“Been looking out to sea, poor thing!” thought Aleck. “I’m afraid she’ll watch for a long time before she sees him coming back.”
He forgot the woman again directly in the business of watching the boat, which kept on coming into sight far below and disappearing again, drawing forth the mental remark from Aleck, “Labour in vain,” for he felt that all the openings below where he stood had been thoroughly searched.
Aleck hung about till the afternoon, and saw the boat shoot off from beyond one of the points in the direction of the sloop lying at anchor, and then went home.
The next morning, when he went up to his signalling spar to direct the glass at the sloop, she was not there; but the cutter, which had been absent, lay in about the same place, and after a time the lad made out another boat coming towards the smugglers’ cove.
“A fresh party,” he said to himself. “Well, I should like to help them find the poor fellow, but if they want help they must come and ask me; I’m not going to be snubbed again.”
He closed his glass and struck off by the shortest way across the head of the smugglers’ cove, making once more for the high ground beyond, for it commanded the coast in two directions. But long before he reached his favourite spot he again caught sight of the fluttering blue petticoat of a woman, and saw her hurrying inland.
“Poor woman!” thought Aleck. “She needn’t be afraid of me.”
He kept an eye upon her till she disappeared, and then went on to the niche in the rock face, settled himself down with his glass, and watched the cutter’s boat, which was steadily pulling in. The birds meanwhile kept on flitting down from where they sat in rows along the inaccessible shelves, skimmed over the water, dived, and came up again with small fishes in their beaks, to return to feed the young, which often enough had been carried off by some great gull, one of the many which glided here and there, uttering their peculiarly querulous, mournful cries, so different in tone from the sharp, hearty calls of the larger inland birds.
There were a good many sailing about overhead, Aleck noted, and they were more noisy than usual, and this, judging from old lore which he had picked up from Tom Bodger and the fishermen, he attributed to a coming change in the weather, wind perhaps, when the sea, instead of being soft blue and calm, might be lashed by a storm to send the waves thundering in upon the rocks, to break up into cataracts of broken water and send the glittering foam whirling aloft in clouds.
“No more hunts then,” thought Aleck; and then aloud to a great white-breasted gull which floated overhead, watching him curiously, “Well, what are you looking at? I’ve not come egging now.”