“Who said it warn’t?” growled the man; “but if he’d done ten times as much I’m not going to have you spying and prying about here. What is it you want to know?”
“That’s my business,” said Aleck, defiantly. “I say, you haven’t made a fortune out of smuggling, have you, and bought the estate?”
“You keep your tongue quiet, will yer?” growled the man, fiercely. “What do you know about smuggling?”
“Just as much as you do, Eben Megg,” cried the boy, laughing. “Just as much as everyone else does who lives here. Didn’t our old maid come in scared one night after a holiday and walking across from Rockabie and go into a fit because she had seen, as she said, a whole regiment of ghosts walking over the moor, leading ghostly horses, which came out of the sea fog and crossed the road without making a sound? Jane said they were the spirits of the old soldiers who were killed in the big fight and buried by the four stones on Black Hill, and that as soon as they were across the stony road they were all swallowed up in a mist. She keeps to it till now, and believes it.”
“Well, why shouldn’t she?” growled the man. “She arn’t the first as has seen a ghost. Why shouldn’t she?”
“Because it’s so silly, when it was a party of smugglers leading their horses, with kegs slung across their backs and bales on pack saddles.”
“Bah!” cried the man. “Horses loaded like that would clatter over the rough stones.”
“Yes,” said Aleck, “if their hoofs weren’t covered over with bits of canvas and a few handfuls of hay.”
“What!”
“I found one that a horse had kicked off on the road one morning, Eben,” said the boy. “Ah! I see now.”