VIIAND AN UNBLEST DAWN
THERE was murder in Champe’s bloodshot eyes, and for the moment I was helpless, having the waistcoat bridged across my arms like a hangman’s shackles. Luckily for me, he had no weapon, else it is to be feared I should have quit this troubled scene there and then.
As it was, he flung himself upon me like a wild beast, all claws to grip and teeth to tear, and I went down as if I had been a ten-pin, and he a bowl twirled by the hand of the Giant Grim. Also his clutching fingers were at my throat before I could rip and rend that cursed manacling waistcoat into rags; so, by the time my arms were free, the cold dead air of the big room was no longer mine to breathe, and this fickle world, or what little I could see of it, was turning red and green and black and back to red again before my eyes which seemed to be sticking out of my head on a pair of horns like a snail’s.
But Baylor’s Horse, or any fraction of it, does not die without a struggle. With my hands free, I got a grip of the black-faced maniac’s wrists, held it, tightened it until I could feel the joints crack and his big fingers relax because there was no longer any livingconnection between them and the pounding heart and maddened brain.
After that it was simpler, though he was the heavier man. With a quick bending of the strangled wrists, I rolled him off of me, holding him so until the red lights stopped their dancing and I could get up with some assurance that I should not be entirely helpless on my feet. Then I loosed him, and staggered upright, reeled across to the door and shut and barred it.
“That’s for you, as well as for myself, you addle-headed idiot!” I panted; and then I swore at him heartily as he sat on the floor nursing his helpless hands.
He was not much behind me in the cursing, his tongue being still uncrippled. What he called me is not in any gentleman’s word-book, but I did not lay it up against him. “You have reason, my friend,” I allowed him, and sat down on the bed’s edge to rest my throat while he eased the burden of his soul.
“Well, have you said it all?” I asked, after he had sworn himself out of breath and doubled up every epithet in the vocabulary of abuse.
“Damn you for a—” he began again, taking a fresh start; and I laughed till my strained eyes ran over with the tears and my throat ached again. The figure of the man, with his darkly ferocious face, sitting hunched upon the floor, his benumbed hands crossed upon his knees and his loose-hung jaw wagging like a panting dog’s in a vain effort to keep pace with the outpouring flood of vituperation, was inexpressibly mirth-provoking to me, though another might not have found it so.
But there finally came an end, alike to his ravings and to my laughter, and we arrived at some better understanding; though not all at once, you may be sure.
“Curse you for a deserting traitor, Captain Richard Page! I’ll kill you for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was his closing volley.
“Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him again.
“What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter; Middleton saw me come off.”
“No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse. Moreover, I deserted for the same identical cause that you did.”
“You lie, Captain Page,” he said quite brutally; but I forgave him.
“I wouldn’t be above it, Champe—to an enemy, and if there were any good end to be subserved. But in this instance I am talking to a friend—you see I can be generous, in spite of your having just tried to choke the life out of me. You’ll understand when I tell you that I know your business in New York, and that I am here solely to help you forward it.”
That was the moment when I thought he would go chittering crazy with rage and despair. Disappointment, mad wrath, sharp remorse, bitter curses directed now at everything he could lay tongue to, boiledout of him as if he had been a pot hung above the hottest fire that ever crackled on a housewife’s hearth.
“Hell and zounds!” he foamed, when he became a little coherent again. “All the devils in the pit fight for that man! Listen, Captain Page: this night was our final chance, and on this night of all others everything was at last in readiness. Major Lee, with a picked troop from the legion, was in hiding in the wood across the river, and a boat from the schooner Nancy Jane was to be hanging off and on to come ashore and take us to the Jersey side.”
“Go on,” I commanded sharply, though the sharpness was not for poor Champe; it was for what I foresaw was coming.
“It was trimmed to the last shaving of a toothpick,” he continued fiercely. “I knew his custom—to walk late o’ night in the garden. I had loosened a board in the fence, and we—the one who was to help, and I—were to seize and bind and gag him, whip him out through the hole in the fence, and so to the river and the boat.”
“I see,” I said; and certainly I did see—far more than was pleasant to contemplate.
“When it was told me he was going to a rout, I thought our cursed luck had tripped us again,” Champe went on. “Then I got the order to follow him, as a guard of honor, I suppose, and here you thrust yourself in, Captain Page.”
“No,” I denied; “I was thrust in; but, like yourself, I take it, I was not sorry to have the chance of keeping him in view. Go on with your tale.”
“It is soon told,” he rejoined. “At the mansion house up yonder, having no orders to wait for his coming out, I ran back to set the trap. Two freezing hours we lay under the cedars in that hell-fired garden, and then we saw the lights, and a little farther on we heard the old fox walking into the trap. But he was not alone, as you know, Captain Page.”
“How many of you were there?” I asked.
“Two: one other and myself. The third was on the river bank, signaling the boat.”
“You should have killed me out of your way, Sergeant Champe. It was your plain duty to your country. If we ever get out of this and back to our own horse-ropes, I shall see you court-martialed for that slip, my good man.”
“There were but the two of us, Captain Dick,” he said, giving me the name my own troop used.
“Well? How many would you ask for, to put the quietus on one man, and he armed only with a sword that you did not need to let him lug out of its sheath?”
His scowl, which was the natural fashion of his forbidding face, broadened into a sardonic grin.
“My fellow under the cedars might have chanced it, since he didn’t know you. But not I, my bully captain. I know you too well, sir. Before we could have said ‘Jack Robinson’ you would have had one or both of us wondering how we came there with so many skin rents to be sewed up.”
“Not at all,” said I. “I should have been fighting on your side. But, of course, you couldn’t know that.”
“No; we couldn’t and didn’t. You know whathappened afterward; how we hid and watched you two going back and forth so near to us that any time you passed I could have touched you. Once my fellow sneezed, though he well-nigh burst a blood-vessel trying to stop it. You didn’t hear it, but Arnold did. Then I thought we should have to run the risk of your frog-sticker, Captain Dick, whether we liked it or no.”
“Were you under the evergreens?”
“Sure enough. You made the circle completely around us. But for my taking in a leg, you would have stumbled over me.”
I held up a hand for silence.
“You are fluenter than I am with the soldier-curses, Champe. Will you say over a few of the choicest of them for me? All through those two hours while you were freezing under the evergreens, I was hammering my brain to invent some way by which I could take Sir Judas with my two unaided hands. I knew nothing of Major Lee’s dispositions, or of the boat, or of what you had done; which is pointedly my own fault, since I should have left everything else to wait and hunted you out before I ventured to stick my oar in. Certainly you missed the fool-killing chance of a lifetime, Sergeant, when you failed to run me through with your bayonet this night!”
But at this the humaner side of the dark-faced sergeant-major came to the fore.
“No, Captain Dick,” he said quite civilly. “It was our crooked luck again, and some of it was my fault. I took you for what you seemed to be—this morning, and more than ever, this afternoon and evening whenyou had the colors on. But it’s done and over, and there are two of us to pay the piper instead of one. It’s the devil’s own pickle we are in, sir, with these coats of ours to tell what we’ll have to do and where we’ll have to go to-morrow.”
I thought so, too, and for a little time could do nothing better than to prop my face in my hands and grill it over back and forth in all its bitterness. But finally out of the grilling came that fuddle-headed thought of mine builded on the fumes of the warmed wine and concerning itself with an assault on Arnold’s house, with men enough to make it somewhat less than madness.
Now my own men were far enough away, but, by Champe’s tale, Major Lee was in hiding somewhere on the Jersey shore; and I knew the mettle of the major and of the men he commanded.
“There is hope yet, Sergeant!” I cried, when the idea had fully taken shape. “Are you hot-blooded enough to go with me where I shall lead?”
Champe wagged his hands back and forth and stretched the fingers.
“The feeling is coming back to them,” he said, and then he got up and signified his readiness.
I explained my plan to him in low tones, remembering, at this late dealing of the cards, that Castner had rooms somewhere on this same floor with us.
“You say Major Lee has a force in hiding across the river. Good; we’ll slip out of this, one at a time, scud for the river, and steal a boat. When we find the major, I shall beg him to lend me a dozen of his men.If he will do it—and you know him better than I do—we’ll steal another boat and come back.”
Champe’s dark eyes were blazing.
“And we’ll sack the house and take the traitor in his bed!” he exclaimed. “Captain Dick, if you can put that through, I’ll lie down and let you walk on me for that neck-wringing I gave you a few minutes back.”
“Never mind the choking-match, Jack Champe; get you out of here, and wait for me in the street. I’ll join you when I’ve pieced my clothes together on me,” I said; and so it was settled.
I found Champe waiting when I had sneaked out of the tavern so quietly, I hoped, as to make my going pass unnoticed. Together we sought the river bank, and craftily dodging a sleepy sentinel, crept down to the water’s edge. Luck was with us this time, for before we had gone a dozen paces along the shore we came upon a small boat riding by a long chain, and, searching in likely hiding-places under the overhanging bank, we found the oars. Pieces of my torn waistcoat answered for the muffling; and in the next passing of the sleepy sentry on the bank above, we pushed off and rowed lustily for the opposite shore.
But that one piece of good luck in finding the boat and getting off unseen exhausted our allotment for the night. Champe’s two confederates, the one who had been with him in the garden, and the other who had been standing guard at the river’s edge, had both disappeared and we knew not where to look for them. In due time we made a landing on the Jersey side; whereupon we became as helpless as a pair of babes in thewood. We had no more idea where to look for Major Lee and his troopers than we should have had if we had been born blind, the third man in Champe’s plot, the river-edge watcher who was to signal to theNancy Jane’sdinghy, and who was afterward to guide the captors, being the only one who knew.
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 theboat-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.