XXTRAITORS ALL
IT WAS still early in the evening when I reentered the ground-floor room of Arnold’s house—the room of the cold hearth—on my return from the soul-searching, but most heart-warming interview with Beatrix Leigh. Champe wheeled quickly to face me at the door-closing, and I saw that his day-long moodiness had vanished to give place to suppressed excitement.
“My God!” he said grittingly. “I thought you’d never come!—or that the provost-guard with the handcuffs would get here first. Sir Judas has played fairly into our hands at last. For a good half-hour past he has been walking in the garden—alone!”
“Ah?” said I, seeing how poignantly the matter had climaxed in my short absence, and not seeing, in the suddenness of it, what course I ought to steer. “So you think our chance has come?”
“Think?” he echoed; “think? Why, Captain Dick, isn’t it the very bone and marrow of the thing we’ve been praying for? We’ve but to go quietly and raise the boat from the river-bottom where we sank it, to make all ready, nab him, and away up-river in the darkness. The very night belongs to us—black dark,and with the wind quartering right to blow us where we wish to go. Come; we are wasting the precious minutes!” And while he was struggling into his watchcoat he kept on saying over and over again: “Good God—if he will only give us time!”
He was out and away before I could say more to him, and I followed more leisurely, turning over in my mind a dozen expedients which might serve in the last resort to make this climaxing broadside flash in the pan. For now there was no more hesitation. In the open field, or even with the poor chance that the hunted fox has, after he has heard the dogs baying at his heels, I would have flung myself upon the traitor to take him, or let him kill me as I tried. But to win his confidence, as I had, and then to steal up and garrote him like a wretched footpad was no longer among the possibilities for an officer and a gentleman—and a Virginian.
None the less, there was a thing to be done, and done quickly. Champe had no such scruples as these I had so lately admitted, and I must swiftly invent a way to stop him from putting his neck solus, as you might say, into the hangman’s halter. For I made no doubt that, lacking my help or countenance at the pinch, my dour-faced sergeant would thrust me aside, with a saber slash if no other means offered, and fling himself madly into the kidnapping breach single-handed and alone.
You are to figure these reflections flashing themselves upon the mental mirror as I stepped from the fireless guard-room into the broad entrance hall whichwas used as a lounging place indifferently by Arnold’s aides or Sir Henry Clinton’s. When I passed through there were three young fellows with their feet to the fire; young Hetheridge, Ensign Brewster, and an aide of General Phillips’ whose name I had heard but had promptly forgotten.
“Good evening to you, Captain Page,” said Hetheridge; “are you off after your black-faced sergeant? What ails the beggar that half the time he forgets to salute his betters in passing?”
I was about to make some indifferent rejoinder and go on to the door when the thought struck me that here was a chance to drive a small nail for Champe against the day of need.
“The sergeant is a law to himself, like one of the old Cromwell Ironsides,” I replied lightly. “He should have been born in the other century, when we should have seen him going about with a Bible in one hand and a two-edged slaughter sword in the other. I advise you young gentlemen to walk straight: otherwise he’ll be denouncing you as traitors, some fine day when you least suspect it.”
Brewster laughed.
“He looks like a man who would denounce his own blood brother if the occasion should arise. For the last half-hour he has been raging up and down in that cold guard-room muttering and cursing to himself like a madman, and I dare swear I heard your name mingled in his maledictions, Captain Page.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I agreed readily. “The sergeant has had a suspicious eye on me for some littletime past. He is a grim devil of a fellow, I promise you, and no man’s good company. I begged the general’s permission to keep him by me as a soldier-servant, but lord! he’d sour the milk before the milkmaid could get it strained into her crocks.”
“Being such a devil, I wonder he didn’t stay with the other devils—saving your presence, Captain,—on the far side of the Neutral Ground,” young Hetheridge put in.
Now all this talk was a cruel wasting of most critical time, but I paused to drive the saving nail yet a little farther into the wood.
“Champe may be like some others of that devilish rank and file you speak of, Mr. Hetheridge; one who has been constrained against his will to go barefoot and empty-bellied in a cause that meant nothing to him. At any rate, you can find no fault with his present loyalty. You may believe it or not, as you please, but when he first saw me here in New York he took me for a spy, broke into my room at the tavern and all but had me choked to death before I could get the better of him.”
There was a laugh at this, and then the young fellow whose name I could not remember, said: “I wish you joy of such a soldier-servant as that; I do, indeed.” And, as I laid a hand on the door-latch; “Drink an extra posset for me, while you’re about it, Captain Page, if that’s what you are going after. My throat is as dry as a desert.”
It was well that they should think I was on my way to the tavern, and I vanished while the notion lay uppermostin their minds. Champe was waiting for me at the corner of the house, and he was fairly shaking with fierce impatience.
His greeting of me took the form of a raging oath directed at my time-killing with the young fellows at the house fire; and then: “While you were dallying I got a glimpse of him—he’s there yet, tramping up and down the walk. Hell and furies—if he’ll only give us time—time!” And again, before I could have any speech with him, he was dragging me by a roundabout way to come at the back of the garden enclosure and to the place where our sunken boat was lying.
While we were waiting for our chance to dodge the pacing sentry on the river bank, speech was still impossible, but in the interval I began to get some glimmerings of a plan which would solve the wretched tangle, and at the same time give Champe his leave to escape.
We both saw Arnold through the gap in the fence, which was still open. Once he extended his walk on the garden path to come and stand almost within touching distance of us as we lay crouching in the shadows. He seemed to be staring out over the river which the gale was lashing into yeasty foam-crests. I marveled at his indifference to danger, the more since he had not seemed at all indifferent hitherto. And now he had more cause to fear, knowing by the broken lock and the muddy foot- and finger-marks that at least one desperate attempt had been made to abduct him. But, as I have said before, cowardice in any real pinch of danger was not among his many faults.
Nothing would have been easier than for us to seize and bind and gag him there and then, leaving him so fettered and silenced to wait on the issues of our boat recovery. Champe was hot for doing this, and I had much ado to hold him back. When we had our opportunity to pass the sentry, Arnold had gone back to his tramping of the garden path and I felt that the worst of the crisis was now safely passed.
Reaching the water’s edge we groped for our mooring rock and found the boat’s painter fastened as we had left it. In the task of raising the boat, Champe worked like a demon, wading in the icy water to tug and haul, and when the little craft finally showed her nose, plunging his arms shoulder deep to remove the weighting stones. Since the pacing sentinel passed and repassed on the bank above us every five minutes or so, silence and caution were prime necessities; and again and again I had to warn my companion on the score of his reckless and frantic haste.
So working and halting, the task was accomplished at last; and when the final stone was removed and we had rocked and rolled the boat gently on the beach to free it of some of the water, Champe got in to bail while I held the gunwale and kept an ear alert for the sentry’s comings and goings.
“All ready, Captain Dick,” muttered the frenzied one when he had finished the bailing and had carefully pulled the oars from their anchorings under the thwarts. “Make fast, and hold her so until I get out.”
The time was come for striking the deadly blow, and it fell upon poor Champe without warning.
“Stay where you are, Sergeant,” I commanded in low tones. “The game is up, and we shall not do this thing which we set out to do. Take the oars and let the tide and your two arms get you safely back to Major Lee’s camp at Tappan while you have the chance.”
I could not see his face in the darkness, but my imagination could very well picture the fierce rage which was distorting it.
“What’s that you say?” he choked. “You are giving it up?—now, when the devil himself couldn’t balk us? In God’s name, what do you mean, Captain Dick?”—this last in an agonized whisper.
“I mean precisely what I say; you can not take him alone, and I shall not help you.”
“You are turning your back upon it, and you are staying here?” he muttered, as one half dazed. Then he came suddenly alive to the full meaning of my words: “You are a foul traitor, Captain Richard Page! Curse you, curse you, curse you!—that Judas and the women have won you over! I’ll see you hanged for this, if so be I have to hang with you! Out of my way, or I’ll kill you where you stand!”
He had started up, and was clambering over the thwarts to get at me, when I stooped and gave the boat a mighty shove out into the stream. The sudden lurch made him lose his balance and come down with a noisy crash among the unshipped oars. As quick as thought, the sentry on the bank above cried out his challenge of “Halt! Who goes there?” but Champe, furious as he was, was yet wary enough to lie still, letting thewind and tide carry him on. The sentry did not climb down the bank to investigate, as I made sure he would; and better still, he did not fire his piece to give the alarm. I thought surely that Arnold must have heard his shout, in which case my capture would be certain.
That the shouted challenge had been heard, I had proof presently in a wind-blown muttering of voices at the top of the bank overhead. I figured that the sentry had stopped to speak to Arnold, but I could make no move to escape. Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness, but I could not tell whether it had gone up or down the river or was drifting with wind and tide out toward the Jersey shore. It was enough that it had gone, as I fondly hoped, beyond the possibility of a return. Champe, I fancied, would come to his senses shortly and make his way to safety. Surely he would know that it would be nothing short of suicide for him to land again within the enemy’s lines.
When all was quiet again on the bank above I still had to wait some little time before venturing to cross the sentry’s path on my retreat. There was good hope in the interval since I neither heard nor saw more of the sergeant and was thus convinced that he was making the best of his way out of the peril. More than once, however, while I waited, I could distinguish the sound of Arnold’s footsteps on the gravel walk in the garden, so I knew that the traitor had not been frightened away by whatever talk he had had with the bank-pacing sentry.
Since boldness is often the truest kind of caution, it was in my mind that I should snatch my chance to pass the sentry and so slip through the gap in the fence to join Arnold in the garden, trusting to my wit to frame a plausible excuse for the intrusion. Though for honor’s sake I had turned my back on the purpose of betraying our chief deserter, I meant to delay my own escape long enough to make sure that Champe was safely out of the way. Try as I might, I could not rid myself of the fear that he might yet be retaken, and in that case he would sorely need a friend at court to save him from the rope. You will say that I might have cut this knot by going with him in the boat, but I confess frankly that I had no stomach for such an enterprise. Indeed, as matters stood at our parting, it was plainly evident that I should have had to kill him or let him kill me to patch up a peace between us.
It was with a mind strangely confused by the sudden turn which I had forced our fortunes to take that I climbed the bank and dodged the sentry and made my way by the roundabout route Champe and I had taken, back to the street. I went this way, not because I was afraid to carry out that purpose of going through the garden, but because, in passing the gap in the fence, I found the garden walk untenanted, and a light showing in the upper windows of the house to tell me that Arnold had gone back to his office workroom.
With my feet pressing the familiar pavements in front of the house, it came to me suddenly and with a curious little shock that I had lighted upon an entirelynew world; a world in which I was at the same moment a man of rejuvenated honor and a hunted fugitive. I say it without shame that for the moment my eyes were dimmed and a rush of emotions too varied to be analyzed came swiftly over me. It is no light thing to fling one’s self, heart and soul, into the accomplishment of a certain purpose and then to turn short and take the path of renunciation at the very climax of success.
Yet I felt strangely light-hearted, and as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that all was over, I could realize very clearly that neither General Washington nor Mr. Hamilton could possibly have foreseen any such wading in the pool of duplicity for me as that into which my emprise had pushed me. Also, I understood that when they should be made aware of all the circumstances they would be the first to approve this final step of withdrawal which, lacking Beatrix Leigh’s gentle promptings, I might never have taken.
So my conscience was clear at last and yet all this had little bearing upon things present and pressing. When all was said, I was to the full as likely to pay the spy’s penalty now as I should have been had I been taken red-handed in the very act of abducting Arnold. The facts of my mission were all known to Castner, and it was upon these facts, and not upon the accomplishment, that I should be tried and condemned. Why Castner had waited so long before springing his trap I could not guess. Now that he was back from wherever he had been and with the spy Askew safely intow, a word to Sir Henry Clinton and another to Arnold were all that were needed. And, surely, Castner had had time to preach an entire sermon to either or both of them since I had seen him passing the tavern with his two companions.
I had a part answer to this puzzling question of the reason for Castner’s delay when, while I was as yet hanging upon my heel and not knowing which way to turn, I saw an officer with the shoulder-straps of a general descending Sir Henry Clinton’s steps; a man walking slowly and with his head bowed and his hands tightly locked behind him. The man was Benedict Arnold; and they had just been giving him the undeniable proof of my treachery. I knew it as well as if I had been an eavesdropper at the conference behind Sir Henry Clinton’s closed door.
Now you may scoff, if you will, but this discovery, the clinching of the nail, as you may say, hurt me unspeakably for the moment. Deny it as we may, we do all live more or less upon the good opinions of our fellow creatures; and surely I had painted myself as a villain of the deepest dye for this man who was coming on with his head bowed and carrying in his heart a bitter disappointment to go with him back to his quarters in the adjoining house.
I turned away, immeasurably saddened in spite of the strange and most welcome heart-lightening; and I do think I would have given much at that moment to be able to tell Arnold that I had spared him at the final crisis. He would never know, and perhaps that was best; yet I thought it was a needless twist of thethumb-screws of fate both for him and for me that he could not know.
But there was no time for repining. I had no thought of taking the first step in an effort to secure my own safety until after I should have made sure of Beatrix’s embarkation and departure; indeed, it was this, as much as anything else, that had made me miss the chance of fighting it out with the saturnine sergeant in the boat. By every lover’s obligation it was my first duty to see Beatrix and my Cousin Ju on board theNancy Jane, with the staunch little schooner plunging on its way down the bay; and after that I could make my flight—if Champe should not have turned up again to need a friend, and if all the avenues should not be closed to me.
But the more I thought of the seaward venture for the two women the less I liked it. It was a rough night, with the wind in the wrong quarter and the lower bay still cluttered with the waiting ships of Arnold’s expeditionary fleet. Again, Sprigg’s vessel might be detained; at any hour it might be boarded by the harbor patrols, and its contraband lading—the recovered tobacco—turned up to the light. In that case I knew that the military authority which had winked at the ransoming of the tobacco cargo could not, and would not, openly intervene.
Worse than all, Major Simcoe’s troop might return from its wild-goose chase on the Tarrytown road in time to claim passage rights for its twenty-man quota on theNancy Jane. Perhaps the Rangers had returned already!
With that threatening possibility in mind I resolved to go at once to the barracks on a spying reconnaissance, and if I should find that Simcoe’s troop had returned, to press quickly on to the Vandeventer house to hasten the embarkation. But first I yielded to a madman’s prompting that had been fretting at me ever since Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness and I had realized that I was once more a free man. It was no less than a foolish notion that I should like to show myself to Beatrix at the parting moment in my true colors—the same patriot homespun I had worn when she had given me God-speed at the door of her father’s house in Virginia, and which I had exchanged so unwillingly for these cursed facings of Arnold’s Loyal Americans.
Now that I had cut loose once and for all from the tanglings of chicanery and deceit, this uniform of Arnold’s Legion was hateful—doubly hateful. To every eye that saw me in it, it told an added lie; and I was sick and nauseated with lying. Could I not slip into the tavern and find my portmanteau and make the change?
It seemed feasible enough; and a stealthy peering through the windows of the lighted tap-room showed me a measurably clear field. A Quaker in a drab long-coat and broadbrim sat at one of the tables smoking a thin-stemmed church-warden. Two Hessians of Knyphausen’s were guzzling ale at another; and the Irish barman was nodding sleeping behind his wicket.
I opened the door and entered, passing quickly to the stair and reaching it before the aproned Irishmanat the bar could do more than rouse himself and say, “Och, ’tis yourself, then, is it, Captain Page?” and straightway fall to nodding again.
Coming to the barn-like room above-stairs which had apparently lain undisturbed since Champe and I had forsaken it to become fugitives two days before, I found flint, steel and tinder box, and a candle-end to flare gustily in the cold drafts of the place while I made the swift change from red and green to homespun blue. Flinging the badges of disgrace into the corner, I replaced the Scots’ rapier in its belt, thinking that I must, after all, be beholden to King George for this much of my equipment. For Champe still had my horse-saber, and I would not go on Beatrix’s business weaponless.
Being now ready to run the gauntlet of the tap-room again I sallied out and groped my way to the stair-head. A hubbub of voices was rising from the room below and when I had stepped cautiously down to the landing turn I saw that my fate had already outrun me. In the few minutes which had elapsed since my passing through it, the tap-room had filled with soldiers and a crowding throng of riff-raff from the street; and by the light of the bar candles I saw Castner. He was questioning the Irish barman sharply and the good pot-filler was trying his best to shield me.
“Arrah, now, Liftenant, dear! is it Captain Page you’d be asking for? Shure I haven’t seen the smilin’ face av him these four hours. Would he be comin’ here widout me knowin’ ut?”
At this point there was a stir in the crowd and atail man, soaked and dripping, pushed his way rudely up to Castner’s elbow. I looked and looked again, and gasped. By all the lunatics that ever filled a Bedlam, it was John Champe!
“Don’t believe that lying Irishman, Lieutenant Castner!” he cried out hoarsely. “I tell you I saw him enter here—no longer ago than the time it took me to run and fetch you, sir!”
I saw Castner’s involuntary shrinking from the man who was thus betraying one who at least held the claim of being a fellow-countryman, a fellow-soldier, and a fellow-deserter. I confess that, at first, it seemed blankly incredible to me that Champe should be doing this. If the spy Askew’s story was to be taken as a whole, the sergeant from Major Lee’s Legion was involved no less deeply than the captain from Baylor’s Horse. But there was no mistaking his intention. There were black circles around his eyes and he was so drunk with passion that he could scarcely stand without leaning against the barman’s wicket.
My first impulse was to steal back up the stair to try a drop from one of the windows. But when I would have translated the impulse into action, another man, a small rattish man in gray clothes and with a great bunch of seals dangling at his watch-fob, thrust himself forward out of the mob of onlookers and I heard his whispered word to Castner.
“On the stair landing, Lieutenant. Look for yourself, and let the Irishman spare his lying evasions!”
Castner looked as directed, bowing gravely when he saw me.
“Come down, Captain Page, and surrender your sword,” he commanded, soberly stern; and the brabble of voices ceased and a sudden hush fell on the room. Also, I noticed when Castner spoke and all eyes were turned to my landing, Champe drew back behind the more forward ones in the crowd and I saw him no more.
Now that the suspense was ended and open war was declared, I felt better and could even lean over the stair-rail and laugh down upon these king’s bush-beaters.
“You want my sword, Lieutenant?” I retorted. “I’ll give it to you, or to any man whose need is greater than my own—always provided that you or he will take it point foremost.”
“I make the demand in the king’s name,” said Castner, refusing to be either joked or jarred out of his even-toned soberness. And then he added, out of the heart of friendliness, I do think: “I wouldn’t make it harder for you than I must, Captain Page. You should see that resistance is madness.”
“I see that you may order your men to train their muskets on me and bring me down bird-wise, Mr. Castner. I do assure you it will be far more merciful than those other designs you have on me.”
He took me at my word with a soldierly disregard for further parleyings. In a trice he had cleared the space to the stair-foot, and had given the order to five of his musketeers. When their pieces were leveled he gave me one more chance.
“Once more, and for the last time, will you come down and render yourself, Captain Page?”
“With pleasure!” I cried; and whipping the rapier from its sheath I vaulted over the stair-rail and fell upon him so heartily that he was driven fairly back among his musket men before he could bare steel and defend himself.
Lord! but there was a scattering among those gaping lookers-on! Never have I seen buyers in the eagerest market so anxious to get to the front—only their front was the rear. With an onset so vigorous and unexpected, I might have cut and thrust my way to the door, if it had not been for the cursed little gray-coated spy, James Askew. But at the charging instant he dodged to get behind me, and I knew better than to leave an enemy of his temper unaccounted for in the rear. My foining to get a side-thrust at the spy gave Castner his chance to draw; and in another breath we were at it, hammer and tongs, Castner striving manfully to press me to the wall, and Dickie Page fighting as a man fights when he knows that his hours are strictly numbered, and who asks no more of this world and his enemies therein than the chance to die while his blood is leaping battle-warm.
It was the cur Askew who ended it, after all, though not as he meant to, I’ll dare swear. In our stamping rushes and thrustings and parryings, Castner and I had him penned in a corner, and at length, in a wide flanconade, my sword’s point touched him on the outward sweep to line. With a yelp like that of a pricked dog, he darted out of his corner and made to get away, rushing blindly into the zone of whistling sword blades.
It was the end of him, as well as of the sword play. He was just in time to catch the swift following thrust with which Castner replied to my attack, and the lieutenant’s blade passed clean through him; through his heart, I think, for he dropped like a stone, and gave only a shiver before his eyes glazed and his jaw fell.
This was my fair chance to kill Lieutenant Charles Castner, of the King’s Own; but I hope we Pages are something better than assassins, even when the blood is hot and we are fighting for our lives. My point went to the floor, and I stepped back to let Castner disengage; then the musketeers flung their pieces aside and made their smothering rush, and I was done.
The lieutenant was considerably out of breath when he pulled his sword from the spy’s body and fell fiercely upon his men, who were mishandling me pretty cruelly.
“Your word that you will not try to escape, Captain Page!” he panted; but I would not give it.
“No; ‘safe bind, safe find,’ is your motto, my good friend,” I said cheerfully, holding out my wrists for the cord.
It galled him to do it, but he would not fail in any part of his duty.
“I have had too much trouble in overtaking you,” he said in extenuation, when the soldiers were tying my hands; with all the riff-raff of idlers turned back now to look on, gaping.
“What a pity you have lost your witness,” I remarked, indicating the dead spy.
“The less valuable of my witnesses,” he correctedcurtly. “Unhappily for you, there is another and more credible one.”
This remark of his set me to wondering. Then I remembered the third man who had walked with Castner and the spy in the afternoon—the man whose face I could not see, but whose gait and figure had been singularly familiar. Was this the “more credible” witness? I should soon know.
We stayed no time at all in the tavern after the hand-tying. With a word to the inn people about the disposition of the body of James Askew, Castner disciplined his corporal’s guard and we took the open air for it, pointing not for Sir Henry Clinton’s house, as I supposed we should, but on past it toward Fort George.
Within the walls of the fort, we marched silently to the house of the commander, a long low structure of Dutch brick, facing the parade ground. Two rooms of it were well lighted, and when the door was opened and I was thrust in, I saw that the court-martial was sitting and waiting for me, and that I was confronting my judges.