Part 23 (2/2)

”Here's where the hoss is; Pete Westervelt takes keer of him,”

whispered the watchman, and strode, not to the stables, but to the door of what appeared to be an outer kitchen, which he opened with a key of his own. A friendly whinny greeted him from the narrow dark s.p.a.ce into which he disappeared. He soon came out, leading the horse he used in his journeys to and from the American camp, and bearing saddle and bridle on his arm. The two men speedily adjusted these, whereupon Philip mounted.

”Bring or send the beast back by night,” said Meadows, handing over the key, with which he had meanwhile relocked the door of his improvised stable. ”Hoss-flesh is d.a.m.n' skeerce these times.” This was the truth, the needs of the armies having raised the price of a horse to a fabulous sum.

Philip promised to return the horse or its equivalent; gave a swift acknowledgment of thanks, and a curt good-night; and made off, leaving old Meadows to foot it, and row it, once more back to New York.

'Twas now, till he should reach the camp, but a matter of steady galloping, with ears alert for the sound of other hoof-beats, eyes watchful at crossroads and open stretches for the party he hoped to forestall. While he had had ways and means to think of, and had been in peril of detection by the British, or in doubt of obtaining a horse without a long trudge to Ellis's hut, his mind had been diverted from the unhappy interview with Margaret. But now that swept back into his thoughts, inundating his soul with grief and shame, of the utmost degree of bitterness. These were the more complete from the recollection of the joyous antic.i.p.ations with which he had gone to meet her.

Contemplation of this contrast, sense of his desertion, overcame his habitual resistance to self-pity, a feeling against which he was usually on the stronger guard for his knowledge that it was a concomitant of his inherent sensibility. He quite yielded to it for a time; and though 'twas sharpened by his comparison of the Margaret he had just left, with the pretty, soft-smiling Madge of other days, that comparison eventually supplanted self-pity with pity for her, a feeling no less laden with sorrow.

He dared not think of what her perverseness might yet lead her to. For himself he saw nothing but hopeless sorrow, unless she could be brought back to her better self. But, alas, he by whose influence that end might be achieved--for he could not believe that her heart had quite cast him out--was flying from her, and years might pa.s.s ere he should see her again: meanwhile, how intolerable would life be to him!

His heart, with the instinct of self-protection, sought some interest in which it might find relief.

He thought of the cause for which he was fighting. That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love. Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied. He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the resource that is left him when he is scorned elsewhere. And he felt his ardour for it fanned by his deepened hate for the opposing cause, a hate intensified by the circ.u.mstance that his rival was of that cause. For that rival's sake, he hated with a fresh implacability the whole royal side and everything pertaining to it. He pressed his teeth together, and resolved to make that side pay as dearly as lay in him to make it, for what he had lost of his wife's love, and for what she had lost of her probity.

And the man himself, Falconer! 'Twas he that commanded this night's wild attempt, if she had spoken truly. Well, Falconer should not succeed this night, and Philip, with a kind of bitter elation, thanked G.o.d 'twas through him that the attempt should be the more utterly defeated. He patted his horse--a faithful beast that had known but a short rest since it had travelled over the same road in the opposite direction--and used all means to keep it at the best pace compatible with its endurance. Forward it sped, in long, unvarying bounds, seeing the road in the dark, or rather in the strange dusky light yielded by the snow-covered earth and seeming rather to originate there than to be reflected from the impenetrable obscurity overhead.

From the attempt which he was bent upon turning into a ridiculous abortion, if it lay in the power of man and horse to do so, Philip's thoughts went to the object of that attempt, Was.h.i.+ngton himself. He was thrilled at once with a greater love and admiration for that firm soul maintaining always its serenity against the onslaughts of men and circ.u.mstance, that soul so unshakable as to seem in the care of Fate itself. Capture Was.h.i.+ngton! Philip laughed at the thought.

And yet a British troop had seized General Charles Lee when he was the rebels' second in command, and, in turn, a party of Yankees had taken the British General Prescott from his quarters in Rhode Island. True, neither of these officers was at the time of his seizure as safely quartered and well guarded as Was.h.i.+ngton was now; but, on the other hand, Margaret had spoken of treachery in the American camp. Who were the traitors? Philip hoped he might find out their chief, at least.

It was a long and hard ride, and more and more an up-hill one as it neared its end. But Philip's thoughts made him so often unconscious of his progress, and of the pa.s.sage of the hours, that he finally realised with a momentary surprise that he had reached a fork of the road, near which he should come upon the rebel pickets, and that the night was far spent. He might now take one road, and enter the camp at its nearest point, but at a point far from Was.h.i.+ngton's headquarters; or he might take the other road and travel around part of the camp, so as to enter it at a place near the general's house. 'Twas at or near the latter place that the enemy would try to enter, as they would surely be so directed by the traitors within the camp.

Heedless of the apparent advantage of alarming the camp at the earliest possible moment, at whatever part of it he could then reach, he felt himself impelled to choose the second road. He ever afterward held that his choice of this seemingly less preferable road was the result of a swift process of unconscious reasoning--for he maintained that what we call intuition is but an instantaneous perception of facts and of their inevitable inferences, too rapid for the reflective part of the mind to record.

He felt the pressure of time relaxed, for a troop of horse going by the circuitous route Meadows had indicated could not have reached the camp in the hours since they had pa.s.sed the place where Meadows had seen them. So he let his horse breathe wherever the road was broken by ascents. At last he drew up, for a moment, upon an eminence which gave, by daylight, a wide view of country. Much of this expanse being clear of timber, and clad in snow, it yielded something to a night-accustomed eye, despite the darkness. A low, far-off, steady, snow-m.u.f.fled beating, which had imperceptibly begun to play on Winwood's ear, indicated a particular direction for his gaze.

Straining his senses, he looked.

Against the dusky-white background of snow, he could make out an indistinct, irregular, undulating line of moving dark objects. He recognised this appearance as the night aspect of a distant band of hors.e.m.e.n. They were travelling in a line parallel to his own.

Presently, he knew, they would turn toward him, and change their linear appearance to that of a compact ma.s.s. But he waited not for that. He gently bade his horse go on, and presently he turned straight for the camp, having a good lead of the hors.e.m.e.n.

He was pa.s.sing a little copse at his right hand, when suddenly a dark figure stepped from behind a tree into the road before him. Thinking this was a soldier on picket duty, he recollected the word of the night, and reined in to give it upon demand. But the man, having viewed him as well as the darkness allowed, seemed to realise having made a mistake, and, as suddenly as he had appeared, stalked back into the wood.

”What does this mean?” thought Philip; and then he remembered what Margaret had said of treachery. Was this mysterious night-walker a traitor posted there to aid the British to their object?

”Stop or I'll shoot you down!” cried Philip, remembering too late that he had parted with both his pistols at the Bowery lane guard-house.

But the noise of the man's retreat through the undergrowth told that he was willing to risk a shot.

Philip knew the importance of obtaining a clue to the traitors. The rebels had suffered considerably from treachery on their own side; had been in much danger from the treason of Doctor Church at Boston; had owed the speedier loss of their Fort Was.h.i.+ngton to that of Dumont; and (many of them held) the retreat which Was.h.i.+ngton checked at Monmouth, to the design of their General Charles Lee. So the capture of this man, apart from its possible effect upon the present business, might lead to the unearthing of a nest of traitors likely at some future time, if not to-night, to menace the rebel cause.

Philip leaped from his horse, and, trusting to the animal's manifest habit of awaiting orders, stopped not to tie it, but plunged directly into the wood, drawing his sword as he went.

The sound of the man's flight had ceased, but Philip continued in the direction it had first taken. He was about to cross a row of low bushes, when he unexpectedly felt his ankle caught by a hand, and himself thrown forward on his face. The man had crouched amongst the bushes and tripped him up as he made to pa.s.s.

The next moment, the man was on Philip's back, fumbling to grasp his neck, and muttering:

”Tell me who you are, quick! Who are you from? You don't wear the dragoon cap, I see. Now speak the truth, or by G.o.d I'll shoot your head off!”

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