“You must take to the road, worn out as you are, and make your way back to your regiment, Sergeant,” I said, settling Champe’s course for him as if I had been his own captain. But now his dogged courage seemed to have oozed away. “I can never make it, Captain Dick. I’d be overhauled as soon as daylight comes, and that would mean dancing upon nothing for me. They wouldn’t even give me a soldier’s death.” “Pshaw, man!” said I, half angrily. “Being safely out of the town and this far on the road, you have little to fear.” But he only shook his head gloomily, and would not be persuaded, breaking in upon me, while I was trying to urge him, with a question as to my own designs. I laughed. “I came out to snare Sir Judas,” I told him. “That, and nothing less, is what I shall do, John Champe, if I follow him to the ends of the earth.” “You’ll be taken and hanged,” said Champe. “Not if I can help it, you may be sure. But come; you must decide. I’m going back, and there is little enough time to do it in, the Lord knows.” He hesitated yet another minute or two and then rose up stiffly from the log on which he had been sitting. “I’ll go back with you and see it through,” he declared moodily. I tried once again to dissuade him, showing him how he was likely to have miseries enough as a common soldier in any regiment commanded by Arnold; showed him further how he would certainly be required to choose between death at the last and fighting against his country in very deed and fact. But it was all to no purpose. Say what I would, his only reply was a stubborn repetition: “I’ll go back with you and see it through.” And when I could get nothing more out of him, we made our way as swiftly as possible back to our stolen boat, taking to the water a short half-hour, I should say, before dawn-breaking. Our luck, which had left us so promptly after the boat-stealing, gave us a little glimpse of itself again when we approached the New York shore. By the merest chance, we took ground within a few feet of the dangling boat chain, and by chance again, our sleepy sentinel, or another in his place, was at the other end of his beat when we climbed cautiously up the bank. Once more safely in the town, we separated; Champe to go to his barracks, and I to steal unobserved into my tavern and up the stair and so to my room with the unrumpled bed. I rumpled the bed duly, in less than two minutes after I had dropped the door-bar, being fully nine-tenths dead for the want of sleep and rest. But I had scarcely pulled the covers up before there came a mighty thundering at the door; and when I went to answer it, I was told that my general commanded my attendance on the moment--and he had sent a soldier to do the summoning. VIII A WALK UP GALLOWS HILL IT nettles me to think that one carrying the name of Page should be a prey to senseless terror, but the sight of that sour-faced soldier standing, with his musket at parade, before my door, made me ill.