She burst out, “Stay—if you will! Stay! And yet I warn you.” She slipped from me, and vanished like a wraith into the shadows of the wood.
Chapter XXV. Insistence of Captain Blunt
Now attempting to follow Miss Milne, and have further conversation with her, I found myself presently in a wild tangle of the wood, so that I had much difficulty in forcing my way through it. Not finding her, bramble-scratched and moss-stained at last I reached the wall, and followed it down, thinking to find the breach by which I had left the garden. But as I approached it, I halted suddenly, hearing voices from the garden; and, knowing them for the voices of Blunt and Martin Baynes and my uncle, engaged in an unseemly wrangle, I rejoiced that I was still hidden by the creepers hanging over the wall.
Blunt was growling, “Ay, ay, you’ve given me to know you’ll be rich, when the old man’s gone. You think to lay your hands then on the spoil he’s piled up and held all these years. Ay, but the old man’s alive, and I’m sailin’ again with never a penny of profit to me.”
“And the lad’s come to the old man,” Martin broke in, “and by all saying he’s likely to have every penny, and you not the colour of a farthing. What d’ye say to that, Mr. Craike? what d’ye say?”
My uncle answered disdainfully, “You get nothing from me. You’re a pretty pair of rogues to come and threaten. I trust you, Baynes, to hold the rogue and you to take him aboard, Blunt; and he slips through your hands. I wonder at your audacity.”
“Fine talk!” cried Blunt; and Martin burst out, “You’ll pay nothing! Will you not? What if I go to old Sir Gavin? What if I give him the tale? He’d listen and he’d set you by the heels, as gladly as he’d set Roger Galt. Though you’re one of his kind—”
“You have it,” my uncle assented, “one of Sir Gavin’s kind. Do you threaten me, Martin Baynes, you, for all the repute of the Stone House and Mistress Baynes and her grandsons? Are there not strange tales of the Stone House—of travellers lost on the moors? Of a pedlar whose dog was heard wailing at the gates of the Stone House, as dogs wail for their dead masters? Do you threaten me, Martin Baynes? And you, Blunt? Did you never sail further than the coasts of France? Did you never plunder an English ship? Were you never more than smuggler?”
“Never more,” cried Blunt, “than Edward Craike, and never so much.”
“A gentleman of fortune,” said my uncle, “a voyager born a hundred years and odd after his time. Tush, that my father profited by his voyages is nothing, Blunt; he plundered no English ships; if his men spilt any blood, it was not English.”