Marah got into the one boat which floated in the little artificial creek, and thrust me down into the stern sheets. Then he shoved her off with a stretcher (the oars had been carried to the fisher's house, there were none in the boat), and as soon as we were clear of the rocks, in the rather choppy sea, he stepped the stretcher in the mast-crutch as a mast, and hoisted his coat as a sail. He made rough sheets by tying a few yards of spun-yarn to the coat-skirts, and then, shipping the rudder, he bore away before the wind towards the cave by Black Pool.
We had not gone far (certainly not fifty yards), when we saw the horses of the coastguards galloping down to the sea, one of the horses shying at the whiteness of the breaking water.
A voice hailed us. "Boat ahoy!" it shouted; "what are you doing in the boat there?"
And then all the horsemen drew up in a clump among the rocks.
"Us be drifting, master," shouted Marah, speaking in the broad dialect of the Devon men; "us be drifting."
"Come in till I have a look at you," cried the voice again. "Row in to the rocks here."
"Us a-got no o-ars," shouted Marah, letting the boat slip on. "Lie down, son," he said; "they will fire in another minute."
Indeed, we heard the ramrods in the carbines and the loud click of the gun-cocks.
"Boat ahoy!" cried the voice again. "Row in at once! D'ye hear? Row in at once, or I shall fire on you."
Marah did not answer.
"Present arms!" cried the voice again after a pause; and at that Marah bowed down in the stern sheets under the gunwale.
"Fire!" said the voice; and a volley ripped up the sea all round us, knocking off splinters from the plank and flattening out against the transom.
"Keep down, Jim; you're all right," said Marah. "We will be out of range in another minute."
Bang! came a second volley, and then single guns cracked and banged at intervals as we drew away.
For the next half-hour we were just within extreme range of the carbines and musketoons. During that half-hour we were slowly slipping by the long two miles of Slapton sands. We could not go fast, for our only sail was a coat, and, though the wind was pretty fresh, the set of the tide was against us. So for half an hour we crouched below that rowboat's gunwale, just peeping up now and then to see the white line of the breakers on the sand, and beyond that the black outlines of the horsemen, who slowly followed us, firing steadily, but with no very clear view of what they fired at. I thought that the two miles would never end. Sometimes the guns would stop for a minute, and I would think, "Ah! now we are out of range," or, "Now they have given us up." And then, in another second, another volley would rattle at us, and perhaps a bullet would go whining overhead, or a heavy chewed slug would come "plob" into the boat's side within six inches of me.
Marah didn't seem to mind their firing. He was too pleased at having led the preventives away from the main body of the night-riders to mind a few bullets. "Ah, Jim," he said, "there's three thousand pounds in lace, brandy, and tobacco gone to Dartmoor this night. And all them redcoat fellers got was a dead horse and a horse with a water-breaker on him. And the dead horse was their own, and the one they took. I stole 'em out of the barrack stables myself."
"But horse-stealing is a capital offence," I cried. "They could hang you."
"Yes," he said; "so they would if they could." Bang! came another volley of bullets all round us. "They'd shoot us, too, if they could, so far as that goes; but so far, they haven't been able. Never cross any rivers till you come to the water, Jim. Let that be a lesson to you."
I have often thought of it since as sound advice, and I have always tried to act upon it; but at the time it didn't give much comfort.
At the end of half an hour we were clear of Slapton sands, and coming near to Strete, and here even Marah began to be uneasy. He was watching the horsemen on the beach very narrowly, for as soon as they had passed the Lea they had stopped firing on us, and had gone at a gallop to the beach boathouse to get out a boat."
"What are they doing, Marah?" I asked.
"Getting out a boat to come after us," he answered. "Silly fools! If they'd done that at once they'd have got us. They may do it now. There goes the boat."
We heard the cries of the men as the boat ground over the shingle. Then we heard shouts and cries, and saw a light in the boathouse.
"Looking for oars and sails," said Marah, "and there are none. Good, there are none."
Happily for us, there were none. But we heard a couple of horses go clattering up the road to O'Farrell's cottage to get them.
"We shall get away now," said Marah.
In a few minutes we were out of sight of the beach. Then one of the strange coast currents caught us, and swept us along finely for a few minutes. Soon our boat was in the cave, snugly lashed to the ring-bolts, and Marah had lifted me up the stairs to the room where a few smugglers lay in their hammocks, sleeping heavily. Marah made me drink something and eat some pigeon pie; and then, stripping my clothes from me, he rubbed me down with a blanket, wrapped me in a pile of blankets, and laid me to sleep in a corner on an old sail.
CHAPTER XIV.
A TRAITOR
The next day, when I woke, a number of smugglers had come back from their ride. They were sitting about the cave, in their muddy clothes, in high good spirits. They had been chased by a few preventives as far as Allington, and there they had had a brisk skirmish with the Allington police, roused by the preventives' carbine fire. They had beaten off their opponents, and had reached Dartmoor in safety.
"Yes," said Marah; "all very well. But we have been blabbed on. We had the cutter on us on our way out, and here we were surprised coming home. It was the Salcombe cutter chased us, and it was the Salcombe boys gave the preventives the tip last night. Otherwise they'd have been in Salcombe all last night, watching Bolt Tail, no less. 'Stead of that, they came lumbering here, and jolly near nabbed us. Now, it's one of us. There's no one outside knows anything: and only half-a-dozen in Salcombe knew our plans. Salcombe district supplies North Devon; we supply to the east more. Who could it be, boys?"
Some said one thing, some another. And then a man suggested "the parson"; and when he said that it flashed across my mind that he meant Mr Cottier, for I knew that sailors always called a schoolmaster a parson, and I remembered how Mrs Cottier had heard his voice among the night-riders on the night of the snow-storm just before Christmas.
"No; it couldn't be the parson," said some one. "No one trusts the parson."
"I don't know as it couldn't be," said the man whom they called Hankie. "He is a proper cunning one to pry out."
"Ah!" said another smuggler. "And, come to think of it, we passed him the afternoon afore we sailed. I was driving with the Captain. I was driving the Captain here from Kingsbridge."
"He knows the Captain," said Marah grimly. "He might have guessed—seeing him with you—that you were coming to arrange a run. Now, how would he know where we were bound?"
"Guessed it," said Hankie. "He's been on a run or two with the Salcombe fellers. Besides, he couldn't be far out"
"No," said Marah, musingly; "he couldn't. And a hint would have been enough to send the cutter after us."
"But how did he put them on us last night?" said another smuggler. "We had drawed them out proper to Bolt Tail to look for a cargo there. Properly we had drawed them. Us had a boat and all, showing lights."