Perkins arrived, and he was still whirling the cutlass above him as if he meant to lop off a head or two.
So intently was I watching the scene below on the beach that I nearly failed to notice that one of the cargo men had circled round and started up the bluff. He had not yet noticed me, because I was partly hidden by the high grass of the hummock and had not moved for a minute or more. It was now time to move, however. I knew I must head him off ere he reached the top of the bluff, and I lose him completely among the houses and the winding streets at this edge of the town. I ran to intercept him.
He was a big man, half again as large as I, but he lumbered unsteadily up the little hill in such a way that I knew I should have no difficulty in overtaking him. But then what? Short of shooting him in the leg, what could be done to stop him? He had glimpsed my approach, so there could be no question of catching him by surprise-and so I simply stopped. Yes, stopped and drew from its sheath the cutlass I had been given, and from its holster I took one of the pistols. With the sword in my right hand and the pistol in my left, I resumed my run, and in seconds I caught the big fellow up.
“Halt,” said I.
Yet he did not halt; he kept straining up the bluff, his feet slipping in the dry sand, so that he found it near impossible to make any upward progress.
“Halt,” said I again.
To no avail. He pumped his legs still more vigorously, and so I gave him a swift jab in the buttocks with the point of the sword. He let out a proper scream. I knew that I could not have hurt him quite so much as that. It must have been that he was taken by surprise.
“Would you like another?” I shouted at him.
His legs at last had halted. He turned round, and I saw in his wild eyes an unspoken threat. He seemed to be weighing his chances. I raised the point of the cutlass so that it was less than a foot from his sagging belly. I brought up the pistol that he might reckon it also in the odds against escape.
“Go ahead,” said I in a suitably nasty tone, ”and if you do, I’ll skewer you on the sword and finish you off with the pistol. And do not suppose I lack the stomach for it.”
I should like to think, reader, that it was my threatening tone persuaded him-and perhaps it was-but I believe it more likely that the poor fellow, panting with exhaustion, was simply too tired from the efforts he had made thus far, to consider any course but surrender.
Reluctantly, he nodded, and I stepped aside and pointed the direction with the sword.
“This way,” said I. ”Down there with the rest.”
And down the bluff we went. There was nothing more for me to say to him, and so I said nothing. Upon our arrival, I found the rest had been disarmed and were in a similar state of sullen compliance. One of the constables had with him a considerable length of rope and was occupied in binding the prisoners each to each; the second held them where they stood with pistol and cutlass. Mr. Perkins brought the horse-handler back to his fellows, urging him on from the saddle with the flat of his sword. I noted that the wounded man had had his shoulder bound after a fashion; the bleeding had, in any case, been stanched with a tourniquet.
With my prisoner added to their number, we had taken four. Not a bad haul except that three (the second cargo-handler and the two in the boat) had escaped our trap. Still, none of our fellows had been so much as scratched. We could count this a certain victory.
In all, it took about ten minutes to attend to matters before marching the prisoners off to the inn where they would spend the night. We marched them up toward the bluff, with the constables at the head of the column and Mr. Perkins and I bringing up the rear, leading the two horses. Along the way, he mentioned a matter in which I had considerable interest, as did Sir John later on.
“You know, Jeremy,” said he, ”something struck me as strange whilst I was putting on my show back there.”
“Oh? And what was that?”
“Well, when I got down amongst them and everything started happening at once, I could just swear that one of them who pushed the boat out and manned the oars-the passenger, I guess you’d say-”
“Yes?”
“Was wearing skirts. Could you tell better from where you were?”
“Why, 1 don’t know. Let me think about that a moment.” I sought then to call to mind exactly what I had seen. Yet all that came was a picture of confusion. At last, giving it up, I shook my head. ”I really can’t say,” I declared. ”As you yourself put it, everything was happening at once. But it would indeed seem strange if it were a woman.”
He nodded, then fell silent, though not for long. ”Another thing,” said he, ”these two horses.”
“What about them?”
“Well, that one you’re leading, he was meant to be led, no question of it. He’s big and strong and meant to carry cargo. In short, he’s a packhorse. That’s why we loaded him up with those boxes that came off the boat, whatever’s in them. An’t I right?”
“Certainly you are, but what is your point?”
“Just that this one I’m leading is a saddle horse, pure and simple, and a damn good one at that. She’s nervous and temperamental and just a bit headstrong, but those are all signs of a good animal. Now, she was all saddled and waiting there for the passenger that came off that cutter. But you know what I found out when I went to ride her? I found out she had on her a sidesaddle, a woman’s saddle, if you please. Now, what do you think of that, Jeremy?”
”I’d say it proves your point beyond argument,” said I, laughing. ”Now why didn’t you-”
I never quite finished that sentence, for behind us a great roar sounded, then above, a moment later, came a great whirring noise.
“Better run for it, gents,” yelled Mr. Perkins. ”That ain’t a musket they’re shooting at us!”
“What is it, then?”
“A cannon, and that was a cannonball landed just to the north of us.”
Hard as it was to find proper footing on that sandy bluff, the entire party managed, nevertheless, to make their way to the top of it in impressively short time. The horses, too, alive to the sense of panic in the men, heaved their way up through the sand in great, bounding leaps, racing them to the summit.
Once up and over the crest, prisoners and captors stood, resting as if out of range, wheezing and coughing. But Mr. Perkins would have none of that.
“Better move it on, gents,” he urged them. ”Next time might come closer.”
There was no next time, as it happened-not on that night, in any case. The cutter fired but once, perhaps more in pique than with a true intention to destroy: the prisoners were, after all, their own people. One of them was greatly disturbed by these events. The oarsman whose pistol had misfired seemed to be praying in the Romish style, blessing himself repeatedly. But listening carefully to him (he was quite near us), I found that it was not Latin but French he spoke, and that those were not prayers but curses he raised to heaven.
A surgeon had to be roused to remove the bullet from the wounded prisoner’s shoulder. Mr. Perkins was sent by the senior constable to fetch him. I volunteered to accompany my friend, for there was yet much I wished to know. There had been little opportunity to talk while on our way to the Good King George. The constables had unwisely marched the procession through Alfred Square, perhaps eager to show off what they had accomplished in their night’s work. While they received all the attention they might have wished, even then it seemed to me to be attention of the wrong sort. At our first appearance in the square, the patrons had poured out of the Turk’s Head and the other inns, alehouses, and dives to jeer at the luckless captives. The prisoners were greeted with laughter, hoots, and cries of derision. The tenor of these calls seemed to be that the mighty had fallen, that they were finally to get what they deserved. Oddly, it had not occurred to me until then that there might be more than one party in the smuggling trade there in Deal; there might be two, three, or even more; and all might be in mortal competition, each with the other. And why not? The robber gangs of London were in such a state, were they not? Upon one fabled occasion, two gangs had fought a pitched battle in Bedford Street over the question of which of them ”owned” a certain territory below Holbourn and above the Strand.
The crowd from Alfred Square had followed us down Middle Street, creating noise and confusion all the way
