“As I would Light Horse Harry Lee, himself, Captain Dick,” was his answer.
“Then listen: we will discuss ways and means, and work together, as heretofore, straight through to our end. But if anything happens—if, say, we should be taken in the act—you must not scruple to turn against me; to save yourself if you have to catch and hold me while they tie my hands. Will you promise to do this?”
“No,” he said bluntly. “I could never do that, Captain Dick. There is only one thing that would ever make me an enemy of yours—and then there would be no feigning about it: if you should turn softhearted of a sudden, and spare Sir Judas—”
“Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Have I shown a soft heart, thus far?”
“No; but—but—your pardon, Captain Dick, but there is a woman in this tangle of ours; two of them; and one of them would willingly die in this man’s place, and the other—”
“Never say it, John Champe!” I interposed. “When it comes to that, I shall want you for my enemy; and you must not spare me the shrewdest blow you can strike. But in the other event, you must save yourself if you can, remembering this one thing—that I shall hang a great deal the easier and more comfortably if I hang alone.”
“I’m too sleepy still to argue that point out with you,” he protested; and I think he was nodding again, to make up the arrears of the night, before I had ascended the stair to take my place at Arnold’s door.
The traitor never left his house all that afternoon, and when I was not dozing in my chair in the corridor, I could hear his pen scratching steadily, hour upon hour. For a brevet-commander who was, in truth, no more than the colonel of a regiment, Arnold did more writing than any lawyer’s clerk, and sometimes I have wondered if his treasonable correspondence did not have its first beginnings in his insatiable thirst for letter-writing. But no: it was his vanity again, which ever loves to dribble from a pen’s point, that made him such a slave of the ink-pot.
The house darkened early in the afternoon, and when I went to the corridor window to look at the sky, there were promises of a storm. Here was Champe’s prophecy of further obstacles on its way to fulfillment hours ahead of any possible move we could make. Inclement weather, rain, snow or cold, we might brave, but not a wind which would raise a sea.
I looked at the heavens long and earnestly. There was a gray sky, but the clouds were lower than I liked to see them. Rain or snow it would be, I decided, with a chance of wind from the southeast. That was nothing, so long as it did not blow too hard.