‘He is here, and he is alone,’ the Captain answered. ‘Our hawser fetched him off his horse as neatly as ever a gull was netted by a cragsman. What have ye done in our absence, Silas!’
‘We have the packs ready for carriage,’ said the man addressed, a sturdy, weather-beaten seaman of middle age. ‘The silk and lace are done in these squares covered over with sacking. The one I have marked “yarn” and the other “jute”—a thousand of Mechlin to a hundred of the shiny. They will sling over a mule’s back. Brandy, schnapps, Schiedam, and Hamburg Goldwasser are all set out in due order. The ‘baccy is in the flat cases over by the Black Drop there. A plaguey job we had carrying it all out, but here it is ship-shape at last, and the lugger floats like a skimming dish, with scarce ballast enough to stand up to a five-knot breeze.’
‘Any signs of the Fairy Queen?’ asked the smuggler.
‘None. Long John is down at the water’s edge looking out for her flash-light. This wind should bring her up if she has rounded Combe-Martin Point. There was a sail about ten miles to the east-nor’-east at sundown. She might have been a Bristol schooner, or she might have been a King’s fly-boat.’
‘A King’s crawl-boat,’ said Captain Murgatroyd, with a sneer. ‘We cannot hang the gauger until Venables brings up the Fairy Queen, for after all it was one of his hands that was snackled. Let him do his own dirty work.’
‘Tausend Blitzen!’ cried the ruffian Dutchman, ‘would it not be a kindly grass to Captain Venables to chuck the gauger down the Black Drop ere he come? He may have such another job to do for us some day.’
‘Zounds, man, are you in command or am I?’ said the leader angrily. ‘Bring the prisoner forward to the fire! Now, hark ye, dog of a land-shark; you are as surely a dead man as though you were laid out with the tapers burning. See here’—he lifted a torch, and showed by its red light a great crack in the floor across the far end of the cave—‘you can judge of the Black Drop’s depth!’ he said, raising an empty keg and tossing it over into the yawning gulf. For ten seconds we stood silent before a dull distant clatter told that it had at last reached the bottom.
‘It will carry him half-way to hell before the breath leaves him,’ said one.
‘It’s an easier death than the Devizes gallows!’ cried a second.
‘Nay, he shall have the gallows first!’ a third shouted. ‘It is but his burial that we are arranging.’