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Updated: June 24, 2025
He was an Argyleshire man, who had come out to the island as a lad in 1786, and had worked his way up to the position of agent to the Rooksby estate at Horton Pen. He had a little estate of his own, too, at the mouth of the River Minho, where he grew rice very profitably. He had been the first man to plant it on the island.
"You knew I was on the island," I pinned him down. "You used to come to the island," he corrected. "I've just explained how. But you were not there much, or we should have been able to lay hands on you. We wanted to. There was a warrant out after you tried to murder us. But you had been smuggled away by Ramon." I tried again: "You have heard of my brother-in-law, Sir Ralph Rooksby?"
"Hey, John John Kemp; come down, I say!" I started away from the glass as if I had been taken in an act of folly. Rooksby was flicking his leg with his switch in the doorway, at the bottom of the narrow flight of stairs. He wanted to talk to me, he said, and I followed him out through the yard on to the soft road that climbs the hill to westward.
That day my cousin Rooksby had become engaged to my sister Veronica, and I had a fit of jealous misery. I was rawboned, with fair hair, I had a good skin, tanned by the weather, good teeth, and brown eyes.
He suddenly turned a little to one side, and fixed me with his clear eyes. "My friend," he said, "if I told you that Rooksby and your greatest Kent earls carried smugglers' tubs, you would say I was an ignorant fool. Yet they, too, are magistrates. The only use I have ever made of these ruffians was to-day, to bring you here. It was a necessity.
I told him that Veronica had a baby, and he sighed. "She married the excellent Rooksby?" he asked. "Ah, what a waste." He relapsed into silence again. "There was no woman in your land like her. She might have And to marry that that excellent personage, my good cousin. It is a tragedy." "It was a very good match," I answered. He sighed again.
Barnes remarked hurriedly, "This 'll be your Mr. Macdonald"; and, turning his back on me, forgot my existence. I felt more alone than ever. The man in front of me held his head low, as if he wished to butt me. I began breathlessly to tell him I had a letter from "my my Rooksby brother-in-law Ralph Rooks-by" I was panting as if I had run a long way. He said nothing at all.
I was going to make a fight; they had torn me from Seraphina, to fulfill their own accursed ends. I felt myself grow harsh and strong, as a tree feels itself grow gnarled by winter storms. I said to the turnkey again and again: "Man, I will promise you a thousand pounds or a pension for life, if you will get a letter through to my mother or Squire Rooksby of Horton."
The thing seemed incredible to me. Here was an adventure, and I was shocked to see that Rooksby was in a pitiable state about it. "But, Ralph," I said, "I would help Carlos." "Oh, you," he said fretfully. "You want to run your head into a noose; that's what it comes to. Why, I may have to flee the country. There's the red-breasts poking their noses into every cottage on the Ashford road."
The two Spaniards were lying in the fern looking on when you come blundering your clumsy nose in. If it hadn't been for Rooksby you might have Hullo, there!" he broke off. An answer came from the black shadow of a clump of roadside elms. I made out the forms of three or four horses standing with their heads together. "Come along," Rangsley said; "up with you. We'll talk as we go."
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