I did not reply, but poked behind a sideboard with my pistol muzzle. Both Kate and her mother seemed to me, despite their efforts to repress it, to manifest a very great uneasiness. I did not wonder at it, for I knew they must fear to be detected in their collusion with the traitor. Kate continued to gibe at me.
“Oh, well, it’s not Captain Chudleigh I’m looking for,” said I at last.
“And in truth if it were, you’d be afraid to find him,” replied she, a sprightly flash appearing in her eye.
I said no more, content with my hit. I found no one below stairs, and joined Whitestone on the second floor, the women still following me and upbraiding me. I looked more than once at Kate, and I could see that she was all in a tremor. I doubted not it arose from a belief that I had discovered her treachery, as well as from a fear that we would capture the chief traitor.
Whitestone had not yet found our man, though he had been in every room on the second floor and even into the low-roofed garret. At this the two women became more contumelious, crying out that we were now shamed by our own acts. But we were confident that the man was yet in the house. I pushed into a large room which seemed to serve as a spare chamber. We had entered it once before, but I thought a more thorough search might be made. In one corner, some dresses hanging against the wall reached to the floor. I prodded one of them with my fist and encountered something soft.
The dress was dashed aside and our man sprang out. There was a low window at the end of the room, and with one bound he was through it. Whitestone fired at his disappearing body, but missed. We heard a second shot from the man on guard below, and then we rushed pell-mell down the stairs to pursue him.
I bethought me at the door to bid one of the men stay and watch the house, for I knew not what further treachery the women might meditate. This stopped me only a moment, and then I ran after Whitestone, who was some steps in the lead. We overtook the man who had fired at Martyn, and he said he had hit him, so he thought.
“When he sprang from the window he rose very light from the ground,” he said, “and I don’t think the fall hurt him much.”
We saw Martyn some twenty yards or more in advance of us, running toward the south. It was of double importance now that we should overtake him, for if we did not he would be beyond our lines, and, barring some improbable chance, would escape to Clinton with a report of Burgoyne’s condition.
The fugitive curved here and there among the shadows but could not shake us off. I held my loaded pistol in my hand and twice or thrice had a chance for a fair shot at him, but I never raised the weapon. I could shoot at a man in the heat of battle or the flurry of a sudden moment of excitement, but not when he was like a fleeing hare. Moreover, I preferred to take him alive.