“Hell and zounds!” he foamed, when he became a little coherent again. “All the devils in the pit fight for that man! Listen, Captain Page: this night was our final chance, and on this night of all others everything was at last in readiness. Major Lee, with a picked troop from the legion, was in hiding in the wood across the river, and a boat from the schooner Nancy Jane was to be hanging off and on to come ashore and take us to the Jersey side.” “Go on,” I commanded sharply, though the sharpness was not for poor Champe; it was for what I foresaw was coming. “It was trimmed to the last shaving of a toothpick,” he continued fiercely. “I knew his custom--to walk late o’ night in the garden. I had loosened a board in the fence, and we--the one who was to help, and I--were to seize and bind and gag him, whip him out through the hole in the fence, and so to the river and the boat.” “I see,” I said; and certainly I did see--far more than was pleasant to contemplate. “When it was told me he was going to a rout, I thought our cursed luck had tripped us again,” Champe went on. “Then I got the order to follow him, as a guard of honor, I suppose, and here you thrust yourself in, Captain Page.” “No,” I denied; “I was thrust in; but, like yourself, I take it, I was not sorry to have the chance of keeping him in view. Go on with your tale.” “It is soon told,” he rejoined. “At the mansion house up yonder, having no orders to wait for his coming out, I ran back to set the trap. Two freezing hours we lay under the cedars in that hell-fired garden, and then we saw the lights, and a little farther on we heard the old fox walking into the trap. But he was not alone, as you know, Captain Page.” “How many of you were there?” I asked. “Two: one other and myself. The third was on the river bank, signaling the boat.” “You should have killed me out of your way, Sergeant Champe. It was your plain duty to your country. If we ever get out of this and back to our own horse-ropes, I shall see you court-martialed for that slip, my good man.” “There were but the two of us, Captain Dick,” he said, giving me the name my own troop used. “Well? How many would you ask for, to put the quietus on one man, and he armed only with a sword that you did not need to let him lug out of its sheath?” His scowl, which was the natural fashion of his forbidding face, broadened into a sardonic grin. “My fellow under the cedars might have chanced it, since he didn’t know you. But not I, my bully captain. I know you too well, sir. Before we could have said ‘Jack Robinson’ you would have had one or both of us wondering how we came there with so many skin rents to be sewed up.” “Not at all,” said I. “I should have been fighting on your side. But, of course, you couldn’t know that.”