Part 11

“Not to-day, Captain Dick; it is not my day for visiting Sir Henry Clinton; nor did I mean that it should be Mr. James Askew’s, either. But by this time I saw that I could not frighten him entirely off; he was too shrewd and too eager for the gold. So the only thing was to carry out Major Lee’s court-martial sentence on the body of the prisoner. He was as good as dead, anyway.”

“Surely, Sergeant Champe, if you escape the gallows here it will be only so that you may live to carry out your hereditary destiny of hanging other people,” I commented. “But go on: he consented to your plan?”

“Something cautiously, though he was now in the middle of his third cup of strong waters. Sifting him carefully again, I found that he was afraid to pass through the town in daylight, and here he played into my hands. I told him we might take a boat and pull around the water-front to the fort landing-place and so dodge all the curious eyes in the town.”

“But how would that help us?” I queried. I confess I was a little dull that morning.

Champe’s face lightened with his diabolical grin when he explained his purpose. When they were safely in the boat--a cockle-shell belonging to the Three Larks--he meant to upset it and drown the spy.

“It was all but done,” he went on regretfully. “I had bargained for the hiring of the boat, and we were on our way to the waterside with the oars when the guard relief came along. The one chance in a thousand rose up and kicked me. The guard officer was a line corporal I had quarreled with over a game of cards while the Loyal Americans were in barracks.”

“And he knew you--recognized you?”

“In two quacks of a duck. I had barely time to tip Askew the wink to sheer off, before the redcoat was calling me by my right name, and demanding to know why I was out of the fleet and masquerading ashore in citizen’s clothes. I had no answer ready for all this, so Askew and I were like the two women grinding at the mill--one was taken and the other left. The rest of the tale you know as well or better than I, Captain Dick.”

“I know that we are both no better than dead men if we can not lay hands on this spy of yours before he has screwed up courage to name his price to Sir Henry Clinton or Arnold,” I said gravely. “But doubtless he has already done so.”

Champe shook his head.

“I’m hoping not. He was well frightened by the fierceness with which the guard corporal bullied me; and when I had my last glimpse of him he was making off up the shore and evidently wishing with all his heart he dared break into a run.”

“Yet he will come to it,” I asserted. “The gold-greed will drive him, and his news is too big to keep. I’d give the best field of the Page tobacco lands to know if we are still in time to stop him.”

The sergeant rose and stretched his long arms over his head. Then he felt of his neck tenderly, saying with a touch of grim humor: “The cord isn’t knotted around it yet. Pass your orders, Captain Dick. What do we do?”

“Nay,” said I; “you’ve proved that your head is as good or better than mine. What do you say?”

“Being footloose, and having my regimentals on, I might go and have another look for Mr. James Askew. Then, if I could get him and my bully guard-relief corporal in the same crazy wherry--”

“You’d drown them both, I suppose,” I laughed. “Never mind the corporal; he’s harmless enough, while this man Askew holds your life in one hand and mine in the other. What will you do with him if you find him?--or when you find him?”

“I’ll keep him from spreading his sails to Sir Henry Clinton’s golden breeze, at all events,” said the sergeant meaningly. Then: “You don’t happen to have a bit of poison of any kind in your kit, do you?”

“Bah!” said I. “Do it soldierly, at least, Sergeant Champe.”

“So I will, then,” he agreed. After which he asked me if I would stay where I was and pray for his success.

“I’ll do better than that--being somewhat out of practice on my knees,” I told him. “It lies in my mind that I’ll go yonder to Sir Henry’s door and be at hand to stop our man if he should slip through your fingers and decide to ask an audience of Sir Henry Clinton without your help. Can you describe him so I would know him?”

“Why, yes,” said the sergeant, scratching his head with a meditative finger. “You’ll place him in the hollow half of a minute. He’s much like other men, neither very big nor very little; less tall than the tallest, and by no means as short as the shortest. You can’t well miss him.”

Sharp as our peril was, I had to laugh at Champe’s notion of a description. But time was pressing.

“Try it again, Sergeant,” I encouraged. “This time I’ll help you. Just answer my questions one at a time and we’ll have him. First, how old would you take him to be?”

Champe knitted his brows thoughtfully. “By grabs, Captain Dick, I never thought to ask him!”

“No, no; of course you couldn’t ask him. But fire a guess at it. Is he a young man?”

“No; I wouldn’t call him young; say thirty, or forty, or maybe fifty, or so.”

“Great Marlborough!” I raged. “Can’t you come any nearer to it than that? How about his eyes--what color are they?”

“Hum--his eyes; well, now, there you have me again, Captain. They are devilish sharp little eyes; I can tell you that. But lord! I couldn’t name you their color in a month of Sundays.”

“By all the blind pipers that ever twiddled a horn-pipe--I don’t believe you looked at him at all!” I broke out, annoyed beyond measure at this unexpected development of the sergeant’s weak point. “Is it any use to ask you how he was dressed?”

Champe’s face lightened now, and the frown of perplexity smoothed itself out.

“Surely; I can tell you that to the dotting of an ‘i.’ I remember noticing particularly that he was dressed quite like other folk--buckle-shoes, breeches, waistcoat, coat and hat. There you have him from head to foot.”

“Heavens and earth, man!” I exclaimed. “How in the devil’s name am I to help in this if you can’t give me the first living idea of the fellow I’m to look for? Think, Sergeant--think hard. Surely there must have been some noticeable thing about him that would serve to place him for me.”

Champe put his head in his hands and appeared to be making the mental effort of a lifetime. After a long minute he looked up to say: “I’ve got it, Captain Dick, I’ve got it. Come to think of it, I’m almost sure he wore a scratch-wig like a farmer’s.”

I shook my head in despair. Half the men in America wore scratch-wigs. Yet the edge of the necessity was in no wise dulled by Champe’s inability to visualize the spy for me.

“Try it again, Sergeant,” I entreated; and now he got up and began to walk the floor, cracking the joints of his big fingers and scowling ferociously in the throes of recollection. I venture to say he walked a full quarter-mile up and down the long room before he stopped to make his final dash at the impregnable barrier.

“I have it now,” he said, pleased as a child over the finding of a long-sought-for plaything. “His waistcoat was gray, Captain Dick; and he wore a black stock--aye, it was black, sure enough. But”--smiting fist into palm with a mighty thwack to make the climax--“the thing I noticed hardest was his watch-fob; a bunch of seals hanging at the end of a leather thong, and he twiddles them, so”--suiting the action to the word--“all the time as he talks or walks. Never tell me, Captain, that I haven’t got him down to the very parting of the hair for you.”

“Oh, you have,” I said ironically; “indeed you have. I could doubtless recognize Mr. James Askew in the dark, and with my eyes shut; or that way as well as any other. But the twiddling of the watch-fob seals may do. Now to the work. When you’ve succeeded--or failed--come back here and put a corner of your neckerchief in the window for a signal; right-hand if you’ve hit the mark, left-hand if you’ve missed.”

“You’ll be within call?” he asked, as I was unbarring the door.

“I shall be patrolling before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, ready to nip Mr. James Askew if he turns up on my beat--always providing that he twiddles his watch-seals at the proper instant.”

“One more word,” said the sergeant, when my hand was on the latch. “Major Lee’s order is to drop the hitch-rope and run for it. You’ve said nothing as to that, yet, Captain Dick.”

“And I say nothing now, save that Major Lee is not my commanding officer. He is yours, however--which may make a difference in your case. Does it?”

“No,” he said shrewdly; and we went out through the tap-room one at a time, and each to his own separate pool to fish for James Askew.

XIII

HOW A FISH WAS HOOKED AND LOST

THE talk in my tavern room with Champe had used up so much time that it was midday and beyond when I joined the group of orderlies and unattached officers lounging before Sir Henry’s door, and had a welcome in strict accordance with the freezing December weather and the uniform I was wearing--cool and contemptuous.

Now this was grateful to me, in a way, and in another way it made me spitefully savage. It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins.

So, when there were covert sneers and back-turnings enough to make a man sick, I began to strut and sneer in self-defense, twitting a lieutenant of Hetheridge’s whose line was the first to break at Monmouth, and a captain of Knyphausen’s whose Hessian devils had cut a troop of our horse to pieces at Tappan after it had surrendered.

This was all very hot-headed and rash, and would doubtless have involved me in trouble enough if a diversion had not come in the shape of Mr. Justice Smith’s new London-made hackney coach drawn by four horses which, for their postilions and trappings, might have been taken out of a crack artillery troop.

The coach came to a stand before Arnold’s door, and, as may be imagined, I left the quarreling Hessian captain without ceremony when I saw the faces of Margaret Shippen and Mistress Beatrix Leigh behind the window-panes.

“I have come to see the general, Captain Page,” said Mistress Arnold, when I had opened the coach door. “Will you be my _avant coureur_?”

“Most gladly,” I replied. And when I had found Arnold at his writing-table, and had his command to fetch his wife up to him, I went back to show Mistress Margaret the way.

“You will undertake to keep Beatrix from stagnating for the few minutes I shall need, Captain Page?” said this dear lady, when I was leaving her at Arnold’s office door; and I said I would try, and was thanking her when she bade me hasten before some of the other officers had cut me out.

I was minded to hasten fast enough, though not specially for the reason given by Mistress Margaret. I thought it would be a much more inclement day than this seventeenth day of December, Anno Domini, 1780, when I could not hold my own against a handful of redcoat popinjays who picked flaws in a man because he did not happen to be wearing a shoulder-knot to their liking.

But alas! pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction. When I reached the street here was my lady Beatrix laughing and chatting most amiably with the little ensign who had been one of her partners at Mr. Justice Smith’s rout, and there were only a cool little nod and a blank smile for my hasty return. All of which put me on my mettle so that I stayed at the ensign’s elbow, and trod on his toes, and apologized therefor, and was pleasantly rude and insulting until he finally gave me, though not without black looks and a smothered curse or two, my place at the open door of the hackney coach.

“Pray where did you learn your new boorishness, Captain Page; in the Dutch Highlands?” queried my lady, in the gentle tone she used when the lightning is about to flash.

“I learned to fight for my rights in Old Virginia,” I retorted gaily; “and I shall not soon forget the lessons you have taught me touching them.”

“I decline to be your sponsor--in that or in anything else, Captain Page,” she declared, regarding me critically.

Now here was a pretty change of climate, I thought. The night before, when she believed I was going off to the wars with Arnold, there were sympathy and anxiety and tenderness, and even a little love, perhaps. And now, merely because I had not gone quite so suddenly as the program called for, the wan December sunshine could not have held itself more chillingly aloof.

“What have I done to-day that I had not done before last night, Beatrix?” I asked, shifting my position at the coach step so that I could keep one eye on Sir Henry Clinton’s door--for the possible coming of the twiddler of watch-seals was sorely dividing my attention, or diverting it.

“You are wearing a coat that I do not like,” she announced, going back to the original cause of quarrel.

“It is as good a coat as the one Ensign Brewster is wearing,” I ventured.

“It is not!” she retorted. “He is wearing the coat of his king and country, and in his case it fits honestly.”

“Well, then; this is the same coat I wore last night,” I urged, presuming rashly where I should have had more sense.

“Last night is not to-day: and I have lived half a lifetime since last night.”

“Then you think more of a cause than you do of a man?” I asked; and I would never have said such a thing to her if I had not been hag-ridden by my responsibility for one James Askew.

“You are quibbling!” she returned. “The cause is much--God knows how much it is to our stricken country: but truth and faith and loyalty are more. I could honor you in spite of your colors, Dick, if you fought under them as honestly as Ensign Brewster does.”

“I may be fighting more honestly than you think,” I broke out, pushed to the wall, as I was likely to be in any controversy with her.

She took me up so quickly that I had no breathing space.

“You have hinted before that you could explain if you would, Dick,” she said with low-toned eagerness. Then, looking past me to see if any of the others were within earshot: “Tell me--is it a mask? Are you--”

I made a swift gesture for silence. There are times when the very stones in the pavement must not be trusted.

“You must not forget that you are speaking to a captain in Benedict Arnold’s Legion, or”--here I lowered my voice to mate it with her eager half-whisper--“that a word of what you have just hinted would hang that same captain higher than Haman!”

“But you do not deny--you do not deny!” she fluttered. “Oh, Dick! give me one little thread to cling to--one look to tell me that you are--”

I knew her bosom was heaving; that the quick tears had risen to quench the righteous indignation in the beautiful eyes. And yet I could not speak to her; could not even look at her. For here was Arnold coming down the house steps with Mistress Margaret on his arm; and, not fifty feet away, a smallish man in sober gray was standing before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, looking curiously up at the higher windows and absently toying with a great bunch of seals at his watch-fob as he stared.

There was no time to say a word to Beatrix, if I ever hoped to have time for any future word with her--time and the breath to say it with. The smallish man in gray, gazing in abstracted indecision at Sir Henry’s upper windows, was twiddling my life and Sergeant Champe’s at his fingers’ ends. Let him take but a single step within the door he was facing, and we two would be as water spilt on the ground, which can not be gathered up again.

I scarcely know how I left her; how, for one brief instant, I made way deferentially for Arnold and his wife, and in the next had come within gripping distance of the man in Quaker gray. But the thing was done in some fashion, and after this frenzied taking of the first step, the next came easily.

“Your name is Askew--James Askew?” I whispered in the spy’s ear; and if I had put the point of a knife between his ribs he could not have winced more palpably.

“No, no, Lieutenant--er--Captain, I should say; you are quite mistaken, sir. Duvall is my name; Harrison Duvall, of--of Pennsylvania.”

“One of your names, perhaps,” I qualified, smiling down on him meaningly, and now I noted the shifting ferrety eyes whose color Champe could not recall--the eyes, the black stock and the scratch-wig.

“We need not quarrel over a little matter of names, Mr. Askew,” I went on rapidly. “Let it be sufficient that I know you and know your business here. You are in great danger--as great as, or greater than, that which you were confronting in Mr. Washington’s camp at Tappan no longer ago than yesterday morning.”

If there had been any doubt as to the man’s double-dealing past, his carrying of water on both shoulders, his appearance now would have removed it. His colorless face became tallowy, and fine little beads of sweat were starting from his forehead. I followed up my advantage like a swordman who dares not give his antagonist time to gather and parry.

“We know a thing or two about you here,” I continued, speaking softly and edging between him and the group of officers at Clinton’s door. “Sir Henry would be most happy to lay eyes on you--happier than you would be, a few hours later. I say your danger is greater here than it was at Tappan: our prisoners do not break jail so easily as Mr. Washington’s do.”

His face was like parchment now, and he had to wet his lips before he could speak.

“I--I can make my standing good with Sir Henry,” he faltered. “There was a mistake about that affair of Major André’s. It was not I who told Paulding and Williams where they were to lie in wait for the major--I did not!”

Now I thought I had him! Paulding and Williams were two of the three men who had arrested Major André, and it was common talk in the patriot camps that some one had first told them where to look for André, though these two, as well as Isaac Van Wart, the third man, stoutly denied it.

“You will have trouble in proving that mistake, Mr. Askew,” I said; “great trouble, I fear. But that is for the future; your present risk is in standing here, where some one who knows you as well or better than I, may chance to come along.”

He had been casting furtive glances over his shoulder, as if picking out the way to run; but now that I had him at bay, the time was ripe for an escape from the dangerous neighborhood of the general headquarters.

“Come with me,” I commanded hurriedly, linking an arm in one of his. “You have a piece of news to tell--but not to Sir Henry Clinton. There is a better market, and a much safer one.”

He yielded, reluctantly, only because he had good reason to be afraid of every one. I could feel the fear tremor shaking him all the way to the tavern to which I led him, and a great contempt for the paltry villain made my gorge rise and the touch of his arm seem like pollution. He was silent and furtively watchful till I got him into the inn and up the stair. But on the threshold of my room he hung back and showed his teeth in a snarl.

“I don’t know who you are, or where you are taking me!” he burst out; and then he tried to twist his arm free, developing sudden and unlooked-for strength in the momentary struggle.

“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and followed to shut and bar the door.

He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat. For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever saw.

“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were saying that you had news to sell--”

“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or I--I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”

“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is your best assurance of safety.”

“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”

“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”

I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.

“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”

His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.

“Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from him.

“I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for his meddling; and the captain--”

“Well,” said I; “and the captain?”

His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning.

“You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?”

“Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.”

The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating.

“We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an _impasse_, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.”

“I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the fact,” I objected bluntly.

“Ah; that is another drawback--one which I overlooked at the moment. It would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of getting rid of the _corpus delicti_. But if I might offer a suggestion; the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your sergeant might compass the funeral--though not without a possible risk.”

His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.

“No,” he went on, in the same even tone, “the disposition of my poor body is not what deters you. It is that other thing I mentioned--your reluctance to premeditated blood-shedding. Now that is purely conventional, if I may say so. To kill is to take life; and the mere manner of its taking can make but little difference to the slayer, and none at all to the victim. Yet the traditions are strong; and I am relying quite confidently upon them, Captain Page.”