“But—but the other circumstances, sir,” I prompted, hoping to turn him back from this aftermath business, as he called it, in the tavern.
“They are quite conclusive. All day yesterday a troop of rebel horse was in hiding on the Jersey shore, evidently waiting for some prearranged event to come off. Late in the evening the schooner Nancy Jane dropped a boat, manned by a single pair of oars, and then stood up and down the river for several hours. The dropped boat was seen more than once by our sentries, and it was always hanging in the tideway at the same place.”
“Surely, all this was most suspicious!” I exclaimed, as heartily as I could.
“It was; but this was only the groundwork of the plot. You remember the loose board in the fence at the back of my garden? That board had been removed for a purpose. Captain. At the very moment when you remarked it, there were men in the garden waiting their chance to attack me. They were hidden under the cedars, and it was one of them who coughed or sneezed loud enough for me to hear him.”
“Heavens!” I ejaculated. “What a desperately narrow escape you have had, General Arnold!”
“I think so myself,” he observed quite coolly. And then, without a sign or a word of warning, he struck my slowly recovering self-possession the most treacherous back-blow it ever had. “Captain Page, I owe you something, as I have admitted. But you must be frank with me. The soldier who climbed the stair in the tavern last night was Sergeant Champe, and the door he entered was yours.”
If I ever have a son, I shall pray God to endow him with an alert brain, the choicest gift a man can have. If I had hesitated a single instant as to the course I should pursue, if I had winked a wink too many or drawn a breath a thousandth part of a second too long—well, there would have been a midnight walk for me to the top of Gallows Hill to keep a tryst with some Tory Jack Ketch, with Mistress Beatrix left to cry her pretty eyes out, if she cared anything for poor Dickie Page.
But I did none of these fatal things. Instead, I flushed, sought for the exact face of innocent guilt, and said, “General Arnold, I do most humbly beg your pardon for deceiving you, though I beg you to believe that, as far as I went, I told you the precise truth.” Here I let him see my eyes for long enough to drive that nail well home. “But beyond the time of my going to bed, I hoped you would not press me too closely. Champe did come to my room. He had been making a night of it with some of the other men—their last night ashore—and his temper even when he is fully sober, is none of the best, as you may have already observed.”
He gave me a slow nod, and I went on, gaining a little now in the race with the hangman, I hoped.
“He was most quarrelsome and abusive. He had sought me out, it seems, because he had a drunken notion that I was responsible for your leaving him outside of Mr. Justice Smith’s house last night, and so exposing him to the gibes of those horse-boys and others of the regular line who hate our legion uniform wherever they see it. There was more than a squabble; it was a pitched battle, and I had to beat a little sober sense into him before I could quiet him, and even then he went on babbling foolishness and curses until I was afraid he would have the house about our ears.”