To gain a lawless passport through the land.
crabbe.
IT is a soft moonless night in October. The darkness seems filled with that calmest and most sufficing of all sounds, the sea, breaking on a sandy shingle, with the long-drawn hush of the retreating wave. Yet if you listen you may hear another sound. A footfall on the sand occasionally, and the sound of men’s voices, lowered.
For Crumblejohn and Ratface have sent round the message that tub-carriers, a full force of them, will be wanted on this night of the 18th, at Grey Rock, off Knapper’s Head. And the tub-carriers are already assembled, numbering about twenty-five villagers, and half as many boys.
A light flares up against the night-sky at some point along the coast, far away.
It stars the darkness, a crumb of light. Then it grows slenderly, and sinks once more to waver upward, and then the night engulphs it all but a creeping thread of light that holds it own.
“You can light that pipe o’ yourn, master.”
“Whoi doänt yon light bleäze then? Be ’ee sure they gave the right beacon word? Who done it? Whose work wer to see to yon?”
“It was Ratface that see’d to that. That’s why he beänt here to-night. He’ll see the light’s all right.”