CHAPTER XIIINCHBRAYOCKARCHIEsprang 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 theVentureshiver 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 theVentureas 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 theVenture, 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.Archie contemplated Captain Hall where he stood in a little group of men. He looked even less of a personage in the morning light than he had done in the cabin, and the young man suspected that he had gone to bed in his clothes. This reminded him that he himself was unwashed, unshaven, and very hungry. Whatsoever the issue of the attack might be, there was no use in remaining starved and dirty, and he determined to go below to forage and to find some means of washing. There was no one to gainsay him at this time of stress, and he walked into Hall’s cabin reflecting that he might safely steal anything he could carry from the ship, if he were so minded, and slip overboard across the narrow arm to the bank with nothing worse than a wetting.Whilst he was attending to his own necessities, the booming went on overhead, and at last a shout from above sent him racing up from the welcome food he had contrived to secure. The wall on Inchbrayock was shattered in two or three places and the unseen gun was silent. The cannonade from Dial Hill had stopped, but a train of figures was hurrying across from the northern shore of the island, taking shelter among the bushes and stones. A boat was being lowered from theVenture, for the tide, now sweeping in, had covered the mud, making a landing possible. Men were crowding into her, and as Flemingtongot round to his former place of observation she was being pushed off.Hall, who was standing alone, caught sight of him and came towards him; his face looked swollen and puffy, and his eyes were bloodshot.“We have been attacked,” he began—“attacked most unexpectedly!”“I had the honour to report that possibility to you last night, sir,” replied Flemington, with a trifle of insolence in his manner.An angry look shot out of Hall’s rabbit eyes. “What could you possibly have known about such a thing?” he cried. “What reason had you for making such a statement?”“I had a great many,” said Archie, “but you informed me that you had no leisure to listen to any of them until this morning. Perhaps you are at leisure now?”“You are a damned impudent scoundrel!” cried the other, noticing Flemington’s expression, which amply justified these words, “but you had better take care! There is nothing to prevent me from putting you under arrest.”“Nothing but the orders I carry in my pocket,” replied Archie. “They are likely enough to deter you.”The other opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so a shot crashed into the fore part of the ship, and a hail of bullets ripped out from the thicket on the island; the boat, which was half-way between theVentureand Inchbrayock, spun round, and two of the rowers fell forward overtheir oars. Hall left Archie standing where he was.The gun that the ship’s gunners believed themselves to have disabled had opened fire again, after a silence that had been, perhaps, but a lure to draw a sortie from her; and as it was mere destruction for the boat to attempt a landing in the face of the shot, she had orders to put back.The position in which he was placed was now becoming clear to Hall. He was cut off from communication with the quays by the guns safely entrenched on the island, and those on Dial Hill, though out of range for the moment, would prevent him from moving nearer to the watermouth or making an attempt to get out to sea. He could not tell what was happening in the town opposite, and he had no means of finding out, for the whole of the cannon that he had been mad enough to leave by the shore was in the enemy’s possession, and would remain so unless the townspeople should rise in the Government interest for their recapture. This he was well aware they would not do.His resentment against his luck, and the tale-bearing voice within, which told him that he had nothing to thank for it but his own carelessness, grew more insistent as his head grew clearer. He had been jerked out of sleep, heavy-headed, and with a brain still dulled by drink, but the morning freshness worked on him, and the sun warmed his senses into activity. The sight of Flemington, clean, impertinent, and entirely comprehensiveof the circumstances, drove him mad; and it drove him still madder to know that Archie understood why he had been unwilling to see his report last night.Hall’s abilities were a little superior to his looks. So far he had served his country, not conspicuously, but without disaster, and had he been able to keep himself as sober as most people contrived to be in those intemperate days, he might have gone on his course with the same tepid success. He was one who liked the distractions of towns, and he bemoaned the fate that had sent him to anchor in a dull creek of the East Coast, where the taverns held nothing but faces whose unconcealed dislike forbade conviviality, and where even the light women looked upon his uniform askance. He was not a lively comrade at the best of times, and here, where he was thrown upon the sole society of his officers, with whom he was not popular, he was growing more morose and more careless as his habits of stealthy excess grew upon him. Archie, with his quick judgment of his fellow-men, had measured him accurately, and he knew it. In the midst of the morning’s disaster the presence of the interloper, his flippant civility of word and insolence of manner, made his sluggish blood boil.It was plain that the party on the island must be dislodged before anything could be done to save the situation, and Hall now decided to land as large a force as he could spare upon the mainland.By marching it along the road to Ferryden he would give the impression that some attempt was to be made to cross the strait nearer to the coast, and to land it between Dial Hill and the sea. Behind Ferryden village a rough track turned sharply southward up the bank, and this they were to take; they would be completely hidden from Inchbrayock once they had got over the crest of the land, and they were to double back with all speed along the mainland under shelter of the ridge, and to go for about a mile parallel with the Basin. When they had got well to the westward side of the island, they were to wheel down to the Basin’s shore at a spot where a grove of trees edged the brink; for here, in a sheltering turn of backwater among the trunks and roots, a few boats were moored for the convenience of those who wished to cross straight to Montrose by water instead of taking the usual path by the stepping-stones over Inchbrayock Island.They were to embark at this place, and, hugging the shore, under cover of its irregularities, to approach Inchbrayock from the west. If they should succeed in landing unseen, they would surprise the enemy at the further side of the graveyard whilst his attention was turned on theVenture. The officer to be sent in command of the party believed it could be done, because the length of the island would intervene to hide their manœuvres from the town, where the citizens, crowding on the quays, would be only too readyto direct the notice of the rebels to their approach.As the boat put off from the ship Archie slipped into it; he seemed to have lost his definite place in the scheme of things during the last twenty-four hours; he was nobody’s servant, nobody’s master, nobody’s concern; and in spite of his bold reply to Hall’s threat of arrest, he knew quite well that though the captain would stop short of such a measure, he might order him below at any moment; the only wonder was that he had not done so already. He did not know into what hands he might fall, should Hall be obliged to surrender, and this contingency appeared to be growing likely. By tacking himself on to the landing-party he would at least have the chance of action, and though, having been careful to keep out of Hall’s sight, he had not been able to discover their destination, he had determined to land with the men.After they had disembarked, he went boldly up to the officer in charge of the party and asked for permission to go with it, and when this was accorded with some surprise, he fell into step. As they tramped along towards Ferryden, he managed to pick up something of the work in hand from the man next to him. His only fear was of the chance of running against Logie; nevertheless, he made up his mind to trust to luck to save him from that, because he believed that Logie, as a professional soldier, would be in command of the guns on the hill. It was fromDial Hill that the tactical details of the attack could best be directed, and if either of the conspirators were upon the island, Archie was convinced it would be Ferrier.They soon reached Ferryden. The sun was clear and brave in the salt air over the sea, and a flock of gulls was screaming out beyond the bar, dipping, hovering, swinging sideways against the light breeze, now this way, now that way, their wanton voices full of mockery, as though the derisive spirits imprisoned in the ocean had become articulate, and were crying out on the land. The village looked distrustfully at the approach of the small company, and some of the fisher-wives dragged their children indoors as if they thought to see them kidnapped. Such men as were hanging about watched them with sullen eyes as they turned in between the houses and made for the higher ground.The boom of theVenture’sguns came to them from time to time, and once they heard a great shout rise from the quays, but they could see nothing because of the intervening swell of the land. They passed a farm and a few scattered cottages; but these were empty, for their inmates had gone to the likeliest places they could find for a view of what was happening in the harbour.Presently they went down to the Basin, straggling by twos and threes. At the water’s edge a colony of beeches stood naked and leafless, their heads listed over westward by the winds thatswept up the river’s mouth. They were crowded thick about the creek down which Flemington and his companions came, and at their feet, tied to the gnarled elbows of the great roots beneath which the water had eaten deep into the bank, lay three or four boats with their oars piled inside them. The beech-mast of years had sunk into the soil, giving a curious mixture of heaviness and elasticity to the earth as it was trodden; a water-rat drew a lead-coloured ripple along the transparency, below which the undulations of the bottom lay like a bird’s-eye view of some miniature world. The quiet of this hidden landing-place echoed to the clank of the rowlocks as the heavy oars were shipped, and two boatloads slid out between the stems.Archie, who was unarmed, had borrowed one of the officer’s pistols, not so much with the intention of using it as from the wish for a plausible pretext for joining the party. At any time his love of adventure would welcome such an opportunity, and at this moment he did not care what might happen to him. He seemed to have no chance of being true to anybody, and it was being revealed to him that, in these circumstances, life was scarcely endurable. He had never thought about it before, and he could think of nothing else now. It was some small comfort to know that, should his last half-hour of life be spent on Inchbrayock, Madam Flemington would at least understand that she had wronged him in suspecting him of being a turncoat. If only James couldknow that he had not betrayed him—or, rather, that his report was in the hands of that accursed beggar before they met among the broom-bushes! Yet, what if he did know it? Would his loathing of the spy under the roof-tree of his brother’s house be any the less? He would never understand—never know. And yet he had been true to him in his heart, and the fact that he had now no roof-tree of his own proved it.They slipped in under the bank of the island and disembarked silently. The higher ground in the middle of it crossed their front like the line of an incoming wave, hiding all that was going on on its farther side. They were to advance straight over it, and to rush down upon the thicket where the gun was entrenched with its muzzle towards theVenture. There was to be no working round the north shore, lest the hundreds of eyes on the quays should catch sight of them, and a hundred tongues give the alarm to the rebels. They were to attack at once, only waiting for the sound of another shot to locate the exact place for which they were to make. They stood drawn up, waiting for the order.Archie dropped behind the others. His heart had begun to sink. He had assured himself over and over again that Logie must be on Dial Hill; yet as each moment brought him nearer to contact with the enemy, he felt cold misgiving stealing on him. What if his guesses had been wrong? He knew that he had been a fool to run the risk hehad taken. Chance is such a smiling, happy-go-lucky deity when we see her afar off; but when we are well on our steady plod towards her, and the distance lessens between us, it is often all that we can do to meet her eyes—their expression has changed. Archie’s willingness to take risks was unfailing and temperamental, and he had taken this one in the usual spirit, but so much had happened lately to shake his confidence in life and in himself that his high heart was beating slower. Never had he dreaded anything as much as he dreaded James’s knowledge of the truth; yet the most agonizing part of it all was that James could not know the whole truth, nor understand it, even if he knew it. Archie’s reading of the other man’s character was accurate enough to tell him that no knowledge of facts could make Logie understand the part he had played.Sick at heart, he stood back from the party, watching it gather before the officer. He did not belong to it; no one troubled his head about him, and the men’s backs were towards him. He stole away, sheltered by a little hillock, and ran, bent almost double, to the southern shore of the island. He would creep round it and get as near as possible to the thicket. If he could conceal himself, he might be able to see the enemy and the enemy’s commander, and to discover the truth while there was yet time for flight. He glanced over his shoulder to see if the officer had noticed his absence, and being reassured, he pressed on.He knew that anyone who thought about him at all would take him for a coward, but he did not reckon that. The dread of meeting James possessed him.Sheep were often brought over to graze the island, and their tracks ran like network among the bushes. He trod softly in and out, anxious to get forward before the next sound of the gun should let loose the invading-party upon the rebels. He passed the end of the stepping-stones which crossed the Esk’s bed to the mainland; they were now nearly submerged by the tide rising in the river. He had not known of their existence, and as he noticed them with surprise, a shot shook the air, and though the thicket, now not far before him, blocked his view of theVenture’shull, he saw the tops of her masts tremble, and knew that she had been struck.Before him, the track took a sharp turn round a bend of the shore, which cut the path like a little promontory, so that he could see nothing beyond it, and here he paused. In another few minutes the island would be in confusion from the attack, and he might discover nothing. He set his teeth and stepped round the corner.The track widened out and then plunged into the fringe of the thicket. A man was kneeling on one knee with his back to Flemington; his hands were shading his eyes, and he was peering along a tunnel-shaped gap in the branches, through which could be seen a patch of river and the damaged bows of theVenture.Archie’s instinct was to retreat, but before he could do so, the man jumped up and faced him. His heart leaped to his mouth, for it was James.* * * * *Logie stood staring at him. Then he made a great effort to pick up the connecting-link of recollection that he felt sure he must have dropped. He had been so much absorbed in the business in hand that he found it impossible for a moment to estimate the significance of any outside matter. Though he was confounded and disturbed by the unlooked-for apparition of the painter, the idea of hostility never entered his mind.“Flemington?” he exclaimed, stepping towards him.But the other man’s expression was so strange that he stopped, conscious of vague disaster. What had the intruder come to tell him? As he stood, Flemington murmured something he could not distinguish, then turned quickly in his tracks.Logie leaped after him, and seized him by the shoulder before he had time to double round the bend.“Let me go!” cried Archie, his chest heaving; “let me go, man!”But James’s grip tightened; he was a strong man, and he almost dragged him over. As he held him, he caught sight of the Government pistol in his belt. It was one that the officer who had lent it to Flemington had taken from the ship.He jerked Archie violently round and made a snatch at the weapon, and the younger man, all but thrown off his balance, thrust his arm convulsively into the air. His sleeve shot back, laying bare a round, red spot outside the brown, sinewy wrist.Then there flashed retrospectively before James’s eye that same wound, bright in the blaze of the flaming paper; and with it there flashed comprehension.His impulse was to draw his own pistol, and to shoot the spy dead, but Archie recovered his balance, and was grappling with him so that he could not get his arm free. The strength of the slim, light young man astonished him. He was as agile as a weasel, but James found in him, added to his activity, a force that nearly matched his own.There was no possible doubt of Logie’s complete enlightenment, though he kept his crooked mouth shut and uttered no word. His eyes wore an expression not solely due to the violent struggle going on; they were terrible, and they woke the frantic instinct of self-preservation in Flemington. He knew that James was straining to get out his own pistol, and he hung on him and gripped him for dear life. As they swayed and swung to and fro, trampling the bents, there rose from behind the graveyard a yell that gathered and broke over the sound of their own quick breaths like a submerging flood, and the bullets began to whistle over the rising ground.Archie saw a change come into James’s eyes; then he found himself staggering, hurled with swift and tremendous force from his antagonist. He was flung headlong against the jutting bend round which he had come, and his forehead struck it heavily; then, rolling down to the track at its foot, he lay stunned and still.
ARCHIEsprang 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 theVentureshiver 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 theVentureas 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 theVenture, 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.
Archie contemplated Captain Hall where he stood in a little group of men. He looked even less of a personage in the morning light than he had done in the cabin, and the young man suspected that he had gone to bed in his clothes. This reminded him that he himself was unwashed, unshaven, and very hungry. Whatsoever the issue of the attack might be, there was no use in remaining starved and dirty, and he determined to go below to forage and to find some means of washing. There was no one to gainsay him at this time of stress, and he walked into Hall’s cabin reflecting that he might safely steal anything he could carry from the ship, if he were so minded, and slip overboard across the narrow arm to the bank with nothing worse than a wetting.
Whilst he was attending to his own necessities, the booming went on overhead, and at last a shout from above sent him racing up from the welcome food he had contrived to secure. The wall on Inchbrayock was shattered in two or three places and the unseen gun was silent. The cannonade from Dial Hill had stopped, but a train of figures was hurrying across from the northern shore of the island, taking shelter among the bushes and stones. A boat was being lowered from theVenture, for the tide, now sweeping in, had covered the mud, making a landing possible. Men were crowding into her, and as Flemingtongot round to his former place of observation she was being pushed off.
Hall, who was standing alone, caught sight of him and came towards him; his face looked swollen and puffy, and his eyes were bloodshot.
“We have been attacked,” he began—“attacked most unexpectedly!”
“I had the honour to report that possibility to you last night, sir,” replied Flemington, with a trifle of insolence in his manner.
An angry look shot out of Hall’s rabbit eyes. “What could you possibly have known about such a thing?” he cried. “What reason had you for making such a statement?”
“I had a great many,” said Archie, “but you informed me that you had no leisure to listen to any of them until this morning. Perhaps you are at leisure now?”
“You are a damned impudent scoundrel!” cried the other, noticing Flemington’s expression, which amply justified these words, “but you had better take care! There is nothing to prevent me from putting you under arrest.”
“Nothing but the orders I carry in my pocket,” replied Archie. “They are likely enough to deter you.”
The other opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so a shot crashed into the fore part of the ship, and a hail of bullets ripped out from the thicket on the island; the boat, which was half-way between theVentureand Inchbrayock, spun round, and two of the rowers fell forward overtheir oars. Hall left Archie standing where he was.
The gun that the ship’s gunners believed themselves to have disabled had opened fire again, after a silence that had been, perhaps, but a lure to draw a sortie from her; and as it was mere destruction for the boat to attempt a landing in the face of the shot, she had orders to put back.
The position in which he was placed was now becoming clear to Hall. He was cut off from communication with the quays by the guns safely entrenched on the island, and those on Dial Hill, though out of range for the moment, would prevent him from moving nearer to the watermouth or making an attempt to get out to sea. He could not tell what was happening in the town opposite, and he had no means of finding out, for the whole of the cannon that he had been mad enough to leave by the shore was in the enemy’s possession, and would remain so unless the townspeople should rise in the Government interest for their recapture. This he was well aware they would not do.
His resentment against his luck, and the tale-bearing voice within, which told him that he had nothing to thank for it but his own carelessness, grew more insistent as his head grew clearer. He had been jerked out of sleep, heavy-headed, and with a brain still dulled by drink, but the morning freshness worked on him, and the sun warmed his senses into activity. The sight of Flemington, clean, impertinent, and entirely comprehensiveof the circumstances, drove him mad; and it drove him still madder to know that Archie understood why he had been unwilling to see his report last night.
Hall’s abilities were a little superior to his looks. So far he had served his country, not conspicuously, but without disaster, and had he been able to keep himself as sober as most people contrived to be in those intemperate days, he might have gone on his course with the same tepid success. He was one who liked the distractions of towns, and he bemoaned the fate that had sent him to anchor in a dull creek of the East Coast, where the taverns held nothing but faces whose unconcealed dislike forbade conviviality, and where even the light women looked upon his uniform askance. He was not a lively comrade at the best of times, and here, where he was thrown upon the sole society of his officers, with whom he was not popular, he was growing more morose and more careless as his habits of stealthy excess grew upon him. Archie, with his quick judgment of his fellow-men, had measured him accurately, and he knew it. In the midst of the morning’s disaster the presence of the interloper, his flippant civility of word and insolence of manner, made his sluggish blood boil.
It was plain that the party on the island must be dislodged before anything could be done to save the situation, and Hall now decided to land as large a force as he could spare upon the mainland.By marching it along the road to Ferryden he would give the impression that some attempt was to be made to cross the strait nearer to the coast, and to land it between Dial Hill and the sea. Behind Ferryden village a rough track turned sharply southward up the bank, and this they were to take; they would be completely hidden from Inchbrayock once they had got over the crest of the land, and they were to double back with all speed along the mainland under shelter of the ridge, and to go for about a mile parallel with the Basin. When they had got well to the westward side of the island, they were to wheel down to the Basin’s shore at a spot where a grove of trees edged the brink; for here, in a sheltering turn of backwater among the trunks and roots, a few boats were moored for the convenience of those who wished to cross straight to Montrose by water instead of taking the usual path by the stepping-stones over Inchbrayock Island.
They were to embark at this place, and, hugging the shore, under cover of its irregularities, to approach Inchbrayock from the west. If they should succeed in landing unseen, they would surprise the enemy at the further side of the graveyard whilst his attention was turned on theVenture. The officer to be sent in command of the party believed it could be done, because the length of the island would intervene to hide their manœuvres from the town, where the citizens, crowding on the quays, would be only too readyto direct the notice of the rebels to their approach.
As the boat put off from the ship Archie slipped into it; he seemed to have lost his definite place in the scheme of things during the last twenty-four hours; he was nobody’s servant, nobody’s master, nobody’s concern; and in spite of his bold reply to Hall’s threat of arrest, he knew quite well that though the captain would stop short of such a measure, he might order him below at any moment; the only wonder was that he had not done so already. He did not know into what hands he might fall, should Hall be obliged to surrender, and this contingency appeared to be growing likely. By tacking himself on to the landing-party he would at least have the chance of action, and though, having been careful to keep out of Hall’s sight, he had not been able to discover their destination, he had determined to land with the men.
After they had disembarked, he went boldly up to the officer in charge of the party and asked for permission to go with it, and when this was accorded with some surprise, he fell into step. As they tramped along towards Ferryden, he managed to pick up something of the work in hand from the man next to him. His only fear was of the chance of running against Logie; nevertheless, he made up his mind to trust to luck to save him from that, because he believed that Logie, as a professional soldier, would be in command of the guns on the hill. It was fromDial Hill that the tactical details of the attack could best be directed, and if either of the conspirators were upon the island, Archie was convinced it would be Ferrier.
They soon reached Ferryden. The sun was clear and brave in the salt air over the sea, and a flock of gulls was screaming out beyond the bar, dipping, hovering, swinging sideways against the light breeze, now this way, now that way, their wanton voices full of mockery, as though the derisive spirits imprisoned in the ocean had become articulate, and were crying out on the land. The village looked distrustfully at the approach of the small company, and some of the fisher-wives dragged their children indoors as if they thought to see them kidnapped. Such men as were hanging about watched them with sullen eyes as they turned in between the houses and made for the higher ground.
The boom of theVenture’sguns came to them from time to time, and once they heard a great shout rise from the quays, but they could see nothing because of the intervening swell of the land. They passed a farm and a few scattered cottages; but these were empty, for their inmates had gone to the likeliest places they could find for a view of what was happening in the harbour.
Presently they went down to the Basin, straggling by twos and threes. At the water’s edge a colony of beeches stood naked and leafless, their heads listed over westward by the winds thatswept up the river’s mouth. They were crowded thick about the creek down which Flemington and his companions came, and at their feet, tied to the gnarled elbows of the great roots beneath which the water had eaten deep into the bank, lay three or four boats with their oars piled inside them. The beech-mast of years had sunk into the soil, giving a curious mixture of heaviness and elasticity to the earth as it was trodden; a water-rat drew a lead-coloured ripple along the transparency, below which the undulations of the bottom lay like a bird’s-eye view of some miniature world. The quiet of this hidden landing-place echoed to the clank of the rowlocks as the heavy oars were shipped, and two boatloads slid out between the stems.
Archie, who was unarmed, had borrowed one of the officer’s pistols, not so much with the intention of using it as from the wish for a plausible pretext for joining the party. At any time his love of adventure would welcome such an opportunity, and at this moment he did not care what might happen to him. He seemed to have no chance of being true to anybody, and it was being revealed to him that, in these circumstances, life was scarcely endurable. He had never thought about it before, and he could think of nothing else now. It was some small comfort to know that, should his last half-hour of life be spent on Inchbrayock, Madam Flemington would at least understand that she had wronged him in suspecting him of being a turncoat. If only James couldknow that he had not betrayed him—or, rather, that his report was in the hands of that accursed beggar before they met among the broom-bushes! Yet, what if he did know it? Would his loathing of the spy under the roof-tree of his brother’s house be any the less? He would never understand—never know. And yet he had been true to him in his heart, and the fact that he had now no roof-tree of his own proved it.
They slipped in under the bank of the island and disembarked silently. The higher ground in the middle of it crossed their front like the line of an incoming wave, hiding all that was going on on its farther side. They were to advance straight over it, and to rush down upon the thicket where the gun was entrenched with its muzzle towards theVenture. There was to be no working round the north shore, lest the hundreds of eyes on the quays should catch sight of them, and a hundred tongues give the alarm to the rebels. They were to attack at once, only waiting for the sound of another shot to locate the exact place for which they were to make. They stood drawn up, waiting for the order.
Archie dropped behind the others. His heart had begun to sink. He had assured himself over and over again that Logie must be on Dial Hill; yet as each moment brought him nearer to contact with the enemy, he felt cold misgiving stealing on him. What if his guesses had been wrong? He knew that he had been a fool to run the risk hehad taken. Chance is such a smiling, happy-go-lucky deity when we see her afar off; but when we are well on our steady plod towards her, and the distance lessens between us, it is often all that we can do to meet her eyes—their expression has changed. Archie’s willingness to take risks was unfailing and temperamental, and he had taken this one in the usual spirit, but so much had happened lately to shake his confidence in life and in himself that his high heart was beating slower. Never had he dreaded anything as much as he dreaded James’s knowledge of the truth; yet the most agonizing part of it all was that James could not know the whole truth, nor understand it, even if he knew it. Archie’s reading of the other man’s character was accurate enough to tell him that no knowledge of facts could make Logie understand the part he had played.
Sick at heart, he stood back from the party, watching it gather before the officer. He did not belong to it; no one troubled his head about him, and the men’s backs were towards him. He stole away, sheltered by a little hillock, and ran, bent almost double, to the southern shore of the island. He would creep round it and get as near as possible to the thicket. If he could conceal himself, he might be able to see the enemy and the enemy’s commander, and to discover the truth while there was yet time for flight. He glanced over his shoulder to see if the officer had noticed his absence, and being reassured, he pressed on.He knew that anyone who thought about him at all would take him for a coward, but he did not reckon that. The dread of meeting James possessed him.
Sheep were often brought over to graze the island, and their tracks ran like network among the bushes. He trod softly in and out, anxious to get forward before the next sound of the gun should let loose the invading-party upon the rebels. He passed the end of the stepping-stones which crossed the Esk’s bed to the mainland; they were now nearly submerged by the tide rising in the river. He had not known of their existence, and as he noticed them with surprise, a shot shook the air, and though the thicket, now not far before him, blocked his view of theVenture’shull, he saw the tops of her masts tremble, and knew that she had been struck.
Before him, the track took a sharp turn round a bend of the shore, which cut the path like a little promontory, so that he could see nothing beyond it, and here he paused. In another few minutes the island would be in confusion from the attack, and he might discover nothing. He set his teeth and stepped round the corner.
The track widened out and then plunged into the fringe of the thicket. A man was kneeling on one knee with his back to Flemington; his hands were shading his eyes, and he was peering along a tunnel-shaped gap in the branches, through which could be seen a patch of river and the damaged bows of theVenture.
Archie’s instinct was to retreat, but before he could do so, the man jumped up and faced him. His heart leaped to his mouth, for it was James.
* * * * *
Logie stood staring at him. Then he made a great effort to pick up the connecting-link of recollection that he felt sure he must have dropped. He had been so much absorbed in the business in hand that he found it impossible for a moment to estimate the significance of any outside matter. Though he was confounded and disturbed by the unlooked-for apparition of the painter, the idea of hostility never entered his mind.
“Flemington?” he exclaimed, stepping towards him.
But the other man’s expression was so strange that he stopped, conscious of vague disaster. What had the intruder come to tell him? As he stood, Flemington murmured something he could not distinguish, then turned quickly in his tracks.
Logie leaped after him, and seized him by the shoulder before he had time to double round the bend.
“Let me go!” cried Archie, his chest heaving; “let me go, man!”
But James’s grip tightened; he was a strong man, and he almost dragged him over. As he held him, he caught sight of the Government pistol in his belt. It was one that the officer who had lent it to Flemington had taken from the ship.
He jerked Archie violently round and made a snatch at the weapon, and the younger man, all but thrown off his balance, thrust his arm convulsively into the air. His sleeve shot back, laying bare a round, red spot outside the brown, sinewy wrist.
Then there flashed retrospectively before James’s eye that same wound, bright in the blaze of the flaming paper; and with it there flashed comprehension.
His impulse was to draw his own pistol, and to shoot the spy dead, but Archie recovered his balance, and was grappling with him so that he could not get his arm free. The strength of the slim, light young man astonished him. He was as agile as a weasel, but James found in him, added to his activity, a force that nearly matched his own.
There was no possible doubt of Logie’s complete enlightenment, though he kept his crooked mouth shut and uttered no word. His eyes wore an expression not solely due to the violent struggle going on; they were terrible, and they woke the frantic instinct of self-preservation in Flemington. He knew that James was straining to get out his own pistol, and he hung on him and gripped him for dear life. As they swayed and swung to and fro, trampling the bents, there rose from behind the graveyard a yell that gathered and broke over the sound of their own quick breaths like a submerging flood, and the bullets began to whistle over the rising ground.
Archie saw a change come into James’s eyes; then he found himself staggering, hurled with swift and tremendous force from his antagonist. He was flung headlong against the jutting bend round which he had come, and his forehead struck it heavily; then, rolling down to the track at its foot, he lay stunned and still.