“How should I know? I say, though, how staggered them chaps was when they got up to the rock and found no one to fight!”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Oh, no—more you wasn’t. Come along, come along, lads. Here we are waiting for stowage, and you talk about us keeping you waiting.”
“You mind your own job,” growled the voice that Hilary had heard finding fault before.
There was more scuffling of feet, and then the two men went on talking.
“The cutter’s sailors had come, of course, after the boy, and they stumbled on the way through the rocks, just same as the boy did; and we waited for ’em with a few sticks, and then give ’em as much as were good for ’em, and then retreated, big Joey keeping the way till we had all got up the rock, and then up he come in the dark, and you’d have laughed fit to crack your sides to hear them down below whacking at the stones with their cutlashes till they was obliged to believe we was gone, and then they went back with their tails between their legs like a pack of dogs.”
The other man laughed as Hilary drank in all this, and learned how the crew had been after him, and realised most thoroughly how it was that he had been brought there, and also the ingenious plan by which the smugglers and the political party with whom they seemed to be mixed up contrived to throw their enemies off the scent. There was an interval, during which the two men seemed to be very busy stowing away kegs and packages, and then they went on again.
“Skipper of the cutter come next day—that one-eyed chap we took in so with the lugger—and his chaps brought him up to the rocks, and then, my wig! how he did give it ’em for bringing them a fool’s errand, as he called it! It was a fine game, I can tell you.”
“Must have been,” said the other, as Hilary drank in this information too, and made mental vows about how he would pay the scoundrels out for all this when once he got free.
Then there was a cessation of the feet coming down the stairs, broken by one step that Hilary seemed to recognise.