Suppose, too, the smugglers should have returned, and, perhaps, caught Jack; they would seize him also, and it would be impossible to persuade them that he had not come to rob their store. Still, his chief anxiety was for Jack.
He thought much less about himself, or the dangers he might have to encounter.
Bill was a hero, though he did not know it, notwithstanding that he had been originally only a London street boy.
“I must find Jack, whatever comes of it,” he said to himself, as he pushed on.
At last he reached the low entrance of the smugglers’ store-room, as Jack and he had called it. He crept on carefully, and as he gained the inner end of the passage, he saw a light burning close to where the goods were piled up, but no voices reached his ear.
If the smugglers were there, they would surely be talking. He rose to his feet, holding out the candle before him. Seeing no one, he advanced boldly across the cavern. There lay a figure stretched upon the ground!
It was Jack!