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The shingle crashed at intervals beneath the feet of a large body of men. I remembered the smugglers; but it was as if I had remembered them only to forget them forever. Old Rangsley, who steered with the sheet in his hand, kept up an unintelligible babble. Carlos and Castro talked under their breaths. Along the gunwale there was a constant ripple and gurgle.
A matter of fifty pun ten?... Why don't you make them bring they lanthorns?" A couple of dark lanthorns were passed to Rangsley, who half-uncovered one, and lit the way up steep wooden stairs. We climbed up to a tiny cock-loft, of which the side towards the sea was all glazed.
"Here's three men to be set aboard the Thames at a quarter after eleven. . . ." Rangsley said again. "Here's... a-cop... three men to be set aboard Thames at quarter after eleven," a voice hiccoughed back to us. "Well, see you do it," Rangsley said. "He's as drunk as a king," he commented to us; "but when you've said a thing three times, he remembers hark to him."
I was pulled down on my knees, then thrust forward, and then left to myself while they rushed to bonnet Lillywhite. I stumbled against a great, quiet farm horse. A continuous scuffling went on; an imperious voice cried: "Hold your tongues, you fools! Hold your tongues!..." Someone else called: "Hear to Jack Rangsley. Hear to him!" There was a silence.
The moon was hidden from us by clouds, but, a long way off, over the distant sea, there was an irregular patch of silver light, against which the chimneys of the opposite houses were silhouetted. The church clock began muffledly to chime the quarters behind us; then the hour struck ten strokes. Rangsley set one of his lanthorns on the window and twisted the top.
Jack Rangsley was a tall, big-boned, thin man, with something sinister in the lines of his horseman's cloak, and something reckless in the way he set his spurred heel on the ground. He was the son of an old Marsh squire. Old Rangsley had been head of the last of the Owlers the aristocracy of export smugglers and Jack had sunk a little in becoming the head of the Old Bourne Tap importers.
But he was hard enough, tyrannical enough, and had nerve enough to keep Free-trading alive in our parts until long after it had become an anachronism. He ended his days on the gallows, of course, but that was long afterwards. "I'd give a dollar to know what's going on in those runners' heads," Rangsley said, pointing back with his crop. He laughed gayly.
Afterwards, when I stood on the deck, they began laughing at old Rangsley, who held forth in a thunderous voice, punctuated by hiccoughs: "They carried I aboard a cop theer lugger and sinks I in the cold, co old sea." It mortified me excessively that I should be tacked to his tail and exhibited to a number of people, and I had a sudden conviction of my small importance.
A thing that was "unnatural" to Jack Rangsley the man of darkness, who lived forever as if in the shadow of the gallows was a thing to be avoided. He was for me nearly as romantic a figure as Carlos himself, but for his forbidding darkness, and he was a person of immense power.
From the quarry a voice shrieked: "Help help for the love of God I can't. . . ." There was a grunt and the sound of a fall; then a precisely similar sequence of sounds. "That'll teach 'em," Rangsley said ferociously. "Come along they've only rolled down a bank. They weren't over the quarry. It's all right. I swear it is." And, as a matter of fact, that was the smugglers' ferocious idea of humour.
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