“Your privilege is always to hope, Captain Page, and I think I should be the last person in the world to rob you of it,” she said; then she gave me a loving message to her husband, and truly I felt more and more the despicable villain the deeper I was drawn into this playing of the go-between for husband and wife.
On my return to the lower end of the town, I made a détour to the western waterside with a view to familiarizing myself with the situation which would confront us when we should not have daylight to show us what we needed to see. The riverside was well guarded to a point far beyond the town, and the river itself was patrolled by small craft. I saw no rowing boats at all on that bank. It came to me now, that our greatest difficulty would lie in this finding of a suitable boat. Unless I could use my authority as an officer in seizing one, I fancied that we should look long before obtaining one in any other way. This would be an extra hazard, to be sure, but we were already so deep in hazards, that the addition of another could make little difference.
I had turned inland, and was passing the sugar-house prison in the corner of the churchyard, when I met Major Simcoe again; and this time it was he who halted me.
“Your fellow-countryman, the sergeant, seems to have got himself into trouble, Captain Page. Had you heard of it?”
My heart turned to lead at his words, but I was careful to keep the weight of it out of my face and voice.
“Our sergeant seems to trouble you much more than he does me, Major,” I said, trying to say it as lightly as I could. “What has he been doing now?”
The major laughed.
“That remains to be determined. He was found prowling about the waterside in citizen’s clothes a little while ago, and since he could give no reasonable account of himself to the officer of the guard, he was clapped into a cell.”
I was burning to ask if the news of this climaxing disaster had been carried to Arnold, but I dared not. So I escaped from the major as I could, and hurried down to Fort George, passing the door of Arnold’s house on the way, as one might take a morning’s saunter in front of a cannon loaded, and with the slow-match burning.
At the fort the commandant, a British officer of the bulldog type, was exceedingly brusk with me, paying his backhanded compliment to the uniform I wore, and at first would give me no satisfaction whatever.