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"Let's get aboard quickly," suggested Frank, "and look about." "Up we go," cried Tom. "Easy, lads, the ladder's shaky." Jack in the lead stepped inside the pilot house and down the companion-way. As he reached the cabin below, his chums heard him stumble. Quickly they reached for the light switch. "Who left that bundle there?" asked Jack. "What's in it?"
"Well, I'm married to her, any way." "Monstrous fine woman," Mr. Jope observed cheerfully. "Ay; she's all that. It seems like a dream. You'd best step on board: the ladder's on t'other side." As we passed under the vessel's stern I looked up and read her name Glad Tidings, Port of Fowey. "I've a-broken it to her," our host announced, meeting us at the top of the ladder.
So saying, he pressed forward into the crowd, followed by his guide; and when at last the latter pointed out the culprit, he seized his arm and dragged him back to the ladder's foot, where he peremptorily ordered him to restore the stolen gold. All this was done in less time than I have taken to tell it.
Here's your grip, here's your hat. The ladder's on the port side. Look where you're stepping. We can't show any lights, and it's dark as " But, even as he spoke, like a flash of powder, as swiftly as one throws an electric switch, as blindingly as a train leaps from the tunnel into the glaring sun, the darkness vanished and the tug was swept by the fierce, blatant radiance of a search-light.
My hail, if not my words, reached him; he glanced up, saw the figure on the ladder, and was seized instantaneously with the spirit of the chase. Yelling something reassuring, the gist of which escaped me, he constituted himself a reception committee of one and started for the ladder's foot. But our doughty Teuton was a resourceful person.
He thought of his father and of his frail brother Christopher; and he wished he had been kinder to both; then he had the thought of his wife and his helpless child, and all that might befall them. And he thought, too, of God, whom he must now meet, who seemed to sit like a Judge, in a pavilion of clouds at a ladder's fiery head, with no smile or welcome for him.
And yet it had to be dared; a man must go up that night for a woman's sake. Well, I took off my boots at the ladder's foot, and thrusting my pistol into my waist-belt I spoke a warning word to Peter Bligh. "This," said I, taking from Regnarte the key I needed, "this opens the iron doors you will meet down yonder. If misfortune happens to me, go straight through and take my place.
I have shown you the ladder's foot, 'I have set the Lord always before me. The top round reaches the throne of God, and whoever begins at the bottom, and holds fast the beginning of his confidence firm unto the end, for him the great promise of the Master will come true, and Christ's 'joy will remain in him and his joy shall be full.
Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off, and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct some temporary device for keeping his house over his head, saw from the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards the shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land.
Some of the crew, grouped about the ladder's foot, laughed at this; others began to mutter among themselves as though the beacon troubled them, and they did not like it. A seaman's the most superstitious creature that walks the earth or sails on the sea, as all the world knows.
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