That shot brought him down, and now he seemed as eager to give me my sergeant, and to be quit of us both, as, a moment before, he was reluctant. Champe was fetched from some dungeon underneath the battlements, and he was shrewd enough not to make much of seeing me with the commandant, who now followed me to the sally-port, with protestations of his guiltlessness in Champe’s arrest, and begging me not to make too much of it with Sir Henry Clinton. I set his mind at rest on this point, telling him that if he did not report the _faux pas_, I should not; a statement which was well within the bounds of truth. Once free of the fort with my derelict, I hurried him around to the tavern and up to my room. “Out of that masquerade and into your uniform quickly!” I commanded; and I would not let him tell his morning adventures until he had made the change. When he was once more, in outward appearance, a soldier of the Loyal American Legion, he set his back against the wall and said: “Well, Captain Dick, I’ve found the boat for us, though I don’t know but what I’ve had to kill a man to quiet our title to it.” XII HOW THE HOOK WAS BAITED CHAMPE’S calm announcement that he had purchased a boat at the price of a man’s life was startling enough; but before I could ask for the particulars he had pushed the dreadful deed and all thought of it into the background with an ominous hint and a still more ominous query. “The boat business isn’t the worst of it, by the value, much or little, of another man’s life,” he affirmed soberly. Then the query: “Is your standing still good over yonder, Captain Dick?” with a jerk of his thumb toward Sir Henry Clinton’s and Arnold’s headquarters. “My standing was as sound as ever, up to an hour or two ago; though it had a pretty narrow margin when Major Simcoe came ashore and went within an ace of spilling all our fat into the fire. But why? Has anything happened that promises to make a breach in it?” Champe took his back from the wall and sat down, locking his hands over one knee. “Let me ask you first: did they tell you what I was doing when they put me under arrest?--but of course they didn’t; they couldn’t have guessed it.” “They told me nothing save that you were a soldier out of uniform, that you were a skulker from the fleet, and that you were making for a boat with a pair of oars on your shoulder--preparing to run away, they supposed.” “They got it all straight, as far as they went,” he responded, nodding his head sagely. “Only they didn’t go half far enough. I was doing my prettiest to make a chance to put the quietus on a second man; and I would have compassed it within the next quarter-hour, if the guard officer hadn’t clapped his good eye on me.” “Heavens!” I exclaimed. “You surely missed your calling, Sergeant Champe. You should be the public hangman in some county where the court sits once a month.” Champe’s grin was appreciative rather than reproachful.