Beggars on Horseback

by F. Tennyson Jesse

Thomasin jambed the helm up as Bendigo, with the agility of long use to sudden danger, eased off the sheets; and then Thomasin could see what menaced them. A Preventive boat, like themselves with no light save the wretched glimmer over the compass, had been lying to under her mizzen, and already her men were making sail. Thomasin sat gripping the tiller while the voices of her menfolk came to her ears.

"The topsail!" shouted Robin; but Bendigo's voice made answer: "Not till us has to—it might rip mast off in this gale. Try the jib. . . ."

They set the jib and shook out the reefs in the mainsail, and the Merrymaid answered to it like a racehorse to the whip. She quivered all her length, the tiller pushed like a sentient thing against Thomasin's palm and they went reeling on.

For nearly an hour they ran before the wind, helped by the flood-tide, and all the time the Preventive boat was slowly gaining on them, for she was carrying a larger stretch of canvas. She was nearly upon them when the sound of breaking surf told that they were nearing the Manacles, and the tide was still fairly low. Suddenly Robin's voice came again, this time with a thrill in it: "Now's our chance!" he called. "We'll hoist the topsail and make a run for it inside of the Manacles."

He was at the mast as he spoke, and Thomasin heard the thin scream of the unoiled sheave as the topsail halliards ran through it. The next moment the mast creaked and bent; the almost useless jib slackened as the other sails took all of the wind, and the Merrymaid shook her nose and plunged into the broken water that gleamed between the blackness of the mainland and the Manacles.

"They'll never dare follow!" cried Bendigo; and even as he did so, the Preventive boat, trusting to her superior speed to make good, began to come round to the wind so as to pass the Manacles on the outer side. The added strain proved too much, and her mast snapped with a report like a gunshot—the one clean, sharp sound through all that flurry of rushing, edgeless noise, and it told its own tale to the eager ears on the Merrymaid. She, under the influence of the topsail, was burying her bows at every plunge, and Thomasin knew, by the sudden cessation of the tiller's tug, that the rudder had lifted clear of the racing water, only to drive into it again with a blow that sent her reeling. Thomasin's fight with the boat she loved began in real earnest. Yawing stubbornly, the Merrymaid pulled against the tiller so that the rough wood seemed to burn into Thomasin's flesh, so hard had she to grip it to keep the boat's head from going up into the wind.

With the breath failing in her throat, she had none left to cry for help; she could only wrestle with the tiller, which, all the weight of the yawing Merrymaid against it, seemed about to crush her.

Then hands came over hers in the darkness, and even at that moment her flesh knew Robin's.

"Tell me if I make a mistake; you know this hell-pool better than me," he called to her through the noise of the surf; and, with an easing of the muscles so exquisite as to be almost a pain in itself, she felt him absorb the weight of the boat into his grip. With the lifting of that strain from her shoulders and arms came the realization of how mercilessly his hands were grinding hers against the tiller, yet that pain sent the first tremor of unadulterated passion through her that she had ever felt, because it was the first time he had hurt her. There was no need for her to call directions to him—he and she were so welded in one at the tiller that the unconscious pull of her arm beneath his told him, in his state of receptive tension, what to do more surely than any words. That was their true mating—not what followed after—but there in the stern of the reeling Merrymaid; for all that was least calculated and finest in Robin had leapt to the need of it, and their consciousness was fused as completely in the fight for life as the pain in their hands was at the tiller.

They were through—through and safe, and five minutes more saw them round the point and in the calmer water, where they slipped the cargo, and soon after they had made the harbour under easy sail, innocent of contraband from stem to stern.