“When we are in, you will follow me, Sergeant; I know the placing of the furniture and where the bed stands. The word is silence, absolute; once awakened, Arnold will fight—no man more desperately. But you know this as well as I. At the bedside you will fall upon him and bind him, trusting to me to keep him quiet with the rapier point. Do your work quickly and thoroughly, and use this door-key in your knotted handkerchief for a gag. Are you ready?”
“Ready and waiting, Captain Dick,” was the muttered reply; and we swung the door slowly on its hinges.
Though there were ample windows in both ends of it, the long room was dark. But now our eyes had become somewhat accustomed to these inner glooms, and we could make out the dim shapes of the furnishings nearest to us; the writing-table, the chairs, the clumsy, cushioned settle drawn out before the cold hearth.
Groping our way by slow inchings along the opposite wall, we finally came to the alcove holding the bed, a high, canopied contrivance of the older fashion, with heavy curtains to shut it in. I could have sworn I heard the traitor’s gentle breathing when I laid a cautious hand on the curtains to draw them aside. “Now!” I whispered; and as the curtains parted, Champe sprang like a tiger through the opening and I felt quickly for the man’s face on the pillows to guide the rapier’s point for the silencing.
There was no face on the pillows; no human figure outlined beneath the covers; which were drawn up smoothly as the traitor’s chamber-man, or -woman, had left them. We had struck our blow and it had missed!
Champe sat up on the edge of the bed, and I heard his low chuckling laugh.
“Shall I bind and gag the pillow, Captain Dick?” he asked sardonically; and then he burst out in a soft-voiced torrent of the most fearsome curses. “The devil takes choice care of his own,” he gritted, at the far end of the outburst. “Four times have I had this Judas fairly in my hands, and four times he has whipped out of them! Not once before in all these two months has he slept away from here, Captain Dick—I’d swear it! And now, on this one night of all the sixty-odd.... Well, shall we go down to the fort and turn ourselves over to the provost-guard?”
For the moment it seemed as reasonable as anything else that remained for us to do. But youth dies hard; and youth with the Page blood jumping in its veins the hardest of all.
“They call me a daredevil, at home, John Champe,” I said evenly, “and Mr. Hamilton named me so when he asked me to go to help you. I have a mind to do the maddest thing you ever dreamed of, which has its one chance in a million of saving our necks only because it is mad. Do you try it with me?”
“Lord, yes,” said the sergeant wearily, “even if it’s to crawl in here between Arnold’s blankets and let him find us so when he comes.”