I
The Parson stamped up and down the loft, gnawing his thumb.
Those long shots from the rear had ceased half an hour ago. A tall Grenadier drooped across the wall. How should he have known there was one in the cottage could reach out a fatal finger and tap him on the forehead at two hundred yards?
The Parson's jolly face was haggard.
Now and then he peered out of the seaward window, listening. On the knoll all was still. He could see nothing, could hear nothing. Blue Knickers had withdrawn; he could mark no prowling figures. Only among the tree-trunks a pale wisp of smoke meandered upwards, telling of a camp-fire behind.
About him was the drowsy buzz-z-z of an August noon. A cabbage butterfly sailed by. The creature's insufferable airs annoyed him. The fate of Nelson, the life of a noble lad, these were nothing to it, curse it for its callousness!
The minutes passed. The silence was so oppressive that he could hear it. It stifled him.
What an age the boy was! Good heavens!—he could have got to the mouth of the drain and back half-a-hundred times by now! What was the delay?—Things must have gone awry! Yet how could they?—It was always the way! There was no trusting any living soul but yourself! Why the devil couldn't he be in two places at once?—It was damnable!
He pulled himself together with a jerk.
Here he was becoming unjust, irritable, womanish; everything he had always most despised in a man of action.
A shout came to him from seaward.
A shot followed.
The perspiration started to his forehead. He ran to the ladder-head.
In the dimness below he could see the old foretop-man sitting alert beside the black square of the open trap.
Piper was stooping forward, one great hand curved at his ear, listening intently.
"Piper!"
"Sir."
"All well below there?"
"Well, sir, I'm not justly sure. A minute back I seemed to feel like a gush o wind—"
"Then hail the boy, man!"
"Boy Hoad! below there!" in stentorian tones.
The only answer was a rush of air through the open trap, and the muffled slam of a door, house-shaking.