XIVA CASK OF BITTERS
EXPECTING nothing less than the spy’s return at the head of an arresting party, we lost no time getting out of the tavern, Champe going first, and I following when he gave the prearranged signal that the coast was clear.
Being safely out-of-doors, our next care was to put distance between us and the threatening trap from which we had escaped. Taking the readiest way that offered we hurried eastward through the burned district, avoiding the barracks on one hand and the water-front on the other, having no particular destination in view at first, and no plan other than the simple one of losing ourselves as completely and speedily as possible.
In this dodging flight, on which we ran as the wicked do,—with no man pursuing,—the sergeant was the file-leader. Having been in the town for near two months, he knew its byways, and though the short winter day was drawing on to its early dusk, he seemed never to be at fault in our various windings and turnings.
We were a good distance from the fort, and had borne eastward and northward until the houses were growing far apart and scattering, when Champe ledthe way to the right and we pressed on until we could hear the waters of the East River lapping coldly on the shingle. By this time the stars were coming out, and a thin sickle of a moon in its first quarter hung in the western sky. In the chill, gray half-light a house, isolated by its situation, and still farther set apart from its neighbors by a high-fenced garden, loomed darkly before us, its windows shuttered and its chimney smokeless.
“Here is our burrow,” announced the sergeant, opening the garden gate to admit us. Then, as I reeled rather than walked into the enclosure: “Is Mr. Askew’s love pat still fretting you, Captain?”
I said it was, and made light of it, though my head was buzzing like a hive of angry bees. I had no notion of where Champe was taking me; and, what with the pain and the desire to be warmed and at ease, I was not curious enough to inquire.
Quite as if he were the owner of the house, Champe strode to the door, fitted a key in the lock, clicked it and bade me enter. But since the room to which the door gave ingress was as dark as a pocket, I let him show me the way. The interior was cold and discomforting, with the dead chill which goes with closed doors and windows and long-extinguished fires; and when the sergeant had shut and locked the door we were in darkness thick enough to be cut with a knife.
“Hold hard for a minute until I make a light, Captain Dick,” said the voice of my companion, muffled, as it seemed to me, by the tangible darkness. Then came the snicking of flint upon steel, a spark, a dullglow in the tinder, and, a little later, a flame for a candle which, when it was lighted, showed us a scantily furnished living-room in some disorder, a table with dishes and the remainder of a meal standing in the middle of the floor, and a hearth cold, but with the kindlings laid ready for lighting.
Champe thrust the candle flame among the dry pine splinters, and when the blaze began to murmur in the chimney, he filled a kettle from the water bucket bracketed on the wall and hung it on the crane. At this juncture my curiosity came to life.
“Give it a Dutch name, Champe; whose house is this you’re making so free with?” I demanded, drawing a chair up to the table and sitting down to hold my buzzing head in my hands.
“You’ve guessed it at the first word,” chuckled the sergeant. “It’s the Dutch boat-builder’s house, sure enough—or it was before I buried him in the cellar and took possession in the name of General Washington and the Continental Congress. That’s my dinner you’re looking at—or what remains of it. And there’s more where that came from—such as it is.”
“But the man?” I exclaimed in honest horror. “You didn’t murder him, Champe?”
“That’s as it may be. I wrapped him up in some of his own boat cordage, with a knotted turn of it between his teeth for quietness’ sake, and lowered him into the hold. Alive or dead, he’ll be there now, if the rats haven’t eaten him.”
“This won’t do at all, Sergeant!” I protested in shocked deprecation. “The fact that the man happenedto own a boat which we needed is no reason why we should turn rawhead-and-bloody-bones pirates. Bring the candle and show me where you have put him.”
“Going to have him up for our supper guest, Captain Dick? He’ll be most awkwardly in the way, won’t he?”
“Never mind; bring the candle and show me the way. Why, good heavens, man! what has the poor devil done that we should treat him as if we were red Indians? He may be one of our friends, for aught we know!”
“He’s a Dutchman, and he builds small-boats for the king’s ships,” growled Champe stubbornly; but he took up the candle and piloted the way to a room in the rear, a bare shed of a place, with fire-wood stacked along two sides of it, a dismantled baking oven buttressing the chimney of the fore-room, and a great pile of the bricks heaped upon a huge square trap-door leading to the cellar. From a ceiling beam above the trap a stout iron hook depended, as if the cellar had been a ship’s hold to be filled and emptied with a block and tackle.
Champe put his candle on the oven ruins and addressed himself to the task of removing the door weightings. The uncovering revealed a ring sunk in the planking of the trap, and when the door was lifted, an ill-smelling black cavern, with rude steps leading down into it, came into view.
The sergeant swung into the dank pit and held up his hand for the candle.
“Give me the glim and I’ll fetch him out,” he said.“There’s no need for two of us.” And when the yellow glow of the candle disappeared in the liquor-smelling depths I was left in the dark.
It seemed a long time before the glow reddened again in the darkness below as Champe made his way back to the stair-head.
“Come down, Captain Dick, if your head’s steady enough,” he called. “I’m fairly stuck.”
I promptly lowered myself into the hole, with the sergeant lighting the way for me. The cellar was a curiously spacious underground store-room for so small a house, wide and to the full as high as the rooms above, and the liquor odor was amply accounted for by a double row of great casks, ranked against the walls. Then I saw the meaning of the trap-door’s size, and of the hook set in the beam above it.
“Your Dutchman is something both more and less than a boat-builder, Sergeant,” I commented. “This is a smuggler’s store-house. But where is he?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said my companion in a mystified tone; and presently he was showing me the cords with which the man had been bound—enough of them to have swathed the captive from neck to ankles.
The knots had been untied, not cut, and the ropes had evidently been tossed aside in haste. But there was no man entangled in their meshes, and nothing to point out his way of escape from the cellar.
We looked everywhere, as we thought, and carefully, for with this man at large there was an added danger to be faced. How he could have escaped fromthe cellar was a mystery which was still unsolved after we had examined as we thought, every foot of exposed wall surface for another outlet and had found none.
“We have missed it somehow,” I insisted, when we had made a second circuit of the place, peering behind the casks of liquor and probing, as we imagined, every nook and corner that would have hidden a cat. “There is a secret way out of here, somewhere, and your man has taken it. Let us hope he will stay away until we have borrowed what we need of food and shelter and transport.”
“I’ll drink to that hope,” said my sergeant, who had found an earthen pot and a cask up-ended with a spigot piercing it near its lower chime.
I told him to drink heartily and give the house a good name, but at the first mouthful he strangled and spat and spilled the potful of the liquor in the straw.
“Faugh!” he grimaced. “I thought I knew all the flavors that can come out of a barrel, but this is sure the major-general of them all for nastiness!Whoosh!it tastes as if all the old boots of the British Army had been steeped in it for a month!”
“And yet some other man would no doubt choose it before good, sound old Madeira,” I returned, climbing the steps to the cleaner air of the room above. And when Champe was up: “Shut the trap, Sergeant, so we may eat our suppers without the reminders. It would make a drunkard sick to stay within nose distance of that foul hole.”
Back at our fireplace in the fore-room, we found the kettle boiling merrily. Champe discovered a tea-chestamong the boat-builder’s provisions, and a hot cup of tea, made strong enough to float an egg, speedily cleared my head of the bee-tangles, and let me punish, with as good an appetite as the sergeant’s, the black bread and cheesy butter, greased down with cuts from the haunch of boiled ham that Champe had spared from his midday meal.
Not to miss any of the comforts afterward, we rummaged a bit of tobacco out of the Dutchman’s closet, together with a couple of the long-stemmed china-bowled pipes of the Netherlands; and, could we have been assured that we should remain undisturbed for the hour or two that must elapse before it would be safe to take the to-be-borrowed boat out of the Dutchman’s shop at the river-end of the garden, and in it seek fresh adventures, there would have been nothing left to wish for.
But there are no assurances in this world of chance-takings. We did not know what moment our boat-builder might turn up, with a gang of smugglers or others at his elbow, and with a just cause of quarrel big enough to warrant anything he might do to us. Moreover, there was Mr. James Askew, also at large, and doubtless seeking for us as the woman of Scripture, who lit her candle and swept her house diligently until she found her lost piece of money. Moreover, again, there was the Irish grog-seller, whose silence, bought and paid for though it was, was worth little more than a perjurer’s oath.
“Well, let’s be doing,” I said, when we had wrought through a pipeful or two of the boat-builder’stobacco, and the weight of the various “moreovers” was beginning to grow oppressive. “Will your Dutchman happen to have such a thing as a lantern about his house?”
The sergeant went to rummage in the outer room, coming back almost immediately to ask if I had heard a noise.
“Nothing but the wind in the chimney,” I said.
“I did,” said Champe, listening attentively. “It was like the soft slamming of a door, and I thought it was in here.”
“Not here, certainly. There is no door but the front one, and that is locked as you left it.”
“All right; then I didn’t hear it,” he contradicted, and went out again to continue the lantern hunt.
The next time it was I who heard the noise, which sounded like a blow struck upon an empty cask. Tip-toeing out, I laid a finger on Champe’s shoulder, and his nervous start was a measure of the pitch to which we were both keyed.
“Hist!” I whispered; “your Dutchman has come back to his cellar!”
The sergeant cocked an ear and we both listened intently. There were no more alarms, and the silence of the grave seemed to have settled on the lonesome house.
“What did you hear?” queried my companion, when the silence had become unendurable.
“Some one kicking an empty cask. Lift that trap again while I hold the light for you.”
Champe stooped and raised the heavy door, andagain the rank smell of the liquor, more overpowering than before, rose into the room. None the less, Champe dropped into the vault, skipping the first half-dozen steps of the ladder-like stair; and when he was down I gave him the candle and followed.
To all appearances the spacious cellar was as we had left it an hour before, though I could not rid myself of the notion that the smell of the liquor was vastly stronger. We passed again between the rows of casks, the sergeant with the flaring candle held high. In the farthest corner the bunch of tangled cords still lay where the boat-builder, escaping from his bonds, had flung it down.
“Nothing different,” was Champe’s remark; and then some devil of suggestion put the idea into his head which was like to cost us more than we knew how to pay. “Sound the casks,” he said. “Maybe some of them are empty.”
I began it on my side with my sword-hilt, and the first resounding thwack brought the catastrophe. As if the blow had touched a hidden spring, the head flew out of the up-ended cask near the trap, and a dripping, reeking little man climbed agilely out of it and darted up the steep stair, with Champe and me knocking each other down in the effort to overtake him. Followed swiftly the crash of the trap-door falling into place, and intermittent thunder as of a brick wall tumbling into sections upon the floor above—thunder eloquent of the fact that the fugitive was taking a leaf out of Champe’s own book and weighting the trap for us as the sergeant had weighted it for him.
The wind, or the shock of the falling door, had extinguished our candle, and we were in total darkness. But Champe had his flint and steel and tinder box, and the tallow dip, for what small good it might do us, was soon flaring again.
“That was a master bright idea of yours, Sergeant Champe,” I commented grimly, when the noise overhead had ceased, and we were left to silence and our own thoughts. “If you had only added that we should begin with the cask which was most likely to hold our Jack-in-the-box—but it came wrong end foremost, like everything else in this wretched mission of ours!”
Champe was smacking his lips reminiscently and paying scant attention to my irony.
“Never say I can’t tell soaked boots when I taste them,” he broke out triumphantly. Then the disgust of it suddenly overcame him and he spat again. “Yah! when next I lay hands on that Dutchman, I’ll make him drink every drop of it he has left behind.”
“‘First catch your hare,’” I quoted. “As matters stand now, we are the trapped ones, and it was very neatly done. I think we are likely to stay here until this boat-builder can go and find some of his smuggler friends to help him collect his bill for damages. And it will be a pretty long score, too, wouldn’t you say?”
“Long enough,” was the reply; “though I didn’t mishandle him any more than I had to, to make sure of the boat for to-night. A boat we must have, says you; and orders are orders, for Jack Champe. But let’s try a push on that trap—until we find out if he’s piled the whole oven a-top of us.”
The lift from the steps was clearly impossible. Only one of us could stand to shoulder the door at once, and when we had both tried and failed, we rolled a cask under the opening and so got the double heave.
“Lift, Captain!” grunted Champe; “lift till your eyes hang out!” and so I did, and so did he; but the loaded door never stirred. The Dutchman had done his work faithfully and well.
The sergeant came down from the steps with the veins in his forehead swelled to great whipcords.
“I’ve put three hundred pounds of tobacco to the height of my shoulder with less wind-cutting,” he panted, scraping the sweat from his face with a crooked forefinger. And then: “I’ll never trap a rat again while I live, Captain Dick. I know now how it feels.”
“We won’t give up yet,” I cut in. “There must be some way out of this hole. If it were a common house-cellar, there would be no need; but as a store-house for smugglers ... they’d never leave themselves without a back door for emergencies. Take that side first, and we’ll sound every stone in the walls, if need be.”
This time we were made to know how carelessly we had searched in the former instance. Behind a tier of casks, which were ranked so closely against the wall as completely to conceal it, was a low arched opening closed by a stout door with neither lock nor hinges. With no tools heavier than our swords, we could not force it; and when we drummed upon it, it gave back the blows solidly, as if it were backed by a bank of earth or another wall.
“That is why our Dutchman hid in the cask and waited for his chance,” said Champe, when the low door had baffled us completely. “He couldn’t open this dodge-way, himself.”
After that, we left nothing untried for the time we had at our disposal. The walls were carefully sounded, stone by stone, the straw on the floor was swept aside and the flagging received the same unsparing scrutiny. Failing all else, we meant to try digging out the mortar joints around a stone in that part of the wall which Champe remembered as the highest above ground on the outside—this with our swords’ points. But we put that off until the last for the best of reasons. It was not unlikely that we should need the weapons for another purpose before long, and it would be an ill thing to have either of them broken or dulled.
We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.
“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?”
“An hour, maybe, if we don’t have to go too far a-sea to dodge the guard boats.”
“Good. Then we have something less than an hour in which to claw or fight our way out of this and get afloat. Work your brain with that end in view, John Champe: our lives are but a means to an end, which is to drag the greatest villain of his time back to justice. Don’t lose sight of that if we have to fight for it; but we’ll not fight if we can help it. Back to that dodge-door again, and we’ll see if we can’t hit upon some way to force it.”