“Never mind,” I rejoined. “You’re calling yourself a dead man, now, and so you needn’t worry with the ‘whys’--though I don’t mind explaining the present one. We’ve been at a good bit of trouble getting hold of that boat, and if we can make shift to keep the breath in our bodies for a few hours longer, we may need it again. That’s all. Now come with me, and obey your orders to the letter.” Once again we scrambled up the bank, dodged the sleepy sentinel, passed to the street by a détour, and so came boldly to the front of the house we had broken into. Then I told Champe what we were to do. “Make a complete soldier of yourself, now, Sergeant, and follow two steps behind me. We shall pace a sentry-beat up and down before the house from this on, until Arnold returns and finds us here. When he comes, you will salute and stand at parade, and look as weary as you can to back what I shall say to him. Mark time--march!” XVII MASKED BATTERIES WITHOUT a word, Champe fell in two paces to the rear and caught the step, and thus began the weariest and I do think the most forlorn-hope vigil that was ever kept. For its patient keeping the sergeant deserves the greater credit, for I at least knew how I meant to try a desperate cast to bring us out of our looped gallows ropes, but Champe knew nothing save that I had formed a peg of some sort to hang a hope upon. Tired and hungry, cold and cramped from our long confinement in the small boat as we were, the disappointment of the empty bed and bedroom had crushed and benumbed us. It was a dead wall from which courage refused to rebound; a pit to swallow the bravest resolution; a clog for our feet and shackles for our wrists. I do not speak for Champe; but for myself, if the meanest soldier in the British garrison had come to tell me I was his prisoner, I think his bare word would have made me tag along after him like a cowed spaniel. And the dreadful length of it! While we were fighting our way up the ladder of the hours, with midnight and the accomplishment of our purpose for the goal, time passed us on the wing. But now the minutes dragged leaden-footed. It seemed as though the dawn would never come. Fort George, looming grim and forbidding in the darkness no more than a musket-shot from the seaward end of our pacing sentry-beat, might have been a citadel of the dead; a huge mausoleum with never a living soul to tenant it. Even the tavern, where you would suppose some one would be stirring at any hour in the twenty-four, was silent and dark and apparently deserted.