Call it a weakness if you will, but after he was gone I wasted some precious minutes sitting on the bunk-bed with my head in my hands and my heart mellowing in a sudden rush of meliorating softness. It is so easy to fall into the rut of the harsh rigidities, judging all humankind by unbending formulas of right and wrong and making no allowances for the thousand and one battling influences which are always dragging the human atom hither and yon. This man whose name had become a hissing and a reproach was neither an angel nor a devil; he was merely a human being, swayed now by the good and now by the evil. If he had shown himself capable of the basest political treachery, he here and now had also shown that he could be magnanimous and truly generous to a fallen enemy. It was another key-grating in the door-lock that roused me from the softening reverie and I sprang up, shocked for an instant by the thought that I had spent all my little respite and that midnight was come. That shock was followed by another when the door opened and Champe, with a face so haggard and wrought upon that I scarcely recognized him, came stumbling in to fall upon his knees at my feet. “Champe!” I cried, thinking nothing but that they had sifted the truth out of him in some way, and that he was to die with me. “Aye,” he mumbled, “I’ve come, Captain Dick. Strangle me with your bare hands--burn my eyes out with the candle--do what you will to me and I’ll never cheep nor whimper nor lift a finger. They’ve told me what you did; how you stood up and took it all upon yourself, after I had gone crazed with rage and disappointment and betrayed you like another Judas! Let me hang in your place; or if I can not, I’ll hang with you--I swear it!” “Hush!” I commanded harshly, for I could not trust myself to speak otherwise. And then: “You need not reproach yourself. They would have caught me anyway before the night was over, and there is no sense in two hanging where one will serve. But tell me: how did you get here?” “Warnock is corporal of the guard, and one night I saved him from being found asleep at sentry post. He told me what you said to General Phillips; how you--” his voice broke and again I had to be rough with him to save my own self-possession. “Name of the devil!” I cut in snappishly. “Dry your eyes, Sergeant, and take the crack out of your voice. You are the man of all others who can do me a service, and here you come to me whimpering and crying like a whipped dog!” “Say it, Captain Dick,” he pleaded. “Give me my orders, and I’ll--” “--And you’ll carry them out: of course, you will,” I finished for him. “Now listen, and I’ll tell you what you are to do.” A plan had been shaping itself with lightning-like swiftness in my brain since he had told me enough to make it plain that he was still free to go and come in the town; that he had not yet been put under guard to be sent to the ships, as Arnold had said he would be.