It was a smuggler sure enough, and hence my father’s strict order to be silent, for the smugglers had not a very good character in our parts, and ugly tales were told of how they had not scrupled to kill people who had interfered with them when busy over their dangerous work.
I was watching them eagerly, when, all at once, I turned cold and shivered, for it had suddenly struck me that old Jonas was away with his lugger, and that this must be it landing its cargo, while all the time, so close to me that I could have stretched out my hand and touched him, there lay my school-fellow—the old smuggler’s son.
“He must suspect him,” I said to myself; and then, “What must he feel?”
And all the while there below us was the busy scene—the men coming and going and the cargo being landed, till all at once there was a cessation. Those who returned from the cave stayed about the vessel, and seemed, as far as we could make out, to be climbing on board, and as I suddenly seemed to be making out their figures a little more clearly, my father whispered, “Lie down, boys, or you will be seen. The day is beginning to dawn.”
We obeyed him silently, and lay watching, seeing every minute more clearly that the dark-looking vessel, which loomed up very big, was being thrust out with long oars, and beginning to glide slowly away in a thick mist which hung over the sea a hundred yards or so from shore. Then as it reached and began to fade, as it were, into the mist, first one then another dark patch rose from the deck.
“Hoisting sail,” I said to myself. “Two big lug-sails. It is the Saucy Lass—old Jonas’s lugger, and it looks big through the fog.”
Just then in the coming grey dawn I saw another patch rise up, following a creaking noise, and I could make out that it was a third sail, when I knew that it could not be the Saucy Lass, but must be a stranger.
I was so glad, for Bigley’s sake, that my heart gave quite a heavy throb; and, unless I was very much deceived, I heard my father draw a long breath like a sigh of relief.
As we gazed at the sails and the dark hull in the increasing light, everything looked so strange and indistinct that it seemed impossible for it all to be real. The sails began to fill, and the vessel glided silently away without a voice on board being heard, till it was so far-off that my father said:
“I think we may begin to talk, my lads, now.”