I do not know how it came about, or why I spun on my heel and threw the rapier up to guard my head. It was not for any warning either to eye or ear that he gave me, certainly. But when I wheeled, the heavy trooper’s sword was flashing in the air and my instinctive parry served only to break the force of the blow—to turn it flat-bladed when it was meant to be a cleaver-cut such as a butcher would aim at the meat on his block. Then the half-lighted dusk of the long room burst into a thousand scintillating stars, and I knew no more until I came back to life with John Champe kneeling beside me and sopping my head with icy water from the hand-basin.
“The man—Askew?” I gasped, when I could find the words. “Is he gone?”
“I don’t see him anywhere,” said the sergeant, making believe to peer into the gathering shadows. Then he chuckled. “So it was Askew who gave you this goose-egg on your skull, was it? But rest you easy, Captain Dick; he has had time to swim the Hudson corner-wise before this. The blood was dried in your hair when I found you lying here—and that was a good quarter-hour ago.”
I sat up on the floor, and the stars began to twinkle again.
“Help me,” I muttered. “We must get out of this—now—this minute! That double-faced fiend will be back again, with a file of soldiers at his heels. Stir yourself, man, for heaven’s sake! I tell you he knows us both—and knows us for what we really are!”
XIV
A CASK OF BITTERS
EXPECTING nothing less than the spy’s return at the head of an arresting party, we lost no time getting out of the tavern, Champe going first, and I following when he gave the prearranged signal that the coast was clear.
Being safely out-of-doors, our next care was to put distance between us and the threatening trap from which we had escaped. Taking the readiest way that offered we hurried eastward through the burned district, avoiding the barracks on one hand and the water-front on the other, having no particular destination in view at first, and no plan other than the simple one of losing ourselves as completely and speedily as possible.
In this dodging flight, on which we ran as the wicked do,—with no man pursuing,—the sergeant was the file-leader. Having been in the town for near two months, he knew its byways, and though the short winter day was drawing on to its early dusk, he seemed never to be at fault in our various windings and turnings.
We were a good distance from the fort, and had borne eastward and northward until the houses were growing far apart and scattering, when Champe led the way to the right and we pressed on until we could hear the waters of the East River lapping coldly on the shingle. By this time the stars were coming out, and a thin sickle of a moon in its first quarter hung in the western sky. In the chill, gray half-light a house, isolated by its situation, and still farther set apart from its neighbors by a high-fenced garden, loomed darkly before us, its windows shuttered and its chimney smokeless.