"Let your piece cool a moment," said Marah, "then we will sponge and load again, and then Jim'll try. You were too much to the right, Mr Hugh. Your shots fell astern."
After a minute or two we cleaned the gun thoroughly and reloaded.
"Now," said Marah, "remember one thing. If you was in a ship, fighting that other ship, you wouldn't want just to blaze away at her broadside. No. You'd want to hit her so as your shot would rake all along her decks from the bow aft, or from the stern forrard. You wait a second, Master Jim, till the wind gives her bows a skew towards you, or till her stern swings round more. There she goes. Are you ready? Now, as she comes round; allow for it. Fire!"
Very hurriedly I made my aim, and still more hurriedly did I give fire. Again came the bang and flash; again the gun clattered over; but, to my joy, a smacking crack showed that the shot went home. The shock made the old Snail roll. A piece of her bow was knocked off. Two or three bullets ripped through her sail. One bored a groove along her, and the rest went over her.
"Good," said. Marah. "A few more like that and she's all our own. Now it's my shot. I'll try to knock her rudder away. Wait till she swings. There she comes! There she comes! Over a little. Up a little. Now. Fire." He darted his linstock down upon the priming. The gun roared and upset; the bullets banged out the Snail's stern, and she filled slowly, and sank to the level of the water, her mast standing erect out of the flood, and her whole fabric swaying a little as the water moved her up and down.
After that we fired at the mast till we had knocked it away, and then we placed our toys in the sheltered fireplace of the ruin and came away, happy to the bone, talking nineteen to the dozen.
CHAPTER VI.
THE OWL'S CRY
For the next month we passed all our afternoons with Marah. In the mornings the Rector gave us our lessons at Strete; then we walked home to dinner; then we played with our gun and cutter, or at the sailing of our home-made boats, till about six, when we went home for tea. After tea we prepared our lessons for the next day and went upstairs to bed, where we talked of smugglers and pirates till we fell asleep. Marah soon taught us how to sail the cutter; and, what was more, he taught us how to rig her. For an hour of each fine afternoon he would give us a lesson in the quarry office, showing us how to rig model boats, which we made out of old boxes and packing-cases. In the sunny evenings of April we used to sail our fleets, ship against ship, upon the great freshwater lake into which the trout-brook passes on its way to the sea. Sometimes we would have a fleet of ships of the line anchored close to the shore, and then we would fire at them with the gun and with one of Marah's pistols till we had shattered them to bits and sunk them. Sometimes Marah would tell us tales of the smugglers and pirates of long ago, especially about a pirate named Van Horn, who was burned in his ship off Mugeres Island, near Campeachy, more than a hundred years back.
"His ship was full of gold and silver," said Marah. "You can see her at a very low tide even now. I've seen her myself. She is all burnt to a black coal, a great Spanish galleon, with all her guns in her. I was out fishing in the boat, and a mate said, 'Look there. There she is!' and I saw her as plain as plain among all the weeds in the sea. The water's very clear there, and there she was, with the fishes dubbing their noses on her. And she's as full of gold as the Bank of England. The seas'll have washed Van Horn's bones white, and the bones of his crew too; eaten white by the fish and washed white, lying there in all that gold under the sea, with the weeds growing over them. It gives you a turn to think of it, don't it?"
"Why don't they send down divers to get the gold?" asked Hugh.
"Why!" said Marah. "There's many has tried after all that gold. But some the shacks took and some the Spaniards took, and then there was storms and fighting. None ever got a doubloon from her. But somebody'll have a go for it again. I tried once, long ago. That was an unlucky try, though. Many poor men died along of that one. They died on the decks," he added. "It was like old Van Horn cursing us. They died in my arms, some of 'em. Seven and twenty seamen, and one of them was my mate, Charlie!"
I have wandered away from my story, I'm afraid, remembering these scraps of the past; but it all comes back to me now, so clearly that it seems to be happening again. There are Marah and Hugh, with the sun going down behind the gorse-bank, across the Lea; and there are the broken ships floating slowly past, with the perch rising at them; and there is myself, a very young cub, ignorant of what was about to come upon me. Perhaps, had I known what was to happen before the leaves of that spring had fallen, I should have played less light-heartedly, and given more heed to Mr Evans, the Rector.
Now, on one day in each week, generally on Thursdays, we had rather longer school hours than on the other days. On these days of extra work Hugh and I had dinner at the Rectory with Ned Evans, our schoolmate. After dinner we three boys would wander off together, generally down to Black Pool, where old Spanish coins (from some forgotten wreck) were sometimes found in the sand after heavy weather had altered the lie of the beach. We never found any Spanish coins, but we always enjoyed our afternoons there. The brook which runs into the sea there was very good for trout, in the way that Marah showed us; but we never caught any, for all our pains. In the summer we meant to bathe from the sands, and all through that beautiful spring we talked of the dives we would take from the spring-board running out into the sea. Then we would have great games of ducks and drakes, with flat pebbles; or games of pebble-dropping, in which our aim was to drop a stone so that it should make no splash as it entered the water. But the best game of all was our game of cliff-exploring among the cliffs on each side of the bay, and this same game gave me the adventure of my life.
One lovely afternoon towards the end of the May of that year, when we were grubbing among the cliff-gorse as usual, wondering how we could get down the cliffs to rob the sea-birds' nests, we came to a bare patch among the furze; and there lay a couple of coastguards, looking intently at something a little further down the slope, and out of sight, beyond the brow of the cliff. They had ropes with them, and a few iron spikes, and one of them had his telescope on the grass beside him. They looked up at us angrily when we broke through the thicket upon them, and one of them hissed at us through his teeth: "Get out, you boys. Quick. Cut!" and waved to us to get away, which we did, a good deal puzzled and perhaps a little startled. We talked about it on our way home. Ned Evans said that the men were setting rabbit snares, and that he had seen the wires. Hugh thought that they might be after sea-birds' eggs during their hours off duty. Both excuses seemed plausible, but for my own part I thought something very different. The men, I felt, were out on some special service, and on the brink of some discovery. It seemed to me that when we broke in upon them they were craning forward to the brow of the cliff, intently listening. I even thought that from below the brow of the cliff, only a few feet away, there had come a noise of people talking. I did not mention my suspicions to Hugh and Ned, because I was not sure, and they both seemed so sure; but all the way home I kept thinking that I was right. It flashed on me that perhaps the night-riders had a cave below the cliff-brow, and that the coast-guards had discovered the secret. It was very wrong of me, but my only thought was: "Oh, will they catch Marah? Will poor Marah be sent to prison?" and the fear that our friend would be dragged off to gaol kept me silent as We walked.