XXIIIN THE POWDER-ROOM
WHEN Castner turned me over to the guard I was taken to a high-arched, brick-walled chamber buried in the battlements of the fort beyond the barracks. By its location I took the cell to be the powder-room of the old Dutch fortress antedating Fort George by a century or more; guessing at this because the place was too spacious to figure as a dungeon, and much too gloomy to be put to any other use.
By all the obligations of a decent upbringing at the hands of godly parents, I suppose I should have gone down on my two knees to spend the few hours that were left in making my peace with God. Certain it is that there were sins enough to be repented of, though I hope and trust they were chiefly soldier sins, and not the kind that make a sniveling craven of the sinner at the last. As to this, however, these death-hour penitences have always seemed to me to be a rather pitiful and unworthy begging of the Great Question; and, besides, hope dies hard in vigorous youth, especially when it is fed by anxiety for the unknown fate of a loved one.
So, when I heard the big key grate in the lock at the outgoing of Corporal Warnock, my jailer, I tookthe candle which Warnock’s, or Castner’s, kindness allowed me, and began a searching review of my dungeon.
From the furnishings, a blanketed bunk-bed in one corner, a small table untidy with candle drippings, and a heavy three-legged stool, I judged that the place had been lately used by the British occupiers as a guard-room for the detention of petty military offenders. Beyond this there was little to be remarked save that the bricks in the walls were old and crumbling, that the arch of the ceiling had fallen out in several places to litter the earthen floor with débris, and that the door was strong and new and solid enough to stop a battering-ram.
After a careful scrutiny of the door and its massive lock there seemed to be little left for hope to build upon. Having been designed for a magazine, the brick-lined cavern had no window or other outlet; as, indeed, it could not well have, being sunk in the earthwork. Hence, a second tour of the place, in which I made use of the heavy little stool to sound the walls, promised nothing, you would say. Yet to this seemingly fruitless proceeding hope owed the fresh lease of life which was to carry it in some fashion over the high crisis of despair.
It was in that end of the oblong cell directly opposite the door that I came upon a section of the wall which seemed to give back a hint of hollowness to judicious thumpings with the stool. This set me to examining that part of the brickwork with greater care. In this area the bricks were newer, and by passing thecandle back and forth I found the reason for the fresher brickwork. A low doorway in the original wall had been filled up and its outlines were plainly traceable.
On my knees before this bricked-up door I sought to recall all I had ever heard of the earlier fortalice—the old Fort Amsterdam of the Dutch. Somewhere, in some Dutch settler’s house on the upper Hudson, I had once seen a sketch plan of Fort Amsterdam; in that plan there were outworks shown beyond the walls, though they were not so extensive as those constructed later by the British rebuilders. Had the Dutchmen used this tunnel passage to supply their outer works with ammunition? It seemed altogether logical and reasonable to assume that they had.
Having reasoned thus far, the next step was clearly obvious. Beyond the bricked-up door there would be a passage leading to what was now the southeastern ravelin. True, the passage might have been filled up when the doorway was stopped; but the hollow sound given back by the newer wall encouraged the more hopeful conclusion. Taking the existence of the passage for granted, the next thing in order was—or should have been—a tool to dig with. But a cat with clipped claws could scarcely have been more helpless in this respect than I was. The most painstaking search of the littered floor revealed nothing in the way of a bit of metal that would scratch the mortar of the joints in the later masonry, much less a practicable digging tool.
I was sitting on the edge of the bunk-bed with my chin in my hand and fairly at the end of any fruitfulinvention, when there came muffled sounds beyond the door to warn me of an approaching intrusion. Presently the key squeaked in the rusty lock and the door swung open to admit a visitor. By the light of the one poor guttering candle on the table I did not make him out at first, though I supposed, of course, it would be Castner. But when I looked again I found myself staring in astonishment into the gloomy eyes of Benedict Arnold. I knew what he had come for, or thought I did; and once more I strung myself up to the task of deceiving him yet further—for John Champe’s sake.
“So,” he said, and his voice was so low that it was almost gentle; “the long road of equivocation has found its fatal turn at the last, has it, Captain Page?”
I thought he had come to gloat over me, as would have been most natural, but never was a prefiguring worse mistaken. Coming closer until I could almost feel the auger-boring of the moody eyes, he went on in the same low monotone.
“You doubtless think that you, of all living men, are the most to be pitied, Captain. You are young; you have scarcely tasted of life; you have been permitted to look into the eyes of love with the good hope that in the days to come there would be happy fruition; you have an honorable name and forebears to whom your children might look back with honest pride; and in a few short hours all this will be blotted out for you forever. Tell me, sir; was it worth this stupendous sacrifice—the bare chance of taking a broken, disappointed fellow-man back to die this same death which is now confronting you?”
I saw now that he was not meaning to rejoice in my downfall, and I took time for my answer.
“A good soldier should not measure the weight of sacrifice in a question of duty.”
His hands went apart in a sudden gesture of impatience.
“What is duty? A man, by some blunderings of chance or perhaps by his own crafty chicanery, becomes your superior officer. Are you to lay aside all your convictions of justice and mercy and common manly honor merely because he holds up before you a fetish of soldierly obedience? Remember, he is but a man, as you are. Stripped of his rank and all the artificial contrivances which have made him for the moment figure as your superior, he becomes only a fellow human being, standing high or low in your estimation only as his heart is sound or depraved.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Arnold,” I put in; “pardon me if I say that you are beclouding the issue. The matter of duty, as I have conceived it, does not rest upon the question of obedience to a ranking superior. It has a better foundation in the love of country. I will be very plain with you. It seemed to me to be for the best good of my poor distracted country that you should be made to go back and pay the penalty for the blow you have struck it. Acting upon that conviction, I came here—voluntarily, you must understand, and not upon the command of any superior whomsoever.”
He took another step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder.
“You did this from your own conception of yourduty, and yet when the chance came you spared me. Captain Page. Why did you change your mind? Was it because you found me something less than the despicable piece of gallows-meat you had been told I was?”
I could not tell if this were merely the undying vanity of the man fishing for compliments on the edge of the grave, or some better prompting; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“I found you as I expected to find you, a most misguided man, as I still hold you to be; but yet a man, and neither greatly better nor worse than others, Mr. Arnold. The discovery that I made—or rather that was made for me—was in myself.”
“Ah? And that was—?”
“It was the discovery that there are lengths to which a man and a gentleman may not go, even to compass the greatest apparent benefit to his fellow-men and his country. You put it within the truth when you say that I spared you. At this very moment, had I willed it so, you might be lying bound and gagged in the bottom of a rowboat and well on your way to the camp at Tappan. I have told you the simple truth, Mr. Arnold; I assumed the task of kidnapping you voluntarily, and voluntarily I relinquished it.”
“I know,” he rejoined abruptly, and then he turned from me and began to pace the floor as if in a repressed passion. After a time he broke out bitterly.
“Like others, you know nothing of the conditions. You saw only a man turning his back upon a causeto which he had given as much or more than any, and straightway you set him down as the basest traitor, measuring the depth of his depravity, it may be, by that very standard of loyal service which he himself had set. What can you know of the slights and evasions, the refusal to recognize just claims, the spite and envy of those who drag others down so that they themselves may climb the higher?” Then, stopping suddenly to face me: “Captain Page, they even put a cloud upon my honesty in money matters!”
Now I had heard that there had been charges of irregularity in his official reports; it was common talk in the army, though I think none went so far as to charge dishonesty. His repute had been that of a high-stomached officer who could as little bear criticism as he could a rebuff to his ambition. But I said nothing. I could do no less than pity a man who felt that he must come and try to justify himself to a condemned spy whose confessed object was, or had been, a most deadly one. But he fell to pacing again without waiting for my reply.
“You did not believe that scandal about the regimental accounts, Captain Page?” he said, after another pause.
“No; I did not believe it, and I think there are few in our army who do. But that is nothing, Mr. Arnold; you are well hated for a much greater thing.”
“What is done, is done,” he broke in moodily. “I did not come here to argue with you, Captain; I came to ask what I may do to make your fate more easily met. Your life I can not save; that matter has gonebeyond me now, however much I might wish to intervene. But any last request you may have to make—”
There were two, and on one of them, the safe departure of Beatrix, my lips were sealed. But of the other I spoke freely.
“You have not mentioned Sergeant Champe in all this, and I would not have my sins charged to his score,” I began: “I do not know how much or how little you are involving him—”
He interrupted with gesture expressive of complete understanding and appreciation.
“Champe is but a common soldier, and a most fanatical patriot, like yourself, Captain Page. I have known this last, or suspected it, from the beginning. There will be no punishment for him greater than that which will be the greatest for a man of his stamp—to be obliged upon a warrant of life or death to make good his lately sworn oath of allegiance in battle. He rejoins the legion to-night, and when the fleet sails he will go with it, to live or die as he fights or refuses to fight.”
I stood up, hoping he would take it as a hint that I desired to be alone.
“There is nothing more, then, I believe,” I said. “Due report of this night’s doings will be sent to Colonel Baylor, I trust; and I shall be glad if the charge against me shall stand without reference to my self-appointed errand. I ask this as much for your sake as for my own, Mr. Arnold. Others might not understand why I found my mission impossible at its final turning point.”
“You mean that the report shall go out that you were executed merely as a spy caught within the enemy’s lines?”
“That was my meaning; yes.”
In a flash he held out his hand, and I forgot that he was a traitor to the cause I loved and grasped it heartily.
“You are a man in all your inches, Captain Page,” he declared warmly; and then: “I would to God I could do you a real service, sir! You think there will be only one woman to be broken-hearted, but I assure you there will be two. I shall ill know how to face the second one when I have to tell her that you spared me of your own free will, and that yet you had to die!”
“Let your gratitude to the other woman nerve you to that task, Mr. Arnold,” I put in quietly. “It was Mistress Beatrix Leigh who showed me my duty to her—and to myself.”
“Ah, these women!” he said gently. “A man never sees himself as he ought to be until he looks into the crystal mirror of a good woman’s soul. You are prodigiously to be pitied, Captain Page—but not more than you are to be envied. A little respite—time granted you for a meeting and a parting with this young woman who hates me well but hates dishonor more—possibly my word to Sir Henry Clinton would run thus far. Shall I try it, sir?”
I shook my head and said, no. Apart from the added agony of such a meeting and parting, I hoped against hope that the good fates and Captain Elijah Sprigg had already made it impossible by puttingBeatrix safely a-sea, though I feared the New Englander might wait to get word of me first.
“Then I can only bid you farewell, Captain, and wish with all my heart that I might put a sword in your hand and tell you to fight your way to death like a soldier!”
With that he gripped my hand again and went quickly to the door; and I think Warnock or another must have been waiting for him, for when I looked again the door had opened and closed, and I was alone.
Call it a weakness if you will, but after he was gone I wasted some precious minutes sitting on the bunk-bed with my head in my hands and my heart mellowing in a sudden rush of meliorating softness. It is so easy to fall into the rut of the harsh rigidities, judging all humankind by unbending formulas of right and wrong and making no allowances for the thousand and one battling influences which are always dragging the human atom hither and yon. This man whose name had become a hissing and a reproach was neither an angel nor a devil; he was merely a human being, swayed now by the good and now by the evil. If he had shown himself capable of the basest political treachery, he here and now had also shown that he could be magnanimous and truly generous to a fallen enemy.
It was another key-grating in the door-lock that roused me from the softening reverie and I sprang up, shocked for an instant by the thought that I had spent all my little respite and that midnight was come. That shock was followed by another when the door openedand Champe, with a face so haggard and wrought upon that I scarcely recognized him, came stumbling in to fall upon his knees at my feet.
“Champe!” I cried, thinking nothing but that they had sifted the truth out of him in some way, and that he was to die with me.
“Aye,” he mumbled, “I’ve come, Captain Dick. Strangle me with your bare hands—burn my eyes out with the candle—do what you will to me and I’ll never cheep nor whimper nor lift a finger. They’ve told me what you did; how you stood up and took it all upon yourself, after I had gone crazed with rage and disappointment and betrayed you like another Judas! Let me hang in your place; or if I can not, I’ll hang with you—I swear it!”
“Hush!” I commanded harshly, for I could not trust myself to speak otherwise. And then: “You need not reproach yourself. They would have caught me anyway before the night was over, and there is no sense in two hanging where one will serve. But tell me: how did you get here?”
“Warnock is corporal of the guard, and one night I saved him from being found asleep at sentry post. He told me what you said to General Phillips; how you—” his voice broke and again I had to be rough with him to save my own self-possession.
“Name of the devil!” I cut in snappishly. “Dry your eyes, Sergeant, and take the crack out of your voice. You are the man of all others who can do me a service, and here you come to me whimpering and crying like a whipped dog!”
“Say it, Captain Dick,” he pleaded. “Give me my orders, and I’ll—”
“—And you’ll carry them out: of course, you will,” I finished for him. “Now listen, and I’ll tell you what you are to do.”
A plan had been shaping itself with lightning-like swiftness in my brain since he had told me enough to make it plain that he was still free to go and come in the town; that he had not yet been put under guard to be sent to the ships, as Arnold had said he would be.
First I plied him with questions which he answered with rare intelligence, giving me the exact location of the powder-room prison cell in relation to its surroundings, and telling me what lay beyond the fortress walls behind it—a ravelin, a ditch, outworks, and then the beach. Then I gave him his instructions.
“You remember the sea-captain who sent you to fetch me to the tavern?”
Champe nodded.
“He is with us, though he claims to be a neutral and is allowed to go and come as a trader, under some surveillance. His schooner lies in the East River, ready to put to sea, if it has not already sailed. Your task is to find the ship and the man, if they are within finding distance. Tell the captain what has befallen me, and you may add that I’m going to try to break jail. If I succeed, a few stout friends, to be waiting on the beach at the southeastern angle of the fort at half an hour before midnight, might turn the scale for me.”
“I’ll find him if I have to go to hell to make thesearch a thorough one. But what hope have you of breaking out of this, Captain Dick?”
I dragged him across the room and showed him the outlined door in the earthward wall.
“You are to smuggle me something to dig with,” I told him, and instantly he searched in his pockets and found a huge clasp-knife.
“Will that do, think you?” he asked.
“I’ll make it do for the brickwork, though, the good Lord knows, I may need a pick and shovel for anything this bricked-up door tells me of what is beyond it. But never mind; go you and do your part, Sergeant. And one other thing: Captain Sprigg has either gone to sea, or is about to go, as I have told you, and his errand is to convey two women home to Virginia. One of those women is my cousin, and the other—”
“The other will be somewhat more than a cousin, if you live to get free of this: I take you, Captain.”
“Good. Then you will see to it yourself that whatever may be done toward helping me, there must be a sufficient guard left to protect the women. That is all, I believe, though I would give much for a weapon of some sort bigger than this pocket-knife to even me with those who will seek to stop me after I burrow out.”
At that Champe unbuttoned his great watchcoat and showed me my good Scots rapier hanging by a thong around his neck; and I could have shouted for joy.
“Where did you find it?—and how could you pass the guard with it?” I demanded.
“I found it in the barracks, where one of Warnock’s men had flung it aside,” he explained. “I thought first to bring your own horse-saber, which I was wearing, but Warnock made me put it away before he would let me see you. I did put it away, but I hid this other in my coat at the same time.”
With midnight coming nearer at every breath we drew, I gave Champe his final word.
“Do your errand quickly, Sergeant,” I adjured him. “On two counts you have little time to spare: Sprigg’s vessel, if it be not already gone, will be ready to go at any minute; and after all you may be too late. The other count is your own. You will be ordered to rejoin the legion before the night is out; I have Arnold’s own word for that.”
“They’ll not take me down the bay alive before my errand is done; I promise you that, Captain Dick.”
While he was hammering at the door for Warnock to come and let him out, I hid the rapier in the blankets of the bed; and no sooner was the door opened for Champe, and closed behind him with the bolt shot, than I fell to work with the great clasp-knife, digging as for dear life.
It took no little time to loosen the first brick, toil as I would, and when it was withdrawn, the thrust-in candle showed nothing but a shallow, earth-smelling burrow behind the wall, with its farther extremity stopped up by a stout wooden boarding.
This was sufficiently discouraging, since it indicated that the old sally-port through the powder-room to the outworks had been sealed up at both ends. Howthick the outer barrier might be, I had no means of determining; and before I could remove any more bricks, I heard the key rattling in the lock again, and there was barely time to stand the clumsy little table before the tell-tale breach beginnings, to kick the floor rubbish over the mortar powderings that whitened it, and to slip the clasp-knife into my pocket, when the bolt was shot and Castner marched in.
Now was the time when it took the final ounce of fortitude in the good old Page reserves to make me face him and say carelessly, “Is it midnight, at last, Lieutenant? By all the hours that ever struck, I thought it would never come!” For, truly, and for the second time that night, I made sure that my short respite had slipped away unheeded, and that he had come for me.
“No, Captain Page,” he rejoined soberly; “it wants two good hours of midnight yet, and I’ve come on a different errand. You have spoken twice in my hearing of a postponed engagement with your—with this Captain Seytoun who has come so far out of his way to do you an ill turn: are you still wishing it might be kept?”
I made my laugh sound as lightly as it should have sounded if the meeting with my cousin Devlin’s slayer were the last unfulfilled desire of a man who was about to die.
“You saw how hard I tried to make him wish it. My dear Castner, he is little better than a brute beast. I doubt if the rope stout enough to drag him to a fair field of honor has ever been twisted.”
The lieutenant’s eyes were fixed upon one of the holes in the ceiling masonry.
“It would be little loss to the reb—to the American cause if he should never return to Tappan?” he suggested.
“It would be small loss, as you say. Though you will not look at it in that light, the man is a traitor at heart; a man who, to satisfy a purely personal grudge, does not scruple to betray his trust, his cause and his commanders.”
Castner looked me full in the eyes.
“He hates you well, Captain Page. I had no thought save to have James Askew’s story confirmed by some one in authority. I was astounded when the spy told me that, upon a few hours’ notice, an officer of Major Lee’s Legion would meet us at a certain spot on the Tarrytown road and confirm his information word for word. We rode out to the Neutral Ground to the place indicated by Askew, and there we met this precious troop-captain. He not only did all that Askew had promised for him; he was anxious to come and testify in person. I had little choice but to give him the safe-conduct necessary.”
“No, no,” I hastened to say. “I’m never blaming you, my dear Lieutenant. Don’t think it for a moment.”
“Thank you,” he returned. “Duty is a hard schoolmaster at times; never harder for me than in the present instance, Captain Page. But to return to this poltroon captain of horse; I am beginning to suspect that he had another object in asking for his safe-conduct,eager as he is to see you effaced. He has been making inquiries of me about a lady.”
“Ah?” said I; and then: “I’ll name her for you—Mistress Beatrix Leigh, of Virginia?”
“The same. She is here on some business for her Virginia estates—a tobacco cargo that fell into the hands of our Philistines. Some influence has been brought to bear upon Sir Henry Clinton to make him wink at the blockade-running of this confiscated cargo, provided it can be done without bringing it to public notice. Seytoun tells me of this, lodges an information against one Elijah Sprigg, captain of Mistress Leigh’s ship, and urges me to lay the affair by the heels.”
“You mean to do it, Lieutenant Castner?” I demanded angrily.
“Not upon that cur’s prompting, you may be sure,” was the hearty rejoinder. “But this is all far beside the mark. One other request Seytoun makes of me, and that is that he be permitted to see you, alone, before you—before your—”
“Before my hanging, you would say; don’t boggle at so harmless a little word, my good friend: I don’t. You’ll let him come?”
“That rests with you,” he announced quietly. “Do you still wish to keep your—that broken engagement with him?”
I fear my smile at this was cynical.
“You needn’t approach it so cautiously, Lieutenant. He merely wishes to come and triumph over a fallen enemy. I know him. I’m beginning to think there is no fight in him.”
“By heavens! I’d make him fight!” burst out my quiet lieutenant, in a most unprecedented upflash of rage. “See here, Captain Page; by all the gods, I’m going to take the chance of having my commission canceled, and send him to you! Here is my sword”—he drew it and flung it upon the bed. “You’ll promise me that you will not use it in a way to make me sorry that I trusted you?”
“Most willingly,” I replied, smiling at his sudden ardor, and added: “But he won’t fight, Mr. Castner.”
“Then kill him!” he snapped vindictively; and turned to kick hotly at the door for the guard to come and let him out.
Not to lose any of the precious minutes I fell into furious labor on the hole in the wall as soon as the door clanged behind Castner. When at length the aperture was large enough to let me squeeze through, nothing was revealed save the crumbling sides of a damp earth-tunnel, with the wooden bulkhead stopping its farther end.
I did not dare to creep into the tunnel for a better investigation of thecul de sac. If Seytoun had not changed his mind, he might be admitted at any moment, and remembering this, I hastily replaced the loosened bricks, and moved the table, with the candle on it, against the wall. Happily, I had made the breach so low that the table hid it; which was more by hit than good wit, since I had not thought of having to conceal it.
These preparations were barely completed when the door-bolt clicked, and my enemy was come. Betweenthe bolt shooting and the swinging of the door, I had time to drop down upon the edge of the bunk-bed, and to put my face in my hands; so Seytoun found me as I wished he should find me—in an attitude of the deepest dejection.
He took instant advantage of it, as I made sure he would, laughing harshly and slapping his leg, and saying it was as good as a comedy to see me sniveling like a whipped schoolboy because, forsooth, I was going to be choked presently with a bit of cord!
At first I took no notice of him, wishing to see him climb the ladder of triumph so high that the fall, when it should come, would jar his teeth loose. He climbed fast enough, in all conscience, pouring out the most obscene imprecations upon me, telling me how he should live to see me dancing upon nothing; how he would marry Beatrix now in spite of hell and all the base-born, light-mothered Pages that ever mewled in their nurses’ arms; how, in one stroke, he would be avenged for all that I had ever done to him.
When he had run the full gamut of abuse, and was fairly at a stand for fresh epithets, I took him up, not angrily, for, strange as it may seem, I could not for the life of me stir the hot rage that had twice or thrice made me so eager to kill him.
“You say I am a coward, Seytoun, and that is a harsh word to fling at a dying man. What have I ever done to you, more than to post you in the tidewater country for killing my cousin Devlin Page over a game of cards without giving the poor lad a tenth of a chance to defend himself?” I asked.
“You posted me, and you have struck me twice without giving me a chance to kill you!” he raged. “On top of that you have eaten insults that would have made a horse-boy fight!”
“Um,” said I. “If I have eaten at your table, I have also made you eat at mine. And I had a much better cause than you, Wolf Seytoun,” I added, giving him the name he went by in Virginia. “The woman who loves me, and who will loathe and despise you to her dying day for this night’s work, begged me to spare you—for the sake of our common country—and I gave her my promise.”
“By heaven!” he shouted, “you’ll taunt me with that? I tell you, Beatrix Leigh will—”
“Hold on,” I warned, raising a hand in deprecation. “That makes twice you have used her name to me within five minutes. Don’t do it again!”
“What’s to stop me if I name her a hundred million times?” he bellowed.
“This,” I said, taking up the sword that Castner had flung upon the bed. And still I was not angry.
His first act was the craven cur’s: a swift glance over his shoulder to see if haply the door had been left ajar to let him run; his next was the trapped wolf’s: a whipping-out of his saber, and a lightning-like launching of his great body in a rush that was meant to slay me before I could get upon my feet.
The attack failed only because I was fully expecting it; but the warding of the murderous saber cut snapped my borrowed weapon short off at the hilt. It was here that John Champe’s devotion surely saved mylife. But for his smuggling of the Scots rapier under his coat, I should have been left unarmed and helpless, and Seytoun would certainly have slain me like a dog.
But the rapier was at hand, and I made shift to snatch it out of its hiding-place beneath the blankets, to spring aside from the second saber sweep, and to face my antagonist in some equality.
Then began a battle the like of which I hope never to have part in again. Seytoun’s face was the face of a demoniac, and he fought with the coward’s courage, the frenzy of a madman. For a time I could do nothing but strive to keep out of his way, and never before had I been made to feel the bitter inadequacy of the lighter weapon when opposed to the heavier troop saber. I dared not try to parry his sweeping slashes, and my only hope lay in winding him.
This result came in time, helped on by his reckless wasting of his strength, and by the heavy coat he was wearing. Then it was my turn, and I began to press him slowly backward, changing my defense into an attack, and crowding him to make good before he should recover and catch his second wind. Round and round the narrow cell we went, and still the heavy saber rose and fell, and the slender rapier darted in and out, and never a drop of blood was drawn.
“End it!” I cried; “why don’t you end it, you brute beast?”
He took me at my word, or tried to. In a fierce rush he backed me all across the room, and when he had me in a corner, stooped, caught up the heavy stool in his left hand and hurled it at my head. It was abase advantage to take of a lighter-armed antagonist, but I forgave him. For at the instant of missile-hurling I found my opening, and the rapier flashed in over the momentarily neglected guard; darted in and found its mark and pierced it.
I did not thrust a second time; did not need to. While the clock could tick twice, he stood looking at me with a sort of shocked wonder in his bloodshot eyes. Then he turned away slowly, and fell face downward across the bunk-bed, and I think he never stirred afterward.