VIDARK NIGHT
IT WAS not much beyond ten o’clock when we stepped out under the cold December stars and bade farewell to Mr. Justice Smith’s hospitable house of entertainment.
I wondered a little at Arnold’s leaving so early, but the wonder was appeased when he took another way back to the seaward end of the town; a way which led to the Loyal American barracks.
Here, though I stood aside and took no part in Arnold’s talk with a group of his officers, I overheard a thing to shock the plotting part of me swiftly into action. In a breath it was made plain that the time for trapping our Judas had shrunk to a few short hours. Early in the morning the legion was to begin embarking for some destination as yet kept secret, and once on shipboard, all chance of our seizing the traitor would be at an end.
This explained most clearly Arnold’s allusions of the afternoon, and his early quitting of the house of merrymaking. Also his saying to me that there was much to be done before the morrow. Truly, there was much to be done. If our business, Sergeant Champe’s and mine, were not to burst like a pricked bubble itmust have its beginning, its middle part, and its ending crammed into the few hours that remained to us.
So now I was set mad again upon that elusive chase of Champe, and I had no more idea than a babe unborn what had become of him. Now that I remembered, it struck me like a blow that I had not seen him at all since Arnold and I had passed him on our coming out of the headquarters house in the lower town. After that moment he had been a mere echoing of footsteps in the rearward dark.
Worse than this, he had not been our rearguard on the retreat from Mr. Justice Smith’s to the barracks, or if he had, I had not heard him. Being footloose while Arnold was conferring with his officers about the morning’s move to the ships, I used my liberty and my eyes in a painstaking search, scrutinizing every man in sight who wore a legion uniform. But the sergeant was nowhere to be seen.
This left me to climb desperately into the breach alone—with no scaling ladder in sight; but lord! what would this life be without its little excitements and its apparently unsolvable problems? I was still alive, unhanged, fit and vigorous; with my sweet lady’s kiss—I could swear she kissed me back again, whether she meant to or no—warm upon my lips, and with two good hours of the night available before the tide would turn to oppose an up-river flight.... The biggest battles of the world had been fought and won in less time, I reflected; and when we left the barracks, I was planning just how I would clinch my man so he should not have a chance to get at those flapped coat pockets with their short-barreled pistols.
The onward faring was made in silence, with one of us, at least, listening anxiously for footfalls in the rear—footfalls, which, however, stubbornly refused to become audible. While his moody silence held, I was afraid Arnold would dismiss me at the house door; on which chance I should lose him altogether for the night. But at the very moment of key-fitting he asked me in, saying that there were certain maps of the southern coast which he would like to have me verify for him in the figures of the soundings.
This gave me a little extension of the precious time, at all events, and when we were above-stairs, and he had lighted the candles, the maps were spread on the table and I had to quibble afresh, giving him anchorage depths in the Virginia roadways where a fishing-smack would go aground, and otherwise discrediting the makers of the finest set of navigation charts I had ever seen.
It encouraged me not a little that he was restless while this map-undoing was going on, walking up and down the room and coming now and then to bend over the table to keep the question and answer alive. I say it encouraged me, for the thing I feared was that he would settle down for the night’s work and tell me to leave him. But so long as he stayed afoot and restive there seemed room for the hope that he might be going out again.
The hope was not unfounded, as the event proved. Right in the midst of the map talk he broke off to ask me if I were leg-weary, and if I would favor him by accompanying him to the garden in the rear of thehouse, where, as he said, it was his nightly custom to walk off the perplexities and brain fatigues of the day.
Anything was better than being hived up in the house with him, I decided, and while the garden promised little, it had the advantage of being out-of-doors and a few paces nearer to the river which must be my highway to success and freedom, if any highway were to be found.
So we tramped down the stair again, and I had my first unsatisfactory sight of the garden at the back. As well as I could make out in the starlight, it was a long and rather narrow area, enclosed within a high wooden fence, with a graveled walk running down the middle of it, and with a few shrubs and stunted trees growing in the neglected flower- and vegetable-beds; as safe a place against any desperate kidnapping purpose as any that could be found outside of the garrison prison yard.
Arnold was still harping upon the Virginia coast and its anchorages when we began to pace a weary sentry-beat side by side up and down the graveled walk, and he kept it up with a great persistence, inquiring minutely into the navigating particulars, and keeping me so busy misleading him that I could not get a moment for the consideration of any plotting plan at all.
But as for that, the whole heavens and earth and all the universe were blankly void of suggestion. I could think of nothing that offered the slightest chance of success. To drop a step behind, to give him a sudden wrestler’s back-throw and afterward to bind andgag him were all simple enough. My six feet of good, sound, country-bred Virginia bone and muscle would answer for these primitive beginnings. But having trussed my fowl, I should be like the man who stole a hobbled horse, which he could neither carry nor ride. I could never hope to escape out of the high-fenced garden with my captive, or to reach the river unhalted, or, reaching it, to have the fairy luck of finding a boat with oars shipped and waiting for me to pull away in.
One of these difficulties—the least of them—overcame itself as we were wheeling to make one of our face-abouts at the lower end of the walk. A board in the high fence paling had been displaced, and when I touched it with my foot it fell outward with a dry clatter and left a gap in the enclosure.
“Your boundaries are tumbling down, General Arnold,” I remarked carelessly; and he replied that it mattered little, since they would be another’s boundaries very shortly. After which he paid no more attention to the gap opened by the falling board; but I did, and every time we made the turn at the walk’s end it tempted me. If I only knew what lay beyond: how far it was to the river’s edge, and what one of a thousand chances I might have of finding a boat unlocked and with oars in it!
But I did not know, could not know; and thus the irresolute “I dare not,” waited upon the “I would,” and I was alternately fever-hot with excitement and shivering in depression, the thing to be desired being so near and yet so inimitably far.
It was some time after the incident of the gap-opening,and while we were passing a point midway between the house and the garden end, that Arnold stopped short in his questioning about the Portsmouth harbor to hold up a finger for silence.
“What was that?” he asked, and I saw his other hand disappear into one of the pistol-hiding pockets.
“I heard nothing,” I made answer, which was the truth.
“It was a sneeze or a cough,” he commented; “I am certain of it.”
The pause gave me time to look around more precisely than I had been able to while he was holding me in talk. The scrubby trees and evergreens might possibly have sheltered an eavesdropper, but not safely. Besides these there was nothing in the garden that would have concealed a cat.
“It was the sentry in front of Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters,” I suggested.
“No,” he objected; “it was nearer at hand. Make a circuit of that shrubbery, Captain Page, while I cover this side.” And I heard the click of a pistol-lock as he pulled the weapon from his pocket.
I ran around the larger clump of evergreens, sword in hand, and found nothing—the more readily since I was not expecting to find anything. When I came up with him again, he appeared to be satisfied, and we went on walking and talking as before, though now I observed that he kept his right hand in the pocket of the greatcoat, and I could feel rather than see that his eyes were roving watchfully from side to side as we paced up and down.
It must have been nearly midnight when the long forced march back and forth in the garden walk ended, and with its ending all hope of carrying off the traitor by main strength and awkwardness bade me farewell, for that night at least. I took it hard, not knowing if there would ever be another night more promising; and when Arnold had put me through the house and out at the front door, telling me to go to my inn quarters and to be prepared for an early reveille, I hung about in the street and made friends with the sentry at Sir Henry Clinton’s door as if I were still on duty, killing time for another full hour until I saw the lights go out in the traitor’s upper room; all this on the barest chance that he might come down again and so re-open the book of fate.
When all was over I went to my tavern, railing at Sir Judas, at John Champe, and most of all at myself for the futile fizzling out of a thing that looked so simple on the face of it. Also, I had a hard word or two for Mr. Hamilton for waiting until the clock had fairly struck before he turned the failing failure over to me.
This is how it looked to me, sober and chilled. But after I had got warm before the blazing fire of logs in the tavern bar, and was the better for a hearty swig of fresh-mulled wine, things took on a cheerfuller hue; and when I lighted my tallow dip and went above-stairs to the great barn-like room which had been assigned me, I was turning over in my mind a wild plan of how I might smuggle in a dozen of my fellows from Baylor’s Horse, snatch the traitor out of his bed,and mount and ride and cut the way out to freedom. By which it would appear that the hot wine, poured into an empty stomach, had straightway climbed to the upper story—a thing quite possible, even when one is twenty-two past, a Virginian, and a well-seasoned soldier, to boot.
I had no more than struggled out of my watchcoat, and was making ready to tumble into bed, when there came a trampling of heavy feet up the stair and along the corridor. Somewhere about opposite my door the footsteps paused, and I paused, too, with my waistcoat half off and the wine fumes clearing from my brain as swiftly as if a cold north wind were blowing them aside.
And, in good truth, I needed to be sobered suddenly, for the next instant the door sprang open as from a lusty kick, and Sergeant-Major John Champe, his saturnine face a devil-mask of furious and frenzied rage, charged in upon me.