This information gave Lee the greatest satisfaction. On the night in question he left camp with a small party, taking with him three led horses, for the prisoner and his captors, and at midnight sought the appointed spot. Here he waited with slowly declining hope. Hour after hour passed; the gray light of dawn appeared in the east; the sun rose over the waters; yet Champe and his prisoner failed to appear. Deeply disappointed, Lee led his party back to camp.
The cause of the failure may be told in a few words. It was a simple one. The merest chance saved Arnold from the fate which he so richly merited. This was, that on the very day which Champe had fixed for the execution of his plot, Arnold changed his quarters, his purpose being to attend to the embarkation of an expedition to the south, which was to be under his command.
In a few days Lee received a letter from his agent, telling the cause of failure, and saying that, at present, success was hopeless. In fact, Champe found himself unexpectedly in an awkward situation. Arnold's American legion was to form part of this expedition. Champe had enlisted in it. He was caught in a trap of his own setting. Instead of crossing the Hudson that night, with Arnold as his prisoner, he found himself on board a British transport, with Arnold as his commander. He was in for the war on the British side; forced to face his fellow-countrymen in the field.
We need not tell the story of Arnold's expedition to Virginia, with the brutal incidents which history relates concerning it. It will suffice to say that Champe formed part of it, all his efforts to desert proving fruitless. It may safely be said that no bullet from his musket reached the American ranks, but he was forced to brave death from the hands of those with whom alone he was in sympathy.
Not until Arnold's corps had joined Cornwallis at Petersburg did its unwilling recruit succeed in escaping. Taking to the mountains he made his way into North Carolina, and was not long in finding himself among friends. His old corps was in that State, taking part in the pursuit of Lord Rawdon. It had just passed the Congaree in this pursuit when, greatly to the surprise of his old comrades, the deserter appeared in their ranks. Their surprise was redoubled when they saw Major Lee receive him with the utmost cordiality. A few minutes sufficed to change their surprise to admiration. There was no longer occasion for secrecy. Champe's story was told, and was received with the utmost enthusiasm by his old comrades. So this was the man they had pursued so closely, this man who had been seeking to put the arch-traitor within their hands! John Champe they declared, was a comrade to be proud of, and his promotion to a higher rank was the plain duty of the military authorities.
Washington knew too well, however, what would be the fate of his late agent, if taken by the enemy, to subject him to this peril. He would have been immediately hanged. Champe was, therefore, discharged from the service, after having been richly rewarded by the commander-in-chief. When Washington, seventeen years afterwards, was preparing against a threatened war with the French, he sent to Lee for information about Champe, whom he desired to make a captain of infantry. He was too late. The gallant sergeant-major had joined a higher corps. He had enlisted in the grand army of the dead.
MARION, THE SWAMP-FOX.
Our story takes us back to the summer of 1780, a summer of war, suffering, and outrage in the States of the South. General Gates, at the head of the army of the South, was marching towards Camden, South Carolina, filled with inflated hopes of meeting and defeating Cornwallis. How this hopeful general was himself defeated, and how, in consequence, the whole country south of Virginia fell under British control, history relates; we are not here concerned with it.
Gates's army had crossed the Pedee River and was pushing southward. During its march a circumstance occurred which gave great amusement to the trim soldiery. There joined the army a volunteer detachment of about twenty men, such a heterogeneous and woe-begone corps that Falstaff himself might have hesitated before enlisting them. They were a mosaic of whites and blacks, men and boys, their clothes tatters, their equipments burlesques on military array, their horses—for they were all mounted—parodies on the noble war-charger. At the head of this motley array was a small-sized, thin-faced, modest-looking man, his uniform superior to that of his men, but no model of neatness, yet with a flashing spirit in his eye that admonished the amused soldiers not to laugh at his men in his presence. Behind his back they laughed enough. The Pedee volunteers were a source of ridicule to the well-clad Continentals that might have caused trouble had not the officers used every effort to repress it.