But we were not getting out into the current. That was becoming moment by moment very plain. Already we were moderately deeply out. The surface of the sea came now almost up to Keig’s chin as he pushed us. And the raft had in the meanwhile been sucking up water like a sponge, and sinking inch by inch lower as it did so. Margaret was paddling now as frenziedly as I was, but neither of our efforts seemed to help much.
Keig tapped me sharply on my ankle as I knelt there.
‘You’d better get in the water and help me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be swimming in another couple of yards.’
I laid down my paddle and slid off the side of the raft, a sudden miasma of unwillingness spreading all through me as I felt again the chill touch of the water round my middle.
But there was no time to indulge in fine sensations. We were still no more than fifty yards from the shore. Anyone coming out of the dell on to that small strip of sand could not help but see us at once. No doubt we were still within shotgun range. I put my hands on the back of the raft and kicked out with my legs for all I was worth.
With Keig swimming strongly beside me, we began making some slight progress. But it takes a tremendous amount of effort to impel a mattress of bundled sticks through water, and we were not going by any means fast.
Keig lifted his head from the water beside me.
‘Put the packets in the sea,’ he said to his wife.
Margaret took one frightened look back at the so-close shore and then one after the other tipped the two big bundles off the raft. The one I had carried down to the beach had been heavy enough, and I imagine that both of them must have contained a good many weighty articles. They sank in seconds.
Keig and I kicked on. The cumbersome square raft moved soggily through the water. I took a quick glance back. We had gained ten yards, if that. And still there was not the slightest sign of that powerful tug which earlier had fought us to within feet of the beach when the tide had been running that much differently.
Again Keig lifted his head from the water.
‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘you’ll need to get in yourself. Hold hard to the raft and you’ll be safe as can be.’
‘Yes, Keig,’ she said.
She moved to the side of the clumsy, swaying platform. Keig still had his head up, looking at her.
‘You’ll need to take that dress off too,’ he said. ‘It’ll have you under, the way it is. Hang it from the side.’
It was a fine summer’s afternoon. No doubt two hundred miles away to the east of us the beaches of Cornwall were at this moment crowded with bikini-clad women lazing full length in the sun. Even some twenty miles away on the one stretch of decent bathing beach Oceana possessed there would be girls in scanty enough swimsuits. But I knew that what Keig had just asked of his wife was something that struck to the very heart of her sense of decency.
I sank my face into the water in front of me and kicked out savagely.
And in a minute or so something soft and clinging wrapped itself round my foot for an instant. I jerked it clear. And next moment I felt the sodden raft rise sharply up and all at once we began to make faster progress. I took my face out of the water but still kept my eyes fixed firmly on the ragged white ends of the bundled sticks in front of me.
Before long I heard Keig’s voice, low and cautious.
‘Stop now. Hold on hard and I’ll turn her so she comes between us and the shore.’
I stopped my desperate kicking and felt the raft being manoeuvred round. Soon I was able to see the shore.
We were some fair way out, though exactly how far I did not like to guess. To calculate it accurately would have meant heaving my head up above the level of the brushwood bundles in front of me, and I remembered all too clearly how unpleasant the sound of the buckshot had been swishing into the water near me when the Keepers had fired at us as we swam away from the lighter. However, even from behind the screen of sticks I could see the trees of the dell plainly enough.
What would our raft look like from over there? A heap of driftwood, or something less easily explained? Would the head of Keig’s axe catch the sun as it had done when he had come towards me in the dell an hour or so ago? Would that betray us?
Before very much longer I realized I was about to learn the answer. Suddenly a group of figures had come running out from among the trees. I could see them from about knee-level up, and it was clear that they were wearing the Keepers’ green uniform and carrying guns.
There was nothing we could do but hold on to our platform of bundled sticks, keep our heads low and hope. I tried to work out what our plan should be if it became clear the Keepers had spotted us, but I could think of nothing.
Through the latticework of sticks up against my face I could glimpse the group down on the beach in front of the dell and hear indistinctly the sound of voices. Apparently some sort of conference was taking place. Were they examining whatever traces we had left while getting the raft into the water and discussing what they meant? What would happen if they hit on the right answer?
Quite suddenly all of them swung round in the same direction as if a conclusion had been simultaneously arrived at. And then they tramped off along the shore.
We hung there watching them for two or three minutes before we dared believe that they were in fact going away. But eventually it was clear beyond doubt that this was what was happening.
‘They missed us,’ I said. ‘They missed us.’
‘Keep still,’ Keig muttered.
But I needed no warning: I was not going to risk budging an inch while it was at all possible that any one of that party of six or seven Keepers might yet turn round and spot me. Soon enough, however, even that danger was gone as the party rounded the nearest headland.
Without a word more, we swung the raft round and Keig and I began swimming. Within ten yards, ironically enough, we felt the current begin to grip. In half a minute more we were being whirled along at an exhilarating pace.
‘We’ll get up now,’ Keig growled after a little. ‘You first, Margaret.’
I experienced again all the awkward sympathy I had felt for her when she had had to undress and get in. But there was nothing I could do about it: with the best will in the world I could not keep my face buried in the water for all the length of time it would take to reach some point where we could get to the mainland shore.
But I did contrive not to look in her direction at all until Keig briskly ordered me on to the raft in my turn. As I heaved my torso up I saw that she was wearing, in fact, undergarments—a short bodice and long, almost bloomer-like knickers—about twice as modest as the average swimsuit. Yet I had no doubt it was a positive ordeal for her to know I was heaving and puffing my way up beside her.
For all the rest of the trip down the Oceana coast—and it was dusk before we were swept close enough in for it to be worth striking out for the shore—I contrived to avoid looking at her as much as I possibly could.
We made a lucky landfall. The little beach the raft eventually touched was surrounded by a twenty-foot high contorted grey granite cliff. At its foot the coarse sand was even perfectly dry and still warm to the touch. As we settled down on it for the night a luscious, orangey moon appeared on the horizon out at sea.
I lay back, feeling for the first time in more than twenty-four hours that I could afford to relax completely. In the slanting moonlight I could make out some twenty yards away the forms of Keig, still holding his long-handled axe, and Margaret, carefully spreading her dress out to dry on the warm sand. Keig suddenly spoke, his voice unexpectedly loud in the soft night.
‘Sleep sound,’ he said. ‘Every Keeper in the island believes now we’re either drowned or creeping about waiting to be found over on the Kernel. They know well no one’s ever reached this side swimming unless it’s at the very best of the tide. You can count on it that we’ve thrown them off for good.’
It was quite a speech, perhaps the longest I had heard from him at any one time. And in spite of an undertone of b
oastfulness which I had not altogether been prepared for, it was very reassuring. I had to admit that, near squeak or not, his overall plan for escape had worked.
I was about to say as much, formally, when I saw his broad-shouldered form moving swiftly away down towards the sea. I wondered what he was up to.
I do not think I could have guessed in a hundred years.
Down at the very edge of the sea Keig planted himself squarely, feet about eighteen inches apart, firmly dug into the wet sand. Then he flexed his arms once or twice and tossed that long axe of his high up into the air.
I watched it twirl over and over, its head glinting out in the moonlight with every revolution. Keig’s broad-shouldered body was black beneath it, silhouetted against that huge moon. The axe came awkwardly towards him, head foremost. He swayed easily to one side, caught it by the haft and sent it instantly straight up again. Again it twirled in the air, again the moonlight glinted regularly on its broad head—only this time it went at about twice the speed.
And again Keig caught it and sent it spinning up once more, yet faster this time. And again it came twisting wickedly down, was caught and tossed up again, came down again, was sent up one final time. Then, bringing it sharply to his side, he turned on his heel and came walking quietly back up towards us.
Well, well, I thought, he’s proud of himself. He’s as proud as can be.
For a moment as he came walking across the sand up to where Margaret and I lay in our different places under the shelter of the grey cliff I wondered whether I needed to make my apology to him for having doubted that daring plan of his to get over to the Kernel in the lighter. Certainly he did not appear to need any encouragement.
As the top of his long, moon-cast shadow touched the foot of the cliffs I made up my mind.
‘Keig,’ I said, ‘I owe you an apology. I thought going over in the lighter was putting our necks into a noose. But it worked. And now all we’ve got to do is keep out of the way for a week till the steamer leaves again and we can take a boat and carry out the second half of the programme.’
In the dimness I saw Keig swing round towards me.
‘Take a boat?’ he said. ‘What do you mean, take a boat?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if the Keepers think we’re on the Kernel, they won’t be guarding the boats over here. We can take one without any trouble.’
‘Steal a boat? We cannot steal a boat.’
A quick resentment at this dictatorial assertion rose up in me.
‘Call it stealing, if you like,’ I said. ‘But the thing is, we’ll need a boat to get out to the steamer and we’ve got to have one.’
‘And you can’t see what you’re doing?’ Keig grated out. ‘Don’t you know a boat is a man’s living? You can’t steal a man’s living.’
I had to admit, of course, that he was right, much though I jibbed at being told so.
‘Oh, very well,’ I said. ‘We can pay someone to take us out, if we must. But I warn you: it’ll be a different matter trying that in a week’s time than it would be now. Judging by the posters I saw in the town, there’ll be a pretty fair reward out for you. So just watch out when you go offering fishermen a nice bit of extra pocket money, perhaps they’ll realize where they can make a hell of a lot more.’
Keig stood there looking down at me.
‘I’m not going to rob a man of his living, and that’s the way of it,’ he said stubbornly.
By now I had begun to convince myself that going about negotiating for a boat trip out to the steamer was going to be an unnecessarily dangerous business. I decided to try another tack. I sat up and turned to the distant half-upright white shape that was Margaret Keig in her modest undergarments sitting up listening to us.
‘Tell me,’ I said to her, ‘do you think we should take the risk? Do you think we’ll find ourselves sold for Mr Mylchraine’s fat reward or not?’
I counted on her protective instinct. I was to learn better.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘do you really think I’ll go against what Keig says? Do you really?’
‘Oh, all right,’ I said petulantly. ‘We’ll hire a boat and put a brave face on it if we’re sold. I don’t mind.’
‘There won’t be that much of a risk to it,’ Keig said. ‘We’ll wait to do it till the last moment, and I’ll watch the fellow we pick like he’s never been watched before.’
He seemed calmly confident enough and my irritation, which was probably no more than the after-effects of everything I had been through, began to melt away.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least we’ve got a whole week to look around in. With any luck we’ll spot someone who looks a safe bet.’
‘Yes,’ said Keig. ‘A whole week. There’s a lot can be done in a week you know.’
He sounded just a little pleased with himself, like someone who has recently discovered something novel and is unexpectedly presented with a chance to talk about it. He came and sat down on the sand not far away from me.
‘Didn’t you tell me,’ he went on, ‘that our people in Dublin were middling unfit to fight Mylchraine for lack of money?’
‘That was one of the things I learnt from them, yes.’
‘Then this’ll be the way of it,’ Keig said. ‘We’ll bring them a nice packet of Mylchraine’s gold when we go.’
‘Gold? You mean Mylchraine’s revenue? You’re thinking of getting hold of some of that?’
‘I am. And I’ve an idea I know how to do it too.’
I gave a sharp little laugh.
‘Now who’s talking about stealing?’ I said.
Keig rounded on me so quickly he positively bounced on the sand.
‘There’s a difference,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to steal from a poor man when he’s done nothing to deserve it, and it’s another thing altogether to hit back at an enemy when he’s hit you. And that’s what I’m doing to Mylchraine.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
I lay looking over at the great swimmy orange moon and thinking that I had saddled myself with much more than a mere fellow-being in need of a helping hand at the moment I jumped up from my seat in the Rota and ran round the gallery to show Keig his best escape route. I had become caught up by a moral force.
But how on earth did he propose to get his hands on the gold that flowed in to Mr Mylchraine from all over his antiquated little island? And wasn’t this a new outbreak of that streak of craziness in him that I had only just stilled my fears about? Simply because we had thrown off the Keepers was he beginning to believe he could get away with anything?
8
Keig told me his plan for getting hold of a substantial quantity of Mr Mylchraine’s gold next morning before the three of us climbed our way up out of the little cove where we had spent the night. It seemed that one of the things he had learnt as day by day he had been marched down to the Strand to work on loading the lighter with stone for Mr Mylchraine’s huge new house was that once a week the same train that brought cut granite from the big quarries near Portharnel took on its return trip a quantity of gold to be shipped off to Ireland on the weekly steamer.
‘It used to be lobsters the steamer took, and not much more,’ Keig added.
‘I dare say I know why things are different,’ I said. ‘It had crossed my mind to wonder where the money came from for all the whiskey I saw being sold in Lesneven. As I remember in the old days we only just balanced imports and exports.’
‘Whatever the way of it,’ Keig said, ‘there’s one thing certain: gold goes on that train once a week just in time to catch the steamer.’
And a consignment of the withdrawn gold coin Keig proposed to hijack. They were not, he claimed, all that well guarded. When the little train to Portharnel had gold on board there travelled in the guard’s van just one Watchman to protect it. Presumably whoever was responsible for its security relied on very few people knowing any gold was being taken out of the island at all, especially as this was hardly the sort of thing Mr Mylchraine would want to hav
e widely talked about. Consequently the task of guarding it had been left simply to the official island police, the much despised Watch, to the resentment, according to Keig, of the Keepers, whose dissatisfied comments he had chanced to overhear.
I had little doubt that no one else from the chain-gang had any idea of all this: Keig had stood out from the others when I had watched them at work as being the only one of them all with time and strength of mind enough to look about him.
At this point he questioned me, with slow obstinacy, about what I knew of the country through which the single-track railway ran. Gradually from my memory of the few times I had been on the train I was able to piece together quite a reasonable account of the route. And soon it appeared that there was one section of it highly suitable for our purpose. For almost all the last five miles of its twenty-mile run the railway went along a narrow gorge cutting through the hills that bordered the coast, the same gorge which on reaching the sea became the deep and narrow inlet that provides Oceana’s sole anchorage for sea-going vessels of any size. It would not be difficult somewhere there to fell one of the fir-trees that clamber up the gorge sides and block the line. Once the train was halted it would be up to us.
Were the Watchmen who provided the guard armed, I asked Keig. There was, it seemed, only one of them, an elderly fellow, who invariably had this duty and, though he brought along a carbine each time he came, he always stowed it away in the guard’s van with the utmost care as if this was what he was there to protect.
We refined somewhat on the plan when shortly after midday we actually reached our chosen area, after a cautious journey across country, interrupted for sessions of solemn blayberry cramming whenever we came across any of the frequent patches of them which Oceana farmers are careful to leave in the corners of their fields.
We were able to select when it came down to detailed planning a Particularly good stretch of the railway where the trees grew close to the line just after it had taken an especially sharp bend. We calculated that the engine-driver and his fireman would be so busy avoiding hitting the tree across their path that they would have no time to see Keig and myself sprint from cover to the guard’s van. And we also came across a moderately large sapling that had been uprooted in a gale at some time and decided to use this rather than a more giveaway felled tree.
Strong Man Page 7