CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
Penwarden Disappears
As Dick hoped, the scare given to the enemy by his prompt sally from the Towers proved effectual; no further attempt was made to interfere with the boat. Rumours of the contrivance for giving an alarm spread among the villagers, and Mr. Carlyon, without revealing his own misadventure, took care to explain to Petherick, sexton, beadle, and constable, that the intruders would have suffered material damage if they had had the courage to enter the shed. Petherick duly reported this, as the parson intended, adding on his own account that the young monkeys had invented an instrument of torture for all who dared to molest them. The parson's housekeeper discussed with Petherick a strange stain upon her master's stock, and Petherick himself, despatched one day to the Truro perruquier with a parcel carefully tied, was amazed when the tradesman, opening it in his presence, revealed a wig, not iron grey, but mottled blue in colour. These matters were a topic of conversation in Polkerran for many a day, and there were some who offered explanations, and some who shook their heads and looked profoundly wise, but discreetly held their tongues. The truth was never known outside the Towers, Dick threatening Sam with excommunication if he breathed a word of it.
One Wednesday, early in December, the boys set out a little before dawn to fish. The air was cold and misty; trickles of condensed moisture ran down their faces and necks, and little pools formed on the rims of their hats. The exercise of rowing warmed them, and the discomfort, always less to their seasoned skins than it would have been to a townsman and a landlubber, was forgotten altogether when the fish rose freely to their bait. They made a good catch after two hours' work, and turned to row back in order to carry the fish home in time for early breakfast.
They had come nearly a mile from shore, and were pulling hard, the wind blowing off the land against them, when all at once, some distance astern, there loomed out of the mist a three-masted vessel of considerable size.
"Look, Sam," said Dick, "isn't that the same craft we saw following the smack that night?"
"'Tis so," replied Sam; "the night Maister John come home-along. I said he landed from the smack, you mind; you said 'a didn't; and I don't care who the man is, but I know I be right."
"Pull away, Sam. We don't want to be seen. It may be the French privateer we've heard about, and we ought to tell Mr. Mildmay or Penwarden."
"True, and there's money if she's catched. Would they gie us a bit o't, think 'ee?"
"I daresay. There! She has vanished into the mist again. Do you know if the cutter is in the harbour, Sam?"