“To the queen’s taste,” laughed the sergeant. “And at the trigger-pulling moment I made him a proposal. ‘How if we should go together to Sir Henry Clinton, and stand by each other?’ says I; and when I added that I had a bit of influence in that quarter, he took the bait at a gulp.”
“It is very clear that I am not the only daredevil in this company,” I remarked. “But you did not mean to do any such mad thing as that, did you?”
“Not to-day, Captain Dick; it is not my day for visiting Sir Henry Clinton; nor did I mean that it should be Mr. James Askew’s, either. But by this time I saw that I could not frighten him entirely off; he was too shrewd and too eager for the gold. So the only thing was to carry out Major Lee’s court-martial sentence on the body of the prisoner. He was as good as dead, anyway.”
“Surely, Sergeant Champe, if you escape the gallows here it will be only so that you may live to carry out your hereditary destiny of hanging other people,” I commented. “But go on: he consented to your plan?”
“Something cautiously, though he was now in the middle of his third cup of strong waters. Sifting him carefully again, I found that he was afraid to pass through the town in daylight, and here he played into my hands. I told him we might take a boat and pull around the water-front to the fort landing-place and so dodge all the curious eyes in the town.”
“But how would that help us?” I queried. I confess I was a little dull that morning.
Champe’s face lightened with his diabolical grin when he explained his purpose. When they were safely in the boat—a cockle-shell belonging to the Three Larks—he meant to upset it and drown the spy.
“It was all but done,” he went on regretfully. “I had bargained for the hiring of the boat, and we were on our way to the waterside with the oars when the guard relief came along. The one chance in a thousand rose up and kicked me. The guard officer was a line corporal I had quarreled with over a game of cards while the Loyal Americans were in barracks.”
“And he knew you—recognized you?”
“In two quacks of a duck. I had barely time to tip Askew the wink to sheer off, before the redcoat was calling me by my right name, and demanding to know why I was out of the fleet and masquerading ashore in citizen’s clothes. I had no answer ready for all this, so Askew and I were like the two women grinding at the mill—one was taken and the other left. The rest of the tale you know as well or better than I, Captain Dick.”