The rum was served and the captain raised his pannikin:
“To the swift avenging of poor Will Rudrum, to the quick regaining of our dignity, and to the speedy hanging of his Majesty’s foes!”
The men drank, and then Joe Dickinson shouted: “And to our captain, God bless him, and blast them as does him dirty tricks!”
This toast was drunk greedily, and then the bo’sun led three cheers—three cheers which went echoing out of the old barn across the Marsh with a strength that made many a smuggler turn in his bed uneasily.
When they opened the barn door at daybreak to let the captain go forth, they found there a neat pile of weapons: his Majesty’s pistols and his Majesty’s cutlasses were all returned.
“Aye, but there’s some honour amongst thieves, sir!” exclaimed the bo’sun.
“Devil a bit of it!” said the captain. “The rascals know that we can soon get substitutes, and they’ve no wish to have such telltale things discovered on their premises. There’s more good sense than honour in it, I’m thinking, Job Mallet.”
At ten o’clock that morning a coach rolled up to the door of the Ship Inn and out stepped Antony Whyllie, Esq., attorney-at-law from Rye, a man of sixty-five years, but upright and alert as any young man. He was attired in a bottle-green coat, black satin breeches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and faultless linen. His gray wig, tied concisely with a black ribbon, completed a true picture of the law: a man to desire for one’s defence, a man to dread for one’s accusation.
The captain received him at the door of the inn and conducted him to the privacy of his own bedchamber.
There he unburdened his mind to the lawyer, stating all his suspicions and clearly showing how he had arrived at them. By the end of the morning they thoroughly understood each other, the lawyer returning by coach to Rye with orders to the governor of the castle to prepare accommodation for a large number of prisoners and to see to it that there were chains enough to hang ’em to. But, strange to relate, that lawyer in bottle green never reached the little town of Rye, for his coach stopped at a certain farmhouse beyond Romney. Here he alighted to make room for another lawyer, a real lawyer, a man of sixty-five, who had left Rye that very morning to consult with a certain Captain Collyer residing at the Ship Inn, Dymchurch. This lawyer had, needless to say, never arrived at Dymchurch. For at a lonely spot on the road outside Romney a strong body of men had awaited the arrival of his coach. While two or three of them removed the driver from his box to the farmhouse, where they speedily made him drunk, two or three others had entered the coach, securely gagged and blindfolded the occupant, and conveyed him also to the house, the coach immediately proceeding to Dymchurch with another coachman and another lawyer, a man in a bottle-green coat.
The blindfolded lawyer had been scared out of all knowledge, especially by the sound of the voice of a certain man known as the Scarecrow. This terrible ruffian had told the lawyer that if on returning to Rye he breathed a word of what had happened they would most certainly catch him again and do away with him, adding that there was no place more convenient than Romney Marsh for the hiding of a body. So with the exception of telling his awful experience to his wife, whom he feared nearly as greatly as he feared the Scarecrow, Antony Whyllie, attorney-at-law, held his tongue, being only thankful that the rascals had let him off so easily. The coachman, who was so muddled with drink and with falling off his box at least a dozen times on the way back, never even remembered what had happened or to whose kind offices he was indebted for the privilege of becoming so gloriously drunk. So the affair passed unheeded by the public, and the gentleman in bottle green, having changed his clothes, might that very afternoon have been seen going toward the church of Dymchurch. Down into the crypt he went, and there, at a dirty table lighted by a candle set in a bottle’s neck, he aided two other men to work out certain accounts that were spread before them in a book marked “Parish Register of Deaths.” But there were no deaths registered in that book. It was full of figures accounting for cargoes of wool, full of receipts for coffins loaded with spirits.
Sexton Mipps and the gentleman who had worn the bottle-green coat then unlocked an old chest and took out certain money bags which they emptied on the table. The third gentleman, whom they addressed as the Scarecrow, helped them to sort the coin, French in one pile, English in another,
