Sir Bevil Intervenes
Soon after breakfast next morning Dick and Sam went down to the shore to launch their boat for a day's fishing. The post to which it was moored being close under the cliffs, they did not come in sight of it until they reached the foot of the winding path. Then Sam, who was walking ahead, uttered a cry.
"What is it?" asked Dick, hurrying on.
"Scrounch it all, look 'ee, Maister Dick!"
The boat lay on the white sand, but it was a navigable vessel no longer. It had been sawn across in three places. The old craft, which had withstood for forty years the battering of innumerable waves and the more insidious attacks of time, and in which three generations of Trevanions had sailed upon the deep, would be launched no more. It would henceforth serve no useful end except as firewood.
Dick felt first a pang of grief, then a surge of bitter rage. His enemies could not have chosen a more galling or vindictive means of wreaking their ill-will. They had dealt with the boat as the smugglers' craft were dealt with when captured by the revenue officers. Dick saw in their act a subtle indication of the thoroughness with which they identified him with the Government men. It said: "You have joined the revenue officers; very well, we treat you as they treat us." He had no doubt that the destruction of the boat and the firing of the tool-house were parts of one scheme.
"The cowards!" he exclaimed, "to do behind our backs what they durst not do to our face."
"'Tis a miserable, dirty deed," agreed Sam. "We must tell of it to the high powers."
"Much good that will be!" cried Dick bitterly. "We can't tell who did it; Sir Bevil will only instruct Petherick, and he is too much of a fool ever to find out, if he wanted to, which is unlikely. We can do nothing, Sam."
"How can we go fishing now?" said Sam gloomily. "'Tis takin' the bread out of our mouth, that's what it is. They mean us to starve, the wretches."