I made a swift gesture for silence. There are times when the very stones in the pavement must not be trusted.
“You must not forget that you are speaking to a captain in Benedict Arnold’s Legion, or”—here I lowered my voice to mate it with her eager half-whisper—“that a word of what you have just hinted would hang that same captain higher than Haman!”
“But you do not deny—you do not deny!” she fluttered. “Oh, Dick! give me one little thread to cling to—one look to tell me that you are—”
I knew her bosom was heaving; that the quick tears had risen to quench the righteous indignation in the beautiful eyes. And yet I could not speak to her; could not even look at her. For here was Arnold coming down the house steps with Mistress Margaret on his arm; and, not fifty feet away, a smallish man in sober gray was standing before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, looking curiously up at the higher windows and absently toying with a great bunch of seals at his watch-fob as he stared.
There was no time to say a word to Beatrix, if I ever hoped to have time for any future word with her—time and the breath to say it with. The smallish man in gray, gazing in abstracted indecision at Sir Henry’s upper windows, was twiddling my life and Sergeant Champe’s at his fingers’ ends. Let him take but a single step within the door he was facing, and we two would be as water spilt on the ground, which can not be gathered up again.
I scarcely know how I left her; how, for one brief instant, I made way deferentially for Arnold and his wife, and in the next had come within gripping distance of the man in Quaker gray. But the thing was done in some fashion, and after this frenzied taking of the first step, the next came easily.
“Your name is Askew—James Askew?” I whispered in the spy’s ear; and if I had put the point of a knife between his ribs he could not have winced more palpably.
“No, no, Lieutenant—er—Captain, I should say; you are quite mistaken, sir. Duvall is my name; Harrison Duvall, of—of Pennsylvania.”
“One of your names, perhaps,” I qualified, smiling down on him meaningly, and now I noted the shifting ferrety eyes whose color Champe could not recall—the eyes, the black stock and the scratch-wig.
“We need not quarrel over a little matter of names, Mr. Askew,” I went on rapidly. “Let it be sufficient that I know you and know your business here. You are in great danger—as great as, or greater than, that which you were confronting in Mr. Washington’s camp at Tappan no longer ago than yesterday morning.”