“It is soon told,” he rejoined. “At the mansion house up yonder, having no orders to wait for his coming out, I ran back to set the trap. Two freezing hours we lay under the cedars in that hell-fired garden, and then we saw the lights, and a little farther on we heard the old fox walking into the trap. But he was not alone, as you know, Captain Page.”
“How many of you were there?” I asked.
“Two: one other and myself. The third was on the river bank, signaling the boat.”
“You should have killed me out of your way, Sergeant Champe. It was your plain duty to your country. If we ever get out of this and back to our own horse-ropes, I shall see you court-martialed for that slip, my good man.”
“There were but the two of us, Captain Dick,” he said, giving me the name my own troop used.
“Well? How many would you ask for, to put the quietus on one man, and he armed only with a sword that you did not need to let him lug out of its sheath?”
His scowl, which was the natural fashion of his forbidding face, broadened into a sardonic grin.
“My fellow under the cedars might have chanced it, since he didn’t know you. But not I, my bully captain. I know you too well, sir. Before we could have said ‘Jack Robinson’ you would have had one or both of us wondering how we came there with so many skin rents to be sewed up.”
“Not at all,” said I. “I should have been fighting on your side. But, of course, you couldn’t know that.”
“No; we couldn’t and didn’t. You know what happened afterward; how we hid and watched you two going back and forth so near to us that any time you passed I could have touched you. Once my fellow sneezed, though he well-nigh burst a blood-vessel trying to stop it. You didn’t hear it, but Arnold did. Then I thought we should have to run the risk of your frog-sticker, Captain Dick, whether we liked it or no.”