting Arnold. The facts of my mission were all known to Castner, and it was upon these facts, and not upon the accomplishment, that I should be tried and condemned. Why Castner had waited so long before springing his trap I could not guess. Now that he was back from wherever he had been and with the spy Askew safely in tow, a word to Sir Henry Clinton and another to Arnold were all that were needed. And, surely, Castner had had time to preach an entire sermon to either or both of them since I had seen him passing the tavern with his two companions.

I had a part answer to this puzzling question of the reason for Castner’s delay when, while I was as yet hanging upon my heel and not knowing which way to turn, I saw an officer with the shoulder-straps of a general descending Sir Henry Clinton’s steps; a man walking slowly and with his head bowed and his hands tightly locked behind him. The man was Benedict Arnold; and they had just been giving him the undeniable proof of my treachery. I knew it as well as if I had been an eavesdropper at the conference behind Sir Henry Clinton’s closed door.

Now you may scoff, if you will, but this discovery, the clinching of the nail, as you may say, hurt me unspeakably for the moment. Deny it as we may, we do all live more or less upon the good opinions of our fellow creatures; and surely I had painted myself as a villain of the deepest dye for this man who was coming on with his head bowed and carrying in his heart a bitter disappointment to go with him back to his quarters in the adjoining house.

I turned away, immeasurably saddened in spite of the strange and most welcome heart-lightening; and I do think I would have given much at that moment to be able to tell Arnold that I had spared him at the final crisis. He would never know, and perhaps that was best; yet I thought it was a needless twist of the thumb-screws of fate both for him and for me that he could not know.

But there was no time for repining. I had no thought of taking the first step in an effort to secure my own safety until after I should have made sure of Beatrix’s embarkation and departure; indeed, it was this, as much as anything else, that had made me miss the chance of fighting it out with the saturnine sergeant in the boat. By every lover’s obligation it was my first duty to see Beatrix and my Cousin Ju on board the _Nancy Jane_, with the staunch little schooner plunging on its way down the bay; and after that I could make my flight--if Champe should not have turned up again to need a friend, and if all the avenues should not be closed to me.

But the more I thought of the seaward venture for the two women the less I liked it. It was a rough night, with the wind in the wrong quarter and the lower bay still cluttered with the waiting ships of Arnold’s expeditionary fleet. Again, Sprigg’s vessel might be detained; at any hour it might be boarded by the harbor patrols, and its contraband lading--the recovered tobacco--turned up to the light. In that case I knew that the military authority which had winked at the ransoming of the tobacco cargo could not, and would not, openly intervene.

Worse than all, Major Simcoe’s troop might return from its wild-goose chase on the Tarrytown road in time to claim passage rights for its twenty-man quota on the _Nancy Jane_. Perhaps the Rangers had returned already!

With that threatening possibility in mind I resolved to go at once to the barracks on a spying reconnaissance, and if I should find that Simcoe’s troop had returned, to press quickly on to the Vandeventer house to hasten the embarkation. But first I yielded to a madman’s prompting that had been fretting at me ever since Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness and I had realized that I was once more a free man. It was no less than a foolish notion that I should like to show myself to Beatrix at the parting moment in my true colors--the same patriot homespun I had worn when she had given me God-speed at the door of her father’s house in Virginia, and which I had exchanged so unwillingly for these cursed facings of Arnold’s Loyal Americans.

Now that I had cut loose once and for all from the tanglings of chicanery and deceit, this uniform of Arnold’s Legion was hateful--doubly hateful. To every eye that saw me in it, it told an added lie; and I was sick and nauseated with lying. Could I not slip into the tavern and find my portmanteau and make the change?

It seemed feasible enough; and a stealthy peering through the windows of the lighted tap-room showed me a measurably clear field. A Quaker in a drab long-coat and broadbrim sat at one of the tables smoking a thin-stemmed church-warden. Two Hessians of Knyphausen’s were guzzling ale at another; and the Irish barman was nodding sleeping behind his wicket.

I opened the door and entered, passing quickly to the stair and reaching it before the aproned Irishman at the bar could do more than rouse himself and say, “Och, ’tis yourself, then, is it, Captain Page?” and straightway fall to nodding again.

Coming to the barn-like room above-stairs which had apparently lain undisturbed since Champe and I had forsaken it to become fugitives two days before, I found flint, steel and tinder box, and a candle-end to flare gustily in the cold drafts of the place while I made the swift change from red and green to homespun blue. Flinging the badges of disgrace into the corner, I replaced the Scots’ rapier in its belt, thinking that I must, after all, be beholden to King George for this much of my equipment. For Champe still had my horse-saber, and I would not go on Beatrix’s business weaponless.

Being now ready to run the gauntlet of the tap-room again I sallied out and groped my way to the stair-head. A hubbub of voices was rising from the room below and when I had stepped cautiously down to the landing turn I saw that my fate had already outrun me. In the few minutes which had elapsed since my passing through it, the tap-room had filled with soldiers and a crowding throng of riff-raff from the street; and by the light of the bar candles I saw Castner. He was questioning the Irish barman sharply and the good pot-filler was trying his best to shield me.

“Arrah, now, Liftenant, dear! is it Captain Page you’d be asking for? Shure I haven’t seen the smilin’ face av him these four hours. Would he be comin’ here widout me knowin’ ut?”

At this point there was a stir in the crowd and a tail man, soaked and dripping, pushed his way rudely up to Castner’s elbow. I looked and looked again, and gasped. By all the lunatics that ever filled a Bedlam, it was John Champe!

“Don’t believe that lying Irishman, Lieutenant Castner!” he cried out hoarsely. “I tell you I saw him enter here--no longer ago than the time it took me to run and fetch you, sir!”

I saw Castner’s involuntary shrinking from the man who was thus betraying one who at least held the claim of being a fellow-countryman, a fellow-soldier, and a fellow-deserter. I confess that, at first, it seemed blankly incredible to me that Champe should be doing this. If the spy Askew’s story was to be taken as a whole, the sergeant from Major Lee’s Legion was involved no less deeply than the captain from Baylor’s Horse. But there was no mistaking his intention. There were black circles around his eyes and he was so drunk with passion that he could scarcely stand without leaning against the barman’s wicket.

My first impulse was to steal back up the stair to try a drop from one of the windows. But when I would have translated the impulse into action, another man, a small rattish man in gray clothes and with a great bunch of seals dangling at his watch-fob, thrust himself forward out of the mob of onlookers and I heard his whispered word to Castner.

“On the stair landing, Lieutenant. Look for yourself, and let the Irishman spare his lying evasions!”

Castner looked as directed, bowing gravely when he saw me.

“Come down, Captain Page, and surrender your sword,” he commanded, soberly stern; and the brabble of voices ceased and a sudden hush fell on the room. Also, I noticed when Castner spoke and all eyes were turned to my landing, Champe drew back behind the more forward ones in the crowd and I saw him no more.

Now that the suspense was ended and open war was declared, I felt better and could even lean over the stair-rail and laugh down upon these king’s bush-beaters.

“You want my sword, Lieutenant?” I retorted. “I’ll give it to you, or to any man whose need is greater than my own--always provided that you or he will take it point foremost.”

“I make the demand in the king’s name,” said Castner, refusing to be either joked or jarred out of his even-toned soberness. And then he added, out of the heart of friendliness, I do think: “I wouldn’t make it harder for you than I must, Captain Page. You should see that resistance is madness.”

“I see that you may order your men to train their muskets on me and bring me down bird-wise, Mr. Castner. I do assure you it will be far more merciful than those other designs you have on me.”

He took me at my word with a soldierly disregard for further parleyings. In a trice he had cleared the space to the stair-foot, and had given the order to five of his musketeers. When their pieces were leveled he gave me one more chance.

“Once more, and for the last time, will you come down and render yourself, Captain Page?”

“With pleasure!” I cried; and whipping the rapier from its sheath I vaulted over the stair-rail and fell upon him so heartily that he was driven fairly back among his musket men before he could bare steel and defend himself.

Lord! but there was a scattering among those gaping lookers-on! Never have I seen buyers in the eagerest market so anxious to get to the front--only their front was the rear. With an onset so vigorous and unexpected, I might have cut and thrust my way to the door, if it had not been for the cursed little gray-coated spy, James Askew. But at the charging instant he dodged to get behind me, and I knew better than to leave an enemy of his temper unaccounted for in the rear. My foining to get a side-thrust at the spy gave Castner his chance to draw; and in another breath we were at it, hammer and tongs, Castner striving manfully to press me to the wall, and Dickie Page fighting as a man fights when he knows that his hours are strictly numbered, and who asks no more of this world and his enemies therein than the chance to die while his blood is leaping battle-warm.

It was the cur Askew who ended it, after all, though not as he meant to, I’ll dare swear. In our stamping rushes and thrustings and parryings, Castner and I had him penned in a corner, and at length, in a wide flanconade, my sword’s point touched him on the outward sweep to line. With a yelp like that of a pricked dog, he darted out of his corner and made to get away, rushing blindly into the zone of whistling sword blades.

It was the end of him, as well as of the sword play. He was just in time to catch the swift following thrust with which Castner replied to my attack, and the lieutenant’s blade passed clean through him; through his heart, I think, for he dropped like a stone, and gave only a shiver before his eyes glazed and his jaw fell.

This was my fair chance to kill Lieutenant Charles Castner, of the King’s Own; but I hope we Pages are something better than assassins, even when the blood is hot and we are fighting for our lives. My point went to the floor, and I stepped back to let Castner disengage; then the musketeers flung their pieces aside and made their smothering rush, and I was done.

The lieutenant was considerably out of breath when he pulled his sword from the spy’s body and fell fiercely upon his men, who were mishandling me pretty cruelly.

“Your word that you will not try to escape, Captain Page!” he panted; but I would not give it.

“No; ‘safe bind, safe find,’ is your motto, my good friend,” I said cheerfully, holding out my wrists for the cord.

It galled him to do it, but he would not fail in any part of his duty.

“I have had too much trouble in overtaking you,” he said in extenuation, when the soldiers were tying my hands; with all the riff-raff of idlers turned back now to look on, gaping.

“What a pity you have lost your witness,” I remarked, indicating the dead spy.

“The less valuable of my witnesses,” he corrected curtly. “Unhappily for you, there is another and more credible one.”

This remark of his set me to wondering. Then I remembered the third man who had walked with Castner and the spy in the afternoon--the man whose face I could not see, but whose gait and figure had been singularly familiar. Was this the “more credible” witness? I should soon know.

We stayed no time at all in the tavern after the hand-tying. With a word to the inn people about the disposition of the body of James Askew, Castner disciplined his corporal’s guard and we took the open air for it, pointing not for Sir Henry Clinton’s house, as I supposed we should, but on past it toward Fort George.

Within the walls of the fort, we marched silently to the house of the commander, a long low structure of Dutch brick, facing the parade ground. Two rooms of it were well lighted, and when the door was opened and I was thrust in, I saw that the court-martial was sitting and waiting for me, and that I was confronting my judges.

XXI

THE DRUMHEAD COURT

SOME of the British officers gathered in the fort commandant’s room to hold the court-martial were known to me by name, but that which gave me the greatest shock was the sight of Major Simcoe, sitting stern and thoughtful behind the up-ended drum. For his presence argued the return of the Queen’s Rangers from their wild-goose chase up the Tarrytown road, and their return promised the collapse of my care-taking plot to insure the escape of Beatrix and my cousin on the _Nancy Jane_.

But they gave me little time for the anxious lover-thought, these stern gentlemen who were holding an inquest rather than a trial. With a haughty nod, to indicate my place in the prisoner’s dock, I suppose, General Phillips, who sat as judge-advocate, signed to Simcoe, and the major cleared his throat. I saw the burly Knyphausen tilting in his chair; the two Hessian captains sitting on either side of him; the commandant of the fort; a major; and a lieutenant-colonel of Sir Henry’s staff: saw, also, that neither Clinton nor Arnold was present. And then Major Simcoe began to recite the charges against me, Castner bending over to untie my hands as the reading went on.

It was evident, before the charges were half read, that I had been tried and condemned beforehand; that whatever I should say or do would in no wise modify the sentence which had already been determined on. That conviction broke the final thread of prudence in me; and when the major came to that part of his manuscript where it was set forth that I had entered the British lines as a spy and an emissary of General Washington’s, with the premeditated purpose of kidnapping General Benedict Arnold, I laughed hardily, and said I should like to be confronted with the proofs, if there were any.

“You shall be accommodated, Mr. Page,” returned Simcoe gravely. And then to Castner: “Bring in the man, James Askew, if you please, Lieutenant.”

At this I laughed again, and said, most impertinently: “Having run his sword through the body of the said James Askew a few minutes ago, Lieutenant Castner makes his apologies to the court, and--”

“Silence, sir!” thundered Phillips, frowning me down; and I held my peace while Castner explained, rather shamefacedly, how the spy had come to his end.

“Then we will take your testimony, Mr. Castner,” said Simcoe; whereupon the lieutenant told in a straightforward way how the spy Askew had first informed him of my purpose; how, when the story, second-handed on to Sir Henry Clinton, had resulted only in an order for my arrest and detention, which order had been suspended, he, Castner, had gone with Askew to meet an officer of Major Henry Lee’s Legion--one who knew the facts from the rebel side, and who, for the sake of common honor, would substantiate Askew’s story.

Much more the lieutenant said, and doubtless the court listened to him. But I did not. My senses had gone blank to all outward happenings at that mention of an officer of my own fellowship who had made an appointment with Castner and the spy to insure my undoing. Admitting that Mr. Hamilton’s secret had leaked out, what man in all the patriot army hated me cordially enough to do this despicable thing? There was but one answer to that query: I had come between Howard Seytoun and the woman of his desire. For no lighter cause would any man turn his back upon his country, his honor as a soldier, his loyalty to the brotherhood of the army.

When I listened again, Major Simcoe was saying: “Your word is sufficient, of course, Mr. Castner. But for the sake of the formalities, a statement from this officer you speak of would sit well on the records of this court.”

“I anticipated that,” said Castner promptly. “Under an assurance of safe-conduct back to his own lines, the officer has accompanied me to New York.” Then, to one of his men: “Warnock, bring the Continental captain in.”

The man went out, and when next the door was opened, I saw what I was fully expecting to see. Seytoun came in, blinking at the lights, his bloated face flushing purple, and his shifty eyes looking anywhere save in my direction.

“Will you be good enough to answer a few questions, Captain Seytoun?” said Simcoe, taking a most gentlemanly tone with this double-dyed renegade and villain. “You have offered Lieutenant Castner a corroboration of the charge against Captain Richard Page; namely, the fact set forth by the man James Askew: that Captain Page came to New York as a spy and a kidnapper. Is this true?”

“It is,” muttered my accuser in a low tone.

“Upon what grounds do you assert this, Captain Seytoun?” cut in one of Knyphausen’s aides.

“It is the common talk in our camps.”

“You lie, Captain Seytoun--like the father of lies after whom you are named,” I said coolly; for now I remembered Askew’s story of his escape from the guard house at Tappan, and could easily add two and two together.

Simcoe would have put me down with harsh bluster; but now Phillips, cold-eyed and haughty, intervened suddenly.

“Can you impeach the witness, Captain Page?” he demanded.

“I can. By his own confession, James Askew lay under sentence of death in General Washington’s camp at Tappan. He escaped by the connivance of the officer of the guard. The bribe he offered and paid was the sharing of a certain secret with that villain who stands there, and the secret was this highly incredible story upon which you have convicted me, General Phillips. This man knows nothing but that which the spy, Askew, told him, and for aught that can be proved now, the story may well have been nothing more than a tissue of falsehoods, made up for the spy’s own purpose,” I answered boldly.

Seytoun might have outfaced me in this, if he had been endowed with the right kind of brazen courage: it was but my word against his. But his face was an open confession of guilt, and I think they all saw it, though, as I say, his testimony was a mere matter of court-martial routine--my fate had been predetermined long before.

A silence fell upon the room, and it was Major Simcoe who broke it.

“Captain Page, your conviction,”--I remarked that he used the word,--“does not turn upon these preliminaries, which serve merely to show premeditation and design. Whether you came as Mr. Washington’s emissary, or upon your own initiative, matters not: the fact remains that you not only intended to kidnap General Arnold; you have actually made the attempt. Do you deny that, sir?”

I did not see what good could come of adding lies to lies, at least, in my own behalf. By this time it must be known that Champe and I were the two who had eaten our suppers in the Dutch boat-builder’s house, the two who had stolen the boat, and, quite as inevitably, the two who had broken into Arnold’s house to find the empty bed. If I hesitated, it was only because I was striving to devise some way of saving Champe.

“I do not deny it,” I said, when the pause had grown to an impossible length.

“Ah!” said the major; and the exclamation was echoed in an audible sigh of relief on all sides. Then, fixing me with a look that was not all unkindly, Simcoe went on. “Your opportunities for carrying out your desperate enterprise have been all that you could ask; you have so won upon General Arnold’s confidence that he has trusted you fully, and even now, he yields only to the incontestable facts, and would shield you if he could. You must have had more than one chance of carrying out your design.”

“I had,” I broke in. “No more than an hour ago, Mr. Arnold was walking in his garden, alone. Once he came and stood within an arm’s reach of me; and I had a boat at the river’s edge in which to make my escape.”

“Ah!” he said again, and this time the exclamation was a sharp indrawing of the breath. “You spared him; will you tell us why, Captain Page? It can make no difference for or against you, now.”

“It is easily explained,” I said, smiling to give dissimulation the proper mask. “There were two of us; and at the crucial instant one of the two could not, or rather would not, rise to his opportunity--when he found out what that opportunity really meant.”

Simcoe nodded, and I marked the swift glance of intelligence that passed from one to another of my judges. Once more I had been able to impose upon them. They were saying to themselves that at the crisis the loyal sergeant had refused to be dragged into the kidnapping--which was as I had hoped. After which, Phillips took me up.

“Add a little more to your frankness, Mr. Page, and earn the satisfaction that comes from doing a worthy deed at the last,” he said austerely. “Do you confess that you have made a tool of Sergeant Champe in all this conspiracy?”

“I confess it,” I said, striving to keep the keen joy of the success of my stratagem out of the words. “In all the twistings and turnings of the last three days, the sergeant has been merely a well terrified common soldier acting under compulsion coupled with threats to have him hanged for a spy if he refused to obey me. It was I who plotted to keep him ashore when he came as your letter carrier, Major Simcoe; and in all subsequent matters, he has straitly obeyed my orders, doing what he was told to do in the fear of death, and disobeying me only in the final critical moment I have just been telling you about.”

It was here that I was made to feel the curious prickings that come upon getting the credit for a good deed when the credit is not fairly earned.

“You know that the sergeant denounced you, and pointed out the place of your concealment to Lieutenant Castner?” queried the major of Sir Henry’s staff.

“I do, and I applaud his resolution, sir. That is the kind of loyalty I should be rejoiced to discover in my own men. He but did his duty, as he saw it.”

Then this major, whose name I have never known, rose up in his place and gripped my hand most heartily.

“You are a true man and a gentleman, Captain Richard Page, notwithstanding the fact that we shall have to hang you presently,” he said, with bluff good nature; and I thanked him gravely, with that curious prickling that I speak of tingling in my finger-ends.

After this, Major Simcoe asked if I had anything further to say before I should be remanded under guard, and I rose and said I had, if the gentlemen present would bear with me. At General Phillips’s nod, I went on.

“One thing I wish to say is this: as Lieutenant Castner has explained, the spy, James Askew, went to his long account by an accident. But Mr. Castner’s sword has merely saved your hangman an item in his day’s work. I had speech with Askew two days since, as he may or may not have confessed to Lieutenant Castner. In the course of that interview he admitted to me, inadvertently, that he was the man who sold Major André to those who took him.”

The effect of this little shot was quite what I had expected. There were deep and bitter oaths of satisfaction at Askew’s death, and more than one word of thanks to me for setting this matter, which had been in doubt, finally at rest. This emboldened me to go on, for I had a boon to ask.

“That is one thing, General Phillips,” I said, addressing the highest authority I could reach. “Another is in the nature of a condemned man’s final request. I have an unfinished engagement with Captain Howard Seytoun, an engagement entered into before I left the camp at Tappan, and I pray you to grant me a short quarter-hour with him on the fort parade or in a guarded room, under such restrictions as you may see fit to impose.”

I don’t know what might have come of this request if Seytoun had held his peace. The British officers of Sir Henry Clinton’s military family were great sticklers for the point of honor, notwithstanding the well-known opposition of the knight himself to the common practise of dueling. But Seytoun must needs draw himself up scornfully and say that he had no cause of quarrel sufficient to make him wish to give satisfaction to a condemned spy.

At this, I went rage-mad, of course, like a hot-headed fool, and sprang across the intervening space and struck him; after which I was hustled off under guard, as I deserved to be for so greatly offending the dignity of the court; hustled out, and across the parade ground, and into a cold, bare barracks room, where Castner came to find me a few minutes later.

“Well?” I said, rightly guessing that he was the bearer of news.

“Your sentence has been passed, Captain Page, and now that I know you better, I am truly sorry to be General Phillips’s messenger. You are to be confined in a cell under the battlements of the fort until midnight, at which hour you will be taken to Gallows Hill and hanged. It is a terrible short road for you, Captain, and I begged them to make it a little longer, but--”

He choked, and could say no more; and truly, I think I may say without boasting that I was sorrier for this clean-hearted, noble young fellow than I was for myself, just at the moment. But that sorrow, and my own, and all things else were quickly swept out of my mind by a most miserable anxiety for Beatrix. Had Simcoe’s troopers been ordered to the ships? There was one chance in a thousand that Castner might know, and I put the question to him as he was turning me over to the fort prison guard.

“Tell me, Lieutenant,” I said hurriedly; “do you chance to know if the Queen’s Rangers have been given their embarking orders yet? You will betray no trust in telling a dead man.”

He answered without hesitation.

“They have been embarking this evening since supper,” he said, little thinking what a stone he rolled upon my soul in these few words. And then: “Is there anything else, Captain Page?”

“Yes. From what was said in the court room yonder you doubtless gathered how much, or rather how little, Sergeant Champe has been to blame in all that he was made to bear a part in. Because you are a soldier and a gentleman, Lieutenant Castner, I know you have small respect for Benedict Arnold; but for the same reason I am sure you will say a word to him for this poor fellow who, after all, was your best means of bringing me to book. Will you say that word?”

But now Castner swore savagely and said he would not--to Arnold, though if any move were made to question Champe he would come between as he could.

“That is all I ask,” I interposed. “Champe is but an unlettered fellow, and if you were to put him upon the rack, he would be helpless. I shall hang the easier if you promise that he will be spared.”

“Champe will be sent to the fleet to-night to rejoin his legion: I’ll see it done, myself,” was Castner’s promise, and that promise, which was carried out some hours later, did, indeed save Champe from the hangman’s halter, though it sent him with Arnold’s legion to the Virginia ravaging and was, besides, the father to all of the poor sergeant’s wanderings and perils through the weary weeks and months which were to intervene before he could make good his escape and rejoin our army, a ragged, half-starved fugitive, in far-away Georgia.

XXII

IN THE POWDER-ROOM

WHEN Castner turned me over to the guard I was taken to a high-arched, brick-walled chamber buried in the battlements of the fort beyond the barracks. By its location I took the cell to be the powder-room of the old Dutch fortress antedating Fort George by a century or more; guessing at this because the place was too spacious to figure as a dungeon, and much too gloomy to be put to any other use.

By all the obligations of a decent upbringing at the hands of godly parents, I suppose I should have gone down on my two knees to spend the few hours that were left in making my peace with God. Certain it is that there were sins enough to be repented of, though I hope and trust they were chiefly soldier sins, and not the kind that make a sniveling craven of the sinner at the last. As to this, however, these death-hour penitences have always seemed to me to be a rather pitiful and unworthy begging of the Great Question; and, besides, hope dies hard in vigorous youth, especially when it is fed by anxiety for the unknown fate of a loved one.

So, when I heard the big key grate in the lock at the outgoing of Corporal Warnock, my jailer, I took the candle which Warnock’s, or Castner’s, kindness allowed me, and began a searching review of my dungeon.

From the furnishings, a blanketed bunk-bed in one corner, a small table untidy with candle drippings, and a heavy three-legged stool, I judged that the place had been lately used by the British occupiers as a guard-room for the detention of petty military offenders. Beyond this there was little to be remarked save that the bricks in the walls were old and crumbling, that the arch of the ceiling had fallen out in several places to litter the earthen floor with débris, and that the door was strong and new and solid enough to stop a battering-ram.

After a careful scrutiny of the door and its massive lock there seemed to be little left for hope to build upon. Having been designed for a magazine, the brick-lined cavern had no window or other outlet; as, indeed, it could not well have, being sunk in the earthwork. Hence, a second tour of the place, in which I made use of the heavy little stool to sound the walls, promised nothing, you would say. Yet to this seemingly fruitless proceeding hope owed the fresh lease of life which was to carry it in some fashion over the high crisis of despair.

It was in that end of the oblong cell directly opposite the door that I came upon a section of the wall which seemed to give back a hint of hollowness to judicious thumpings with the stool. This set me to examining that part of the brickwork with greater care. In this area the bricks were newer, and by passing the candle back and forth I found the reason for the fresher brickwork. A low doorway in the original wall had been filled up and its outlines were plainly traceable.

On my knees before this bricked-up door I sought to recall all I had ever heard of the earlier fortalice--the old Fort Amsterdam of the Dutch. Somewhere, in some Dutch settler’s house on the upper Hudson, I had once seen a sketch plan of Fort Amsterdam; in that plan there were outworks shown beyond the walls, though they were not so extensive as those constructed later by the British rebuilders. Had the Dutchmen used this tunnel passage to supply their outer works with ammunition? It seemed altogether logical and reasonable to assume that they had.

Having reasoned thus far, the next step was clearly obvious. Beyond the bricked-up door there would be a passage leading to what was now the southeastern ravelin. True, the passage might have been filled up when the doorway was stopped; but the hollow sound given back by the newer wall encouraged the more hopeful conclusion. Taking the existence of the passage for granted, the next thing in order was--or should have been--a tool to dig with. But a cat with clipped claws could scarcely have been more helpless in this respect than I was. The most painstaking search of the littered floor revealed nothing in the way of a bit of metal that would scratch the mortar of the joints in the later masonry, much less a practicable digging tool.

I was sitting on the edge of the bunk-bed with my chin in my hand and fairly at the end of any fruitful invention, when there came muffled sounds beyond the door to warn me of an approaching intrusion. Presently the key squeaked in the rusty lock and the door swung open to admit a visitor. By the light of the one poor guttering candle on the table I did not make him out at first, though I supposed, of course, it would be Castner. But when I looked again I found myself staring in astonishment into the gloomy eyes of Benedict Arnold. I knew what he had come for, or thought I did; and once more I strung myself up to the task of deceiving him yet further--for John Champe’s sake.

“So,” he said, and his voice was so low that it was almost gentle; “the long road of equivocation has found its fatal turn at the last, has it, Captain Page?”

I thought he had come to gloat over me, as would have been most natural, but never was a prefiguring worse mistaken. Coming closer until I could almost feel the auger-boring of the moody eyes, he went on in the same low monotone.

“You doubtless think that you, of all living men, are the most to be pitied, Captain. You are young; you have scarcely tasted of life; you have been permitted to look into the eyes of love with the good hope that in the days to come there would be happy fruition; you have an honorable name and forebears to whom your children might look back with honest pride; and in a few short hours all this will be blotted out for you forever. Tell me, sir; was it worth this stupendous sacrifice--the bare chance of taking a broken, disappointed fellow-man back to die this same death which is now confronting you?”

I saw now that he was not meaning to rejoice in my downfall, and I took time for my answer.

“A good soldier should not measure the weight of sacrifice in a question of duty.”

His hands went apart in a sudden gesture of impatience.

“What is duty? A man, by some blunderings of chance or perhaps by his own crafty chicanery, becomes your superior officer. Are you to lay aside all your convictions of justice and mercy and common manly honor merely because he holds up before you a fetish of soldierly obedience? Remember, he is but a man, as you are. Stripped of his rank and all the artificial contrivances which have made him for the moment figure as your superior, he becomes only a fellow human being, standing high or low in your estimation only as his heart is sound or depraved.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Arnold,” I put in; “pardon me if I say that you are beclouding the issue. The matter of duty, as I have conceived it, does not rest upon the question of obedience to a ranking superior. It has a better foundation in the love of country. I will be very plain with you. It seemed to me to be for the best good of my poor distracted country that you should be made to go back and pay the penalty for the blow you have struck it. Acting upon that conviction, I came here--voluntarily, you must understand, and not upon the command of any superior whomsoever.”

He took another step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“You did this from your own conception of your duty, and yet when the chance came you spared me. Captain Page. Why did you change your mind? Was it because you found me something less than the despicable piece of gallows-meat you had been told I was?”

I could not tell if this were merely the undying vanity of the man fishing for compliments on the edge of the grave, or some better prompting; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“I found you as I expected to find you, a most misguided man, as I still hold you to be; but yet a man, and neither greatly better nor worse than others, Mr. Arnold. The discovery that I made--or rather that was made for me--was in myself.”

“Ah? And that was--?”

“It was the discovery that there are lengths to which a man and a gentleman may not go, even to compass the greatest apparent benefit to his fellow-men and his country. You put it within the truth when you say that I spared you. At this very moment, had I willed it so, you might be lying bound and gagged in the bottom of a rowboat and well on your way to the camp at Tappan. I have told you the simple truth, Mr. Arnold; I assumed the task of kidnapping you voluntarily, and voluntarily I relinquished it.”

“I know,” he rejoined abruptly, and then he turned from me and began to pace the floor as if in a repressed passion. After a time he broke out bitterly.

“Like others, you know nothing of the conditions. You saw only a man turning his back upon a cause to which he had given as much or more than any, and straightway you set him down as the basest traitor, measuring the depth of his depravity, it may be, by that very standard of loyal service which he himself had set. What can you know of the slights and evasions, the refusal to recognize just claims, the spite and envy of those who drag others down so that they themselves may climb the higher?” Then, stopping suddenly to face me: “Captain Page, they even put a cloud upon my honesty in money matters!”

Now I had heard that there had been charges of irregularity in his official reports; it was common talk in the army, though I think none went so far as to charge dishonesty. His repute had been that of a high-stomached officer who could as little bear criticism as he could a rebuff to his ambition. But I said nothing. I could do no less than pity a man who felt that he must come and try to justify himself to a condemned spy whose confessed object was, or had been, a most deadly one. But he fell to pacing again without waiting for my reply.

“You did not believe that scandal about the regimental accounts, Captain Page?” he said, after another pause.

“No; I did not believe it, and I think there are few in our army who do. But that is nothing, Mr. Arnold; you are well hated for a much greater thing.”

“What is done, is done,” he broke in moodily. “I did not come here to argue with you, Captain; I came to ask what I may do to make your fate more easily met. Your life I can not save; that matter has gone beyond me now, however much I might wish to intervene. But any last request you may have to make--”

There were two, and on one of them, the safe departure of Beatrix, my lips were sealed. But of the other I spoke freely.

“You have not mentioned Sergeant Champe in all this, and I would not have my sins charged to his score,” I began: “I do not know how much or how little you are involving him--”

He interrupted with gesture expressive of complete understanding and appreciation.

“Champe is but a common soldier, and a most fanatical patriot, like yourself, Captain Page. I have known this last, or suspected it, from the beginning. There will be no punishment for him greater than that which will be the greatest for a man of his stamp--to be obliged upon a warrant of life or death to make good his lately sworn oath of allegiance in battle. He rejoins the legion to-night, and when the fleet sails he will go with it, to live or die as he fights or refuses to fight.”

I stood up, hoping he would take it as a hint that I desired to be alone.

“There is nothing more, then, I believe,” I said. “Due report of this night’s doings will be sent to Colonel Baylor, I trust; and I shall be glad if the charge against me shall stand without reference to my self-appointed errand. I ask this as much for your sake as for my own, Mr. Arnold. Others might not understand why I found my mission impossible at its final turning point.”

“You mean that the report shall go out that you were executed merely as a spy caught within the enemy’s lines?”

“That was my meaning; yes.”

In a flash he held out his hand, and I forgot that he was a traitor to the cause I loved and grasped it heartily.

“You are a man in all your inches, Captain Page,” he declared warmly; and then: “I would to God I could do you a real service, sir! You think there will be only one woman to be broken-hearted, but I assure you there will be two. I shall ill know how to face the second one when I have to tell her that you spared me of your own free will, and that yet you had to die!”

“Let your gratitude to the other woman nerve you to that task, Mr. Arnold,” I put in quietly. “It was Mistress Beatrix Leigh who showed me my duty to her--and to myself.”

“Ah, these women!” he said gently. “A man never sees himself as he ought to be until he looks into the crystal mirror of a good woman’s soul. You are prodigiously to be pitied, Captain Page--but not more than you are to be envied. A little respite--time granted you for a meeting and a parting with this young woman who hates me well but hates dishonor more--possibly my word to Sir Henry Clinton would run thus far. Shall I try it, sir?”

I shook my head and said, no. Apart from the added agony of such a meeting and parting, I hoped against hope that the good fates and Captain Elijah Sprigg had already made it impossible by putting Beatrix safely a-sea, though I feared the New Englander might wait to get word of me first.

“Then I can only bid you farewell, Captain, and wish with all my heart that I might put a sword in your hand and tell you to fight your way to death like a soldier!”

With that he gripped my hand again and went quickly to the door; and I think Warnock or another must have been waiting for him, for when I looked again the door had opened and closed, and I was alone.

Call it a weakness if you will, but after he was gone I wasted some precious minutes sitting on the bunk-bed with my head in my hands and my heart mellowing in a sudden rush of meliorating softness. It is so easy to fall into the rut of the harsh rigidities, judging all humankind by unbending formulas of right and wrong and making no allowances for the thousand and one battling influences which are always dragging the human atom hither and yon. This man whose name had become a hissing and a reproach was neither an angel nor a devil; he was merely a human being, swayed now by the good and now by the evil. If he had shown himself capable of the basest political treachery, he here and now had also shown that he could be magnanimous and truly generous to a fallen enemy.

It was another key-grating in the door-lock that roused me from the softening reverie and I sprang up, shocked for an instant by the thought that I had spent all my little respite and that midnight was come. That shock was followed by another when the door opened and Champe, with a face so haggard and wrought upon that I scarcely recognized him, came stumbling in to fall upon his knees at my feet.

“Champe!” I cried, thinking nothing but that they had sifted the truth out of him in some way, and that he was to die with me.

“Aye,” he mumbled, “I’ve come, Captain Dick. Strangle me with your bare hands--burn my eyes out with the candle--do what you will to me and I’ll never cheep nor whimper nor lift a finger. They’ve told me what you did; how you stood up and took it all upon yourself, after I had gone crazed with rage and disappointment and betrayed you like another Judas! Let me hang in your place; or if I can not, I’ll hang with you--I swear it!”

“Hush!” I commanded harshly, for I could not trust myself to speak otherwise. And then: “You need not reproach yourself. They would have caught me anyway before the night was over, and there is no sense in two hanging where one will serve. But tell me: how did you get here?”

“Warnock is corporal of the guard, and one night I saved him from being found asleep at sentry post. He told me what you said to General Phillips; how you--” his voice broke and again I had to be rough with him to save my own self-possession.

“Name of the devil!” I cut in snappishly. “Dry your eyes, Sergeant, and take the crack out of your voice. You are the man of all others who can do me a service, and here you come to me whimpering and crying like a whipped dog!”

“Say it, Captain Dick,” he pleaded. “Give me my orders, and I’ll--”

“--And you’ll carry them out: of course, you will,” I finished for him. “Now listen, and I’ll tell you what you are to do.”

A plan had been shaping itself with lightning-like swiftness in my brain since he had told me enough to make it plain that he was still free to go and come in the town; that he had not yet been put under guard to be sent to the ships, as Arnold had said he would be.

First I plied him with questions which he answered with rare intelligence, giving me the exact location of the powder-room prison cell in relation to its surroundings, and telling me what lay beyond the fortress walls behind it--a ravelin, a ditch, outworks, and then the beach. Then I gave him his instructions.

“You remember the sea-captain who sent you to fetch me to the tavern?”

Champe nodded.

“He is with us, though he claims to be a neutral and is allowed to go and come as a trader, under some surveillance. His schooner lies in the East River, ready to put to sea, if it has not already sailed. Your task is to find the ship and the man, if they are within finding distance. Tell the captain what has befallen me, and you may add that I’m going to try to break jail. If I succeed, a few stout friends, to be waiting on the beach at the southeastern angle of the fort at half an hour before midnight, might turn the scale for me.”

“I’ll find him if I have to go to hell to make the search a thorough one. But what hope have you of breaking out of this, Captain Dick?”

I dragged him across the room and showed him the outlined door in the earthward wall.

“You are to smuggle me something to dig with,” I told him, and instantly he searched in his pockets and found a huge clasp-knife.

“Will that do, think you?” he asked.

“I’ll make it do for the brickwork, though, the good Lord knows, I may need a pick and shovel for anything this bricked-up door tells me of what is beyond it. But never mind; go you and do your part, Sergeant. And one other thing: Captain Sprigg has either gone to sea, or is about to go, as I have told you, and his errand is to convey two women home to Virginia. One of those women is my cousin, and the other--”