Chapter I: FOUND Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton waiting for me in that room (7)

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.

“One word, General Arnold, before you go. I spoke, a few moments since, 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.

Though it was not the shortest way to my destination, I went, for a purpose of my own, up Broad Way, past the wretched, makeshift shelters that were taking the place of many fair homes destroyed in the great fire of ’76, past Trinity Church standing as a ghostly ruin on the left, its walls only partly down and a corner of its bell tower still rearing itself high above the fire-killed trees in the churchyard. Beyond the church I made a détour to the westward to get a glimpse of the river. It was not very rough as yet, but a heavy swell was running up with the tide to tell of rough weather to the southward. I recalled the light craft which must be our dependence. It would do very well in a seaway, always provided there was not enough wind to make the waves break over its low gunwale. There were as yet no white-caps to show their teeth on the black and heaving expanse, so I turned back to my errand with rising hope.

As on the former occasion, it was the old negro servant who admitted me to the Vandeventer house and took Arnold’s letter above-stairs; and almost before I had had time to feel the cheer of the fire in the luxurious little reception-room whither I went to await whatever answer there might be, the door opened to show me, not Mistress Margaret, nor yet Beatrix, but Mistress Julianna Pettus, Jack’s aunt, and Beatrix’s cousin, once removed.

Now, truly, Beatrix had told me very plainly that she was expecting “Cousin Ju”; was delaying her departure for Virginia only until that good lady should come over from Philadelphia to accompany her. But this fact, like some others, had gone completely out of my mind, else I think I should never have had the courage to come within speaking distance of the Vandeventer house that night. For Cousin Julianna was fair, fat and forty, with a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than any whip-lash; and being my own second cousin on my mother’s side, she had a sense of proprietorship in me which she had exercised impartially since she stood godmother for me in the old church in Williamsburg.

“Well, Dick Page!” she cried. “So you have come to show me your new clothes, have you? Was there no other ditch that you could wallow in, but you must be the first to disgrace a long line of honorable Virginia gentlemen? Merciful suz! Shame, hot shame on you, boy--to make us all hide our heads this way! Beatrix Leigh will never marry you now; her father would disinherit her flat, and so, too, would I. And you’ve fairly thrown her into Howard Seytoun’s arms, brute beast as he is! No, don’t try to explain it; there is no explanation--there can’t be!”

What could I do, other than bow my head to the righteous storm and let it exhaust itself, if it would? It raged--oh, how scathingly it raged!--for a full quarter of an hour, I believe, during which time I could scarcely get a word in edgewise; but when the hurricane had blown itself out, my cousin sat down and condescended to ask me news of Jack, and of the doings in the camps on the Hudson, remembering herself now and then to flay me afresh for the coat I was wearing.

I told her all she asked to know, and was as meek as mush, hoping she would come finally to telling me something of her plans and Beatrix’s, as she did. And it was very comical, too, if I had been in any laughing mood, for, when she had told me that the rescued Leigh tobacco had been put aboard of a certain coasting schooner named the _Nancy Jane_, Captain Elijah Sprigg, and that her passage to the James River, and Beatrix’s, had been taken on board the same vessel, she remembered suddenly that she was telling all this to a king’s officer, and her threatenings of me, and her alarm for the safety of the tobacco, were equally matched.

“You’ll never go and tell on us, Dick Page!” she half pleaded, half commanded. “You wouldn’t be such an abandoned and despicable villain as that!”

“Why,” said I, teasing her a little, “haven’t you just been telling me that nothing was too hang-dog and mean for me to do, since I am wearing the king’s coat? Isn’t it my duty--my new duty--to go straight down to Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters with the news that you mean to run the blockade with a contraband cargo of tobacco?”

“Oh, you’d never, _never_ do that, Dickie Page!” she protested, wringing her hands in distress. “Mr. Vandeventer says we are ‘winked at’; that because Beatrix is a brave girl, and the friend of Margaret Shippen, she will be allowed to take her tobacco and go home. But I don’t trust them--any of them. They’ll stop us; send us to prison! Dick, you’ll never be so cruel?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you, Cousin Ju,” I laughed. “Get me speech with Beatrix, and I’ll promise you never to lisp a syllable to a living soul about the tobacco.”

“Oh, but Dick! she protests she will never look on your face again--and serve you right, too! She’ll never come down to you for my urging.”

“Yes, she will. Tell her it’s the price of her cargo of tobacco.”

“You promise?”

“Most faithfully, I assure you.”

Cousin Julianna went away in haste, and I was still laughing over her absurd fears when the door opened to admit Beatrix. And I do think she was more beautiful and winsome and alluring than I had ever seen her, as she stood in the doorway, trying to make me believe she was angry--as she was not.

“So you threaten me, do you, Mr. Page? If I don’t dance when you pipe, you will turn informer. Did Cousin Ju tell me straight?”

“If Cousin Ju told you that I was ready to put my soul in pawn for another sight of you, she had the straight of it. I owe you an apology for--”

“You owe me ten thousand of them--and more. You ran from me yesterday afternoon when I was waiting in the coach for Margaret as if I had had the plague!”

“I was on duty and was obliged to go. It was imperative. I might say that the lives of two men hung in the balance of my haste at that particular moment.”

She was leaning against the door-post and regarding me steadily.

“Dick,” she said; “what has come over you since the days when we were children together? Then you were as truthful and transparent as they say Mr. Washington used to be when he was a little lad and would rather be punished than lie; but now.... Listen, sir. Our carriage did not move for five full minutes, and I saw you: you talked easily with a little gentleman in gray, and afterward took his arm and walked away with him to the tavern--and the tap-room, I suppose--without so much as another look in our direction. And now you would tell me--”

“I have told you the exact truth, as far as it went, Beatrix,” I interrupted. “The man in gray held two men’s lives in the hollow of his palm. If I had not caught him on the instant--well, no matter; that was Sir Henry Clinton’s door he was meaning to enter.”

“More mysteries,” she complained, though not so impatiently now, I fancied. “What would have happened if he had gone to see Sir Henry?”

“An almost certain chance that the Gallows Hill squad last night would have been increased by two more unfortunates.”

“How terrible!” she murmured. “Is it possible that you live from day to day in the midst of such frightful perils, Dick? These two endangered men--are they friends of yours?”

I grinned. “One of them I may call my friend: the other--well, there are those who will tell you that the other has always been Dick Page’s own dearest enemy.”

Her keen wit pounced instantly upon the truth before I could bite my tongue for its foolish rashness.

“Yourself? Oh, Dick! what is this wretched web you have become entangled in? Tell me--tell me!”

“I can not,” I said, realizing too late that I had brought all this upon myself.

“You mean you will not: then you do not love me, Dick Page!”

“Perhaps it is because I love you too well, sweetheart. Can’t you believe that?”

“No, I can not. Where there is love, there is confidence and trust. You don’t trust me!”

“I do trust you. But this you are asking me to tell you is not my own secret and, besides, it would only add to your burdens without lightening mine; indeed, it would make mine immeasurably heavier--too heavy to be borne, I fear.”

She sat down and began to look into the heart of the crackling fire on the hearth, as she had done that other night.

“How little you know of women, Dick,” she said musingly. “You ask my love, and yet you deny that love its first privilege--the right to share your dangers and perplexities. More, you would even lie to it--by implication. But you have not succeeded wholly in doing that. Some things I have found out for myself, and one of them is--that you are not the traitor you seem to be, Richard.”

“Hush--for heaven’s sake!” I interposed. “One whisper of that overheard in this house where Margaret Shippen is a guest--”

“Poor, dear Margaret!” she said, and now she was all sympathy and pity. “I doubt if even she would betray you, Dick; and all the others in this house are secretly our friends. But what could have tempted you, a Page and an officer, to become a--a spy?”