Our chasers, whoever they were, were down the stair and at the barrier wall by this time, and a bolt-sliding hand was reaching through the jamb-stone hole while we were hammering our brace into place. Champe grinned ferociously and held the candle flame for a single instant to the back of the groping hand, grinning again at the snatched withdrawal and the yell of pain that went with it; whereupon we fled, praying that the underground tunnel might lead us to the boat-house at the foot of the garden, or if not there, at least to the water side.
It did end, as we hoped it might, in the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge, and now there was little question but that the boat-house and the cellar served the purpose of a gang of smugglers. Our craft, the light ship’s tender for the acquiring of which we had like to have paid the price of our lives, lay on the launching ways. A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge.
The shapely little craft shot well out from the shore, clearing the beach by a long pistol-shot before it lost headway. For some minute or so we lay motionless and kept silence. There was a light in the house out of which we had just burrowed, but we heard no sounds of a fresh alarm. The sergeant chuckled as if he had just come from a merrymaking.
“I think they’ll be all muddle-headed Dutchmen in that smuggling brotherhood, Captain Dick!” he scoffed gently. “To think they wouldn’t leave a few stout fellows to guard the boat-shop when they knew that rabbit-burrow would take us straight to it!”
“We’ll not quarrel with any muddle-headedness of that sort,” I said; and thereupon we shipped the oars noiselessly and pulled softly away from the shore, turning the boat’s head southward and westward only when we felt sure we had gained an offing which would carry us outside of the line of guard ships.
Our guess was good this time. We had pulled cautiously for full half the distance we had to go, and had safely passed three of the coast-guarding vessels, dim bulks lying between us and the shore, when a fog came creeping up from the lower bay. Champe saw it first and pointed out the hazard it would bring.
“We must pull smarter for it, Captain Dick,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’ll be no better than blind men in a strange town if that floating cloud catches up with us.”
So he said, and so I thought, and so it presently proved when the fog closed in about us. We had no compass, and could only hold on as nearly as we could guess in the direction we thought we ought to go. Once we made sure we heard the tramp of the sentry on the battlements of the fort, and the low-voiced challenge of guard-relieving,—which would make the time eleven o’clock,—but before we could be certain of these sounds we were tangled again as to our directions, and the next sounds that came to us were the bumping of our boat’s bows against the side of a ship, and a hoarse voice shouting, “Avast there, you lubbers! Unship your oars and lie still or I’ll fire into you!”
XVI
THE CUP OF TANTALUS
TAKING it all in all, it seems that we should have come promptly to the conclusion that, on this raw night of the seventeenth of December, the stars in their courses were fighting against us; that our own lucky star, if we had any, was a million miles below the horizon.