He strolled away to the back of the cottages, whence he presently returned with two of his mates, and the four men proceeded along the shore to where Willett’s boat lay just above high-water mark.
The Emily was a beamy craft of the type locally known as a “half-share skiff,” solidly built of oak, with varnished planking and fitted with main and mizzen lugs. She was a good handful for four men, and, as she slid over the soft chalk rocks with a hollow rumble, the coast-guards debated the advisability of lifting out the bags of shingle with which she was ballasted. However, she was at length dragged down, ballast and all, to the water’s edge, and then, while Brown stepped the mainmast, the petty-officer gave him his directions. “What you’ve got to do,” said he, “is to make use of the flood-tide. Keep her nose nor’-east, and with this trickle of nor’-westerly breeze you ought to make the lighthouse in one board. Anyhow don’t let her get east of the lighthouse, or, when the ebb sets in, you’ll be in a fix.”
To these admonitions Brown listened with jaunty indifference as he hoisted the sails and watched the incoming tide creep over the level shore. Then the boat lifted on the gentle swell. Putting out an oar, he gave a vigorous shove off that sent the boat, with a final scrape, clear of the beach, and then, having dropped the rudder onto its pintles, he seated himself and calmly belayed the main-sheet.
“There he goes,” growled the coast-guard; “makin’ fast his sheet. They will do it” (he invariably did it himself), “and that’s how accidents happen. I hope old Willett ’ll see his boat back all right.”
He stood for some time watching the dwindling boat as it sidled across the smooth water; then he turned and followed his mates towards the station.
Out on the south-western edge of the Girdler Sand, just inside the two-fathom line, the spindle-shanked lighthouse stood a-straddle on its long screw-piles like some uncouth red-bodied wading bird. It was now nearly half flood tide. The highest shoals were long since covered, and the lighthouse rose above the smooth sea as solitary as a slaver becalmed in the “middle passage.”
On the gallery outside the lantern were two men, the entire staff of the building, of whom one sat huddled in a chair with his left leg propped up with pillows on another, while his companion rested a telescope on the rail and peered at the faint grey line of the distant land and the two tiny points that marked the twin spires of Reculver.
“I don’t see any signs of the boat, Harry,” said he.
The other man groaned. “I shall lose the tide,” he complained, “and then there’s another day gone.”
“They can pull you down to Birchington and put you in the train,” said the first man.