I paused to give him his chance to lead me. It was a perilous road that I was traversing, but I meant to draw him so far afield this time that he would never get back to any suspicion of Champe or me. “Well?” he said sharply. “That was not the end of your adventure, Captain Page?” “No,” I rejoined. “The little man was gone but a short time before he came running back with a mob at his heels--sailors, armed with guns and cutlasses. It did not take us long to understand that the little man was the boat-builder, and that he had contrived to pen his two housebreakers in the cellar.” Arnold nodded with apparent satisfaction. “A troublesome friend of yours and mine will probably trouble us no more, Captain Page,” he commented. “The boat-builder’s house is a hiding-place for smugglers--one of a number in the locality you have described. And your armed sailors were a smuggler’s crew. There was a fight?” “We could not be sure; there was a great deal of noise. But it ended in a fiasco. There was a loophole of escape, and the two cellar prisoners must have found it--we guessed it would be an underground passage leading from the cellar to the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge. At any rate, a dim light flickered for a minute or two in the shop, and then a boat was run down the launching ways, with two men scrambling into it at the final instant.” Again I paused, and once more he gave me my lead. “They escaped?--got off? But surely you did not give up, Captain?” “No. The sergeant and I put to sea the moment we could find a boat and launch it--which seemed to be before the mob in the house had discovered the escape. But when we manned the oars and began to look about us, ours was the only boat in sight. We pulled down the shore, keeping the sharpest lookout, but we saw nothing save the fog, which presently made us lose ourselves, and a guard schooner whose commanding ensign wished to arrest and detain us--chiefly, as I gathered, because we were wearing the uniforms of the Loyal Americans.” For a long time Arnold walked back and forth in deepest meditation, and I feared he was not going to give me the chance to put the capstone on my carefully built pyramid of dissimulation. But he did. “And after your encounter with the young cub who did not like your uniforms, Captain Page--what then?” “We could do nothing in the fog, and we landed, a little way from the fort, and came here to mount guard. Now for the confirmation of all this fairy tale, General: the groggery-keeper can testify to the boat-seeker’s disguise; the smugglers, or their ally, the boat-builder, can be interrogated; and doubtless the discontented navy ensign will remember our visit, our explanations, and our request for the loan of a compass--which he most churlishly refused.”