With that threatening possibility in mind I resolved to go at once to the barracks on a spying reconnaissance, and if I should find that Simcoe’s troop had returned, to press quickly on to the Vandeventer house to hasten the embarkation. But first I yielded to a madman’s prompting that had been fretting at me ever since Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness and I had realized that I was once more a free man. It was no less than a foolish notion that I should like to show myself to Beatrix at the parting moment in my true colors—the same patriot homespun I had worn when she had given me God-speed at the door of her father’s house in Virginia, and which I had exchanged so unwillingly for these cursed facings of Arnold’s Loyal Americans.
Now that I had cut loose once and for all from the tanglings of chicanery and deceit, this uniform of Arnold’s Legion was hateful—doubly hateful. To every eye that saw me in it, it told an added lie; and I was sick and nauseated with lying. Could I not slip into the tavern and find my portmanteau and make the change?
It seemed feasible enough; and a stealthy peering through the windows of the lighted tap-room showed me a measurably clear field. A Quaker in a drab long-coat and broadbrim sat at one of the tables smoking a thin-stemmed church-warden. Two Hessians of Knyphausen’s were guzzling ale at another; and the Irish barman was nodding sleeping behind his wicket.
I opened the door and entered, passing quickly to the stair and reaching it before the aproned Irishman at the bar could do more than rouse himself and say, “Och, ’tis yourself, then, is it, Captain Page?” and straightway fall to nodding again.
Coming to the barn-like room above-stairs which had apparently lain undisturbed since Champe and I had forsaken it to become fugitives two days before, I found flint, steel and tinder box, and a candle-end to flare gustily in the cold drafts of the place while I made the swift change from red and green to homespun blue. Flinging the badges of disgrace into the corner, I replaced the Scots’ rapier in its belt, thinking that I must, after all, be beholden to King George for this much of my equipment. For Champe still had my horse-saber, and I would not go on Beatrix’s business weaponless.
Being now ready to run the gauntlet of the tap-room again I sallied out and groped my way to the stair-head. A hubbub of voices was rising from the room below and when I had stepped cautiously down to the landing turn I saw that my fate had already outrun me. In the few minutes which had elapsed since my passing through it, the tap-room had filled with soldiers and a crowding throng of riff-raff from the street; and by the light of the bar candles I saw Castner. He was questioning the Irish barman sharply and the good pot-filler was trying his best to shield me.
“Arrah, now, Liftenant, dear! is it Captain Page you’d be asking for? Shure I haven’t seen the smilin’ face av him these four hours. Would he be comin’ here widout me knowin’ ut?”
At this point there was a stir in the crowd and a tail man, soaked and dripping, pushed his way rudely up to Castner’s elbow. I looked and looked again, and gasped. By all the lunatics that ever filled a Bedlam, it was John Champe!
“Don’t believe that lying Irishman, Lieutenant Castner!” he cried out hoarsely. “I tell you I saw him enter here—no longer ago than the time it took me to run and fetch you, sir!”
I saw Castner’s involuntary shrinking from the man who was thus betraying one who at least held the claim of being a fellow-countryman, a fellow-soldier, and a fellow-deserter. I confess that, at first, it seemed blankly incredible to me that Champe should be doing this. If the spy Askew’s story was to be taken as a whole, the sergeant from Major Lee’s Legion was involved no less deeply than the captain from Baylor’s Horse. But there was no mistaking his intention. There were black circles around his eyes and he was so drunk with passion that he could scarcely stand without leaning against the barman’s wicket.