Part 20

This was sufficiently discouraging, since it indicated that the old sally-port through the powder-room to the outworks had been sealed up at both ends. How thick the outer barrier might be, I had no means of determining; and before I could remove any more bricks, I heard the key rattling in the lock again, and there was barely time to stand the clumsy little table before the tell-tale breach beginnings, to kick the floor rubbish over the mortar powderings that whitened it, and to slip the clasp-knife into my pocket, when the bolt was shot and Castner marched in.

Now was the time when it took the final ounce of fortitude in the good old Page reserves to make me face him and say carelessly, “Is it midnight, at last, Lieutenant? By all the hours that ever struck, I thought it would never come!” For, truly, and for the second time that night, I made sure that my short respite had slipped away unheeded, and that he had come for me.

“No, Captain Page,” he rejoined soberly; “it wants two good hours of midnight yet, and I’ve come on a different errand. You have spoken twice in my hearing of a postponed engagement with your--with this Captain Seytoun who has come so far out of his way to do you an ill turn: are you still wishing it might be kept?”

I made my laugh sound as lightly as it should have sounded if the meeting with my cousin Devlin’s slayer were the last unfulfilled desire of a man who was about to die.

“You saw how hard I tried to make him wish it. My dear Castner, he is little better than a brute beast. I doubt if the rope stout enough to drag him to a fair field of honor has ever been twisted.”

The lieutenant’s eyes were fixed upon one of the holes in the ceiling masonry.

“It would be little loss to the reb--to the American cause if he should never return to Tappan?” he suggested.

“It would be small loss, as you say. Though you will not look at it in that light, the man is a traitor at heart; a man who, to satisfy a purely personal grudge, does not scruple to betray his trust, his cause and his commanders.”

Castner looked me full in the eyes.

“He hates you well, Captain Page. I had no thought save to have James Askew’s story confirmed by some one in authority. I was astounded when the spy told me that, upon a few hours’ notice, an officer of Major Lee’s Legion would meet us at a certain spot on the Tarrytown road and confirm his information word for word. We rode out to the Neutral Ground to the place indicated by Askew, and there we met this precious troop-captain. He not only did all that Askew had promised for him; he was anxious to come and testify in person. I had little choice but to give him the safe-conduct necessary.”

“No, no,” I hastened to say. “I’m never blaming you, my dear Lieutenant. Don’t think it for a moment.”

“Thank you,” he returned. “Duty is a hard schoolmaster at times; never harder for me than in the present instance, Captain Page. But to return to this poltroon captain of horse; I am beginning to suspect that he had another object in asking for his safe-conduct, eager as he is to see you effaced. He has been making inquiries of me about a lady.”

“Ah?” said I; and then: “I’ll name her for you--Mistress Beatrix Leigh, of Virginia?”

“The same. She is here on some business for her Virginia estates--a tobacco cargo that fell into the hands of our Philistines. Some influence has been brought to bear upon Sir Henry Clinton to make him wink at the blockade-running of this confiscated cargo, provided it can be done without bringing it to public notice. Seytoun tells me of this, lodges an information against one Elijah Sprigg, captain of Mistress Leigh’s ship, and urges me to lay the affair by the heels.”

“You mean to do it, Lieutenant Castner?” I demanded angrily.

“Not upon that cur’s prompting, you may be sure,” was the hearty rejoinder. “But this is all far beside the mark. One other request Seytoun makes of me, and that is that he be permitted to see you, alone, before you--before your--”

“Before my hanging, you would say; don’t boggle at so harmless a little word, my good friend: I don’t. You’ll let him come?”

“That rests with you,” he announced quietly. “Do you still wish to keep your--that broken engagement with him?”

I fear my smile at this was cynical.

“You needn’t approach it so cautiously, Lieutenant. He merely wishes to come and triumph over a fallen enemy. I know him. I’m beginning to think there is no fight in him.”

“By heavens! I’d make him fight!” burst out my quiet lieutenant, in a most unprecedented upflash of rage. “See here, Captain Page; by all the gods, I’m going to take the chance of having my commission canceled, and send him to you! Here is my sword”--he drew it and flung it upon the bed. “You’ll promise me that you will not use it in a way to make me sorry that I trusted you?”

“Most willingly,” I replied, smiling at his sudden ardor, and added: “But he won’t fight, Mr. Castner.”

“Then kill him!” he snapped vindictively; and turned to kick hotly at the door for the guard to come and let him out.

Not to lose any of the precious minutes I fell into furious labor on the hole in the wall as soon as the door clanged behind Castner. When at length the aperture was large enough to let me squeeze through, nothing was revealed save the crumbling sides of a damp earth-tunnel, with the wooden bulkhead stopping its farther end.

I did not dare to creep into the tunnel for a better investigation of the _cul de sac_. If Seytoun had not changed his mind, he might be admitted at any moment, and remembering this, I hastily replaced the loosened bricks, and moved the table, with the candle on it, against the wall. Happily, I had made the breach so low that the table hid it; which was more by hit than good wit, since I had not thought of having to conceal it.

These preparations were barely completed when the door-bolt clicked, and my enemy was come. Between the bolt shooting and the swinging of the door, I had time to drop down upon the edge of the bunk-bed, and to put my face in my hands; so Seytoun found me as I wished he should find me--in an attitude of the deepest dejection.

He took instant advantage of it, as I made sure he would, laughing harshly and slapping his leg, and saying it was as good as a comedy to see me sniveling like a whipped schoolboy because, forsooth, I was going to be choked presently with a bit of cord!

At first I took no notice of him, wishing to see him climb the ladder of triumph so high that the fall, when it should come, would jar his teeth loose. He climbed fast enough, in all conscience, pouring out the most obscene imprecations upon me, telling me how he should live to see me dancing upon nothing; how he would marry Beatrix now in spite of hell and all the base-born, light-mothered Pages that ever mewled in their nurses’ arms; how, in one stroke, he would be avenged for all that I had ever done to him.

When he had run the full gamut of abuse, and was fairly at a stand for fresh epithets, I took him up, not angrily, for, strange as it may seem, I could not for the life of me stir the hot rage that had twice or thrice made me so eager to kill him.

“You say I am a coward, Seytoun, and that is a harsh word to fling at a dying man. What have I ever done to you, more than to post you in the tidewater country for killing my cousin Devlin Page over a game of cards without giving the poor lad a tenth of a chance to defend himself?” I asked.

“You posted me, and you have struck me twice without giving me a chance to kill you!” he raged. “On top of that you have eaten insults that would have made a horse-boy fight!”

“Um,” said I. “If I have eaten at your table, I have also made you eat at mine. And I had a much better cause than you, Wolf Seytoun,” I added, giving him the name he went by in Virginia. “The woman who loves me, and who will loathe and despise you to her dying day for this night’s work, begged me to spare you--for the sake of our common country--and I gave her my promise.”

“By heaven!” he shouted, “you’ll taunt me with that? I tell you, Beatrix Leigh will--”

“Hold on,” I warned, raising a hand in deprecation. “That makes twice you have used her name to me within five minutes. Don’t do it again!”

“What’s to stop me if I name her a hundred million times?” he bellowed.

“This,” I said, taking up the sword that Castner had flung upon the bed. And still I was not angry.

His first act was the craven cur’s: a swift glance over his shoulder to see if haply the door had been left ajar to let him run; his next was the trapped wolf’s: a whipping-out of his saber, and a lightning-like launching of his great body in a rush that was meant to slay me before I could get upon my feet.

The attack failed only because I was fully expecting it; but the warding of the murderous saber cut snapped my borrowed weapon short off at the hilt. It was here that John Champe’s devotion surely saved my life. But for his smuggling of the Scots rapier under his coat, I should have been left unarmed and helpless, and Seytoun would certainly have slain me like a dog.

But the rapier was at hand, and I made shift to snatch it out of its hiding-place beneath the blankets, to spring aside from the second saber sweep, and to face my antagonist in some equality.

Then began a battle the like of which I hope never to have part in again. Seytoun’s face was the face of a demoniac, and he fought with the coward’s courage, the frenzy of a madman. For a time I could do nothing but strive to keep out of his way, and never before had I been made to feel the bitter inadequacy of the lighter weapon when opposed to the heavier troop saber. I dared not try to parry his sweeping slashes, and my only hope lay in winding him.

This result came in time, helped on by his reckless wasting of his strength, and by the heavy coat he was wearing. Then it was my turn, and I began to press him slowly backward, changing my defense into an attack, and crowding him to make good before he should recover and catch his second wind. Round and round the narrow cell we went, and still the heavy saber rose and fell, and the slender rapier darted in and out, and never a drop of blood was drawn.

“End it!” I cried; “why don’t you end it, you brute beast?”

He took me at my word, or tried to. In a fierce rush he backed me all across the room, and when he had me in a corner, stooped, caught up the heavy stool in his left hand and hurled it at my head. It was a base advantage to take of a lighter-armed antagonist, but I forgave him. For at the instant of missile-hurling I found my opening, and the rapier flashed in over the momentarily neglected guard; darted in and found its mark and pierced it.

I did not thrust a second time; did not need to. While the clock could tick twice, he stood looking at me with a sort of shocked wonder in his bloodshot eyes. Then he turned away slowly, and fell face downward across the bunk-bed, and I think he never stirred afterward.

XXIII

OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD

I CONFESS, with some prickings of remorse, that I did not stay to help Seytoun live or die. Fiercely swift as the fight had been, it had cut deeply into the little time I could count on, and no sooner was it ended than I was down on my knees under the table, and burrowing out through the breach in the wall.

Once in the earth kennel, with the candle, and my sword and the clasp-knife, I replaced the bricks hurriedly in the breach and began to sound the wooden bulkhead. To my dismay, it seemed as solid as the earth itself, and I saw nothing for it but to try to dig a passage around it. This might well be the work of hours; but after the moment of despair it gave me, I fell upon the task furiously, digging with the knife, with my hands, and at last with the rapier, boring it around to cut out futile little cones of the crumbling clay.

I was stabbing thus feverishly at the stubborn earth bank, and accomplishing little, as I thought, when sounds in the powder-room behind me made me stop and listen. I heard the door clang back against the wall; heard footsteps and voices, and then the shout of surprise when they found Seytoun. I did not need to look at my watch to see the time: it was midnight and my gallows guard was come for me.

I think it must have been my good angel whispering at my ear--the prompting to make a last despairing push with the thin-bladed sword in the clay at the back of the shallow excavation. To my joy the steel went through, and by wriggling it about I quickly had a hole through which the keen salt air of the December night poured to refresh me.

Luckily, I was still cool enough and sane enough to be certain that I should never have time to enlarge the hole so that it would serve to let me out. I knew it must be only a matter of seconds until those in the powder-room would find the breach in the wall, and I should be like a trapped rat. But now my brain was working swiftly and clearly. The wooden bulkhead stopping the passage was merely covered with a bank of earth in the ravelin ditch to conceal it. Would my strength suffice to overturn it?

Dropping the sword, I put my shoulder to the bulkhead and heaved. It gave--sprung outward at the top and let a little rain of loosened dirt trickle down upon my head. Again I heaved, lifting until the veins in my forehead seemed about to burst; and I could hear the men in the powder-room dragging the table aside, and pulling the loose bricks out of the breach. Another moment, and--

But that moment was mine. With the final heave the bulwark tilted outward and fell into the outworks ravelin with a smothered crash, carrying me with it. There was a shout from behind to follow me out, and a sentry, pacing his beat on the breast-high banquette beyond the ravelin, stopped, gave a great cry as if he had seen a ghost, and let his musket off.

At the musket-fire and the shouts of those who were wriggling through the breach in the wall of the powder-room, there was a rush of the outworks sentinels from both directions. Seeing at once that my only way lay straight before me, I leaped afoot, dragged the dazed gun-firer from the banquette by his legs, and, with another bound, went over the breast-height and tumbled into the moat.

Here the palisade, a closely set fence of upright stakes driven into the ditch-bottom, balked me, but only until I could spring and reach the top and clamber up. It was here that I nearly got my quittance. If I should drop into the V-shaped ditch beyond the palisade, there was an even chance that I should not be able to climb out to the top of the abattis breast beyond. But if I could balance on the stakes for the single instant necessary, the gulf could be leaped. I drew myself up, balancing precariously on the stake tops; there was a roar of musketry behind me, a sharp twinge in my right shoulder, and I hurled myself outward into space.

I remember vaguely the fall among the sharpened tree-branch spines of the abattis, and, more dimly still, a frenzied effort to roll out of the tangle toward the edge of the sea-slope. After this I knew nothing till I came back to life at the bidding of a tossing and wrenching that seemed to be tearing me limb from limb.

The figure was no figure, as I soon discovered. I was in the thick of a group of men who were running swiftly along the beach, four of them carrying me. Somewhere in the background of the night, other men were running, and now and then muskets barked and there came a whining of bullets overhead.

While I was yet no more than half at myself, a voice I should recognize anywhere gasped a question.

“How much farther, Captain Sprigg?” the voice said; and I reached out and laid my hand on the arm of the big fellow running with my bearers.

“Jack!” I shouted feebly.

“The same, Dickie-lad,” he panted back. And then: “Hold the life in you by main strength, Dick; get a tail-twist on it and hang to it! Beatrix and Aunt Ju are waiting for us in the boats!” And again to Sprigg: “How much farther, in God’s name, Captain?”

It was no farther, as it chanced. At Pettus’s eager repetition of his anxious question, the running group swerved sharply to the waterside, and my bearers plunged thigh-deep into the icy water and lifted me gently over the side of a small boat; over the side and into the keeping of a pair of loving arms that clasped themselves quickly about me.

“Beatrix!” I cried in utter weakness; and then I felt her tears drop like warm rain on my face, and heard sounds as of a hand-to-hand struggle on the beach, in the midst of which our smaller boat put off and was pulled swiftly to the side of a schooner lying out of musket range from the shore.

Here again, helping hands were ready to lift me to the deck, where a spare sail was quickly folded to make a bed for me under the lee of the high bulwarks, and a ship’s lantern was brought, and loving womanly hands, four of them now, began to search anxiously for my wound.

In the thick of it I heard the other boat come bumping against the side of the ship, and the men, a half-dozen or more of them, trooped aboard, bringing a prisoner. Following quickly there was a medley of shouted sailor orders in the harsh nasal twang of Elijah Sprigg’s best voice; and then Jack came to kneel beside me, beseeching Beatrix to tell him I was not dead.

The white canvas was snapping and crackling overhead, and the _Nancy Jane_ was heeling to the fair half-gale and racing down the harbor, before they would let me speak; and then all I could say was “Tell me--tell me.”

And they told me, Beatrix and Jack, with Cousin Ju to stroke my forehead and to break in with tearful self-reproachings for the tongue-lashing she had given me in Mr. Vandeventer’s parlor: told me how Jack had got Major Lee’s leave to follow Seytoun to the meeting-place on the Tarrytown road with Askew and Castner; how he had overheard enough to make him disguise himself as a farmer, and dog the three back to New York; how he had accidentally stumbled upon Sprigg and the women as they were making their way to the waterside, and so had been present when Champe brought the news of me.

“But--but how did you come to be so late in starting?” I said, holding my loved one close with the arm they had not bandaged.

“It was God’s Providence, no less, in a thing we took for the greatest disaster that could befall,” said Beatrix gently, taking up the narrative where Jack broke off. “Major Simcoe returned with his troop, and the twenty men of the _Nancy Jane’s_ allotment were sent down to embark. Captain Sprigg claimed to have only the little boat, and he fetched the troopers aboard two or three at a time, and the sailors made prisoners of them, putting them in the hold as fast as they came over the side. All this took so much time that the captain was but just bringing us to the shore when Sergeant Champe came with your message.”

“Lord, lord!” cried I, laughing weakly. “And you’ve got twenty men of the Queen’s Rangers in the hold?”

“Twenty men _and_ the tobacco,” Jack boasted; adding: “and one other fine young fellow--an officer, who was so forward in his pursuit of you that he got tangled up in a hand-to-hand mellay with the long-boat’s crew and we brought him off with us. He says his name is Castner, and he was most anxious to inquire about you, when I told him you were winged.”

Again I laughed, as I should have laughed with my last breath, I think.

“Castner--_Castner_ a prisoner? Treat him well, I do beseech you,” I begged. “He is my friend and one of God’s own gentlemen. But you tell me nothing of Champe.”

“Because there is nothing to tell,” said Pettus sorrowfully. “He went back to the fort to try to get word to you; to tell you that if you failed to dig out, we meant to fall upon your gallows guard for a rescue when they brought you out. They will hang poor Champe, I’m thinking.”

“No,” said I, “they will not hang him. But he may wish they had before he ever hears the old troop call again, Jack,” and I was far indeed from knowing at the moment how true a prophecy I was making.

At this Pettus stood up, and looking back over the schooner’s foaming wake told us how they were displaying signal lanterns on the battlements of Fort George, and how a Bengal light was burning on a ship near the shore to show the sailors heaving up the anchor and making ready to chase us.

“But they’ll never catch us, dear heart!” said my loved one bravely, and again her arms went about my neck.

And so they did not; though to tell of how we ran the gauntlet of the fleet in the lower bay, and of what befell us and our one-and-twenty British captives on a voyage that ended far enough from the Capes of Virginia, would take a livelier pen than mine. For this, as you will see, is but a tale of a few landward days, while that other is of storm and shipwreck, of perilous weeks and weary months, before we saw the tidewater homeland again.

So, then, with the _Nancy Jane_ dancing down the harbor with a bone in her teeth and her canvas straining to the gale; with Cousin Ju beginning to feel the coming sickness and begging Jade to take her to the cabin; and with my dear heart whispering to me between her kisses to know if my shoulder pain was more than I could bear, this pen need add no more to a tale which, brief as its measuring was in days and hours, has already grown over-long.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.