Part 9

There was no help save in a stout lie quickly told; and even this might have disastrous after-consequences if the major should come ashore later on and follow it up.

“General Arnold is my superior officer, and I do not presume to question his reasons for writing another man’s name on the letter which he gives me to deliver, Major Simcoe,” I said boldly, adding, with even greater impudence: “If you do not wish to receive the general’s despatches at my hands, let me have them again and I’ll so report to General Arnold.”

“Oh, there is no need for any heat about it, Captain Page,” was his even-toned retort. “Only, when you go ashore, I shall be glad if you will look up my sergeant and send him off to me. You shall have the boat’s crew as long as may be necessary.”

Now this was not satisfactory, either, since it made me responsible for the boat’s crew, and, indirectly, for Champe’s return. So I took the high-and-mighty stand again.

“Egad, Major Simcoe,” I protested, “I’m afraid you will have to hold me excused. General Arnold would not be greatly pleased to have one of his aides detailed by you to bring in your stragglers.”

At this the doughty major came close and looked me in the eyes as the poor light would let him.

“Hark you, Captain Page,” he said, speaking so those who stood about should not hear; “you seem bent on quarreling with me when there is no need for it. That is your privilege, sir, and if you were a king’s officer I should be the last man in the army to deny you. As it is--well, a polite word or two may go far with a gentleman in your situation, and I wonder you are so slow in perceiving it. Now, sir, will you report to the general in command that I am short a sergeant, and that I shall be greatly pleased to have the proper steps taken to find and send him off to me?”

If there is one good quality above another in the Page make-up it is the instant knowledge of the precise moment when the trumpet should sound the retreat. I saw now that I had taken the wrong tack with the tart major, and that I must butter him well if I wished to come off without loss.

“Saying nothing of your allusions, Major Simcoe,--which we may well take up at some other time and place,--I beg your pardon on the sergeant’s account,” I said, with no more than the proper touch of offended dignity. “You put me upon my mettle, seeming to question my right to bring you a letter--which you may take as the reason why I did not tell you plainly in the beginning that Champe was sent upon another errand after your letter had been written and superscribed. I am sure you do not question the commanding general’s right to use a warrant officer of his own legion as he sees fit.”

“I beg your pardon, Captain Page,” said the major crisply. “I am a soldier, sir, and I was thinking only of the man’s possible disobedience. Of course, if Mr. Ar--if the general required him, I have nothing more to say,” and he drew aside and read his letter.

Now I had another twinge or two to suffer while I waited, for fear Arnold might possibly have made some mention of Champe in the letter. But in a minute or two the major turned and gave me my dismissal quite courteously, telling me that there was no answer other than to convey his duty to the commanding officer, and to say, if it came in my way, that he, Major Simcoe, would report at the headquarters sometime during the following day--a thing I prayed my good angel to prevent, if it could be done without setting the entire cosmic plan of the universe ajee.

Having thus been given leave to vanish, I made good use of it before any other untoward thing should happen; and with a coin apiece for my two sailor oarsmen at the landing, I answered the sentry challenge from the fort and made my way swiftly to the tavern.

Here I learned that my portmanteau had not been taken away, and that a soldier, calling himself my servant, was waiting for me in the room above. Meaning to give the Royalist barman no chance to think that I cared a rap about any common soldier who might be sitting up for me, I ordered a cup of wine and a pipe of tobacco, and sat quietly before the fire in the supper-room, sipping the one and smoking the other for a full half-hour before paying my score and going above-stairs.

In the barn-like room Champe was improving the interval soldier-wise; which is to say that he had taken the covers from my bed, rolled himself in them, and was sound asleep on the floor. He roused at my incoming, however, and was broad awake by the time I had thrown a log on the smoldering fire he had made.

“Well, and how did you carry it off with the major?” he asked when he had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“Not so handsomely as I should have, had you told me it was Major Simcoe I should have to hoodwink,” I retorted. “But you are safe for the time being--which means until Major Simcoe and Arnold meet each other and fall to comparing notes.”

“And then?” queried my sergeant.

“Then Simcoe will learn that I have lied to him, and Arnold may not be able to remember that he sent you on an errand that prevented your return to the ship with his letter to the major,” I rejoined shortly.

“Which means that we have purchased--how many hours, Captain Dick?”

“God knows; and I do not. But we must make the most of what time we have. No one seems to know where our convoy ships of war have gone, or when they are to return. But with the fleet waiting in the lower bay, the interval can not be long. What we do, we must do quickly.”

“Aye,” said Champe; “and what will that be?”

I had been culling the plots out patiently ever since Castner’s announcement of the delay had set them weaving, and now there was but one that offered any promise of success--and that a desperate one. With the uncertain time-factor we had to count on, it was useless to think of trying to get word to Major Lee in the camp at Tappan. What we did must be done without help from the outside; and upon this hard-and-fast pivot the temerarious enterprise must be made to turn.

“What we thought we might accomplish with a corporal’s guard of Major Lee’s men to help us, we must still do, and do it with our hands, John Champe,” I said.

“Take him forcibly in his house, you mean?”

I nodded.

“I’m with you, Captain Dick,” was the stout sergeant’s rejoinder. “But afterward?”

“That is what it may take us all the time we have, and maybe more, to provide for. The river is our only way out, and we must have a boat, the lightest and swiftest we can find. Do you pull an oar, Sergeant?”

“No so comfortably as I do a bridle rein. But I shall make out when it comes to that. What is your plan?--or have you drawn any picture of it in your mind?”

“It is as simple as knocking a beef yearling in the head with a stone,” I admitted, nettled that I could contrive nothing subtler. “We find our boat, beg, buy or steal it, and place it as near at hand as may be convenient. That done, we lay hands on Sir Judas, sleeping or waking, and then for the river and a long pull with the tide or against it, as fortune chances to smile or frown upon us in fixing the hour.”

“Aye,” said Champe, quite without enthusiasm, “it’s surely simple enough, Captain Dick.”

“Think of a better, then,” I snapped curtly.

The sergeant let me have another sight of his ferocious grin.

“I’ve had my turn of thinking, and it’s you for it now,” he retorted. “I might say that you put your foot squarely into my think-trap and stopped it from going off, but I shan’t. You’ll give the order, Captain Dick, and I’ll obey it, if it tells me to cut Mr. Benedict Iscariot’s throat while he is asleep.”

After that we were silent for a time, both of us weighing and measuring the hazards of the desperate game, I think. Champe still kept his place on the floor, sitting jack-knifed with his hands locked over his knees and his wide-opened eyes staring at nothing. Suddenly, as I was opening my mouth to ask where we were likely to find our boat, he laid a hand on my knee and shook his head.

“What is it?” I asked, but only with my eyes.

“There is some one stirring in the room beyond,” he said in a half-whisper. “Who is your neighbor, Captain Dick?”

Matching his tone, I said that I knew none of my fellow lodgers save Lieutenant Castner, and that I did not know the placing of the lieutenant’s room.

“We were full careless,” said my companion. And then he got upon his feet with no more noise than a cat would have made and suddenly extinguished the candle. The firelight still flung long shadows about the room, and in the shelter of the broadest of them Champe glided away to the wall of suspicion and examined it foot by foot with scrutinizing eyes and gently gliding finger-tips. When he crept back to me he was holding out a forefinger the end of which was whitened with powdered lime.

“That tells the tale,” he whispered. “There’s a whiff of this dust on the floor, and above it, at the height of a man’s head, a peep-hole the size of a goose-quill. We must know who is in that room, Captain Dick.”

Here was a crude peril at the very outset of things; but what the sergeant said was very true. We must know who our spy was at all costs. Taking off our shoes we passed silently into the corridor and found the neighboring door by feeling cautiously for it in the dark. It was on the latch, and after listening breathlessly for a full minute we opened the door by slow inchings and listened again. Still there was no sound, and now we entered the room, groping blindly, first for impeding obstacles and then for the bed where our spy might be feigning sleep.

In this noiseless circuiting Champe went to the right and I to the left, and we met in the far corner where the high, four-posted bed filled a sort of alcove built to contain it. Then I think we both drew breath of relief, for the bed was empty.

“Wait for me,” whispered my companion; and when he returned a little later he had relighted our candle and was carrying it high above his head.

But the candle told us nothing more than our gropings had. The room was unoccupied; was bare of any lodger’s belongings; had evidently been undisturbed since its daytime redding by the chamber-maid. But in the partition wall between it and my room we found the peep-hole which, on the principle of locking the stable after the horse had been most successfully stolen, we carefully plugged.

When we were before my fire again we were little wiser than when we had left it. Our danger turned upon a question of time. When was the hole bored through the partition wall? There was no way of determining this: but Champe was sure he had heard footsteps in the adjoining room at the moment when he had called my attention.

“Take it whatever way you please,” he said; “there’s somebody in this house who suspects you. What we have talked here to-night would hang a whole regiment, and it’s my notion that our spy has heard all he needs to hear and has gone for help to take us.”

“In that case,” said I, “since we can die but once, I for my part choose to die fighting rather than at the rope’s end.” So I got up and barred the door.

“Right you are, my Captain,” Champe agreed most heartily; and then we took stock of our weapons.

Fortunately we were provided with the tools we both knew best how to use. My trooper sword, which I had brought off in the boat escape from Nyack, was with my portmanteau; and this I gave to Champe. For myself there was the captain’s rapier that went with my rank as Arnold’s aide; a good serviceable Scottish blade which I had carefully selected from a dozen or more in the barracks armory for its hang and balance. I thought we should be able to give a pretty good account of ourselves when the time came, and so much I said to Champe.

“Aye,” he replied. “They’ll take the muskets to us before they get us, and then I’ll pray only that they’ll shoot straight. Also, I’ll pray that they do not keep us waiting over-long; I’m fair dead for sleep.”

At this I remembered that the sergeant had lost the whole of the preceding night, as I had, and that he had not had my chance of sleeping out the day in recompense. So, when a full half-hour had passed with no signs or sounds of the expected arresting party, I told Champe to roll himself once more in the bed-covers, leaving me to keep watch. The lack of a boat put any action out of the question for the night; and, deplore it as we might, another day must elapse before we could flog our simple garroting plot into shape.

It was a fruitful vigil that I kept, sitting through the quiet hours before the smoldering fire on the hearth; fruitful because it gave me time to pass in orderly review the exciting events which had been crowded into the short space of two days and nights. I could scarcely realize that the day before the quickly changing scenes of the yesterday, I had been pulling a small boat idly down the river from Teller’s Point, intent upon nothing more pressing than the spending of my few hours’ furlough in Dirck van Ditteraick’s tap-room with Jack Pettus for a boon companion.

This side of that, I had quarreled with Seytoun, taken a huge slice of responsibility in the talk with Mr. Hamilton, made my stirring escape from the patriot camp, changed flags, made my standing good with Sir Henry Clinton and with Arnold, and had lived a fairly busy lifetime in a strenuous day and a still more strenuous night. Moreover, I had discovered Mistress Beatrix Leigh in a place where I had least expected to find her, had stirred her anger and contempt, and--I hoped--in some small measure, at least, her love for me; and had involved myself in a tangle of deceit and double-dealing that might well lead me shortly to a British prison and the gallows.

And, last of all, three days away from our quiet camp in the Hudson hills, I was sitting here in an upper room in the tavern, waiting minute by minute for the summons to a struggle which, if it should come, would, for Champe’s sake and mine, much better end in the swiftest snuffing-out for both of us.

I yawned sleepily. Our spy-takers were a long time making up their minds, I concluded, and I had a hearty wish that they would hurry. No man fights the better for having to sit for hours on end with his bared sword across his knees, straining his ears for the first sounds of the battle signal.

Hence, it was with some dull prickings of disappointment that I roused Champe an hour before dawn, and flung myself upon the bed for a little wooing of forgetfulness to precede the forthbringings of another day. For if there had come a thundering at the door and a shouted command to open in the king’s name, we should at least have confronted a peril known and measurable. But now the darkness was full of mysterious eyes, as the silence told of whispering voices; and no step we should henceforth take would be lacking its hidden snare or pitfall.

XI

OUT OF THE NETTLE, DANGER

CHAMPE let me sleep until day-dawn was fully come and the inn was stirring, calling me then, as he explained, only because he was fearful that some orderly from Arnold’s quarters would be up and asking for me, and so raise a wonder at my holding him, Champe, in my room over night.

Being confronted by the perils of the new day, we were first concerned with the problem of keeping the sergeant out of the way, and out of sight of any curious eyes. It was asking too much of the hazards to make the tavern a rendezvous for him, and while he might possibly venture to show himself in the town, trusting to a nimble lie to account for his absence from his regiment and the fleet, it said itself that he must keep well out of sight of Arnold, Major Simcoe, or any shore-keeping officer of the Loyal Americans.

Breakfast was the earliest consideration, however, and I made shift to answer for that, going down to the common-room when the meal was called, and later bribing the cook to give me a tray of dainties for a brother officer, who, as I said, had been forced to share my room with me for the want of sober sense to find his quarters.

How much this tale imposed upon the cook, a fat Dutchman big enough to make three common men in any fair division of flesh, I do not know. But he gave my “brother officer” the credit of a well man’s appetite, and was discreet enough to discard the tray, making the provisions into a paper-wrapped bundle which I might take to my room without exciting remark.

His breakfast despatched, Champe next wished to know how he was to get out of the tavern unhalted to go upon the boat-seeking quest; and here the contents of my portmanteau came into play. In a little time we had him out of his Loyal American regimentals and into the civilian’s clothes I had purchased to replace my patriot homespun. He made a better-looking gentleman of elegance than I had hoped he would, and when he was well-muffled in the cloak that went with the outfitting, I thought he might pass without curious question.

He was eager to make the attempt, as I was to have him. Any minute a messenger might come from Arnold requiring my attendance, and the wonder we had been trying all the morning to avert would be raised with a vengeance. So, after agreeing upon a low sailors’ groggery beyond the burned district on the eastern water-front as our meeting point for the evening, where either of us who chanced to be the first comer would await the arrival of the other, we parted, Champe going boldly down the inn stair in his new toggery and carrying himself as little like a soldier as any young man of fashion in New York.

Now I took it afterward as a piece of sheer good fortune that the idea came into my head to follow the sergeant down, two steps behind him; and assuredly the event proved the timeliness of the prompting. For in the tap-room, at a little table drawn up before the fire, sat Lieutenant Castner as large as life, breakfasting at his leisure; and if I had not steered Champe aside with a muttered exclamation, the sergeant would have brushed Castner’s elbow in passing. As it was, I had time to thrust myself between; and when the door clanged behind the outgoing Champe, I was making my greetings to the lieutenant and asking him if I might share his table for a dish of tea.

He gave me the invitation cordially enough, but there was a look in his mild eyes that I could not fathom. And I was scarcely facing him across the table before he had me skating on the thinnest ice.

“Who was your double, Captain Page?” he asked, with a jerk of his head toward the door which had let Champe out to freedom.

I saw it all instantly. Castner had been with me two days before and had helped me to select the very clothes Champe was now wearing. It was a thrust that called for the deftest parrying, and I was not at my best--I never am in the mornings.

“The man who went out as I came down?” I said, sparring to gain time. “Do you think he favored me?”

“As to his face I could not say,” was the cool reply. “I think he must have the toothache, to judge from his mufflings. But I spoke of his clothes. Hadn’t you noticed that he was wearing a copy of the suit I helped you buy of the little Dutch Jew day before yesterday, Captain?”

I said I had not noticed it, having other things to think of, but the nonchalant reply did not banish the queer look from Castner’s eyes. And when I sought to drag him away from the dangerous subject by asking if he had learned anything new about the movements of the fleet, he answered my question briefly and went back in a word to my perilous skating pond.

“I wonder that you didn’t remark the gentleman’s clothes,” he said musingly. “I don’t think there is another cloak like that in all New York. You say you don’t know him?”

“How should I know him?” I demanded with a good show of impatience. “I merely saw that some one walked ahead of me down the stair and out of the door.”

“Strange,” he said, in the same half-musing tone. “Do you know, Captain Page, I could have sworn that you spoke to him less than a second before you--rather rudely, I fancied--pushed him aside to shake hands with me?”

I thought it was all up with me now, but I set my teeth on a grim resolve to die fighting.

“Perhaps you could even tell me what I said to this gentleman who, at the moment, was nothing more to me than a stumbling-block in my way,” I said, laughing ironically.

“I can,” he rejoined quite evenly. “You gave him the soldier’s word of command: ‘File right!’ you said, and I almost looked to see you follow it up with an oath.”

He had me fairly at a standstill. He had quoted my word of warning to Champe precisely, and I doubt not the tone in which it was given suggested the oath which might have capped it. Having nothing more to say, I held my peace, and when the lieutenant had given his rejoinder time to sink in, he came at me again, this time very gravely.

“You are not altogether transparent, Captain Page, nor have you been since the hour you landed in New York. I don’t want to think ill of you, because ill-thinking of a man in your situation could have but one meaning. Now I shall ask you a fair question, and you shall answer it as you choose. Do you--”

I held up my hand.

“First tell me frankly what you know, Mr. Castner, and then I shall be equally frank with you,” I interposed; adding: “at least, as frank as I can be without involving a gentleman who, I am sure, wishes to be charitably unknown in this little controversy of ours.”

His smile was shrewdly triumphant, but it comforted me beyond measure. Whatever he knew, it was not enough to hang me--yet.

“You had a fellow guest in your room last night, Captain; so much any one who passed through the corridor and heard you talking might know. That you kept this guest all night is quite apparent from the fact that he wore your clothes when he went out just now. It may be a very simple little mystery and easily explained; but, as I said before, mysteries are dangerous things, Captain--for you.”

Now I knew who had bored the hole in the wall of the unoccupied room next to mine and why it had been bored. Castner had wished to see the face of the man whom I was keeping over night. Remembering how hard it would be to see anything definite through a quill-sized hole in a thick partition wall, I took a chance that Castner was still in doubt as to my roommate’s identity. And so long as I could keep this in the dark, there was hope.

“There is no great mystery about it, Mr. Castner, and nothing to conceal save the gentleman’s name and standing. Before I attempt to explain, may I ask if you know anything of General Arnold’s domestic affairs?”

He shook his head.

“As little as may be, and I might say that I don’t care to know more.”

“Then my task is the easier,” I said. “I had the honor of knowing the general’s wife when she was Mistress Margaret Shippen, of Philadelphia. I may tell you, without breaching her confidence, or the general’s, that I was entrusted with a message for her last night. She gave me no answer at the time; but later, learning, possibly, of the change in the sailing orders, it is not beyond belief that she would wish to communicate again with her husband, is it?”

“I suppose not,” he agreed. “But are you trying to tell me that Mistress Arnold’s messenger came naked, and had to borrow your clothes to return in?”

I laughed heartily at this.

“Were you ever drunk and disorderly, Lieutenant Castner?” I asked. “If so, you may have had to borrow a suit of clothes yourself before now. And possibly the loan of a friend’s room to sober up in. And after such an experience, I dare say you would not care to be recognized by your friend’s friend in the morning when you were making your escape.”

“Then they were your clothes?” persisted Castner, laughing now with me.

“You asked me if he came naked: he did not, but he might have gone that way, but for my generosity. Are you quite satisfied, Mr. Castner?”

“I am obliged to be,” he said musingly.