"Ah ba!"
"Either he's gone or he's under cover, though, ma fé, I don't know where he'd find it on L'Etat," and Nance's heart beat hopefully. "However, John Drillot and Peter Vaudin are stopping the night in case he is still there and ventures out of his hole," and her heart sank again, and kicked rebelliously that a man should be hunted thus, like a rabbit.
She spent a night of misery, wondering what was happening on L'Etat, and was at her post above Brenière as soon as it was light.
She saw Philip Vaudin come round from the Creux in his boat and run across to the rock, and almost as soon as he had disappeared round Quette d'Amont, he came speeding back, alone, and not to the harbour, but straight to the fishermen's rough landing-place inside Brenière.
"What is it then, Philip?" she asked anxiously, as he hauled himself up the rocks on to the turf.
"I've come for two miners," he panted, for he had come quickly. "They've run him to earth in a hole, but they won't either of them go in after him, and they want some one who will."
"Ah, then!"
"Yes. He came out in the night, and they chased him, but he got into his hole, and they're sitting on it ever since," and he hurried away through the waste of gorse and bracken to the miners' cottages.
Volunteers were evidently not over plentiful. It was a considerable time before he came back with a Welshman, Evan Morgan, and a young Cornishman, John Trevna, and neither of them seemed over eager for the job.
"For, see you," had been Morgan's view, "coing in a hole after a man what hass a gun iss not a nice pissness, no inteet!" and the Cornishman agreed with him.