XVIIMASKED BATTERIES
WITHOUT a word, Champe fell in two paces to the rear and caught the step, and thus began the weariest and I do think the most forlorn-hope vigil that was ever kept. For its patient keeping the sergeant deserves the greater credit, for I at least knew how I meant to try a desperate cast to bring us out of our looped gallows ropes, but Champe knew nothing save that I had formed a peg of some sort to hang a hope upon.
Tired and hungry, cold and cramped from our long confinement in the small boat as we were, the disappointment of the empty bed and bedroom had crushed and benumbed us. It was a dead wall from which courage refused to rebound; a pit to swallow the bravest resolution; a clog for our feet and shackles for our wrists. I do not speak for Champe; but for myself, if the meanest soldier in the British garrison had come to tell me I was his prisoner, I think his bare word would have made me tag along after him like a cowed spaniel.
And the dreadful length of it! While we were fighting our way up the ladder of the hours, with midnight and the accomplishment of our purpose for thegoal, time passed us on the wing. But now the minutes dragged leaden-footed. It seemed as though the dawn would never come. Fort George, looming grim and forbidding in the darkness no more than a musket-shot from the seaward end of our pacing sentry-beat, might have been a citadel of the dead; a huge mausoleum with never a living soul to tenant it. Even the tavern, where you would suppose some one would be stirring at any hour in the twenty-four, was silent and dark and apparently deserted.
It was an ill time for good thoughts, and, conversely, the very pick and choice of times for the tormenting kind. What masked batteries, trained to blow us into eternity, would the rising sun reveal? We had the little red-nosed navy ensign’s word for it that we had been missed and that the hue and cry had been raised; that the hunt headed, no doubt, by the spy Askew, was already up. Would we be taken before I could try the last brazen-faced throw of the dice? Just here, before this door we were making a mock of guarding, I had parted from my loved one with the heart of gold only a few short hours ago: should I ever see Beatrix Leigh again?—or the men about our own troop fires in the Hudson hills?—or the old home in tidewater Virginia? It seemed altogether unlikely.
And Beatrix; what would she say and do when she should hear the news and realize that, while I was no such despicable traitor as she had believed me to be, I was, none the less, to die a traitor’s death with a cord around my neck? Or, rather, was it not most unlikely that she would ever hear of it at all until afterthe eternal gulf had opened its abysmal chasm between us?
Over and again I tried to break away from these thought-furies; to set calm reason on her seat, and to gather resolution for the impending battle of the wits upon the outcome of which our two lives depended. Never had I striven so hard for calmness and self-control; never was the need greater, and never did the attainment seem more blankly impossible. I was unutterably fagged and exhausted; our antagonist would be fresh from a night’s rest, clear-eyed, with every faculty sharpened and alert. I must fight defensively on the slippery ground of deceit and dissimulation, while my opponent had all the advantages of the attack.
By some strange good fortune I had been able hitherto to deceive Arnold, by nature the most wary and suspicious of men; but sooner or later there must come a turn in the longest road, and I was racked and tormented by the fear that we were now approaching it. Conned over in its details, the expedient I had hit on seemed foolhardy to a degree and most pitifully unconvincing. Yet it was the only one, and I must try it at all hazards. And as often as I came into collision with the stern necessity, the despairing cry rose up out of the underdepths, “Oh, that the morning would come and let us be at the end of this!”
Champe never spoke to me once in all that doleful marching back and forth, nor I to him. I mistrusted that he had his own personal kettle of fish to fry, and that his cooking fire was smoldering evilly or blazingtoo high as often as mine. But he was not a man to vocalize his soul-wrestlings; and, besides, he had a soldier’s choicest gift—complete reliance on his commanding officer, and a blind confidence that the brain which was paid to do the thinking would somehow contrive to think to some good purpose.
I shall always remember with reminiscent thrillings how welcome were the first signs of approaching day; the lifting of the fog over the river, and beyond that, its graying and thinning to transparency; the long roll of the drums sounding the reveille in the fort; the slamming open of shutters as the houses awoke; the cheerful clatter of Hetheridge’s horse as the young orderly rode up to Sir Henry’s door and dismounted.
After a little the fog soared aloft to transform itself into wisp-like clouds high overhead, and the eastern sky reddened, and a horse-boy, whistling André’sCow Chaselately set to music, came out in front of the tavern and began to take down the shutters. Then a housemaid, with her bucket of steaming water and cloths and brushes, opened the door and knelt to scrub the steps. And still the sergeant and I tramped heavily to and fro and waited; and still the man who had slept away from his house did not return.
It was now that the delay began to eat like acid into our very bones. Preparation, a stout bracing for the plunge, is all well enough in its way; but too much of it will curdle the blood in the bravest veins and make a trembling coward of the biggest hero that ever wore laurel. Champe never knew or suspected it, I hope, but for me there were moments after that dawn-breakingwhen a desire to fly to any sand heap big enough to dig me a burrow in, was almost overpowering.
The suspense came to an end at length, as all things in a world of meetings and partings must. I saw Arnold first. He was coming down the street, walking soberly with his head down and his hands behind him; a habit dating, they said, from the day when he had put it forever out of his power to hold his head up among honest men. So walking, he was almost up to us before he saw us; and I could feel Champe’s eyes fairly boring into the back of my neck for fear I should be giving him his cue and he would miss it.
I gave the cue at the instant when Arnold looked up and saw us. As one man, we both halted, faced right, and made the formal salute. Then, throwing every faculty of my exhausted soul into the effort to appear the living mirror of shocked surprise, I exclaimed: “Why, General!—Good heavens, sir! You—you did not sleep at home?”
There was a look in his gloomy eyes that made me shiver when he confronted me calmly and said, “No, Captain Page; I did not sleep at home.”
“Then—then we have been standing our long guard over an empty house?” I faltered; and the faltering was no more than half insincere, if it were that.
“Why should you stand guard at all, Captain Page?” he asked, never relaxing the accusing eye-grip.
“Surely you must have heard?” I protested. “You might well say that no man holding his commission from you could do less than to try to guard your person at such a time as this, General Arnold!”
“Ah? And what haveyouheard?”
“Only what all the town is whispering: that two of Washington’s emissaries, masking as deserters from the rebel army, are here for the purpose of abducting you, sir; that these men—the better to cover their designs—are enlisted in the Loyal Americans; and that these two, a rank and a warrant officer, are missing.”
“You heard all this?” he queried slowly. “And in the face of it you come here to stand a night guard over my house?”
“Surely, sir; and why not? It seemed a moment when loyalty might do well to assert itself; the more since some suspicious occurrences—”
“You are either a very brave and true man, or a very rash one, Captain Page,” he said, breaking in upon me. “Did they not whisper you the names of these two suspected men?”
“No.”
He frowned and looked away.
“I could almost find it in my heart to wish they had,” he said, half to himself, I thought. And then, more pointedly to me: “There is an order out for the arrest of these men—an order issued last night by Sir Henry Clinton, himself. It specifies the names:—Captain Richard Page and Sergeant John Champe.”
Now that the worst had come, the burden tumbled suddenly from my shoulders and I became a man again.
“That is indeed most unfortunate, General Arnold,” I said calmly; “not for us, but for you.”
“Ah? Possibly you will tell me why.”
“Because justice, in pursuing us, may perchance be even a little blinder than she is usually portrayed; and while we are getting our trial and acquittance, the real criminals will go free. But that is neither here nor there. Will you take our swords, General? or shall we go and surrender them to the commandant at Fort George?”
He nailed me up again with the sifting, probing eyes, and I could almost fancy I saw a lurking smile in their farthest underdepths.
“Are you really the true man that Mistress—ah—the person who vouches for you—insists that you are? Or are you the shiftiest, hardiest daredevil villain that ever lived, Captain Page? I confess I don’t know.”
“The court-martial may or may not answer that question for you, General Arnold,” I said coldly. “For myself it matters little, so long as I have the consciousness of duty well done, or well attempted; and I think Sergeant Champe would say the same. Have we your permission to go and surrender ourselves?”
He stopped and paced a step or two, his frown deepening. When he spoke, he took a new tack and a little ray of hope began to glimmer in the murk of doom.
“I have been officiously ignored in this matter, as in many others,” he complained, in the manner of one who lets his inner thought slip into speech. “The hearsay word of some spy, whom I have never been permitted to see and question, is taken, and an order goes out to apprehend two of my own men—men who are responsible to me for their actions, and to no oneelse. Tell me, Captain Page, have you ever given Lieutenant Castner special reason to dislike you?”
“Never to my knowledge,” said I, wondering what was coming.
“He is at the bottom of all this,” snapped Arnold harshly. “It was he who saw the spy; it was he who carried the story to Sir Henry Clinton and procured the order for your arrest. By heaven, sir! for this one time I shall show them that I am at least the colonel in command of my own regiment! Get you into the house—you and the sergeant—and we shall see if their order for your arrest runs this far.”
Surely, this was mirth for the gods; that the man who should have been most eager to see us hanged was interposing his own authority against Sir Henry Clinton’s to balk the hangman! It was like robbing a blind man to take such a gross advantage of his vanity and pride, but there was no alternative. Now that he had told us what we had to fear, there was no other hand or house in all New York that could shield us.
So we followed him through the door of the house which we had lately broken into, and were told curtly to rest ourselves as we could in the orderly-room; and that Arnold’s man would later bring us our breakfast. At the last, when he was leaving us, I ventured to cast a small anchor to windward.
“One word, General Arnold, before you go. I spoke, a few moments since, of certain suspicious occurrences of the night. If, as I have good cause to fear, you shall find yourself overruled in this matter—if you are compelled to turn us over to our accusers—Ibeg you will not do it until you have heard what we have to tell you of last night’s doings in the town.”
“You shall have your hearing, never fear,” he asserted, frowning again at the hint that he would be forced to yield us up, whether he wanted to or not; and so he left us.
“Pull yourself together once more, Sergeant,” I commanded, shaking Champe awake when we were alone together. “We are no more than fairly across the threshold of the peril. We shall doubtless be questioned separately, and God help us if we are not letter-perfect able to tell the same tale! Listen, now, and get your lesson by heart.”
At this I gave him the meat and marrow of the story I meant to tell Arnold on my cross-examination, drilling him patiently until every nerve of him save the receptive was fast asleep. Yet I think he had it all line by line before Arnold’s serving man came with the breakfast, though he afterward went to sleep in his chair with the gulping of his third dish of tea; a good example which I presently followed with the chimney-corner settle for a bed.
Something to my surprise, for I had fancied our business would scarcely wait so long, the day was half spent when an orderly—a new little man I had never seen before—came to rout me out and tell me that General Arnold commanded my presence in the room overhead. I could have wished for a little space in which to set a sleep-befuddled brain in order, but it was not given me. So far from it, I was still yawning foolishly behind my hand when I stumbled intoArnold’s presence, trying to look soldierly, and making a rather shameful failure of it, I fear.
But the man behind the little writing-table gave no heed to my gapings. “Sit down, Captain Page,” he said briskly. “While you have been sleeping, we have come to some better understanding of this business—better for you and Champe, at all events. The order for your arrest has been suspended—or at least, made discretionary with me.”
I saw how his vanity and self-esteem had been propitiated, and was glad, since therein lay our only hope.
“We owe you much more than we have yet been able to pay, General—the sergeant and I,” I said, which was the truth masquerading as a lie. “So long as you are our judge-advocate, we don’t fear the drumhead court. But now, if it is permitted, I should like to inquire how suspicion fell specially on us.”
When he answered, his frown was not for me.
“There is a mystery about it, Captain. Castner claimed to have had speech with a spy, who incriminated you and Champe on a direct charge; and upon that information the order for your arrest was issued—without my knowledge or approval, as I have said. Now, when I go to demand an explanation, the spy has disappeared and Castner is missing. No one else has seen the spy, and even his name is carefully suppressed.”
I put on an air of surprise which I was far enough from feeling. Mr. James Askew’s tenderness about that whispered story of his part in the André betrayal accounted for everything but Castner’s disappearance.
“You are looking for some motive under all this, General?” I inquired.
“To be sure; and it is not far to seek. Lieutenant Castner is my personal enemy, and he has been at no pains to conceal that fact, Captain Page.”
“You astonish me!” I exclaimed; and this, at least, was a pure falsehood.
“It is true,” he asserted bitterly. “He has not scrupled to say openly that Sir Henry would do the king’s cause a worthy service if he would send me to Mr. Washington in chains!”
“Then,” said I, smoothly, “you would rather expect to find him conniving at the crime I was charged with, than to find him striving to prevent it.”
“It is a myth—this kidnapping tale,” said the traitor hotly. “He merely wished to deprive me of your services, Captain—at the expense of your life, if need be!”
Was ever a man so misled? Here was the arch-plotter of his century, the man who had been able for months to hold a trusted station in the patriot army, and at the same time to carry on a constant and treasonable correspondence with his country’s enemies, unable to keep from falling into the simplest of plots laid for him! It was weighing pretty heavily upon Castner, who was merely an honest soldier trying to do his duty as he saw it, but I could hardly afford to defend the lieutenant.
“Whatever the lieutenant’s object may have been, I think that I have had a narrow escape,” I said, which was truth of the truth. “But you spoke of mysteries:I think you will say there are more and greater ones when you hear what I have to tell you, General Arnold. You missed me yesterday afternoon?”
“I did. And that gave more color to Castner’s charges. Also, it was reported that Sergeant Champe had not rejoined his ship, and that you had been seen together, earlier in the day. Also, again, that neither of you could be found, though the order for your arrest went straight to the outposts as soon as it was issued. I take it you are prepared to explain all these seemingly suspicious coincidences, Captain?” He said it almost anxiously, though the anxiety was more for the humbling of Castner than for any other reason, I thought.
“I am, fully,” I replied. “To begin at the beginning, Sergeant Champe did not return to his ship yesterday morning because he failed to find a boat going down to the fleet in the lower bay. Quite naturally, he drifted into a tap-room, the bar of a sailor’s groggery at the waterside. While he was there, and still sober enough to have his wits about him, a man in citizen’s clothes stood at the bar trying to make a bargain with the tavern-keeper for a boat. The sergeant heard all that was said. A boat was required which would carry three men, two of them would row, and it must be exceedingly light and speedy.”
“Ha!” said my listener; “three men, and only two to row. The third man might be a prisoner, eh, Captain Page?”
“Possibly,” I answered, smiling inwardly at the readiness with which he followed me. Then I wenton, keeping as scrupulously within the bounds of fact as if I expected to be called to account for every word—not because I was afraid to lie, but because nothing but the point of view needed to be concealed.
“When the man left the tavern, the sergeant, as you may say, trod in his very footsteps. The long jaunt ended at the house of a Dutch boat-builder on the eastern shore. The man in citizen’s clothes went in, and, a little later, the sergeant thought he heard sounds of a struggle. Be that as it may, the man came presently out of the house and made his way back to the neighborhood of Fort George, where he disappeared. Whereupon the sergeant dutifully hunted me out and told me his story.”
“This was in the morning, you say?” queried Arnold, most deeply interested, as I could see.
“In the forenoon,” I went on, and now I saw that I must begin to invent. “Later on, after Mistress Arnold’s visit to you here, I learned through Champe that the man who had worn citizen’s clothes in the forenoon had turned up at the tavern in the uniform of a British private soldier, and that he had been seen in company with an officer wearing the uniform of the Loyal Americans. This, in itself, seemed a little suspicious, and as the plot you speak of was, by that time, becoming a tavern rumor—”
“I see,” said Arnold, anticipating me. “You sallied out to find this officer and his boat-requiring companion?”
I bowed.
“We had little difficulty in placing them, the officerand his masquerading comrade, in the lane beyond the tavern; and when they went eastward, you may imagine that we, as you might say, tracked them step for step. They took a most roundabout way, but finally reached and entered the boat-builder’s house.”
“Ah; but you did not drop it there, Captain Page. You are far too enterprising, I am sure.” By this time the traitor was up and walking the floor, his eyes flashing, and his entire manner reminding me of nothing so much as of a hound roving to find a scent.
“No; we did not drop it. But what followed was still more mysterious. You must know that by this time it was black dark. The two men locked themselves in the house, struck a light, made a fire on the hearth, and, by the sounds, filled a kettle and put it on to boil.”
“You could see them—see their faces?” was the eager question.
“I saw the face of the soldier, but not that of the officer,” I replied, skipping around the eager query. “The man who had been boat-seeking in the forenoon was tall and dark; something on Sergeant Champe’s order. The other was also tall, with square shoulders, and he was fair.”
Arnold stopped abruptly, and wheeled to face me. Some sudden emotion had transformed him. His eyes were blazing, and the thin nostrils were quivering with rage or excitement, I could not tell which.
“I can name one of those men—possibly both of them!” he cried. “But go on, Captain Page; go on, sir!”
“They made tea and ate,” I went on, wondering what new pool of disturbment I had unconsciously troubled. “Afterward they sat before the fire and smoked. Later, the soldier rose and went into another room, coming back directly to say something which made the officer spring up and go with him. They took the candle, and, as the fire had died down, the house was dark; dark and silent. But after a time there came muffled cries, and a crash like that of a falling trap-door followed by a bedlam of thunderings as if a cataract of bricks were pouring upon the floor. Then a strange little man, dripping and reeking as if he had been soaked in a cask of liquor, dashed out of the house and disappeared in the darkness.”
I paused to give him his chance to lead me. It was a perilous road that I was traversing, but I meant to draw him so far afield this time that he would never get back to any suspicion of Champe or me.
“Well?” he said sharply. “That was not the end of your adventure, Captain Page?”
“No,” I rejoined. “The little man was gone but a short time before he came running back with a mob at his heels—sailors, armed with guns and cutlasses. It did not take us long to understand that the little man was the boat-builder, and that he had contrived to pen his two housebreakers in the cellar.”
Arnold nodded with apparent satisfaction.
“A troublesome friend of yours and mine will probably trouble us no more, Captain Page,” he commented. “The boat-builder’s house is a hiding-place for smugglers—one of a number in the locality youhave described. And your armed sailors were a smuggler’s crew. There was a fight?”
“We could not be sure; there was a great deal of noise. But it ended in a fiasco. There was a loophole of escape, and the two cellar prisoners must have found it—we guessed it would be an underground passage leading from the cellar to the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge. At any rate, a dim light flickered for a minute or two in the shop, and then a boat was run down the launching ways, with two men scrambling into it at the final instant.”
Again I paused, and once more he gave me my lead.
“They escaped?—got off? But surely you did not give up, Captain?”
“No. The sergeant and I put to sea the moment we could find a boat and launch it—which seemed to be before the mob in the house had discovered the escape. But when we manned the oars and began to look about us, ours was the only boat in sight. We pulled down the shore, keeping the sharpest lookout, but we saw nothing save the fog, which presently made us lose ourselves, and a guard schooner whose commanding ensign wished to arrest and detain us—chiefly, as I gathered, because we were wearing the uniforms of the Loyal Americans.”
For a long time Arnold walked back and forth in deepest meditation, and I feared he was not going to give me the chance to put the capstone on my carefully built pyramid of dissimulation. But he did.
“And after your encounter with the young cubwho did not like your uniforms, Captain Page—what then?”
“We could do nothing in the fog, and we landed, a little way from the fort, and came here to mount guard. Now for the confirmation of all this fairy tale, General: the groggery-keeper can testify to the boat-seeker’s disguise; the smugglers, or their ally, the boat-builder, can be interrogated; and doubtless the discontented navy ensign will remember our visit, our explanations, and our request for the loan of a compass—which he most churlishly refused.”
He sat down at his writing-table and put his head in his hands. After another interval of silence, he looked up to say: “You have sufficiently accounted for yourself and Sergeant Champe, Captain; now I shall try to account for the two men who escaped in the stolen boat. Come with me.”
I followed to the other end of the long room, mystified in my turn. But my heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer when he snatched the bed-curtains aside and pointed to the unmistakable mud stains on the coverlet—traces left by Champe: traces which, in the darkness, we had not seen, and which we could not have removed if we had seen.
“Those men whom you found and lost, Captain Page: they came here, either before or after you mounted guard in the street. Their purpose is plain. They entered the house through a window in the rear, leaving these mud stains all the way along. They came here to abduct me, sir, and but for the fortunate circumstance of my absence, they might have succeeded.”
My expression of horrified surprise did not need to be feigned.
“What a frightfully narrow escape!” I exclaimed, but I was thinking of ours rather than his.
“It was,” he said impressively. “But the plot was even subtler than you think. Have you guessed why its execution was delayed until last night? The time was chosen when the Loyal Americans—my own legion—was well out of the way; only two of my own men were known to be ashore, and these two—yourself and Sergeant Champe—were to be frightened by this carefully spread rumor and threat of arrest so that you would both run away, disappear, and so lend color to the later story that you two had surprised me in my bed and carried me off.”
“Good heavens!” I ejaculated. “But that inculpates—”
“Quite true,” he agreed gravely. “It inculpates a British officer; a man who has been forced upon me as an aide; a man who hates and despises me as heartily as Mr. Washington does. Captain Page, if you could have seen the face of the officer, who sat before the fire last night in the boat-builder’s house, you would have seen the face of Lieutenant Charles Castner!”