While he was hammering at the door for Warnock to come and let him out, I hid the rapier in the blankets of the bed; and no sooner was the door opened for Champe, and closed behind him with the bolt shot, than I fell to work with the great clasp-knife, digging as for dear life.
It took no little time to loosen the first brick, toil as I would, and when it was withdrawn, the thrust-in candle showed nothing but a shallow, earth-smelling burrow behind the wall, with its farther extremity stopped up by a stout wooden boarding.
This was sufficiently discouraging, since it indicated that the old sally-port through the powder-room to the outworks had been sealed up at both ends. How thick the outer barrier might be, I had no means of determining; and before I could remove any more bricks, I heard the key rattling in the lock again, and there was barely time to stand the clumsy little table before the tell-tale breach beginnings, to kick the floor rubbish over the mortar powderings that whitened it, and to slip the clasp-knife into my pocket, when the bolt was shot and Castner marched in.
Now was the time when it took the final ounce of fortitude in the good old Page reserves to make me face him and say carelessly, “Is it midnight, at last, Lieutenant? By all the hours that ever struck, I thought it would never come!” For, truly, and for the second time that night, I made sure that my short respite had slipped away unheeded, and that he had come for me.
“No, Captain Page,” he rejoined soberly; “it wants two good hours of midnight yet, and I’ve come on a different errand. You have spoken twice in my hearing of a postponed engagement with your—with this Captain Seytoun who has come so far out of his way to do you an ill turn: are you still wishing it might be kept?”
I made my laugh sound as lightly as it should have sounded if the meeting with my cousin Devlin’s slayer were the last unfulfilled desire of a man who was about to die.
“You saw how hard I tried to make him wish it. My dear Castner, he is little better than a brute beast. I doubt if the rope stout enough to drag him to a fair field of honor has ever been twisted.”
The lieutenant’s eyes were fixed upon one of the holes in the ceiling masonry.
“It would be little loss to the reb—to the American cause if he should never return to Tappan?” he suggested.
“It would be small loss, as you say. Though you will not look at it in that light, the man is a traitor at heart; a man who, to satisfy a purely personal grudge, does not scruple to betray his trust, his cause and his commanders.”