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Updated: May 31, 2025
Then a lock clicked, heavy bars rumbled, and a chain rattled. Rangsley pushed me through the doorway. A side door opened, and I saw into a lighted room filled with wreaths of smoke. A paunchy man in a bob wig, with a blue coat and Windsor buttons, holding a churchwarden pipe in his right hand and a pewter quart in his left, came towards us.
We rode clattering aggressively through the silence of the long, narrow main street. Every now and then Carlos Riego coughed lamentably, but Tomas Castro rode in gloomy silence. There was a light here and there in a window, but not a soul stirring abroad. On the blind of an inn the shadow of a bearded man held the shadow of a rummer to its mouth. "That'll be my uncle," Rangsley said.
"Oh, I know, I know," Rangsley said softly; and, indeed, he did know all that was to be known about smuggling out of the southern counties of people who could no longer inhabit them. The trade was a survival of the days of Jacobite plots. "And it's a hanging job, too. But it's no affair of mine." He stopped and reflected for an instant.
I saw a hand light a torch at the lanthorn, and the crowd of faces, the muddle of limbs, the horses' heads, and the quiet trees above, flickered into sight. "Don't let them hang me, Jack Rangsley," I sobbed. "You know I'm no spy. Don't let 'em hang me, Jack." He rode his horse up to me, and caught me by the collar. "Hold your tongue," he said roughly.
"Now you sit there, on the floor," Rangsley commanded; "can't leave you below; the runners will be coming to the mayor for new warrants to-morrow, and he'd not like to have spent the night in your company." He threw a casement open.
He limited his energies to working the underground passage, to the success of which his fox-like cunning, and intimate knowledge of the passing shipping, were indispensable. I was preparing to follow the others down the ladder when Rangsley touched my arm. "I don't like your company," he said close behind my ear. "I know who they are. There were bills out for them this morning.
"Hullo, captain," he said, "you'll be too late with the lights, won't you?" He had a deprecatory air. "Your watch is fast, Mr. Mayor," Rangsley answered surlily; "the tide won't serve for half an hour yet." "Cht, cht," the other wheezed. "No offence. We respect you. But still, when one has a stake, one likes to know." "My stake's all I have, and my neck," Rangsley said impatiently; "what's yours?
We followed the others downwards into a ground-floor room that was fitted up as a barber's shop. A rushlight was burning on a table. Rangsley took hold of a piece of wainscotting, part of the frame of a panel; he pulled it towards him, and, at the same moment, a glazed show-case full of razors and brushes swung noiselessly forward with an effect of the supernatural.
The drunken voice from below kept up a constant babble of, "Three men to be set aboard Thames... three men to be set . . ." "He'll not stop saying that till he has you safe aboard," Rangsley said. He showed a glimmer of light down the ladder Carlos and Castro descended. I caught sight below me of the silver head and the deep red ears of the drunken uncle of Rangsley.
Suddenly old Rangsley began to sing; his voice was hoarse and drunken. "When Harol' war in va a ded, An' fallin', lost his crownd, An' Normun Willium wa a ded." The water murmured without a pause, as if it had a million tiny facts to communicate in very little time. And then old Rangsley hove to, to wait for the ship, and sat half asleep, lurching over the tiller.
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