“No; we couldn’t and didn’t. You know what happened afterward; how we hid and watched you two going back and forth so near to us that any time you passed I could have touched you. Once my fellow sneezed, though he well-nigh burst a blood-vessel trying to stop it. You didn’t hear it, but Arnold did. Then I thought we should have to run the risk of your frog-sticker, Captain Dick, whether we liked it or no.” “Were you under the evergreens?” “Sure enough. You made the circle completely around us. But for my taking in a leg, you would have stumbled over me.” I held up a hand for silence. “You are fluenter than I am with the soldier-curses, Champe. Will you say over a few of the choicest of them for me? All through those two hours while you were freezing under the evergreens, I was hammering my brain to invent some way by which I could take Sir Judas with my two unaided hands. I knew nothing of Major Lee’s dispositions, or of the boat, or of what you had done; which is pointedly my own fault, since I should have left everything else to wait and hunted you out before I ventured to stick my oar in. Certainly you missed the fool-killing chance of a lifetime, Sergeant, when you failed to run me through with your bayonet this night!” But at this the humaner side of the dark-faced sergeant-major came to the fore. “No, Captain Dick,” he said quite civilly. “It was our crooked luck again, and some of it was my fault. I took you for what you seemed to be--this morning, and more than ever, this afternoon and evening when you had the colors on. But it’s done and over, and there are two of us to pay the piper instead of one. It’s the devil’s own pickle we are in, sir, with these coats of ours to tell what we’ll have to do and where we’ll have to go to-morrow.” I thought so, too, and for a little time could do nothing better than to prop my face in my hands and grill it over back and forth in all its bitterness. But finally out of the grilling came that fuddle-headed thought of mine builded on the fumes of the warmed wine and concerning itself with an assault on Arnold’s house, with men enough to make it somewhat less than madness. Now my own men were far enough away, but, by Champe’s tale, Major Lee was in hiding somewhere on the Jersey shore; and I knew the mettle of the major and of the men he commanded. “There is hope yet, Sergeant!” I cried, when the idea had fully taken shape. “Are you hot-blooded enough to go with me where I shall lead?” Champe wagged his hands back and forth and stretched the fingers. “The feeling is coming back to them,” he said, and then he got up and signified his readiness. I explained my plan to him in low tones, remembering, at this late dealing of the cards, that Castner had rooms somewhere on this same floor with us.