The Smuggler's Cave

by George A. Birmingham

That settled the trouble on the green; but worse trouble waited at the mouth of the cave.

All children have an instinct which enables them to know with certainty when they will be most troublesome to their elders, and a desire, which they make no effort to suppress, to collect together in just that place. The Hailey Compton school children, who might have found amusement in helping their elder sisters to hold the horse or in watching the Whittles waving the signal flag, preferred to gather at the mouth of the cave. Having unexpectedly escaped from school they were full of vitality and spirits. The whole sixty of them ran rapidly to and fro in different directions, leaped from rock to rock with shouts of joy, and often fell, the tumbles being followed by cries of pain.

Besides the children there were some thirty or forty village people who had no part in the pageant gathered at the mouth of the cave. Their number was increased by the arrival of the fourteen girls who had been told not to hold the horse, and the whole twelve mothers. Mrs. Eames had to deal with them as well as with the children.

Her difficulties were increased by young Jim Bunce, son of the man chosen to be captain of the lugger. He had been given the part of leader of the men on shore who landed the cargo. He had lost a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys which he called a tackle. This was a valuable, according to his account an indispensable, stage property. Nothing, so he said, could be done unless the tackle was found.

"How are us to unload the boat without we have a tackle?" he asked, and kept on asking in a steady, emotionless monotone.

He regarded Mrs. Eames as responsible for the tackle, blamed her for the loss and seemed to take it for granted that she either knew where the thing was or possessed some means of finding it out. He did not actually say so, but his tone implied that if the rehearsal and the final performance broke down, as they would unless the tackle was found, Mrs. Eames would have no one to blame except herself. He had a statement which he made repeatedly and very slowly about the loss. After the last rehearsal he had left the tackle coiled up and in good order on top of a rock far above high-water mark just inside the cave. From that rock it had disappeared. This must have been true, for he repeated it at least twenty times without the smallest variation of detail.

While Mrs. Eames appealed to the unwanted people to go away, Jimmy Bunce appealed to her to find his tackle. While she pursued flying children he followed her. When she caught a child he caught her and repeated his statement. When she paused breathless after vain pursuit of a swift child, Jimmy Bunce was at her side. Sometimes he attributed the loss of the tackle to evilly disposed people inspired by the devil who had entered into them. Sometimes he seemed to think that the devil had acted personally in the matter, without using human agency. But—whether man or devil were the culprit—he held that Mrs. Eames was responsible.

She ought to have managed somehow to bring to naught the evil that the craft and subtlety of the devil or man had worked against Jimmy Bunce. If she had not done or could not do that, then the vicar, so Jimmy hinted, ought to give up saying the Litany.

Gladys managed to add a little to Mrs. Eames's difficulties. She had been given a responsible and important job to do. The signallers, Whittle and his brothers, could not see how the preparations for landing were getting on, because the churchyard wall, where they were stationed, was just above the mouth of the cave. Someone had to run off to the end of the beach and tell them when all was ready for the signal to be given. Gladys undertook to do this and promised to stand waving her arms in full view of the Whittles when the time came for the arrival of the boat. She was eager and excited, so eager and excited that she ran after Mrs. Eames wherever she went, asking whether her time of action had yet come.

Mary Lambert viewed the scene with professional calm. She was accustomed to a certain amount of confusion at early rehearsals and felt confident that things would settle down at the end. In the meantime she caught Mrs. Eames whenever she could and asked intelligent and important questions. "Where," for instance, "would the spectators be on the day of the performance?" "Where would the orchestra be placed?" "What kind of platform would be provided for the Nautch Girl dance?"