“I shall be patrolling before Sir Henry Clinton’s door, ready to nip Mr. James Askew if he turns up on my beat—always providing that he twiddles his watch-seals at the proper instant.”
“One more word,” said the sergeant, when my hand was on the latch. “Major Lee’s order is to drop the hitch-rope and run for it. You’ve said nothing as to that, yet, Captain Dick.”
“And I say nothing now, save that Major Lee is not my commanding officer. He is yours, however—which may make a difference in your case. Does it?”
“No,” he said shrewdly; and we went out through the tap-room one at a time, and each to his own separate pool to fish for James Askew.
XIII
HOW A FISH WAS HOOKED AND LOST
THE talk in my tavern room with Champe had used up so much time that it was midday and beyond when I joined the group of orderlies and unattached officers lounging before Sir Henry’s door, and had a welcome in strict accordance with the freezing December weather and the uniform I was wearing—cool and contemptuous.
Now this was grateful to me, in a way, and in another way it made me spitefully savage. It was comforting to know that our nobler enemies detested Arnold’s treachery, carrying their aversion to the extent of despising any one who wore his regimental colors. But, on the other hand, the slight had to pass through me on its way to hit the mark, and I was never good at paying penalties for another’s sins.
So, when there were covert sneers and back-turnings enough to make a man sick, I began to strut and sneer in self-defense, twitting a lieutenant of Hetheridge’s whose line was the first to break at Monmouth, and a captain of Knyphausen’s whose Hessian devils had cut a troop of our horse to pieces at Tappan after it had surrendered.
This was all very hot-headed and rash, and would doubtless have involved me in trouble enough if a diversion had not come in the shape of Mr. Justice Smith’s new London-made hackney coach drawn by four horses which, for their postilions and trappings, might have been taken out of a crack artillery troop.
The coach came to a stand before Arnold’s door, and, as may be imagined, I left the quarreling Hessian captain without ceremony when I saw the faces of Margaret Shippen and Mistress Beatrix Leigh behind the window-panes.