“No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse. Moreover, I deserted for the same identical cause that you did.”
“You lie, Captain Page,” he said quite brutally; but I forgave him.
“I wouldn’t be above it, Champe—to an enemy, and if there were any good end to be subserved. But in this instance I am talking to a friend—you see I can be generous, in spite of your having just tried to choke the life out of me. You’ll understand when I tell you that I know your business in New York, and that I am here solely to help you forward it.”
That was the moment when I thought he would go chittering crazy with rage and despair. Disappointment, mad wrath, sharp remorse, bitter curses directed now at everything he could lay tongue to, boiled out of him as if he had been a pot hung above the hottest fire that ever crackled on a housewife’s hearth.
“Hell and zounds!” he foamed, when he became a little coherent again. “All the devils in the pit fight for that man! Listen, Captain Page: this night was our final chance, and on this night of all others everything was at last in readiness. Major Lee, with a picked troop from the legion, was in hiding in the wood across the river, and a boat from the schooner Nancy Jane was to be hanging off and on to come ashore and take us to the Jersey side.”
“Go on,” I commanded sharply, though the sharpness was not for poor Champe; it was for what I foresaw was coming.
“It was trimmed to the last shaving of a toothpick,” he continued fiercely. “I knew his custom—to walk late o’ night in the garden. I had loosened a board in the fence, and we—the one who was to help, and I—were to seize and bind and gag him, whip him out through the hole in the fence, and so to the river and the boat.”
“I see,” I said; and certainly I did see—far more than was pleasant to contemplate.
“When it was told me he was going to a rout, I thought our cursed luck had tripped us again,” Champe went on. “Then I got the order to follow him, as a guard of honor, I suppose, and here you thrust yourself in, Captain Page.”
“No,” I denied; “I was thrust in; but, like yourself, I take it, I was not sorry to have the chance of keeping him in view. Go on with your tale.”