It was the part of prudence to let the news appear to be a matter of indifference to me, and I answered accordingly.
“A soldier should be prepared for anything; and I’ll dare say the tavern is a fairly good inn—far better than the cabin of an ill-smelling fishing schooner. I thank heaven I have no active command to send me down the bay with the musket men.”
Castner grinned. “I’ve been picking some comfort out of that in my own case,” he admitted. “Do you go back to Mr. Ar—to the general’s quarters?”
I told him I should not, if he would be good enough to report me: that I should go across to the tavern to retake my room, where I might be found if there were any further orders for me. And so we parted at the northwestern angle of the fort, and I was glad to be alone. For now the book of the kidnapping possibilities was suddenly reopened, and my brain was busy with a thousand desperate plots all weaving themselves upon this most opportune delaying of the expedition.
Wanting nothing so much as a chance to let my mind shuttle connectedly among the plot threads, I shunned the tavern and kept on around the northern and eastern escarpment of the fort until I found myself once more approaching the waterside and the landing-place with its two smoky torches still flaring in the wind. The spot was deserted, though it was so close under the guns of the fort that I could hear the tread of the sentinel as he paced back and forth behind the screen of the outer ravelin.
Hearing my footsteps, the sentry stopped and would have challenged me, I suppose, if his attention had not been drawn at the same minute to a ship’s small boat which was approaching the landing. His challenge went for that, instead, and when I heard the answer I stood quickly aside and waited for what should follow. For, by all the good luck that ever fell upon a perplexed and half-desperate plotter, the man who stepped from the stern-sheets of the small boat and made answer to the challenging sentry was none other than my fellow conspirator, Sergeant Champe.
“A courier from the fleet, with letters for General Arnold,” was his reply to the fort’s watch-dog; and when he had taken the few strides necessary to carry him out of earshot from the ravelin and from the two sailors in his boat, I waylaid him, telling him in twenty words how fortune—and Sir Henry Clinton—had given us one more chance to retrieve ourselves.
“Plot for it, then,” was his gloomy response. “I see nothing beyond my going back to the ships presently with the answer to the letter I’m carrying.”
“That you shall not do,” I replied hastily. “We must think up some excuse to keep you ashore. Leave that to me and go on your errand. I’ll wait for you here and have my plan ready against your return.”
The plan, decided on in a half-hour’s chilly marching back and forth across the green while I waited for Champe to come back, was not very complicated. When the sergeant made his appearance I took the despatches and sent him over to the tavern to reengage my room for me, telling him to pose as my soldier-servant therein. Meanwhile, I told him, I would take his place as Arnold’s courier, and it would go hard with me if I should not account for his detention on shore when I could have speech with those on shipboard who had sent him.