“Quiet, you dog!” I ordered, and then I thrust him in ahead of me and followed to shut and bar the door.
He stood where I had pushed him, in the middle of the floor, and made no resistance when I felt him over for weapons and found two dueling pistols and a keen-edged flesher’s knife hidden under his waistcoat. For a man so well provided, he was surely the abjectest craven I ever saw.
“Now you can go a little more comfortably into that matter I spoke of,” I remarked, breaking the blade of the knife over an andiron, and shaking the powder primings out of the pans of the pistols. “You were saying that you had news to sell—”
“I said nothing of the kind,” he flashed back. “Let me out of this, or I—I swear I’ll raise the house on you!”
“No, you won’t,” I replied coolly. “Nothing is farther from your present intentions, Mr. James Askew, and the fact that I know this is your best assurance of safety.”
“I don’t know you,” he raged. “What have you got me here for?”
“That is better,” I said, pushing him into a chair and drawing up another for myself. “First, I brought you here to tell you that your news outran you. I can repeat to you, word for word, the information you were going to try to sell to Sir Henry Clinton.”
I saw, the moment the words were uttered, that I had made the rashest blunder. This spy was no ordinary tale-bearer to be hoodwinked or bullied out of his cunning. The lines of his face grew more hatchet-like and the sharp little eyes dwindled to pin-points.
“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.”
His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt.