But the more I thought of the seaward venture for the two women the less I liked it. It was a rough night, with the wind in the wrong quarter and the lower bay still cluttered with the waiting ships of Arnold’s expeditionary fleet. Again, Sprigg’s vessel might be detained; at any hour it might be boarded by the harbor patrols, and its contraband lading--the recovered tobacco--turned up to the light. In that case I knew that the military authority which had winked at the ransoming of the tobacco cargo could not, and would not, openly intervene. Worse than all, Major Simcoe’s troop might return from its wild-goose chase on the Tarrytown road in time to claim passage rights for its twenty-man quota on the _Nancy Jane_. Perhaps the Rangers had returned already! With that threatening possibility in mind I resolved to go at once to the barracks on a spying reconnaissance, and if I should find that Simcoe’s troop had returned, to press quickly on to the Vandeventer house to hasten the embarkation. But first I yielded to a madman’s prompting that had been fretting at me ever since Champe’s boat had disappeared in the darkness and I had realized that I was once more a free man. It was no less than a foolish notion that I should like to show myself to Beatrix at the parting moment in my true colors--the same patriot homespun I had worn when she had given me God-speed at the door of her father’s house in Virginia, and which I had exchanged so unwillingly for these cursed facings of Arnold’s Loyal Americans. Now that I had cut loose once and for all from the tanglings of chicanery and deceit, this uniform of Arnold’s Legion was hateful--doubly hateful. To every eye that saw me in it, it told an added lie; and I was sick and nauseated with lying. Could I not slip into the tavern and find my portmanteau and make the change? It seemed feasible enough; and a stealthy peering through the windows of the lighted tap-room showed me a measurably clear field. A Quaker in a drab long-coat and broadbrim sat at one of the tables smoking a thin-stemmed church-warden. Two Hessians of Knyphausen’s were guzzling ale at another; and the Irish barman was nodding sleeping behind his wicket. I opened the door and entered, passing quickly to the stair and reaching it before the aproned Irishman at the bar could do more than rouse himself and say, “Och, ’tis yourself, then, is it, Captain Page?” and straightway fall to nodding again.