“It is the common talk in our camps.”
“You lie, Captain Seytoun—like the father of lies after whom you are named,” I said coolly; for now I remembered Askew’s story of his escape from the guard house at Tappan, and could easily add two and two together.
Simcoe would have put me down with harsh bluster; but now Phillips, cold-eyed and haughty, intervened suddenly.
“Can you impeach the witness, Captain Page?” he demanded.
“I can. By his own confession, James Askew lay under sentence of death in General Washington’s camp at Tappan. He escaped by the connivance of the officer of the guard. The bribe he offered and paid was the sharing of a certain secret with that villain who stands there, and the secret was this highly incredible story upon which you have convicted me, General Phillips. This man knows nothing but that which the spy, Askew, told him, and for aught that can be proved now, the story may well have been nothing more than a tissue of falsehoods, made up for the spy’s own purpose,” I answered boldly.
Seytoun might have outfaced me in this, if he had been endowed with the right kind of brazen courage: it was but my word against his. But his face was an open confession of guilt, and I think they all saw it, though, as I say, his testimony was a mere matter of court-martial routine—my fate had been predetermined long before.
A silence fell upon the room, and it was Major Simcoe who broke it.
“Captain Page, your conviction,”—I remarked that he used the word,—“does not turn upon these preliminaries, which serve merely to show premeditation and design. Whether you came as Mr. Washington’s emissary, or upon your own initiative, matters not: the fact remains that you not only intended to kidnap General Arnold; you have actually made the attempt. Do you deny that, sir?”
I did not see what good could come of adding lies to lies, at least, in my own behalf. By this time it must be known that Champe and I were the two who had eaten our suppers in the Dutch boat-builder’s house, the two who had stolen the boat, and, quite as inevitably, the two who had broken into Arnold’s house to find the empty bed. If I hesitated, it was only because I was striving to devise some way of saving Champe.
“I do not deny it,” I said, when the pause had grown to an impossible length.