None the less, there was a thing to be done, and done quickly. Champe had no such scruples as these I had so lately admitted, and I must swiftly invent a way to stop him from putting his neck solus, as you might say, into the hangman’s halter. For I made no doubt that, lacking my help or countenance at the pinch, my dour-faced sergeant would thrust me aside, with a saber slash if no other means offered, and fling himself madly into the kidnapping breach single-handed and alone.
You are to figure these reflections flashing themselves upon the mental mirror as I stepped from the fireless guard-room into the broad entrance hall which was used as a lounging place indifferently by Arnold’s aides or Sir Henry Clinton’s. When I passed through there were three young fellows with their feet to the fire; young Hetheridge, Ensign Brewster, and an aide of General Phillips’ whose name I had heard but had promptly forgotten.
“Good evening to you, Captain Page,” said Hetheridge; “are you off after your black-faced sergeant? What ails the beggar that half the time he forgets to salute his betters in passing?”
I was about to make some indifferent rejoinder and go on to the door when the thought struck me that here was a chance to drive a small nail for Champe against the day of need.
“The sergeant is a law to himself, like one of the old Cromwell Ironsides,” I replied lightly. “He should have been born in the other century, when we should have seen him going about with a Bible in one hand and a two-edged slaughter sword in the other. I advise you young gentlemen to walk straight: otherwise he’ll be denouncing you as traitors, some fine day when you least suspect it.”
Brewster laughed.
“He looks like a man who would denounce his own blood brother if the occasion should arise. For the last half-hour he has been raging up and down in that cold guard-room muttering and cursing to himself like a madman, and I dare swear I heard your name mingled in his maledictions, Captain Page.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I agreed readily. “The sergeant has had a suspicious eye on me for some little time past. He is a grim devil of a fellow, I promise you, and no man’s good company. I begged the general’s permission to keep him by me as a soldier-servant, but lord! he’d sour the milk before the milkmaid could get it strained into her crocks.”
“Being such a devil, I wonder he didn’t stay with the other devils—saving your presence, Captain,—on the far side of the Neutral Ground,” young Hetheridge put in.
Now all this talk was a cruel wasting of most critical time, but I paused to drive the saving nail yet a little farther into the wood.