Part 7

None the less, we sought and searched, as those who have lost their all, using the time recklessly in exploring every stretch of woodland we could locate in the darkness, and even going so far as to inquire when we found any one stirring at any of the isolated farm houses.

It was just before day that we got our clue. A countryman, looking first askance at our uniforms as his lantern showed us to him, told us that a troop of dragoons had been all day in the wood above his house, but that an hour or more ahead of us they had galloped furiously away on the northward road.

Champe and I exchanged discouraged glances. That settled it for us, and when we were out of sight and hearing of the farmer we made some hurried discussion of what came next on our bill of fare.

“You must take to the road, worn out as you are, and make your way back to your regiment, Sergeant,” I said, settling Champe’s course for him as if I had been his own captain.

But now his dogged courage seemed to have oozed away. “I can never make it, Captain Dick. I’d be overhauled as soon as daylight comes, and that would mean dancing upon nothing for me. They wouldn’t even give me a soldier’s death.”

“Pshaw, man!” said I, half angrily. “Being safely out of the town and this far on the road, you have little to fear.”

But he only shook his head gloomily, and would not be persuaded, breaking in upon me, while I was trying to urge him, with a question as to my own designs.

I laughed. “I came out to snare Sir Judas,” I told him. “That, and nothing less, is what I shall do, John Champe, if I follow him to the ends of the earth.”

“You’ll be taken and hanged,” said Champe.

“Not if I can help it, you may be sure. But come; you must decide. I’m going back, and there is little enough time to do it in, the Lord knows.”

He hesitated yet another minute or two and then rose up stiffly from the log on which he had been sitting. “I’ll go back with you and see it through,” he declared moodily.

I tried once again to dissuade him, showing him how he was likely to have miseries enough as a common soldier in any regiment commanded by Arnold; showed him further how he would certainly be required to choose between death at the last and fighting against his country in very deed and fact.

But it was all to no purpose. Say what I would, his only reply was a stubborn repetition: “I’ll go back with you and see it through.” And when I could get nothing more out of him, we made our way as swiftly as possible back to our stolen boat, taking to the water a short half-hour, I should say, before dawn-breaking.

Our luck, which had left us so promptly after the boat-stealing, gave us a little glimpse of itself again when we approached the New York shore. By the merest chance, we took ground within a few feet of the dangling boat chain, and by chance again, our sleepy sentinel, or another in his place, was at the other end of his beat when we climbed cautiously up the bank.

Once more safely in the town, we separated; Champe to go to his barracks, and I to steal unobserved into my tavern and up the stair and so to my room with the unrumpled bed.

I rumpled the bed duly, in less than two minutes after I had dropped the door-bar, being fully nine-tenths dead for the want of sleep and rest. But I had scarcely pulled the covers up before there came a mighty thundering at the door; and when I went to answer it, I was told that my general commanded my attendance on the moment--and he had sent a soldier to do the summoning.

VIII

A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL

IT nettles me to think that one carrying the name of Page should be a prey to senseless terror, but the sight of that sour-faced soldier standing, with his musket at parade, before my door, made me ill.

Weighing it evenly in a calmer moment, it was not so greatly to be wondered at. A spy’s life always hangs by the slenderest thread, with all the world that touches him a den of wild beasts ready to tear him limb from limb. Besides, I was in the last ditch of weariness and fatigue and a tired body is next to an empty belly for sapping the courage.

But, after all, my soldier caller did not put me under arrest when I was dressed and ready to go with him. On the contrary, he preceded me to Arnold’s house, and when I went in, took up his sentry stand before the entrance, pacing in step with Sir Henry Clinton’s man next door.

When I climbed the stair and met the man whose escapes of the night past might have been measured in thicknesses of a hair, the unreasoning terror gripped me again. Arnold was standing with his back to the door when I entered, and when he turned to face me he was scowling darkly and his first question made my heart turn a somersault within me.

“Where did you go last night, after you left me, Captain Page?”

“Nowhere,--at once,” I asserted, meaning to stay in the boat of truth as long as any two planks of it would hold together. “Your thought that you heard some one in the garden set me to thinking; so I hung off and on here before the house until I saw your lights go out.”

“You saw nothing?--heard nothing?”

“No. The town was as quiet as I dare say it used to be when the Mynheers snored their nights away in it.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward I went to my quarters in the tavern where Lieutenant Castner took me,” I continued, making sure that his next question would knock my boat of truth into splinters, leaving me floundering in a sea of lies. And, truly, I did not feel equal to such a swimming match with him, now, with every drop of blood in me nudging its neighbor to keep awake.

“You found all quiet at the tavern?” he demanded, fixing me with his gaze as I have seen a cruel boy pin a fly to the wall.

“As quiet as a graveyard. The barman was only half awake, and the waking half of him went to sleep after he had mulled me a cup of wine.”

“Strange!” he said; and then he fell to walking the floor, and I had time to catch my breath and to get a fresh grip on myself before he began again.

“After your cup of wine, Captain Page? What happened then?”

“I went up-stairs to the room they had given me. But my sleep was bad.”

“Ha!” said he; “now we are coming to it. What disturbed you?”

It was worse than groping in the dark; it was like groping without the sense of touch to guide me. But I had to go on, though I saw that my road might easily end on Gallows Hill.

“First I heard, or dreamed I heard, a noise as of men fighting. A little later I’m sure I heard a great deal of loud talk and some oaths, and tramplings in my corridor and on the stair. After that, I was awake most of the time, I think, but I heard no more of the inn noises.”

He sat down behind his writing-table and waved me to a chair.

“Sit down, Captain Page, and you shall have the explanation of all this,” he said, and the sudden change in his tone relaxed my strain so violently that I fairly reeled into a chair. “I sent for you thus early to question you before you had the news from other sources,” he went on. “Make a note of it, Captain, and when you wish to examine a witness, get hold of him before his impressions have been distorted out of shape by his confusing of them with the impressions of others. You recall what I was saying last night about the Washington plot against my person?”

I bowed.

“I think I owe my liberty, and perhaps my life, to you, Captain Page; or at least to your presence here up to midnight. There are suspicious circumstances enough to warrant the belief that a plot was laid against me, to be sprung last night. I was in hopes that you might be able to add further information; but your items only confirm the story of the inn people. They thought, however, that the sounds of the scuffle came from your room.”

“If I had been as sound asleep as I needed to be, a battle royal might have been fought in my room without my knowing it,” I replied, regaining something of my self-possession.

“This squabble in the inn seems to have been an aftermath,” he continued; “possibly”--and here I thought he looked sharply at me again--“a meeting of the plotters to jangle over their failure. Which points to a traitor among us, Captain, since there are no suspicious characters quartering at the tavern whose room could have been used for a rendezvous. But one thing is certain: one of the janglers was a soldier of the Loyal American Legion in uniform. A horse-boy saw him slip into the tavern and go up-stairs.”

My heart came into my mouth, and, by the bones of all the Pages, I had to swallow twice to get it down again. Champe was surely skating upon the thinnest ice that ever held the weight of a man, and if he broke through, I should be quite as far from the shore as he.

“But--but the other circumstances, sir,” I prompted, hoping to turn him back from this aftermath business, as he called it, in the tavern.

“They are quite conclusive. All day yesterday a troop of rebel horse was in hiding on the Jersey shore, evidently waiting for some prearranged event to come off. Late in the evening the schooner _Nancy Jane_ dropped a boat, manned by a single pair of oars, and then stood up and down the river for several hours. The dropped boat was seen more than once by our sentries, and it was always hanging in the tideway at the same place.”

“Surely, all this was most suspicious!” I exclaimed, as heartily as I could.

“It was; but this was only the groundwork of the plot. You remember the loose board in the fence at the back of my garden? That board had been removed for a purpose. Captain. At the very moment when you remarked it, there were men in the garden waiting their chance to attack me. They were hidden under the cedars, and it was one of them who coughed or sneezed loud enough for me to hear him.”

“Heavens!” I ejaculated. “What a desperately narrow escape you have had, General Arnold!”

“I think so myself,” he observed quite coolly. And then, without a sign or a word of warning, he struck my slowly recovering self-possession the most treacherous back-blow it ever had. “Captain Page, I owe you something, as I have admitted. But you must be frank with me. The soldier who climbed the stair in the tavern last night was Sergeant Champe, and the door he entered was yours.”

If I ever have a son, I shall pray God to endow him with an alert brain, the choicest gift a man can have. If I had hesitated a single instant as to the course I should pursue, if I had winked a wink too many or drawn a breath a thousandth part of a second too long--well, there would have been a midnight walk for me to the top of Gallows Hill to keep a tryst with some Tory Jack Ketch, with Mistress Beatrix left to cry her pretty eyes out, if she cared anything for poor Dickie Page.

But I did none of these fatal things. Instead, I flushed, sought for the exact face of innocent guilt, and said, “General Arnold, I do most humbly beg your pardon for deceiving you, though I beg you to believe that, as far as I went, I told you the precise truth.” Here I let him see my eyes for long enough to drive that nail well home. “But beyond the time of my going to bed, I hoped you would not press me too closely. Champe did come to my room. He had been making a night of it with some of the other men--their last night ashore--and his temper even when he is fully sober, is none of the best, as you may have already observed.”

He gave me a slow nod, and I went on, gaining a little now in the race with the hangman, I hoped.

“He was most quarrelsome and abusive. He had sought me out, it seems, because he had a drunken notion that I was responsible for your leaving him outside of Mr. Justice Smith’s house last night, and so exposing him to the gibes of those horse-boys and others of the regular line who hate our legion uniform wherever they see it. There was more than a squabble; it was a pitched battle, and I had to beat a little sober sense into him before I could quiet him, and even then he went on babbling foolishness and curses until I was afraid he would have the house about our ears.”

“Go on, Captain Page,” said my inquisitor, most grimly non-committal.

“There is little else to tell you, General Arnold. When I had him sobered a little, I saw him past the tavern bar and farther in safety; and when I quitted him I had his promise that he would go to his barracks and behave himself. I confess I would have kept all this from you, if I could. John Champe, sober, is as good a soldier as ever picked a flint, and since I had given him his beating, I thought to spare him a worse thing. So long as your questions did not touch the man’s loyalty--or mine--I felt warranted in holding back this tale of his stumble into the ale-pot. Soldiers will be soldiers, General, and that officer can get the most out of them who first beats them and then overlooks their little peccadilloes.”

I was in cruel doubt for five age-long minutes as to whether I had made my case or signed my death-warrant. No man was ever better able to hide his mind behind his face save in his sudden upblazes of passion, than was this same Benedict Arnold; and when he rose to walk the floor in gloomy meditation, with his head hanging and his fingers tightly locked behind him, I lived a dozen lifetimes and could well-nigh feel the hemp drawing tight around my neck.

But at the end he let me off with a caution and a veiled threat.

“You should have two lessons out of this, Captain Page,” he said at length, stopping abruptly to stand over me. “One is that it is never worth your while to play fast and loose with me in matters of information. Make your mind a looking-glass for me, or better still, a window-pane, for, sooner or later, I shall always be at the bottom of your profoundest secret. The other lesson is this: your adhesion to the king’s cause is but a day old. Until it gains a little age and dignity, it will be well for you to avoid even the appearance of evil.”

I rose, feeling as any man would who had been given his reprieve after the black cap had been fairly drawn down over his eyes.

“I should have known better, General,” I said, feigning the meekest humility and self-reproach. “And now, sir, if you have orders for me--”

He broke into my tender of services with the welcomest word I had heard in many a day.

“Go to your quarters, Captain Page, and finish the sleep I interrupted. Your rest has been sufficiently broken of late to justify some rebellion in nerve and muscle. The embarkation begins to-day, but we shall do well enough without you.”

It was not more than ten minutes from this early-morning tight-rope dance that I once more tumbled into bed in the barn-like upper room at the tavern, and I was sinking sweetly into the lap of the goddess whose charms we never appreciate until a wakeful night or two makes them precious, when I started up with a cold sweat breaking out in a frost rime all over me. In all the tight-rope business, I had never once thought of Arnold’s questioning Champe, or of how little any story of his would be likely to fit in with mine!

If my stripping for bed had been swift, the reversal of the process left the disrobing as far behind as if it were a tortoise racing the fleetest hound that ever gave tongue on fox’s scent. In frantic haste I dressed and left the inn and made my way to the legion barracks. The embarkation had already begun, they told me, and when I mentioned Champe’s company, it was added that it had gone aboard among the first.

On the face of it, this seemed as if it might be a danger past, but I thought it best to make assurance doubly sure and to that end dragged my weary legs down to the boat-landing where the lighters were putting off to the ships.

It was well indeed that I took this final precaution. Not a stone’s throw from the landing I met Champe, that minute come ashore in one of the returning boats on a peremptory summons from Arnold. Beckoning him aside, I told him hurriedly what was before him, and drilled him upon the story I had invented till he begged for mercy and swore he could say it backward.

That was all very well, but I have learned that a cat killed is a cat safely dead only after it is well buried, with the earth tramped down solidly upon it. So, when I had kept sight of Champe until Arnold’s door opened to swallow him, I found a spying place and watched--and had no trouble in keeping awake, either, I promise you--until I saw him come out again.

He gave me the countersign in passing, as he was on his way back to his ship. It was only a single word, “Hoodwinked,” but it lifted a load from my shoulders that was all but crushing me; lifted the load and let me, for the third time that morning, seek the bed that seemed to have a spiteful grudge against a weary soldier of fortune.

This time there were no cold-sweat alarms to snatch me from the brink, and when next I opened my eyes, the room was dark, and I knew not what day or night of the week it was.

IX

IN WHICH I PAY A DUTY CALL

CASTNER was at the supper-table in the tavern common-room when I went up-stairs, and I found that I had slept the clock only once around. To my surprise, the lieutenant was wearing a uniform to match my own, and I saw now why he had been so sore at my pointless joke. He was to accompany the Arnold expedition; and I was not long in divining the reason when he told me sourly that he had been detailed to act as aide to General Arnold. For all he had paid good king’s gold and a commission in the king’s army for his prize traitor, Sir Henry Clinton was afraid to trust him, and my friend Castner was going along as a sort of amiable spy in Arnold’s military household.

“You don’t seem to take your promotion very joyfully,” I laughed, drawing a chair opposite and sitting down to help him with the cold roast.

“It’s a dirty business,” he blurted out; and then he shut his mouth on his meat and I was left to guess whether he meant his own sending, or the proposed descent of an armed force upon a defenseless coast.

A little later three or four other officers came in for their suppers, among them Major Simcoe, who had commanded the Queen’s Rangers at Germantown. Their talk, which comfortably ignored me either as a deserter and as beneath their notice, or as an untried recruit, turned upon the ship expedition and the secret of its destination, which latter seemed to have been well guarded, inasmuch as none of those present appeared to know where the fleet would cast anchor.

I surmised that Major Simcoe’s ignorance was assumed, however. He was deep in the counsels of Sir Henry Clinton, and was a well-trusted officer. I noticed that he kept his face pretty well in his plate and joined in the conversation only as he had to, letting the younger men keep the ball rolling.

From this table talk I learned that the work of putting the troops and stores aboard the ships had been going on all day, and was likely to dig deep into the night, though when the actual sailing order was to be given, did not appear. I was concerned about this on only one point, namely, the hope that there might be time for a visit, hurried or otherwise, to the house where I had seen Margaret Shippen’s face at the door and Beatrix Leigh’s at the upper window.

What excuse I should have for intruding into a house whose owner’s name, even, was still unknown to me, I could not imagine. But that the thing must be compassed admitted of no question. After what I had done in Mr. Justice Smith’s glass-roofed rose-house, I should be either a knave or a coward to run away in silence. Moreover, I had not learned why Mistress Beatrix was in New York, or how long she meant to stay, or any of the hundred things her presence at the Smith mansion had put question-marks after.

From what I heard at the supper-table, I judged my time was short. It was Major Simcoe who said that when the troops were all embarked, the officers would have shore leave only until the ebb tide would serve to let the ships drop down the bay. It was here that I ventured to ask about the wind, and if it were favorable; and the major said it was not, but that the fleet would come to anchor in the lower bay to wait for it.

It was while we were still at table that an orderly came with a summons for me. I was to report to Arnold at my earliest convenience,--I marked the word and took courage from it,--and I might delay so long as would be necessary to make all my preparations for going aboard beforehand, to the end that I should not be obliged to return to the tavern later on if time pressed.

I showed Arnold’s note to Castner, and the lieutenant very kindly offered to expedite my affair by looking after my impedimenta; which was light enough, since I had only the clothes I stood in, the civilian’s suit I had bought of the Dutch Jew, and my patriot homespun. I was the more willing to turn Castner loose in my room for the packing up, because there were no papers, plans of fortifications or any other spy’s death-sentences for him to stumble on, and it lent a fine air of sincerity to my new pledge to give him my keys and to tell him to take or leave what he chose.

This left me free to accompany the orderly who had brought Arnold’s note, and the young man, a fine young gentleman who was a son of that Colonel Hetheridge who was killed at the battle of Monmouth, walked with me to the door of Arnold’s quarters.

I found the traitor busily writing, as he seemed always to be at my entrances. And, as on a former occasion, he waved me to a chair and went on pushing the quill like a regimental clerk who had got behind in his records. When he had folded, sealed and superscribed his letter, he turned to me, and I saw that Sergeant-Major Champe had not failed either himself or me in the cross-questioning of the early morning.

“You are quite refreshed, Captain Page?” he began most kindly; and again I caught myself wishing that he would not so persistently show me the likeable side of him. “You are fortunate in having no family ties to break when we turn our backs upon New York. Will you take it as an older man’s weakness if I say that I shall leave my heart behind me when we sail, Captain Page?”

I said that his sentiment did him honor; adding that I had once had the pleasure of meeting Mistress Arnold while she was yet Mistress Margaret Shippen in Philadelphia.

“A dear lady, with a heart of pure gold,” he said half musingly. And then more pointedly to me: “She remembers you, Captain--which is the chief reason why I am going to let you be the bearer of this farewell note of mine. You can find the house again?”

“Surely,” I replied; and for the instant I forgot my sworn purpose in sudden gratitude to him for putting me so easily and naturally on the way to a fulfilment of my own desires.

“She will see you--as she might not wish to see another,” he continued. “Tell her only cheerful things, Captain Page. Though she does not know our destination or our purposes, she is weighed down with a presentiment of evil to come. That is why I am writing and sending you. There are limits to the sternest fortitude, and I--”

He broke off abruptly, and I could have sworn there were honest tears in his eyes. But by this time I was clinging blindly to the kidnapping purpose that was my only reason for the present hazards, telling myself if that should fail I should see another side of him soon enough, when he should be leading his ravages against my home land. At twenty-two I had yet to learn that no man, however despicable he may be, is all villain; that there will be some meliorating drop of blood in the worst criminal that was ever righteously hanged for his sins.