The chandler screamed, hanging half out of his window: “Yah, ye walking fever! Ye’d sell a real man to save your skin, would ye? But ye’ll go yet for a sessions-bird! Choose th’ hanging afore th’ red check—save up your rum and tak’ it drunk——”
“Fling a stone at that man, somebody,” the officer said.
The “Mermaid” emptied itself into the street—a score or so of the men of the press, seven or eight wretched vagrants, and one or two of the sailors’ doxies who had remained in hiding. A few of the seamen slung their lanterns on their cudgels; the whole company moved; and, as they passed to the harbour front, candles and heads appeared in windows, and groans and hootings followed them. They turned up the main street; the sailors thwacked their miserable captives as they failed to make haste enough up the cobbled steps and timber stairways; one or two of the women dropped behind, breathless; and at the top of the street the Portsannet folk stayed and watched the men of the press take the road that led to the Ladyshaws.
* * * * *
Jessie Wheeler slept soundly in the niche on top of the hay. The nightingale on the thorn was silent, and the embers of the fire on the hearth in the penthouse had sunk to a grey wood ash, that only now and then the light breeze fanned to a faint pink glow. The clouds were close folded overhead; hardly a whisper came from the Ladyshaws. Nellie and the two terriers slept across the thresholds, and with a last soft settling the fire itself seemed to go to sleep.
The retriever heard the noise first, and, suddenly alert, dropped to the down-charge. The terriers set their heads and fore feet low, and growled softly. A man asleep in a shed muttered mechanically, “Quiet!” and turned over. From the brow at the bottom of the meadows came the sound of voices and of a moving company; and then the voices dropped, but the moving came nearer. The terriers broke suddenly into a hubbub of barking; and Jessie woke, and started and trembled.
Jerry Holmes, without his boots, came out of the shed with a lantern; it showed the furrows of his own face, but not the forms that were approaching. They had muffled their lanterns about with coats and handkerchiefs, and the shrouding of one had been done with a spotted neckerchief that showed dabbled with a dusky pattern. Jerry knew no more than that honest men do not wander about the country at night, a score in a band, with doused lanterns; and he gave a shout of “Up, lads!” The terriers barked furiously; the shout was answered by a score of voices; the cloths were twitched off the lanterns; and the press and the seven or eight pressed rushed forward. Jerry, for all he was inland, knew what it was, and his hand tightened on a mattock that all at once he seemed to find in his grasp without being able to tell how he had come by it.
In the big barn doorway the Skipjack and Willie Ramsey appeared. They, too, had caught up what lay nearest to hand—Charlie, the crooked iron handle of some machine, and Willie a breadth of a split lid with a batten across it full of bent nails. There were no doors to the barn, and behind these three other faces peered out anxiously. Old Jerry muttered, “Nay, this is no good; we’re done afore we start”; and he thought of the axes that lay under the brushwood in the Ladyshaws.
“That’s the Skipjack, him wi’ th’ crook; what did I tell ye?” a tall fellow, bound, cried appealingly to a man with a hooked nose and a blue coat with white facings. “And him wi’ th’ black hair’s Willie something—he were back of a hazel bush wi’ a lass—it’s true what I say——”
“Close in and seize them,” the lieutenant ordered. “Creep along the wall, one or two of you, and the rest rush in.”