“Ha!” said he; “now we are coming to it. What disturbed you?”
It was worse than groping in the dark; it was like groping without the sense of touch to guide me. But I had to go on, though I saw that my road might easily end on Gallows Hill.
“First I heard, or dreamed I heard, a noise as of men fighting. A little later I’m sure I heard a great deal of loud talk and some oaths, and tramplings in my corridor and on the stair. After that, I was awake most of the time, I think, but I heard no more of the inn noises.”
He sat down behind his writing-table and waved me to a chair.
“Sit down, Captain Page, and you shall have the explanation of all this,” he said, and the sudden change in his tone relaxed my strain so violently that I fairly reeled into a chair. “I sent for you thus early to question you before you had the news from other sources,” he went on. “Make a note of it, Captain, and when you wish to examine a witness, get hold of him before his impressions have been distorted out of shape by his confusing of them with the impressions of others. You recall what I was saying last night about the Washington plot against my person?”
I bowed.
“I think I owe my liberty, and perhaps my life, to you, Captain Page; or at least to your presence here up to midnight. There are suspicious circumstances enough to warrant the belief that a plot was laid against me, to be sprung last night. I was in hopes that you might be able to add further information; but your items only confirm the story of the inn people. They thought, however, that the sounds of the scuffle came from your room.”
“If I had been as sound asleep as I needed to be, a battle royal might have been fought in my room without my knowing it,” I replied, regaining something of my self-possession.
“This squabble in the inn seems to have been an aftermath,” he continued; “possibly”—and here I thought he looked sharply at me again—“a meeting of the plotters to jangle over their failure. Which points to a traitor among us, Captain, since there are no suspicious characters quartering at the tavern whose room could have been used for a rendezvous. But one thing is certain: one of the janglers was a soldier of the Loyal American Legion in uniform. A horse-boy saw him slip into the tavern and go up-stairs.”
My heart came into my mouth, and, by the bones of all the Pages, I had to swallow twice to get it down again. Champe was surely skating upon the thinnest ice that ever held the weight of a man, and if he broke through, I should be quite as far from the shore as he.