“I saw him fall.”
The shots from the cottage seemed to have sobered the gentry for the moment. Jeffray heard old Isaac screaming and cursing, urging on the men to break in the door. Gathering together in a bunch, they lunged at it again with the wagon-pole, the door splitting from floor to lintel and the pole starting fully three feet into the room. Jeffray had a confused vision of tanned throats and fierce faces, a brandished cutlass, an upraised arm. He fired once, saw a red blotch show on one sun-tanned cheek, and the men hesitate and edge back from the broken door. The pole sank and wedged itself between the rent planking; the shifting figures melted away towards the garden-gate.
Loud cries had risen on the outskirts of the forest.
“Look out, lads, the redcoats; gather, gather!”
There was a scattering of pistol-shots, a confused trampling of feet, the clear-ringing voice of a man shouting orders. A bullet came crashing through the cottage window to bury itself in one of the great beams of the ceiling. Frightened horses were screaming and cantering about the clearing.
Bess was standing by the table reloading the musket. Jeffray, with the empty pistol still smoking in his hand, went to the window and looked out. He saw a man crawling down the path on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting blood, his head lolling from side to side. The open space between the trees seemed a-swirl for the moment with swords and plunging horses, a tangle of redcoats and of blurred and dusky figures. The smuggling folk and the troopers were stabbing and cutting at one another amid the plunging pack-horses. From the southern end of the clearing Jeffray saw a mounted excise-officer cantering up with some twenty revenue men at his heels. They had tracked the smuggling folk up from Thorney Chapel, while the cornet of Light-Horse, led by a spy, had brought his troopers through the woods from Rodenham. Soon the struggling knot of fustian and scarlet broke and spread into scattering eddies. Figures went scudding from the woods, some dropping and grovelling before they reached the cover. The fight was over. The foresters and the smuggling folk, such as were left of them, scattered and fled for the sanctuary of the forest.
Jeffray felt that Bess was near him, and turning sharply he found her standing at his elbow.
“The revenue men,” she said, in her husky voice, putting her hands upon the sill and looking out through the broken lattice.
Jeffray, conscious of the white and desirable face that dreamed up at him out of a cloud of hair, thrilled to the wild charm of it all, the uprushing of romance into his brain.
“Bess,” he said, smiling, “what are we to do?”