Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

THE red bonfire glow tinting the sky over the parade ground of Fort George had faded into the night when I won back to the lower town. Passing the sentries on the outer scarp of the fort I made my way down to the water-front to look for Castner, and to get my embarking directions.

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.

“Good evening to you again, Captain Page,” he said, when he lounged up from the despatching of the last of the boats. “Did you come by the headquarters on your way?”

“No,” said I. “I went on a mission for General Arnold in the town and was told to come directly here.”

“We are delayed,” he announced, not very regretfully I thought. “At the last moment orders came from Sir Henry Clinton detaching our convoy frigate and two of the sloops of war for temporary service elsewhere. The troop fleet is to wait in the lower bay for the return of the three men-of-war, and all officers not on service duty have shore leave during the interval. How does that set with you?”

It was the part of prudence to let the news appear to be a matter of indifference to me, and I answered accordingly.

“A soldier should be prepared for anything; and I’ll dare say the tavern is a fairly good inn—far better than the cabin of an ill-smelling fishing schooner. I thank heaven I have no active command to send me down the bay with the musket men.”

Castner grinned. “I’ve been picking some comfort out of that in my own case,” he admitted. “Do you go back to Mr. Ar—to the general’s quarters?”

I told him I should not, if he would be good enough to report me: that I should go across to the tavern to retake my room, where I might be found if there were any further orders for me. And so we parted at the northwestern angle of the fort, and I was glad to be alone. For now the book of the kidnapping possibilities was suddenly reopened, and my brain was busy with a thousand desperate plots all weaving themselves upon this most opportune delaying of the expedition.

Wanting nothing so much as a chance to let my mind shuttle connectedly among the plot threads, I shunned the tavern and kept on around the northern and eastern escarpment of the fort until I found myself once more approaching the waterside and the landing-place with its two smoky torches still flaring in the wind. The spot was deserted, though it was so close under the guns of the fort that I could hear the tread of the sentinel as he paced back and forth behind the screen of the outer ravelin.

Hearing my footsteps, the sentry stopped and would have challenged me, I suppose, if his attention had not been drawn at the same minute to a ship’s small boat which was approaching the landing. His challenge went for that, instead, and when I heard the answer I stood quickly aside and waited for what should follow. For, by all the good luck that ever fell upon a perplexed and half-desperate plotter, the man who stepped from the stern-sheets of the small boat and made answer to the challenging sentry was none other than my fellow conspirator, Sergeant Champe.

“A courier from the fleet, with letters for General Arnold,” was his reply to the fort’s watch-dog; and when he had taken the few strides necessary to carry him out of earshot from the ravelin and from the two sailors in his boat, I waylaid him, telling him in twenty words how fortune—and Sir Henry Clinton—had given us one more chance to retrieve ourselves.

“Plot for it, then,” was his gloomy response. “I see nothing beyond my going back to the ships presently with the answer to the letter I’m carrying.”

“That you shall not do,” I replied hastily. “We must think up some excuse to keep you ashore. Leave that to me and go on your errand. I’ll wait for you here and have my plan ready against your return.”

The plan, decided on in a half-hour’s chilly marching back and forth across the green while I waited for Champe to come back, was not very complicated. When the sergeant made his appearance I took the despatches and sent him over to the tavern to reengage my room for me, telling him to pose as my soldier-servant therein. Meanwhile, I told him, I would take his place as Arnold’s courier, and it would go hard with me if I should not account for his detention on shore when I could have speech with those on shipboard who had sent him.

Passing on to the landing-place in my new character of despatch carrier, I found the sailors willing enough to exchange the sergeant they had brought ashore for a captain; and at my order to give way, they pulled off to one of the rear-guard vessels of the fleet, where, to my dismay, I found I had to deal with Major Simcoe, whose letters to Arnold had been the despatches carried ashore by Champe.

Quite naturally, the major’s first question was for his messenger, and I was glad that the light of the ship’s lantern was so poor that he could not see my involuntary recoil when I saw who it was with whom I had to fence.

“I am General Arnold’s aide,” I replied guardedly. “Were you expecting some one else, Major Simcoe?”

“I sent a man from the Loyal American detail on board, a sergeant named Champe,” he explained. “Did he return with you, Captain?”

“No. Possibly the general made other use of him,” I suggested.

“Possibly,” said the major, eying me shrewdly from beneath his bushy brows. “But in that case he must have changed his mind after this letter was sent. You will see that it is superscribed to me ‘By the hands of Sergeant Champe,’” and he held the letter so that I might read the writing on the back.

There was no help save in a stout lie quickly told; and even this might have disastrous after-consequences if the major should come ashore later on and follow it up.

“General Arnold is my superior officer, and I do not presume to question his reasons for writing another man’s name on the letter which he gives me to deliver, Major Simcoe,” I said boldly, adding, with even greater impudence: “If you do not wish to receive the general’s despatches at my hands, let me have them again and I’ll so report to General Arnold.”

“Oh, there is no need for any heat about it, Captain Page,” was his even-toned retort. “Only, when you go ashore, I shall be glad if you will look up my sergeant and send him off to me. You shall have the boat’s crew as long as may be necessary.”

Now this was not satisfactory, either, since it made me responsible for the boat’s crew, and, indirectly, for Champe’s return. So I took the high-and-mighty stand again.

“Egad, Major Simcoe,” I protested, “I’m afraid you will have to hold me excused. General Arnold would not be greatly pleased to have one of his aides detailed by you to bring in your stragglers.”

At this the doughty major came close and looked me in the eyes as the poor light would let him.

“Hark you, Captain Page,” he said, speaking so those who stood about should not hear; “you seem bent on quarreling with me when there is no need for it. That is your privilege, sir, and if you were a king’s officer I should be the last man in the army to deny you. As it is—well, a polite word or two may go far with a gentleman in your situation, and I wonder you are so slow in perceiving it. Now, sir, will you report to the general in command that I am short a sergeant, and that I shall be greatly pleased to have the proper steps taken to find and send him off to me?”

If there is one good quality above another in the Page make-up it is the instant knowledge of the precise moment when the trumpet should sound the retreat. I saw now that I had taken the wrong tack with the tart major, and that I must butter him well if I wished to come off without loss.

“Saying nothing of your allusions, Major Simcoe,—which we may well take up at some other time and place,—I beg your pardon on the sergeant’s account,” I said, with no more than the proper touch of offended dignity. “You put me upon my mettle, seeming to question my right to bring you a letter—which you may take as the reason why I did not tell you plainly in the beginning that Champe was sent upon another errand after your letter had been written and superscribed. I am sure you do not question the commanding general’s right to use a warrant officer of his own legion as he sees fit.”

“I beg your pardon, Captain Page,” said the major crisply. “I am a soldier, sir, and I was thinking only of the man’s possible disobedience. Of course, if Mr. Ar—if the general required him, I have nothing more to say,” and he drew aside and read his letter.

Now I had another twinge or two to suffer while I waited, for fear Arnold might possibly have made some mention of Champe in the letter. But in a minute or two the major turned and gave me my dismissal quite courteously, telling me that there was no answer other than to convey his duty to the commanding officer, and to say, if it came in my way, that he, Major Simcoe, would report at the headquarters sometime during the following day—a thing I prayed my good angel to prevent, if it could be done without setting the entire cosmic plan of the universe ajee.

Having thus been given leave to vanish, I made good use of it before any other untoward thing should happen; and with a coin apiece for my two sailor oarsmen at the landing, I answered the sentry challenge from the fort and made my way swiftly to the tavern.

Here I learned that my portmanteau had not been taken away, and that a soldier, calling himself my servant, was waiting for me in the room above. Meaning to give the Royalist barman no chance to think that I cared a rap about any common soldier who might be sitting up for me, I ordered a cup of wine and a pipe of tobacco, and sat quietly before the fire in the supper-room, sipping the one and smoking the other for a full half-hour before paying my score and going above-stairs.

In the barn-like room Champe was improving the interval soldier-wise; which is to say that he had taken the covers from my bed, rolled himself in them, and was sound asleep on the floor. He roused at my incoming, however, and was broad awake by the time I had thrown a log on the smoldering fire he had made.

“Well, and how did you carry it off with the major?” he asked when he had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“Not so handsomely as I should have, had you told me it was Major Simcoe I should have to hoodwink,” I retorted. “But you are safe for the time being—which means until Major Simcoe and Arnold meet each other and fall to comparing notes.”

“And then?” queried my sergeant.

“Then Simcoe will learn that I have lied to him, and Arnold may not be able to remember that he sent you on an errand that prevented your return to the ship with his letter to the major,” I rejoined shortly.

“Which means that we have purchased—how many hours, Captain Dick?”

“God knows; and I do not. But we must make the most of what time we have. No one seems to know where our convoy ships of war have gone, or when they are to return. But with the fleet waiting in the lower bay, the interval can not be long. What we do, we must do quickly.”

“Aye,” said Champe; “and what will that be?”

I had been culling the plots out patiently ever since Castner’s announcement of the delay had set them weaving, and now there was but one that offered any promise of success—and that a desperate one. With the uncertain time-factor we had to count on, it was useless to think of trying to get word to Major Lee in the camp at Tappan. What we did must be done without help from the outside; and upon this hard-and-fast pivot the temerarious enterprise must be made to turn.

“What we thought we might accomplish with a corporal’s guard of Major Lee’s men to help us, we must still do, and do it with our hands, John Champe,” I said.

“Take him forcibly in his house, you mean?”

I nodded.

“I’m with you, Captain Dick,” was the stout sergeant’s rejoinder. “But afterward?”

“That is what it may take us all the time we have, and maybe more, to provide for. The river is our only way out, and we must have a boat, the lightest and swiftest we can find. Do you pull an oar, Sergeant?”

“No so comfortably as I do a bridle rein. But I shall make out when it comes to that. What is your plan?—or have you drawn any picture of it in your mind?”

“It is as simple as knocking a beef yearling in the head with a stone,” I admitted, nettled that I could contrive nothing subtler. “We find our boat, beg, buy or steal it, and place it as near at hand as may be convenient. That done, we lay hands on Sir Judas, sleeping or waking, and then for the river and a long pull with the tide or against it, as fortune chances to smile or frown upon us in fixing the hour.”

“Aye,” said Champe, quite without enthusiasm, “it’s surely simple enough, Captain Dick.”

“Think of a better, then,” I snapped curtly.

The sergeant let me have another sight of his ferocious grin.

“I’ve had my turn of thinking, and it’s you for it now,” he retorted. “I might say that you put your foot squarely into my think-trap and stopped it from going off, but I shan’t. You’ll give the order, Captain Dick, and I’ll obey it, if it tells me to cut Mr. Benedict Iscariot’s throat while he is asleep.”

After that we were silent for a time, both of us weighing and measuring the hazards of the desperate game, I think. Champe still kept his place on the floor, sitting jack-knifed with his hands locked over his knees and his wide-opened eyes staring at nothing. Suddenly, as I was opening my mouth to ask where we were likely to find our boat, he laid a hand on my knee and shook his head.

“What is it?” I asked, but only with my eyes.

“There is some one stirring in the room beyond,” he said in a half-whisper. “Who is your neighbor, Captain Dick?”

Matching his tone, I said that I knew none of my fellow lodgers save Lieutenant Castner, and that I did not know the placing of the lieutenant’s room.

“We were full careless,” said my companion. And then he got upon his feet with no more noise than a cat would have made and suddenly extinguished the candle. The firelight still flung long shadows about the room, and in the shelter of the broadest of them Champe glided away to the wall of suspicion and examined it foot by foot with scrutinizing eyes and gently gliding finger-tips. When he crept back to me he was holding out a forefinger the end of which was whitened with powdered lime.

“That tells the tale,” he whispered. “There’s a whiff of this dust on the floor, and above it, at the height of a man’s head, a peep-hole the size of a goose-quill. We must know who is in that room, Captain Dick.”

Here was a crude peril at the very outset of things; but what the sergeant said was very true. We must know who our spy was at all costs. Taking off our shoes we passed silently into the corridor and found the neighboring door by feeling cautiously for it in the dark. It was on the latch, and after listening breathlessly for a full minute we opened the door by slow inchings and listened again. Still there was no sound, and now we entered the room, groping blindly, first for impeding obstacles and then for the bed where our spy might be feigning sleep.

In this noiseless circuiting Champe went to the right and I to the left, and we met in the far corner where the high, four-posted bed filled a sort of alcove built to contain it. Then I think we both drew breath of relief, for the bed was empty.

“Wait for me,” whispered my companion; and when he returned a little later he had relighted our candle and was carrying it high above his head.

But the candle told us nothing more than our gropings had. The room was unoccupied; was bare of any lodger’s belongings; had evidently been undisturbed since its daytime redding by the chamber-maid. But in the partition wall between it and my room we found the peep-hole which, on the principle of locking the stable after the horse had been most successfully stolen, we carefully plugged.

When we were before my fire again we were little wiser than when we had left it. Our danger turned upon a question of time. When was the hole bored through the partition wall? There was no way of determining this: but Champe was sure he had heard footsteps in the adjoining room at the moment when he had called my attention.

“Take it whatever way you please,” he said; “there’s somebody in this house who suspects you. What we have talked here to-night would hang a whole regiment, and it’s my notion that our spy has heard all he needs to hear and has gone for help to take us.”

“In that case,” said I, “since we can die but once, I for my part choose to die fighting rather than at the rope’s end.” So I got up and barred the door.

“Right you are, my Captain,” Champe agreed most heartily; and then we took stock of our weapons.

Fortunately we were provided with the tools we both knew best how to use. My trooper sword, which I had brought off in the boat escape from Nyack, was with my portmanteau; and this I gave to Champe. For myself there was the captain’s rapier that went with my rank as Arnold’s aide; a good serviceable Scottish blade which I had carefully selected from a dozen or more in the barracks armory for its hang and balance. I thought we should be able to give a pretty good account of ourselves when the time came, and so much I said to Champe.

“Aye,” he replied. “They’ll take the muskets to us before they get us, and then I’ll pray only that they’ll shoot straight. Also, I’ll pray that they do not keep us waiting over-long; I’m fair dead for sleep.”

At this I remembered that the sergeant had lost the whole of the preceding night, as I had, and that he had not had my chance of sleeping out the day in recompense. So, when a full half-hour had passed with no signs or sounds of the expected arresting party, I told Champe to roll himself once more in the bed-covers, leaving me to keep watch. The lack of a boat put any action out of the question for the night; and, deplore it as we might, another day must elapse before we could flog our simple garroting plot into shape.

It was a fruitful vigil that I kept, sitting through the quiet hours before the smoldering fire on the hearth; fruitful because it gave me time to pass in orderly review the exciting events which had been crowded into the short space of two days and nights. I could scarcely realize that the day before the quickly changing scenes of the yesterday, I had been pulling a small boat idly down the river from Teller’s Point, intent upon nothing more pressing than the spending of my few hours’ furlough in Dirck van Ditteraick’s tap-room with Jack Pettus for a boon companion.

This side of that, I had quarreled with Seytoun, taken a huge slice of responsibility in the talk with Mr. 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.

And, last of all, three days away from our quiet camp in the Hudson hills, I was sitting here in an upper room in the tavern, waiting minute by minute for the summons to a struggle which, if it should come, would, for Champe’s sake and mine, much better end in the swiftest snuffing-out for both of us.

I yawned sleepily. Our spy-takers were a long time making up their minds, I concluded, and I had a hearty wish that they would hurry. No man fights the better for having to sit for hours on end with his bared sword across his knees, straining his ears for the first sounds of the battle signal.

Hence, it was with some dull prickings of disappointment that I roused Champe an hour before dawn, and flung myself upon the bed for a little wooing of forgetfulness to precede the forthbringings of another day. For if there had come a thundering at the door and a shouted command to open in the king’s name, we should at least have confronted a peril known and measurable. But now the darkness was full of mysterious eyes, as the silence told of whispering voices; and no step we should henceforth take would be lacking its hidden snare or pitfall.