“He looks like a man who would denounce his own blood brother if the occasion should arise. For the last half-hour he has been raging up and down in that cold guard-room muttering and cursing to himself like a madman, and I dare swear I heard your name mingled in his maledictions, Captain Page.” “I don’t doubt it,” I agreed readily. “The sergeant has had a suspicious eye on me for some little time past. He is a grim devil of a fellow, I promise you, and no man’s good company. I begged the general’s permission to keep him by me as a soldier-servant, but lord! he’d sour the milk before the milkmaid could get it strained into her crocks.” “Being such a devil, I wonder he didn’t stay with the other devils--saving your presence, Captain,--on the far side of the Neutral Ground,” young Hetheridge put in. Now all this talk was a cruel wasting of most critical time, but I paused to drive the saving nail yet a little farther into the wood. “Champe may be like some others of that devilish rank and file you speak of, Mr. Hetheridge; one who has been constrained against his will to go barefoot and empty-bellied in a cause that meant nothing to him. At any rate, you can find no fault with his present loyalty. You may believe it or not, as you please, but when he first saw me here in New York he took me for a spy, broke into my room at the tavern and all but had me choked to death before I could get the better of him.” There was a laugh at this, and then the young fellow whose name I could not remember, said: “I wish you joy of such a soldier-servant as that; I do, indeed.” And, as I laid a hand on the door-latch; “Drink an extra posset for me, while you’re about it, Captain Page, if that’s what you are going after. My throat is as dry as a desert.” It was well that they should think I was on my way to the tavern, and I vanished while the notion lay uppermost in their minds. Champe was waiting for me at the corner of the house, and he was fairly shaking with fierce impatience. His greeting of me took the form of a raging oath directed at my time-killing with the young fellows at the house fire; and then: “While you were dallying I got a glimpse of him--he’s there yet, tramping up and down the walk. Hell and furies--if he’ll only give us time--time!” And again, before I could have any speech with him, he was dragging me by a roundabout way to come at the back of the garden enclosure and to the place where our sunken boat was lying. While we were waiting for our chance to dodge the pacing sentry on the river bank, speech was still impossible, but in the interval I began to get some glimmerings of a plan which would solve the wretched tangle, and at the same time give Champe his leave to escape.