Coming close, he halted, put a finger to his lip and beckoned: then began to lead the way back as he had come.
Thought I, “these are queer doings:” but left Molly to browse, and crept after him on hands and knees. He turn’d his head once to make sure I was following, and then scrambled on quicker, but softly, toward the point where the red glow was shining.
Once more he pull’d up—as I judg’d, about twelve paces’ distance from the edge—and after considering for a second, began to move again; only now he worked a little to the right. And soon I saw the intention of this: for just here the cliff’s lip was cleft by a fissure—very like that in Scawfell which we were used to call the Lord’s Rake, only narrower—that ran back into the field and shelved out gently at the top, so that a man might easily scramble some way down it, tho’ how far I could not then tell. And ’twas from this fissure that the glow came.
Along the right lip of this Billy led me, skirting it by a couple of yards, and wriggling on his belly like a blind worm. Crawling closer now (for ’twas hard to see him against the black turf), I stopp’d beside him and strove to quiet the violence of my breathing. Then, after a minute’s pause, together we pulled ourselves to the edge, and peer’d over.
The descent of the gully was broken, some eight feet below us, by a small ledge, sloping outward about six feet (as I guess), and screen’d by branches of the wild tamarisk. At the back, in an angle of the solid rock, was now set a pan pierced with holes, and full of burning charcoal: and over this a man in the rebels’ uniform was stooping.
He had a small paper parcel in his left hand, and was blowing at the charcoal with all his might. Holding my breath, I heard him clearly, but could see nothing of his face, for his back was toward us, all sable against the glow. The charcoal fumes as they rose chok’d me so, that I was very near a fit of coughing, when Billy laid one hand on my shoulder, and with the other pointed out to seaward.
Looking that way, I saw a small light shining on the sea, pretty close in. ’Twas a lantern hung out from the sloop, as I concluded on the instant: and now I began to have an inkling of what was toward.
But looking down again at the man with the charcoal pan I saw a black head of hair lifted, and then a pair of red puff’d cheeks, and a pimpled nose with a scar across the bridge of it—all shining in the glare of the pan.
“Powers of Heaven!” I gasped; “’tis that bloody villain Luke Settle!”
And springing to my feet, I took a jump over the edge and came sprawling on top of him. The scoundrel was stooping with his nose close to the pan, and had not time to turn before I lit with a thud on his shoulders, flattening him on the ledge and nearly sending his face on top of the live coal. ’Twas so sudden that, before he could so much as think, my fingers were about his windpipe, and the both of us struggling flat on the brink of the precipice. For he had a bull’s strength, and heaved and kicked, so that I fully looked, next moment, to be flying over the edge into the sea: nor could I loose my grip to get out a pistol, but only held on and worked my fingers in, and thought how he had strangled the mastiff that night on the bowling-green, and vowed to serve him the same if only strength held out.