Aleck thought no more of the sounds and went on watching the two vessels, till suddenly they seemed to be doing something in the way of action. A boat was lowered from each, and the lad’s glass was powerful enough to enable him to make out the faces of the officers in the stern-sheets, one of whom was the midshipman who had charge of the boat at Rockabie pier.
Aleck watched the boats rowing shoreward and separating after a time, one of the sloop’s making for the Eilygugg cove, the other rowing in the direction of the gap which led up to the depression in which lay the Den.
Feeling that he would like to be at home if the boat entered their private chasm, as the lad dubbed it, he turned back along the cliff and reached the garden so as to descend to the mooring-place just in time to see the cutter’s boat framed in the opening, the dark rocks round and above, and the little craft floating upon a background of opalescent sea and sky.
“They can’t have come right in,” thought Aleck, and after a time he made for the cliff again to get near the edge and look down, in time to see that both boats were being rowed back to their respective vessels.
An hour after they were slowly gliding away in the direction of Rockabie, their examination having been of the most perfunctory kind.
Chapter Eighteen.
“No, Master Aleck, not gone, as you may say, right off,” replied Tom Bodger, a few days later, as he adzed and planed and hammered away at the kittiwake down in front of the natural boat-house. “They’re a-dodging of it, strikes me. King’s skippers is artful when they wants men. They just got enough of that smuggling lot aboard the sloop to make the cap’n hungry for more, and, you mark my words, he’ll keep away so as to make the likely ones think they’re safe, and then there’ll come a night when they’ll find they arn’t.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Tom,” said Aleck, opening a fresh packet of glistening golden-hued copper nails. “I don’t believe the press-gang will come again.”