“You might be willing to let well enough alone and not try to double on me? I think that is most unlikely, Mr. 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.”
I laughed. The thing had risen to the plane of humor. Here was a man whose life lay in my hand, and he was trying, not to bribe me to spare him, but to persuade me to give him a handsome present for the privilege of sparing him!
But when the laugh was over, the dilemma still remained, with its horns as sharp as before. If I could not kill this scoundrel in cold blood, neither could I turn him loose, with or without a golden bid for his silence. I thought it out calmly and saw no middle way. The man must die, but I would give him an honester man’s chance to die fighting.
My saber was standing in the chimney corner where Champe had left it the night before. I drew it from the sheath and laid it on the table, with the hilt to my spy’s hand.
“Take it and do your best,” I said. “We have spent too many words and too much time.”
But he merely shook his head soberly and locked his hands over one knee.
“I should be a greater ninny than I hoped you took me for, to give you so good an excuse for pinking me, Captain Page. I am no swashbuckling horse-soldier, to tangle my legs in a sword, or to know how to use one.”
Here was the impasse again, with no way to circumvent it, that I could see. What was I to do? With the long Scots’ rapier for a walking-staff I began to pace the floor, cudgeling my brain to think of some expedient that would secure our safety, Champe’s and mine, without sinking one or both of us to the level of remorseless assassins. I had not dreamed it would be so hard. Thumbing it over with Champe, the one desirable thing seemed to be to get hold of this scoundrel before he could leak the news that would efface us. But now he was secured, the whole thing was to know what to do with him.
Askew never moved a muscle as I strode back and forth behind his chair. He sat perfectly still, staring into the blackened fireplace as if its soot-covered interior had fascinated him. A dozen times I passed him, and at each facing about he seemed to be staring the harder, with the thin fingers more tightly interlocked over the suspended knee. Then—