Francis Lynde

“ I’ll kill you for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was his closing volley.
“Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him again.
“What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter; Middleton saw me come off.”
“No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse. ”

“ You are a warm-hearted lover, Captain, and it does you credit. And love knows no politics, I’ll warrant you. Come, let us be going. There is much to be done before to-morrow, and time and tide wait for no man.”
And so we took our departure from the house of revels, and though I looked passionately everywhere for her in the crowded assembly room, I had no other sight of Beatrix, and had to go at last without knowing whether she forgave me for saving my life with that ravished kiss. ”

“ The wind, or the shock of the falling door, had extinguished our candle, and we were in total darkness. But Champe had his flint and steel and tinder box, and the tallow dip, for what small good it might do us, was soon flaring again.
“That was a master bright idea of yours, Sergeant Champe,” I commented grimly, when the noise overhead had ceased, and we were left to silence and our own thoughts. “If you had only added that we should begin with the cask which was most likely to hold our Jack-in-the-box—but it came wrong end foremost, like everything else in this wretched mission of ours!” ”

“ A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL IT nettles me to think that one carrying the name of Page should be a prey to senseless terror, but the sight of that sour-faced soldier standing, with his musket at parade, before my door, made me ill.
Weighing it evenly in a calmer moment, it was not so greatly to be wondered at. A spy’s life always hangs by the slenderest thread, with all the world that touches him a den of wild beasts ready to tear him limb from limb. ”

“ When I set foot upon the landing-stage and remembered all that I had undertaken to do in this British stronghold of New York, remembered, also, how at this very moment, most likely, Jack and Seytoun, and—save Mr. Hamilton alone—every friend and enemy I had left behind me in the camp at Tappan was cursing the very day of my birth, my teeth chattered with the morning’s cold, and I would have given many broad acres of the Page tobacco lands to be well out of the wretched tangle into which my desperate mission had led me. ”

“ I love a boat and the water as I love a good horse; but it is worth something to have your enemy drag you where you expected to drag yourself, and when the shadows of the great western cliffs were blackening thick upon the waters, I kicked the rowing seat out of the way, and stretched myself at ease in the shallop’s bottom to get a soldier’s nap before the sun should rise upon my further adventures. ”

“ Where is your Virginia breeding, man!—or have you lost it campaigning in this cursed country of the flat-footed Dutch?”
I smiled. This, you may notice, was my cool-blood Jack Pettus, who, but a moment earlier, had been telling me that the present was no time to be stirring up private quarrels. But my word was passed—as I knew only too well, and as he could not know.
“I can’t fight Captain Seytoun, Jack; but neither can I brook his endless tongue-lashing,” I said, moodily enough, no doubt.
“‘Can’t’ is no gentleman’s word, Dick,” he insisted, still fiercely emphatic upon the point of honor. ”

“ My senses had gone blank to all outward happenings at that mention of an officer of my own fellowship who had made an appointment with Castner and the spy to insure my undoing. Admitting that Mr. Hamilton’s secret had leaked out, what man in all the patriot army hated me cordially enough to do this despicable thing? There was but one answer to that query: I had come between Howard Seytoun and the woman of his desire. For no lighter cause would any man turn his back upon his country, his honor as a soldier, his loyalty to the brotherhood of the army. ”

“ It was certainly no lightening of my responsibility that made me sleepy when the quill-scratching grew by and by into a soothing lullaby. But there had been a strenuous [69] night and a none too restful day to follow it, and before I realized that I had been asleep, I awoke to find Sir Judas standing over me, with the gloomy scowl of half-aroused suspicion wrinkling his brow, his hands behind him, and his attitude that of a spy at the windows of the unsuspecting.
It is none so easy to come out of a sound sleep in full possession of all the faculties. ”

“ Hamilton, made my stirring escape from the patriot camp, changed flags, made my standing good with Sir Henry Clinton and with Arnold, and had lived a fairly busy lifetime in a strenuous day and a still more strenuous night. Moreover, I had discovered Mistress Beatrix Leigh in a place where I had least expected to find her, had stirred her anger and contempt, and—I hoped—in some small measure, at least, her love for me; and had involved myself in a tangle of deceit and double-dealing that might well lead me shortly to a British prison and the gallows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.
“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?” ”

“ War and its cruel necessities are frightful levelers, breaking down many ideals and brushing aside all the finer scruples. Though I was far from recognizing it at the moment, the desire to carry out the kidnapping purpose had come to be a purely brutal obsession, recking nothing of the common humanities, and completely losing sight of the fact that Arnold, by his misguided trusting of us, no less than by his many kindnesses to me, was making an unconscious appeal too strong to be disregarded. ”

“ A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it came, even while I was seeking for words in which to hint that my present Judas-coat might not always stand between us; the trembling of the sweet lips, the welling up of the tears.
“Oh, what madness possessed you, Dick?” she wailed; “you, who were the bravest, the most devoted, the most cheerful when all was darkest!”
I rose and settled my sword-belt. There was more [130] love-violence ahead if I should stay; that, and the certain breaking of my promise to Mr. Hamilton.
“I have greatly overstayed my time; I must go, Beatrix, dear,” I said, and I scarcely knew the sound of my own voice. ”

“ The man you will strike down to-night has had no hint of warning; miserable traitor as he is, he still believes you are his friend—not only his captain servant, but his friend. He trusts you with his love-letters to his wife; he takes you fully into his confidence. Is it not so?”
“It is,” I confessed. And then I broke out passionately: “But my word is passed; I must not give this up, Beatrix! You must not make me give it up!”
“And I shall not try, Dick, dear,” she went on in the same low tone. ”

“ The day was dawning coldly when I awoke and found that my rescuers—or my captors—were debarking at the town landing-place under the guns of Fort George. It was a raw morning, my leg was stiff and sore from the splinter wound, and the ensign who ordered me to tumble out had evidently taken his cue from his gruff commander and cursed me heartily because I did not move as quickly as he thought I should.
It is remarkable how the morning after takes the fine edge off the enthusiasm and daring of the night before. ”

“ 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, [278] 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the landing-stage, which was lighted by a pair of cresset torches flaring gustily on stakes thrust into the ground, I found the lieutenant. He was forwarding the last few boat-loads of stragglers, and while he busied himself with orders to the ensigns in command of the ships’ boats, I had speech with the quartermaster of the fort garrison, who told me that the greater part of the expeditionary fleet was already standing down the bay.
But Castner had other news for me when he was free to impart it; news which set me aflame with fresh invention fires. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Askew,” I commanded. “You see a way out, and I don’t—other than the bloody one.”
“Ah; now we are coming upon some more habitable ground. Outwardly, you are a Loyalist, Mr. Page, and inwardly, I doubt not, a true patriot. I am neither. I had thought of asking a hundred guineas for this news I carry—it is not too much, you would say?—and it doesn’t matter a boddle to me whose money it is. In other words, your gold will have as true a ring in my ears as Sir Henry Clinton’s, or even Mr. Arnold’s.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any minute a messenger might come from Arnold requiring my attendance, and the wonder we had been trying all the morning to avert would be raised with a vengeance. So, after agreeing upon a low sailors’ groggery beyond the burned district on the eastern water-front as our meeting point for the evening, where either of us who chanced to be the first comer would await the arrival of the other, we parted, Champe going boldly down the inn stair in his new toggery and carrying himself as little like a soldier as any young man of fashion in New York. ”

“ The air of the hothouse place was dense and heavy with the perfume of blooming plants, and there was little light save that which filtered through the glass roof and came from a sort of cresset-lamp bracketed to the housewall outside and overhead. But with all its pent-up fragrance, or perhaps, because of it, the glass house was empty, and I flung myself down upon a settle to wait, hoping against hope that she would relent and come and give me a word with her, though what that word should be, I had no more idea than a simpleton. ”

“ Askew. Don’t you?”
“It is a nice point,” he said, as if deliberating on it. “On the one hand, I have my hundred guineas without the risk. On the other, since I was willing to take the risk to earn them from Clinton or Arnold, why should I hesitate to try the doubling? Ah, I have it! You have heard the saying that money is always cowardly, Mr. Page? With your hundred guineas in my pocket, each cowardly guinea of them will be persuading me to save its life—and yours.” ”

“ Arnold I saw only once or twice, and scarcely gave him a second thought; and as for Champe, whom I might easily have hunted out now since he was probably hanging about the door, I had forgotten the worthy sergeant-major’s existence. So selfish and single-eyed is a great love aroused and well convinced that it has lost its all. ”

“ The night gale, which had blown too hard for our enterprise, Champe’s and mine, had blown the war-ships back to New York from whatever port they had been calling at; and now, my news-vendor told me, the sailing of the fleet waited only on a favorable shift of the wind.
“Two chances against us—Castner and the fleet-sailing,” I said to myself, faring back to my prison cell in Arnold’s house, and breakfast, “both of them more than likely to ripen before we see another night. Truly, the devil fights for his own!” ”

“ The sergeant came down from the steps with the veins in his forehead swelled to great whipcords.
“I’ve put three hundred pounds of tobacco to the height of my shoulder with less wind-cutting,” he panted, scraping the sweat from his face with a crooked forefinger. And then: “I’ll never trap a rat again while I live, Captain Dick. I know now how it feels.”
“We won’t give up yet,” I cut in. “There must be some way out of this hole. If it were a common house-cellar, there would be no need; but as a store-house for smugglers ... they’d never leave themselves without a back door for emergencies. ”

“ Here, where King’s Ferry crossed from bank to bank, lay my greatest chance of danger; and taking the mid-channel for it, I unshipped the oars and let the boat drift as it would in the tideway. So floating, when I was well past the line of the ferry, past all hazard of being discovered by one of our patrol boats, as I imagined, I ventured to step the mast and to hoist the little leg-of-mutton sail with which the boat was provided. The showing of the small triangle of white cloth was my undoing. ”