The meal was no more appetizing than the one which had preceded it on the previous evening. How I longed for a morsel of bread and salt! The last defect I tried to rectify by dipping my meat in salt water; but the result was not all that could be desired, and Woodley laughed at the wry faces which I pulled.
However, the flesh of the bird, followed by a mince-pie, and an apple by way of dessert, certainly appeased our hunger, and in doing so enabled us to face our position with more fortitude. Reclining on the hard rock as near as we could get to the smouldering fire, we went over the whole of our strange adventure from the moment the convicts had seized the coach to the time they had left us in the boat.
"We might be worse off," said George. "I believe that if they'd tied us up in that copse, as that rascal Rodwood suggested, we should have been frozen stiff by morning. I wonder how poor Tom got on! That was a nasty fall of his; I heard his head strike on the hard ground, and I made sure he'd be picked up dead. Them warders, too—I hope the warmth of the straw and the shelter of the cottage kept them alive."
"I believe those villains would have killed any one who had tried to stop them," I remarked. "Do you remember that fellow close to me digging out that stone with his fingers in the pit on the cliff, when the sheep made that false alarm? The way he did it made me tremble. I believe he'd have brained some one with it if we really had been surrounded."
"Well, the whole lot of them are taken by this time, dead or alive; at least that's my belief," answered George. "They were crazy with drink, and would walk straight into the net. That man we heard gallop into the village last night may have given the alarm, and I'll wager there's been a hue and cry and a sharp lookout all to-day. As long as the sea don't prevent it, we shall have a boat sent here for us to-morrow, and then a fine story you'll have to tell the folks at home, and the boys at school next term, Master Sylvester!"
His last remark, though intended to cheer me up, had rather the opposite effect. I must confess that, up to the present, I had been so much concerned with my own personal safety as to give hardly a thought to the friends at home, and to the anxiety which my father and mother must be now feeling at my non-arrival; for by this time the news would no doubt have reached them of the disappearance of the coach. In those days there were no telegraph wires by means of which messages could be sent and replies received in the course of at most a few hours. A messenger had probably been dispatched on horseback to Round Green, to learn whether I had travelled by the ill-fated True Blue; but he would probably not return to Castlefield till late that night. And even now, as I sat blinking at the glowing logs, my parents would be in a state of anxious uncertainty as to whether I was really missing, or had been detained for some reason at the school.
George did not notice my silence, but went on, following up his own line of thought.
"I believe there's been a boat out to-day spying down the coast, and 'twas that the blind fellow heard when he talked about distant voices. My stars! it gave me quite a turn for the minute. I almost thought it was ghosts, and so did some of the rest, I suppose, by the scared look on their faces. You didn't hear nothing, I suppose, did you, Master Eden?"
"No," I replied. "But I hardly expected to; for I've got a bit of a cold in my head, and it's made me rather deaf."
"It was a queer thing," murmured George. "That man had such sharp ears I don't think 'twas fancy; and if not, then what could it have been, I wonder?"