Oliver stopped, for at the mention of the smuggler’s name the pipe dropped from the old man’s mouth, and his face grew pale.
“Jim Cuttance!” he exclaimed after a moment’s pause; “the villain, the scoundrel—what of him? what of him? No good, I warrant. There is not a rogue unhanged who deserves more richly to swing at the yard-arm than Jim Cuttance. What said he about me?”
When he finished this sentence the old man’s composure was somewhat restored. He took a new pipe from the chimney-piece and began to fill it, while Oliver related all that he knew of the conversation between the two smugglers.
When he had finished Hitchin smoked for some minutes in silence.
“Do you really think,” he said at length, “that the man means to do me bodily harm?”
“I cannot tell,” replied Oliver; “you can form your own judgment of the matter more correctly than I can, but I would advise you to be on your guard.”
“What says your friend?” asked Hitchin, turning towards Tregarthen, of whom, up to that point, he had taken no notice.
Thus appealed to, the youth echoed Oliver’s opinion, and added that the remark of Cuttance about his intention not to do something unknown that night, and Joe Tonkin’s muttered expressions of disbelief and an intention to watch, seemed to him sufficient to warrant unusual caution in the matter of locks, bolts, and bars.
As he spoke there came a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a loud and prolonged peal of thunder.
Oliver sprang up.