“That’s for you, as well as for myself, you addle-headed idiot!” I panted; and then I swore at him heartily as he sat on the floor nursing his helpless hands. He was not much behind me in the cursing, his tongue being still uncrippled. What he called me is not in any gentleman’s word-book, but I did not lay it up against him. “You have reason, my friend,” I allowed him, and sat down on the bed’s edge to rest my throat while he eased the burden of his soul. “Well, have you said it all?” I asked, after he had sworn himself out of breath and doubled up every epithet in the vocabulary of abuse. “Damn you for a--” he began again, taking a fresh start; and I laughed till my strained eyes ran over with the tears and my throat ached again. The figure of the man, with his darkly ferocious face, sitting hunched upon the floor, his benumbed hands crossed upon his knees and his loose-hung jaw wagging like a panting dog’s in a vain effort to keep pace with the outpouring flood of vituperation, was inexpressibly mirth-provoking to me, though another might not have found it so. But there finally came an end, alike to his ravings and to my laughter, and we arrived at some better understanding; though not all at once, you may be sure. “Curse you for a deserting traitor, Captain Richard Page! I’ll kill you for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was his closing volley. “Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him again. “What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter; Middleton saw me come off.” “No one saw me, as it happened,” I rejoined, “though Captain Seytoun’s watchboat chased and fired upon me. Yet I say it again, John Champe: I am just as good a deserter as you are, and neither better nor worse. Moreover, I deserted for the same identical cause that you did.” “You lie, Captain Page,” he said quite brutally; but I forgave him. “I wouldn’t be above it, Champe--to an enemy, and if there were any good end to be subserved. But in this instance I am talking to a friend--you see I can be generous, in spite of your having just tried to choke the life out of me. You’ll understand when I tell you that I know your business in New York, and that I am here solely to help you forward it.” That was the moment when I thought he would go chittering crazy with rage and despair. Disappointment, mad wrath, sharp remorse, bitter curses directed now at everything he could lay tongue to, boiled out of him as if he had been a pot hung above the hottest fire that ever crackled on a housewife’s hearth.