“The man was first a deserter from the rebels, and now he has shed his regimentals, and was trying to desert from us,” he said sharply. “Of course, Mr. Arnold will do what he pleases with him, but if the matter lay with me, he would stretch a cord very promptly, Captain.”
“Fortunately, the matter does not lie with you,” I retorted, matching his sharpness. “You have blundered, as some of you gentlemen in the king’s service seem quite prone to do. Sergeant Champe was on duty when you arrested him, and that duty required that he should not appear in his regimentals, as it also required secrecy on his part, even under the questioning of so great a man as you are, Mr. Commandant. I’ll trouble you to set the sergeant at liberty, sir.”
“Upon order, certainly, Captain,” said my bulldog stubbornly.
“You have your order, sir,” I retorted, bristling back at him.
“I have not seen it,” he remarked.
“By heaven, sir, you are hearing it!” I cried. “Do you require me to go back to Sir Henry Clinton and General Arnold, with the information that you decline to take the word of the general’s aide?”
Now there are bullies who can not be bullied, but happily the commandant was not one of them. When I was turning upon my heel, as if in a passion, he called me back.
“I know you are Mr. Arnold’s aide, Captain,” he said, rather less truculently, “but duty is duty, and—”
“Oh, very well,” I said, “it is but a matter of walking up to Sir Henry’s house and telling him that your meddlesome interference has doubtless spoiled the service upon which the sergeant was engaged.”
That shot brought him down, and now he seemed as eager to give me my sergeant, and to be quit of us both, as, a moment before, he was reluctant. Champe was fetched from some dungeon underneath the battlements, and he was shrewd enough not to make much of seeing me with the commandant, who now followed me to the sally-port, with protestations of his guiltlessness in Champe’s arrest, and begging me not to make too much of it with Sir Henry Clinton. I set his mind at rest on this point, telling him that if he did not report the faux pas, I should not; a statement which was well within the bounds of truth.