Cutlass and Cudgel Part 33

"Wait till I get my chance!" he muttered. "I'll sink the first smuggler I meet; and as to that blackavised scoundrel who came and cheated me as he did--oh, if I could only see him hung!"

A couple of hours later, after seeing the lugger's masts and sails slowly disappear, the cutter was once more at her old moorings, and leaving the boatswain in charge, the lieutenant had himself rowed ash.o.r.e, to land upon the ledge, and carefully search the rocks for some sight of a cargo having been landed.

But the smugglers and their sh.o.r.e friends had been more careful this time, and search where they would, the cutter's men could find no traces of anything of the kind, and the lieutenant had himself rowed back to the cutter, keeping the boat alongside, ready to send along sh.o.r.e to the cove to seek for tidings of Gurr and d.i.c.k but altering his mind, he had the little vessel unmoored once more to run back the six miles along the coast till the cutter was abreast of the cove,--the first place where it seemed possible for a boat to land,--and here he sent a crew ash.o.r.e to bring his two men off.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

"How many horses has your father got?"

"Three."

"What colour are they?"

"Black, white, and grey."

"Turn round three times, and catch whom you may."

That, as everyone knows, is the cla.s.sical way of beginning the game of Blind Man's Buff; and supposing that the blinded man _pro tem_, is properly bandaged, and cannot get a squint of light up by the side of his nose, and also supposing that he confuses himself by turning round the proper number of times honestly, he will be in profound darkness, and in utter ignorance of the direction of door, window, or the salient objects in the room.

Take another case. Suppose a lad to have eaten a hearty supper of some particularly hard pastry. The probabilities are that he will either have the peculiar form of dream known as nightmare, or some time in the night he will get out of bed, and go wandering about his room in the darkness, to awake at last, cold, confused, and asking himself where he is, without the slightest ability to give a reasonable answer to his question.

It has fallen to the lot of some people to be lost in a fog--words, these, which can only be appreciated by those who have pa.s.sed through a similar experience.

The writer has gone through these experiences more than once, and fully realised the peculiar sensation of helplessness, confusion, and brain numbing which follows. Dark as pitch is mostly a figure of speech, for the obscurity is generally relieved by something in the form of dull light which does enable a person to see his hand before him; but the blackness around, when Archibald Raystoke began to come back to his senses, would have left pitch far behind as to depth of tint.

His head ached, and there was a feeling in it suggestive of the contents having been turned into brain-fritters in a pan--fritters which had bubbled and turned brown, and then been burned till they were quite black.

He opened his eyes, and then put his hands up to feel if they were open.

They were undoubtedly, and he hurt them in making the test, for he half fancied, and he had a confused notion, that a great handkerchief had been tied over them. But though they were undoubtedly open he could not see. In fact, when he closed them, strange as it may sound, he felt as if he could see better, for there were a number of little spots of light sailing up and down and round and round, like the tiny sparks seen in tinder before the fire which has consumed is quite extinct.

He lay still, not thinking but trying to think, for his mind was in the condition described by the little girl who, suffering from a cold, said, "Please, ma, one side of my nose won't go."

Archy Raystoke's mind would not go, and for a long time he lay motionless.

His memory began to work again in his back, for he gradually became conscious of feeling something there, and after suffering the inconvenience for a long time, he thrust his hand under his spine and drew out a piece of iron, sharp-edged and round like a hoop.

He felt better after that, and fell to wondering why he had brought his little hoop to bed with him, and also how it was that his little hoop, which he used to trundle, had become iron instead of wood.

The exertion of moving the hoop made him wince, for his back was sore and his arms felt strained as if he had been beaten.

His mind began "to go" a little more, and he had to turn back mentally; but he could not do that, so he made an effort to go forward, and wondered how soon it would be morning, and the window curtains at the foot of the bed would show streaks of suns.h.i.+ne between.

Time pa.s.sed on and he still lay perfectly quiet, for he did not feel the slightest inclination to move after his late efforts, which had produced a sensation of the interior of his skull beginning to bubble up with fire or hot lead rolling about. But as that pain declined he felt cold, and after a great deal of hesitation he suddenly stretched out his hands to pull up the clothes.

There were none.

His natural inference had been, as he was lying there upon his back, that he must be in bed; but now he found that, though there were no bed-clothes, he was wearing his own, only upon feeling about with no little pain they did not seem like his clothes.

That was as far as he could get then, but some time after there came a gleam of light in his understanding, and he recalled the mists that hung about the Channel.

Of course he was in one of those thick mists, and he had gone to sleep on--on--what had he gone to sleep on?

The light died out, and it was a long time before, like a flash, came the answer.

The deck of the cutter!

He made a movement to start up in horror, for he knew that he must have gone to steep during his watch, and his pain and stiffness were like a punishment for doing so disgraceful a thing.

"What will Mr Brough say if he knows?" he thought, and then he groaned, for the pain caused by the movement was unbearable.

At last his mind began to clear, and he set himself to wonder with more force. This was not the deck, for he could feel that he was lying on what was like an old sail, and where his hand lay was not wood, but cold hard stone, with a big crack full of small sc.r.a.ps.

The lad shook his head and then uttered a low moan, for the pain was terrible.

It died off though as he lay, still trying hard to think, failing-- trying in a half dreamy way, and finally thrilling all over, for he remembered everything now--the smugglers--the scene in the darkness of the room where he was imprisoned--the coming of that boy who jeered at him till they engaged in a fierce struggle, with the result all plainly pictured, till he was stunned or had swooned away.

These thoughts were almost enough to stun him again, and he lay there with a hot sensation of rage against the treacherous young scoundrel who had lured him on to that struggle, and held him so thoroughly fixed against the bars till he was secured and bound. Yes, and his eyes were bandaged. He could recall it now.

"Oh, only wait till I get my chance!" he muttered, and he involuntarily clenched his fists.

He lay perfectly quiet again though, for he found that any exertion brought on mental confusion as well as pain, and he wanted to think about his position.

It came by degrees more and more, and as he was able to think with greater clearness, he found an explanation of the fancy he had felt, that he must be ill and sea-sick again, and that somebody had been giving him brandy.

Part was fevered imagination, part was reality, for there could be no doubt about that faint odour of spirits. It was brandy, but brandy in smuggled kegs, and the scoundrels of smugglers had shut him up in the vault with their kegs.

"Well, they have not killed me," he said to himself with a little laugh.

"They dared not try that, and all I have to do now is to escape, if Mr Brough does not send the lads to fetch me out."

He went through the whole time now since his landing; thought of what a disgraceful thing it was for a t.i.tled gentleman to mix himself up with smuggling, and what a revelation he would have for the lieutenant and the master who had been so easily deluded by Sir Risdon's bearing.

Then he thought of Celia, and how bright and innocent she had seemed; putting away all thoughts of her, however, directly as his angry feeling increased against Ram and this treacherous girl.

He must have been for hours thinking, often in a drowsy, half-confused way, but rousing up from time to time to feel his resentment growing against Ram, who seemed to him now to be the personification of the whole smuggling gang.

By degrees he grew conscious of a fresh pain, one that was certainly not produced by his late struggles, or by stiffness from lying upon an old sail stretched upon the damp floor of a vault.

As he thought this last, he asked himself why he called it the damp floor of a vault. For it was not damp, but perfectly dry, and below the sc.r.a.ps of stone in the seam there was fine dust.

But the said pain was increasing, and there was no mistaking it. He was hungry, decidedly hungry; and paradoxically, as he grew better he grew worse, the pain in the head being condensed in a more central region, where nature carries on a kind of factory of bone, muscle, flesh, blood, and generally health and strength.

Suddenly Archy recalled that his legs had been bound, and he sat up to find that they were free now, and if he liked he could rise and go to the grated window and call for help.

"If I do, they'll come down and stuff a handkerchief in my mouth again,"

he thought, "and it is no use to do that. I may as well wait till I hear our men's voices, and then I'll soon let them know where I am."