CHAPTER VII
Ortho and Wany were in Penzance looking for cows that had been taken by the Press gang, when they met the Pope of Rome wearing a plumed hat and Teresa’s second best dress. He had an iron walking stick in his hand with a negro head carved at the top and an ivory ferrule, and every time he tapped the road it rang under him.
“Hollow, you see,” said His Holiness. “Eaten away by miners and Buccas—scandalous! One more convulsion like the Lisbon earthquake of fifty-five and we shall all fall in. Everything is hollow, when you come to think of it—cups, kegs, cannon, ships, churches, crowns and heads—everything. We shall not only fall in but inside out. If you don’t believe me, listen.”
Whereupon he gathered his skirts and ran up Market Jew Street laying about him with the iron stick, hitting the ground, the houses and bystanders on the head, and everything he touched rumbled like a big or little gong, in proportion to its size. Finally he hit the Market House; it exploded and Ortho woke up.
There was a full gale blowing from the southwest and the noise of the sea was rolling up the valley in roaring waves. The Bosula trees creaked and strained. A shower of broken twigs hit the window and the wind thudded on the pane like a fist. Ortho turned over on his other side and was just burying his head under the pillow when he heard the explosion again. It was a different note from the boom of the breakers, sharper. He had heard something like that before—where? Then he remembered the Breton with the cutter in chase—guns! A chair fell over in his mother’s room. She was up. A door slammed below, boots thumped upstairs, Bohenna shouted something through his mother’s door and clumped down hurriedly. Ortho could not hear all he said, but he caught two essential words, “Wreck” and “Cove.” More noise on the stairs and again the house door slammed; his mother had gone. He shook Eli awake.
“There’s a ship ashore down to Cove,” he said; “banging off guns she was. Mother and Ned’s gone. Come on.”
Eli was not anxious to leave his bed; he was comfortable and sleepy. “We couldn’t do nothing,” he protested.
“Might see some foreigners drowned,” said Ortho optimistically. “She might be a pirate like was sunk in Newlyn last year, full of blacks and Turks.”
“They’d kill and eat us,” said Eli.
Ortho shook his head. “They’ll be drowned first—and if they ain’t Ned’ll wrastle ’em.”