Cunningham and those who served him were alone in their awful
trade; cruelty unspeakable and frenzied vice are terms which fall
impotent to measure the ghastly depths of an infamy in which they
crawled and squirmed, battening like maggots on hell's own pollution.

Long since, I think, we have clasped hands with England over Cherry
Valley and Wyoming, forgiving her the loosened fury of her red allies
and her Butlers and McDonalds. The scar remains, but is remembered only
as a glory.

How shall we take old England's wrinkled hand, stretched out above the
spots that mark the prisons of New York?--above the twelve thousand
unnamed graves of those who died for lack of air and water aboard the
_Jersey_? God knows; and yet all things are possible with Him--even this
miracle which I shall never live to see.

Without malice, without prejudice, judging only as one whose judgment
errs, I leave this darkened path for a free road in the open, and so
shall strive to tell as simply and sincerely as I may what only befell
myself and those with whom I had been long associated. And if the
pleasures that I now recall seem tinged with bitter, and if the gaiety
was but a phase of that greater prison fever that burnt us all in the
beleaguered city, still there was much to live for in those times
through which I, among many, passed; and by God's mercy, not my own
endeavor, passed safely, soul and body.

THE RECKONING

CHAPTER I

THE SPY

Having finished my duties in connection with Sir Peter's private estate
and his voluminous correspondence--and the door of my chamber being
doubly locked and bolted--I made free to attend to certain secret
correspondence of my own, which for four years now had continued,
without discovery, between the Military Intelligence Department of the
Continental army and myself through the medium of one John Ennis, the
tobacconist at the Sign of the Silver Box in Hanover Square.

Made confident by long immunity from the slightest shadow of suspicion,
apprehension of danger seldom troubled my sense of security. It did
sometimes, as when the awful treason at West Point became known to me;
and for weeks as I lay abed I thought to hear in every footfall on
Broadway the measured tread of a patrol come to take me. Yet the
traitor continued in New York without sinister consequence to me; and,
though my nights were none the pleasanter during that sad week which
ended in the execution of the British adj