“You are turning your back upon it, and you are staying here?” he muttered, as one half dazed. Then he came suddenly alive to the full meaning of my words: “You are a foul traitor, Captain Richard Page! Curse you, curse you, curse you!--that Judas and the women have won you over! I’ll see you hanged for this, if so be I have to hang with you! Out of my way, or I’ll kill you where you stand!” He had started up, and was clambering over the thwarts to get at me, when I stooped and gave the boat a mighty shove out into the stream. The sudden lurch made him lose his balance and come down with a noisy crash among the unshipped oars. As quick as thought, the sentry on the bank above cried out his challenge of “Halt! Who goes there?” but Champe, furious as he was, was yet wary enough to lie still, letting the wind and tide carry him on. The sentry did not climb down the bank to investigate, as I made sure he would; and better still, he did not fire his piece to give the alarm. I thought surely that Arnold must have heard his shout, in which case my capture would be certain. That the shouted challenge had been heard, I had proof presently in a wind-blown muttering of voices at the top of the bank overhead. I figured that the sentry had stopped to speak to Arnold, but I could make no move to escape. Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness, but I could not tell whether it had gone up or down the river or was drifting with wind and tide out toward the Jersey shore. It was enough that it had gone, as I fondly hoped, beyond the possibility of a return. Champe, I fancied, would come to his senses shortly and make his way to safety. Surely he would know that it would be nothing short of suicide for him to land again within the enemy’s lines. When all was quiet again on the bank above I still had to wait some little time before venturing to cross the sentry’s path on my retreat. There was good hope in the interval since I neither heard nor saw more of the sergeant and was thus convinced that he was making the best of his way out of the peril. More than once, however, while I waited, I could distinguish the sound of Arnold’s footsteps on the gravel walk in the garden, so I knew that the traitor had not been frightened away by whatever talk he had had with the bank-pacing sentry.