XVITHE CUP OF TANTALUS
TAKING it all in all, it seems that we should have come promptly to the conclusion that, on this raw night of the seventeenth of December, the stars in their courses were fighting against us; that our own lucky star, if we had any, was a million miles below the horizon.
At the gruff hail from the ship we had collided with, there was nothing for it but to lie on our oars, and to take what was coming to us. I expected a peremptory command to come aboard; but instead, a boat-hook was reached down to hold us as we were, a lantern was lowered in our direction, and the officer of the watch demanded to know who we were and what we were doing.
Here was a chance for the exercising of my most promising gift, and I improved it instantly.
“If this is a king’s ship, we are wearing his majesty’s colors. If not, you may go to the devil with your questions,” I made answer, with all the coolness I could muster.
“Your names, your business, and the night password!” roared our questioner, losing patience, as I thought he would.
“We don’t yield any of the three to every jack-in-a-box ensign who bobs up to ask them,” I retorted blandly. “Go and call your captain, my friend.”
Judging by the choking and spluttering going on in the upper dimnesses I thought our officer, a little man with bullet eyes and a turned-up nose, would have a fit. When he had sworn himself into some atmosphere of coherence he commanded us to tumble aboard, or by all the sea-gods he would keelhaul us first and hang us at the yard-arm afterward. Whereupon I laughed pleasantly, and told him we should do well enough as we were if he would let us have a compass by which to find our way ashore.
That brought him down to us, hand-under-hand on the first rope he could lay hold of; and when he dropped into our cockle-shell we had much ado to keep him from swamping it or himself.
“Up the side, the pair of you!” he blustered, lugging out a huge pistol; and then the light of the lantern showed him our Loyal American facings and my captain’s shoulder-knot, and he changed countenance.
“Sit down, Ensign,” said I, “and be at ease. You’ll spill us if you’re not careful.” And when Champe had slyly rocked the boat to emphasize the invitation: “Now, perhaps, you will be good enough to tell us which way to steer to make the landing at Fort George.”
“Your pardon, Captain,” he said, the bluster all gone out of him. “You are but a cable’s length from the fort. But the orders are strict. You have the password?”
I gave it.
“And your rank and standing?”
“Captain in the Loyal American Legion, and acting aide to General Arnold, detailed for this night on special duty. And my companion is a sergeant in the same service, pulling an oar for me. Is there anything else you would like to know, Ensign?”
“H’m,” he said reflectively. “A lieutenant and a sergeant was what they said to be on the lookout for, but that may have been a mistake.” And then, with a furtive glance at the priming of his great pistol: “I’m sorry to insist, Captain, but I shall have to ask you to come aboard with me. Orders are orders, and they must be obeyed.”
“But why?” I protested. “If you detain me it is at your own risk. My affair is General Arnold’s, and it does not admit of delay.”
“If you are really General Arnold’s aide, you will know more than I can tell you,” he made answer. “It is rumored that two men, an officer and a soldier from Mr. Washington’s army, are here for the purpose of abducting Benedict Arnold, and the rumor says that they came as deserters from the rebels and enlisted in Mr. Arnold’s legion. Be that as it may, two men of the Loyal Americans, a lieutenant and a sergeant, are reported missing, and we have orders to look out for them. You see the situation, Captain?”
Truly, I did; and it was a very sorry situation, indeed. There could be but one explanation. James Askew had sold his news to Clinton or Arnold, and the orders were out to apprehend us. It was but aslip that the missing “captain” figured as a lieutenant on the lips of our ensign; and the sergeant’s rank was correctly stated. So far as I knew, we two, Champe and I, were the only stragglers from the legion; Champe was known to have left his transport ship, and neither of us knew what had transpired after mid-afternoon, when I had left Arnold putting his wife into the hackney coach with Beatrix, and had gone to sink my hook into Mr. Askew’s gills.
As far as I could see, we were fairly netted. Once aboard the schooner under whose counter we were lying, and it was but a step to Fort George and its dungeons, and another, and still shorter one, from the prison to the gallows.
The red-faced little ensign had dropped into the stern-sheets of our boat, and so he sat facing us. I guessed now that he had no captain; that he was the ranking officer of the small guard-ship. Otherwise, his superior would have been on deck long before this, hurling questions at us. If we could but win the red-faced one—
I could not see Champe, who was behind me on the forward thwart. But when the ensign stood up and called to the boat-hook man to haul us amidships, I felt the grim sergeant’s determination in the thrill of the light craft under me. Catching the one fortuitous moment when the ensign was extending a hand to fend us off from the schooner’s side, Champe entangled his oar between the boat and the ship’s bilge, made an awkward effort to disengage it, and clumsily lost his balance, careening the boat with such a suddenjerk that the red-faced little officer went overboard in a clean, sharp headlong plunge.
Whether it was Champe’s intention to drown the officer, offhand, or merely to make a diversion out of which something might grow to our benefit, I never knew. But the diversion was a fact accomplished, beyond doubt. With lusty sailor shouts, the man with the boat-hook gave the alarm, and to the watch on deck was added the watch below, which came tumbling up at the cry of “Man overboard!” Naturally, with no lights, and with the fog thickening on every fresh breath of the sea wind, the men on the schooner did nothing but get in one another’s way; and the ensign who, like many another sailor, could swim no more than a stone, would have drowned a dozen times before they got their tender down from the davits at the stern.
But now I had my small inspiration, and with a quick word to Champe to secure his intelligent help, it was put into effect. It was a simple expedient, namely, to keep our boat within easy snatching distance of the drowning officer, and then to haul him aboard when he was too well soaked and frozen to remember his orders—all of which we did in the proper sequence, and with the desired result.
The pug-nosed little man was no longer red-faced when we passed him up the side of the schooner and into the hands of his excited crew, and no one said us nay when we sheered off silently into the fog afterward, and diligently lost ourselves once more.
That was no joke. We did lose ourselves beautifullythis second time, and when, after what figured to us as two or three of the longest hours ever measured by falling sand grains, our boat took ground with a sidelong lurch, we had no more idea than a pair of innocents what land it might be.
Here came our first disagreement. Champe was for sheering off again and waiting for the fog to lift: I said no; that the fog might not lift until dawn, and, in any event, we must land somewhere, sometime. The sergeant gave way, finally, but not without many misgivings openly expressed. Luck was not with us, he said, and it would be our unblest, crooked hap to walk straight into the arms of some of those who were looking for us.
In divided counsels, therefore, we took our stiffened limbs out of their boat crampings, and stamped and beat our arms and got the sluggish blood in motion before we dragged our craft high and dry, and set out to scramble up the steep bank fronting our landing-place. At the top, to our astonishment, we were above the thin skim of fog that lay like a veil on the surface of the water, and could see dimly the surrounding objects.
The first of these was a man, walking slowly and with measured steps toward us on the bank’s edge.
“A sentry,” muttered the sergeant, and we flattened ourselves silently where we were till the soldier passed us, creeping swiftly forward to cross the line a minute later.
Not above a stone’s throw from the waterside we were brought to a stand by a barrier of some sortwhich, to the sense of touch, proclaimed itself to be a high wooden fence. It was here that Champe gripped my arm and drew me down beside him.
“The luck’s turned, Captain Dick!” he whispered excitedly. “Of all the thousand places where we might have landed, we’ve drifted blindly to the one we were aiming for! This is our garden, and here is the board you kicked loose when you were walking with Sir Judas night before last!”
It was as true as it was blankly incredible. The board pointed out by Champe lay just as it had fallen, and peering through the gap it had left, we could see the dark bulk of Arnold’s house, with Sir Henry Clinton’s shouldering it on the right.
There were no lights in any of the windows, and the garden, when we had entered it through the gap in the fence, was silent and deserted, as might be expected at such an hour. We were in the shadow of the house itself when I bade Champe strike a spark into his tinder box to let us tell the time. It was past two o’clock, though how much past I could not tell, since I had forgotten to wind my watch and it had stopped exactly on the hour.
Determining this, we held a whispered consultation. It was terribly late to press our plan to its conclusion, and Champe urged this, arguing most sensibly that, if we had all good fortune from this on, we could not hope to row far on the way to Tappan before the daylight would show us to all who cared to see; that with the tide against us we would not be past the British boat patrols by sunrise.
On the other hand, I contended that it might very well be now or never.
“You heard what the guard-ship ensign said: if daylight finds us in New York, this day’s sun will be the last we’ll ever see, for they tell me they hang their caught spies at midnight. Our alternative is to take to the boat again and try to escape as we can. But if we try to do this, we may as well take Arnold with us. If we are caught, we hang, anyway, and none the less certainly if we are caught empty-handed.”
Champe saw the force of this, as I was sure he would; and if his teeth were chattering when we set about breaking into the house, why so were mine for that matter, and I protest it was from the raw chill of the morning and not from fear.
Our breaking and entering was easily accomplished. A window in a rear room gave to the cautious prying of Champe’s saber point; and from that room, which, as I knew, was used for stores, to the lower corridor, or entrance hall, we came by forcing the lock of the communicating door.
I half expected to find an aide or an orderly sleeping in this lower hall, if, indeed, there should not be a sentry, awake and on guard. But there was neither nor none of these. The hall was deserted and silent; and when we drew the curtains of the side-lights at the front, there was no sentry outside, save the one whose footfalls we could faintly hear as he marched back and forth before Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters.
Here again, then, fortune appeared to be favoring us most astoundingly. It was almost unbelievable thatthe man we meant to seize and carry off was sleeping quietly, and wholly at our mercy, in the room above. But, unless his guard was in the room with him, there was none in the house; of this we made sure as a condition precedent to our creeping silently up the stairs.
Before the closed door of the office-bedroom I gave the sergeant final whispered instructions; this after we had softly tried the door and found, to our greater astonishment, that it was unlocked.
“When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute; once awakened, Arnold will fight—no man more desperately. But you know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. Do your work quickly and thoroughly, and use this door-key in your knotted handkerchief for a gag. Are you ready?”
“Ready and waiting, Captain Dick,” was the muttered reply; and we swung the door slowly on its hinges.
Though there were ample windows in both ends of it, the long room was dark. But now our eyes had become somewhat accustomed to these inner glooms, and we could make out the dim shapes of the furnishings nearest to us; the writing-table, the chairs, the clumsy, cushioned settle drawn out before the cold hearth.
Groping our way by slow inchings along the opposite wall, we finally came to the alcove holding thebed, a high, canopied contrivance of the older fashion, with heavy curtains to shut it in. I could have sworn I heard the traitor’s gentle breathing when I laid a cautious hand on the curtains to draw them aside. “Now!” I whispered; and as the curtains parted, Champe sprang like a tiger through the opening and I felt quickly for the man’s face on the pillows to guide the rapier’s point for the silencing.
There was no face on the pillows; no human figure outlined beneath the covers; which were drawn up smoothly as the traitor’s chamber-man, or -woman, had left them. We had struck our blow and it had missed!
Champe sat up on the edge of the bed, and I heard his low chuckling laugh.
“Shall I bind and gag the pillow, Captain Dick?” he asked sardonically; and then he burst out in a soft-voiced torrent of the most fearsome curses. “The devil takes choice care of his own,” he gritted, at the far end of the outburst. “Four times have I had this Judas fairly in my hands, and four times he has whipped out of them! Not once before in all these two months has he slept away from here, Captain Dick—I’d swear it! And now, on this one night of all the sixty-odd.... Well, shall we go down to the fort and turn ourselves over to the provost-guard?”
For the moment it seemed as reasonable as anything else that remained for us to do. But youth dies hard; and youth with the Page blood jumping in its veins the hardest of all.
“They call me a daredevil, at home, John Champe,”I said evenly, “and Mr. Hamilton named me so when he asked me to go to help you. I have a mind to do the maddest thing you ever dreamed of, which has its one chance in a million of saving our necks only because it is mad. Do you try it with me?”
“Lord, yes,” said the sergeant wearily, “even if it’s to crawl in here between Arnold’s blankets and let him find us so when he comes.”
“You may say it is quite as sure a road to Gallows Hill as that would be,” I assented. “But come on: first we must leave the bed and this house exactly as we found them. Can you straighten and smooth the covers without a light?”
He said he could, and when he was through we drew the curtains, and took our route in reverse, misplacing nothing, and even staying to put the forced store-room lock back as we had found it. Once more in the garden, we kept to the graveled walk to show no tell-tale foot-prints; and at the fence we were careful to place the fallen board precisely as it had lain before we had kicked it aside to gain our entrance.
Five minutes later, we had dodged the sentry again, and had lowered ourselves cautiously to the river brink, where our boat was drawn out. Watching our chance against the pacing sentry, we floated the little craft silently, loaded it with stones enough to kill its buoyancy, and filled it almost to the gunwale with water. Then we made the painter fast to a rock at the river’s edge, pushed the boat out into deep water, and sank it with a quick jerk on the rope.
“I should have sent it adrift, and no more said,”commented the sergeant. “And I don’t see yet why you didn’t, Captain Dick,” he said.
“Never mind,” I rejoined. “You’re calling yourself a dead man, now, and so you needn’t worry with the ‘whys’—though I don’t mind explaining the present one. We’ve been at a good bit of trouble getting hold of that boat, and if we can make shift to keep the breath in our bodies for a few hours longer, we may need it again. That’s all. Now come with me, and obey your orders to the letter.”
Once again we scrambled up the bank, dodged the sleepy sentinel, passed to the street by a détour, and so came boldly to the front of the house we had broken into. Then I told Champe what we were to do.
“Make a complete soldier of yourself, now, Sergeant, and follow two steps behind me. We shall pace a sentry-beat up and down before the house from this on, until Arnold returns and finds us here. When he comes, you will salute and stand at parade, and look as weary as you can to back what I shall say to him. Mark time—march!”