Frontispiece by
John Wolcott Adams

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1923
By The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in the United States of America
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
I How We Drank a Toast[ 1]
II A Voice in the Night[ 13]
III In Which I Shed My Rank[ 32]
IV How My Rank Was Regained[ 50]
V A Kiss and a Man’s Life[ 73]
VI Dark Night[ 85]
VII And an Unblest Dawn[ 93]
VIII A Walk up Gallows Hill[ 104]
IX In Which I Pay a Duty Call[ 114]
X In Which a Wall Has Ears[ 131]
XI Out of the Nettle, Danger[ 146]
XII How the Hook Was Baited[ 163]
XIII How a Fish Was Hooked and Lost [ 176]
XIV A Cask of Bitters[ 192]
XV In the Fog[ 205]
XVI The Cup of Tantalus[ 209]
XVII Masked Batteries[ 221]
XVIII In Which the Wind Keeps Revels[ 239]
XIX Mine Honor’s Honor[ 256]
XX Traitors All[ 277]
XXI The Drumhead Court[ 296]
XXII In the Powder-Room[ 307]
XXIII Open Field and Running Flood[ 329]

MR. ARNOLD

MR. ARNOLD

I
HOW WE DRANK A TOAST

IF THERE were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick’s pot-house tavern at Nyack.

The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long pull down the river from Teller’s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the four miles from General Washington’s headquarters at Tappan to keep the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or either of us.