He got up, turned once upon his foes, with a last vicious blow of his cutlass, which inflicted a nasty cut on the forearm of one of the revenue-men, and yelled out—
“Off, mates, off! Game’s played!”
Then there was a stampede. The smugglers threw away such weapons as they found cumbersome, and took to flight with as much vigor as they had shown in the fight. Making for the dell at the bottom, Ben the Blast, the lithe, pimply-faced Bill, and two others who were evidently seamen, made for their boats, which, still half-full of the cargo they had been in the act of landing when they were disturbed by the revenue-men, was lying snug among the rocks in charge of a lad.
The tall, thin man in the rug-coat, with the rest of his companions, went up the slope in a northeasterly direction, towards the road.
As they were all far nimbler of foot over the ground, which they knew well, than were their opponents, Lieutenant Tregenna stopped the pursuit of the smugglers when he saw how fast they gained ground, and directed his men to seize such of the contraband goods as were already landed.
When, however, they reached in their turn the bottom of the dell, where they expected to find the booty, they discovered that it had all been safely removed, under cover of the mist, and of the excitement of the fight, and that the boat which had brought it had got out of sight also.
In the meantime Tregenna had been looking about him for the lad who had been the first to attack him, and whom he had himself, in self-defense, somewhat severely wounded. He felt something like admiration of the courage the boy had shown in attacking him single-handed, and was sincerely anxious to learn whether the wound he had been forced to inflict was likely to have lasting consequences.
In answer to the lieutenant’s questions, one of the men said that he had seen one man stagger down the slope some minutes before the conclusion of the struggle, in the direction of the shore.
“He looked, sir,” said the man, “as if he’d had enough of it. He didn’t hardly fare to seem to know whither he was going.”
Tregenna went down towards the shore, trying to find some track which he might follow; but the mist and the darkness were creeping on together, and the traces of the conflict being on all sides, in trampled, blood-stained grass and roughened ground, he found nothing to guide his steps.