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While I dangled I heard in the roaring echoes another splash, and knew that Billy Priske had been thrown from his hold; a splash, and close upon it a heavy grinding sound, a crash of burst planks, an outcry ending in a wail as the lifting sea bore back the Moor's boat and our own together upon the Gauntlet's stem and smashed them like egg-shells.
They were gathered about the gateway again, and, as before, they scampered from us up the glade. But of Billy Priske there was no sign at all. We stared at each other and rubbed our eyes; we two, left alone out of our company of six.
To whose keeping " he turned to my father "am I to entrust them, Sir John?" My father nodded towards Billy Priske, who stepped forward and tucked both parcels under his arm, while Mr. Knox spread his papers on the table.
"Do the night's takings fall short of her equally high standard? She threatens to pull mine: for I, cavalier, am the treasurer. . . . But at what rate am I overrunning my impulses to ask news from you! How does your father, sir that modern Bayard? And Captain Pomery? And my old friend Billy Priske?" I told him, briefly as I could, of my father's end.
He was picking his way across the dry bed of a torrent in the dip not fifty yards below us, leaping from slab to slab of outcropping granite as a man crosses a brook by stepping-stones; and upon a slab midway he halted, drew off his hat, extracted a handkerchief, and stood polishing his bald head while he took stock of the climb before him. "Billy! Billy Priske!"
Sure no second man in England wore Billy Priske's legs! Then, and while I stood amazed, my father's voice and my Uncle Gervase's called to me together: and gulping down all wonder, possessed with love only and a wild joy but yet grasping my fish I splashed across the shallows and up the bank, and let my father take me naked to his heart. "Clivver boy, clivver boy!" said the voice of Billy Priske.
Although the sun would not pierce to the valley for another hour, it slanted already between the pine-stems on the ridge, and above us the sky was light with another day. And again, punctual with the dawn, over the ridge a far voice broke into singing. As before, it came to us in cadences descending to a long-drawn refrain Mortu, mortu, mortu! "Billy! Billy Priske!" we called, and listened.
In the great entrance-hall he paused to lift a bunch of rusty keys off their hook, and, choosing the largest, unlocked the door of the State Room. The lock had been kept well oiled, for Billy Priske entered it twice daily; in the morning, to open a window or two, and at sunset, to close them.
If we could discover another such pair among the mob, now!" "We are wasting time here for certain," said I. "And where, by the way, is Billy Priske?" "If you waste your time upstairs here, gentlemen," said Miss Whiteaway, "belike you may do better in the parlour, where I had prepared for some friends of mine with two-three chickens and a ham." "Ah, to be sure," said I; "the packet-men!"
We walked back to our lodgings that afternoon, with Billy Priske behind us bearing in his pocket the Great Seal and under his arm, in a checked kerchief, the Iron Crown of Corsica. Two mornings later we took horse and set our faces westward again; and thus ended my brief first visit to London.
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