James had placed himself advantageously. The thicket of elder and thorn which had engulfed one end of the burial-ground made excellent concealment, and in front of him was the solid wall, through a gap in which he had turned the muzzle of his six-pounder. He sat on the stump of a thorn-tree, his head in his hands, waiting, as he knew he would have to wait, for some time yet, till the first round from Dial Hill should be the signal for his own attack. The moon had made her journey by this hour, and while she had been caught in her course through the zenith in the web of cloud and mist that thickened the sky, she was now descending towards her rest through a clear stretch; she swung, as though suspended above the Basin, tilted on her back, and a little yellower as she neared the earth, a dying, witch-like thing, halfway through her second quarter. James, looking up, could see her between the arms of the crosses and the leaning stones.
The strangeness of the place arrested his thoughts and turned them into unusual tracks, for, though far from being an unimaginative man, he was little given to deliberate contemplation. The distant inland water under the lighted half disc was pale, and a faintness seemed to lie upon the earth in this hour between night and morning. His thoughts went to the only dwellers on Inchbrayock, those who were lying under his feet—seamen, for the most part, and fisher-folk, who had known the fury of the North Sea that was now beginning to crawl in and to surround them in their little township with its insidious arms, encircling in death the bodies that had escaped it in life. Some of them had been far afield, farther than he had ever been, in spite of all his campaigns, but they had come in over the bar to lie here in the jaws of the outflowing river by their native town. He wondered whether he should do the same; times were so uncertain now that he might well take the road into the world again. The question of where his bones should lie was a matter of no great interest to him, and though there was a vague restfulness in the notion of coming at last to the slopes and shadows of Balnillo, he knew that the wideness of the world was his natural home. Then he thought of Bergen-op-Zoom. . . .
After a while he raised his head again, roused, not by the streak of light that was growing upon the east, but by a shot that shattered the silence and sent the echoes rolling out from Dial Hill.
[CHAPTER XII
INCHBRAYOCK]
ARCHIE sprang up, unable, for a moment, to remember where he was. He was almost in darkness, for the port looked northward, and the pale light barely glimmered through it, but he could just see a spurt of white leap into the air midway across the channel, where a second shot had struck the water. As he rushed on deck a puff of smoke was dispersing above Dial Hill. Then another cloud rolled from the bushes on the nearest point of Inchbrayock Island, and he felt the Venture shiver and move in her moorings. Captain Hall’s voice was rising above the scuffling and running that was going on all over the ship, and the dragging about of heavy objects was making the decks shake.
He went below and begun to hustle on his clothes, for the morning air struck chill and he felt the need of being ready for action of some kind. In a few minutes he came up warily and crept round to the port side, taking what cover he could. Then a roar burst from the side of the Venture as she opened fire.
He stood, not knowing what to do with himself. It was dreadful to him to have to be inactive whilst his blood rose with the excitement round him. No one on the vessel remembered his existence; he was like a stray dog in a market-place, thrust aside by every passer brushing by on the business of life.
It was soon evident that, though the guns on the hill commanded the Venture, their shot was falling short of her. As the sun heaved up from beyond the bar, the quays over the water could be seen filling with people, and the town bells began to ring. An increasing crowd swarmed upon the landing-stage of the ferry, but the boat herself had been brought by James to the shore of Inchbrayock, and nobody was likely to cross the water whilst the island and the high ground seaward of the town was held by the invisible enemy which had come upon them from heaven knew where. Captain Hall was turning his attention exclusively on Inchbrayock, and Flemington, who had got nearer to the place where he stood, gathered from what he could hear that the man on Dial Hill was wasting his ammunition on a target that was out of range. A shot from the vessel had torn up a shower of earth in the bank that sloped from the thicket to the river-mud, and another had struck one of the gravestones on the island, splitting it in two; but the fire went on steadily from the dense tangle where the churchyard wall no doubt concealed earthworks that had risen behind it in the dark hours. This, then, was the outcome of James’s night-wanderings with Ferrier.