“Sit down, Captain Page, and you shall have the explanation of all this,” he said, and the sudden change in his tone relaxed my strain so violently that I fairly reeled into a chair. “I sent for you thus early to question you before you had the news from other sources,” he went on. “Make a note of it, Captain, and when you wish to examine a witness, get hold of him before his impressions have been distorted out of shape by his confusing of them with the impressions of others. You recall what I was saying last night about the Washington plot against my person?” I bowed. “I think I owe my liberty, and perhaps my life, to you, Captain Page; or at least to your presence here up to midnight. There are suspicious circumstances enough to warrant the belief that a plot was laid against me, to be sprung last night. I was in hopes that you might be able to add further information; but your items only confirm the story of the inn people. They thought, however, that the sounds of the scuffle came from your room.” “If I had been as sound asleep as I needed to be, a battle royal might have been fought in my room without my knowing it,” I replied, regaining something of my self-possession. “This squabble in the inn seems to have been an aftermath,” he continued; “possibly”--and here I thought he looked sharply at me again--“a meeting of the plotters to jangle over their failure. Which points to a traitor among us, Captain, since there are no suspicious characters quartering at the tavern whose room could have been used for a rendezvous. But one thing is certain: one of the janglers was a soldier of the Loyal American Legion in uniform. A horse-boy saw him slip into the tavern and go up-stairs.” My heart came into my mouth, and, by the bones of all the Pages, I had to swallow twice to get it down again. Champe was surely skating upon the thinnest ice that ever held the weight of a man, and if he broke through, I should be quite as far from the shore as he. “But--but the other circumstances, sir,” I prompted, hoping to turn him back from this aftermath business, as he called it, in the tavern. “They are quite conclusive. All day yesterday a troop of rebel horse was in hiding on the Jersey shore, evidently waiting for some prearranged event to come off. Late in the evening the schooner _Nancy Jane_ dropped a boat, manned by a single pair of oars, and then stood up and down the river for several hours. The dropped boat was seen more than once by our sentries, and it was always hanging in the tideway at the same place.” “Surely, all this was most suspicious!” I exclaimed, as heartily as I could.