Have ye got him?' they cried. 'Did he indeed come? Had he attendants?'
'He is here, and he is alone,' the Captain answered. 'Our hawser fetched him off his horse as neatly as ever a gull was netted by a cragsman. What have ye done in our absence, Silas!'
'We have the packs ready for carriage,' said the man addressed, a sturdy, weather-beaten seaman of middle age. 'The silk and lace are done in these squares covered over with sacking. The one I have marked "yarn" and the other "jute"--a thousand of Mechlin to a hundred of the shiny. They will sling over a mule's back. Brandy, schnapps, Schiedam, and Hamburg Goldwasser are all set out in due order. The 'baccy is in the flat cases over by the Black Drop there. A plaguey job we had carrying it all out, but here it is ship-shape at last, and the lugger floats like a skimming dish, with scarce ballast enough to stand up to a five-knot breeze.'
'Any signs of the _Fairy Queen_?' asked the smuggler.
'None. Long John is down at the water's edge looking out for her flash-light. This wind should bring her up if she has rounded Combe-Martin Point. There was a sail about ten miles to the east-nor'-east at sundown. She might have been a Bristol schooner, or she might have been a King's fly-boat.'
'A King's crawl-boat,' said Captain Murgatroyd, with a sneer. 'We cannot hang the gauger until Venables brings up the _Fairy Queen_, for after all it was one of his hands that was snackled. Let him do his own dirty work.'
'Tausend Blitzen!' cried the ruffian Dutchman, 'would it not be a kindly grass to Captain Venables to chuck the gauger down the Black Drop ere he come? He may have such another job to do for us some day.'
'Zounds, man, are you in command or am I?' said the leader angrily. 'Bring the prisoner forward to the fire! Now, hark ye, dog of a land-shark; you are as surely a dead man as though you were laid out with the tapers burning. See here'--he lifted a torch, and showed by its red light a great crack in the floor across the far end of the cave--'you can judge of the Black Drop's depth!' he said, raising an empty keg and tossing it over into the yawning gulf. For ten seconds we stood silent before a dull distant clatter told that it had at last reached the bottom.
'It will carry him half-way to hell before the breath leaves him,' said one.
'It's an easier death than the Devizes gallows!' cried a second.
'Nay, he shall have the gallows first!' a third shouted. 'It is but his burial that we are arranging.'
'He hath not opened his mouth since we took him,' said the man who was called Dicon. 'Is he a mute, then? Find your tongue, my fine fellow, and let us hear what your name is. It would have been well for you if you had been born dumb, so that you could not have sworn our comrade's life away.'
'I have been waiting for a civil question after all this brawling and brabbling,' said I. 'My name is Micah Clarke. Now, pray inform me who ye may be, and by what warrant ye stop peaceful travellers upon the public highway?'
'This is our warrant,' Murgatroyd answered, touching the hilt of his cutlass. 'As to who we are, ye know that well enough. Your name is not Clarke, but Westhouse, or Waterhouse, and you are the same cursed exciseman who snackled our poor comrade, Cooper Dick, and swore away his life at Ilchester.'
'I swear that you are mistaken,' I replied. 'I have never in my life been in these parts before.'
'Fine words! Fine words!' cried another smuggler. 'Gauger or no, you must jump for it, since you know the secret of our cave.'
'Your secret is safe with me,' I answered. 'But if ye wish to murder me, I shall meet my fate as a soldier should. I should have chosen to die on the field of battle, rather than to lie at the mercy of such a pack of water-rats in their burrow.'
'My faith!' said Murgatroyd. 'This is too tall talk for a gauger. He bears himself like a soldier, too. It is possible that in snaring the owl we have caught the falcon. Yet we had certain token that he would come this way, and on such another horse.'
'Call up Long John,' suggested the Dutchman.