“Ha!” he said, with a shrill indrawing of his breath. “I thought your voice seemed familiar, though I couldn’t place it at once. You had a much better reason than the one you gave me for getting me to come away from the headquarters, Captain Richard Page.” His naming of me was enough, and my stomach rebelled at the thought that I would have to turn butcher and kill him, even as Champe had planned to kill him. Yet I resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt, if indeed, there were any doubt. “Tell me plainly what you think you know,” I said, looking away from him. “I know that two men, a captain in Baylor’s Horse and a sergeant of the Continental Army, are here in New York for the purpose of seizing Benedict Arnold and carrying him back to Tappan. The sergeant I met this morning, thanks to a two-faced gentleman who shall pay dearly for his meddling; and the captain--” “Well,” said I; “and the captain?” His eyes lighted with a blaze of triumphant cunning. “You are a good actor, Captain Page, but not quite good enough. Will you unbar the door and let me go? Or shall I call for help?” “Neither,” I rejoined briefly, drawing my sword and laying it across my knees. “A movement out of your chair, or a tone louder than you have been using, and you are a dead man, Mr. James Askew.” The threat quelled him, or rather I should say, it put him the keener upon his wits. I saw nothing for it now but a bloody murder, and was trying to nerve myself to it when he spoke again, smoothly insinuating. “We seem to have arrived at what our friends the French would call an _impasse_, Captain Page,” he said quietly. “I can hang you; therefore you dare not let me go. The alternative is for you to pass that shining slip of steel through me two or three times; and that, too, has its drawbacks. You don’t come of murdering stock, Captain Page, though I don’t doubt you have killed your antagonist often enough in hot blood.” “I was thinking more of what I should do with your carcass after the fact,” I objected bluntly. “Ah; that is another drawback--one which I overlooked at the moment. It would be inconvenient to have a dead man in your room, with no way of getting rid of the _corpus delicti_. But if I might offer a suggestion; the river is not far away, and under cover of night you and your sergeant might compass the funeral--though not without a possible risk.” His coolness, now that the real pinch had come, was amazing. I could hardly believe this was the same man whom I had frightened into teeth chatterings before Sir Henry Clinton’s door but a few minutes ago.