by G. A. Henty
This conversation came back to Julian’s memory, as he stood by the clump of bushes wondering what had become of the man that he had pursued, and it flashed upon him that the spot where he was standing could not be far from the smugglers’ cavern, and that the entrance to this might very well be among these bushes. The man knew where that entrance was, and nothing was more likely than that he should make for it as a place of concealment until an opportunity occurred to get on board a lugger and cross the channel. It was a very likely place; men could come and go at night without risk of being seen or heard by any of the coast-guardsmen on the cliff, and would not be likely to encounter anyone within two or three miles of it. Years might pass without anyone happening to enter the bushes.
Laying down his gun, Julian began to search in earnest. It was half an hour before, feeling about in the coarse grass, he came upon a handle. He pulled at it, gently at first, then as it did not yield, he exerted his strength, and it gave way, and a section of the rough herbage rose, while three feet away it sank in the same proportion. Raising it higher, he saw that the trap-door—for such it was—was two feet wide by about five feet long and eighteen inches deep; it was, in fact, a deep tray pivoted on the centre and filled with earth, on which grass grew as freely as in the ground adjoining.
The greater portion of the trap was overhung by bushes, which grew so thickly around the part which sank that the probability was small indeed that anyone would tread upon it. Julian saw, too, that under the handle was a bolt that, when fastened, would hold the trap firmly down. No doubt the man in his haste had forgotten to fasten it before he descended. Looking down, Julian saw a circular hole like a well, evidently artificially made in the chalk; a ladder was fastened against one side.
Julian hesitated. Should he return to Weymouth, inform the authorities that he had traced the murderer of Mr. Faulkner to a place of concealment, and bring them there to arrest him, or should he go down and encounter him single-handed? Although of a fearless disposition, he would have decided on the more prudent course had it not been that to have done so, would have let the authorities into the knowledge of the smugglers’ cave. Although he had determined to have nothing more to do with them, this he felt would be an act of treachery, for it was only because he had been believed by Bill to be absolutely trustworthy, that the latter had told him of the existence of this cavern and of the secret exit, and without that information he would never have searched for and discovered the trap-door. Then, too, the thought that the credit he would gain by the capture of the murderer single-handed would go far to efface the memory of the disgrace that had befallen him, helped to decide him.
He fetched his gun and slung it over his shoulder, got upon the ladder, and pulled the trap-door down behind him. As he did so he found that it moved easily, and that he could push it up again without any difficulty, and feeling the bolt, discovered that it had been partially shot, but not sufficiently to catch fairly, although containing so far a hold of the frame, that it had torn a groove in the somewhat rotten wood with the force that he had used to raise it. He went down the ladder very cautiously, until, after descending for some thirty steps, his foot encountered solid ground. After a moment’s consideration he knelt down and proceeded on his hands and knees. Almost immediately he felt the ground slope away in front of him. He got on to his feet again. Holding out his arms he found that the passage was about four feet wide, and he began to descend with extreme care, feeling his way along both walls. He had gone, he thought, about fifty yards when the passage made a sharp turn, still descending, and at a considerable distance ahead the light streamed in through a rugged hole. He walked more confidently now, and soon the light was sufficient to enable him to see the path he was following.
On arriving at the aperture, he saw that, as he expected, he was looking over the sea. On one side of the hole there was a shelf cut in the chalk. This was stained as if by oil, and he guessed at once that it was a look-out and a spot for signalling a craft in the offing. The path here turned again and ran parallel with the face of the cliff. There was no occasion to exercise care in walking now, as here and there the light streamed in through openings a few inches long. He now unslung his gun, stooped and took off his boots, and then proceeded noiselessly. The descent was considerable, and in some places steps had been cut. At last he arrived at a door. It was roughly but very solidly made, and would doubtless sustain an attack for some time before it yielded, and so would give time to the occupants, in case the trap-door was discovered, to make their escape by the lower entrance on to the beach. There was a latch to it. Lifting this quietly, he found the door yielded, and, holding his gun in his right hand ready to cover the fugitive the moment he entered, Julian threw the door wide open and sprang forward.
He had not calculated on a further descent, but the floor of the cave was five feet below him, and he fell heavily upon it, the gun going off as it struck the floor. Instantaneous as the fall had been, his eyes had taken in the scene. Several lanterns faintly lit up the cave; while in the centre a table, at which several figures were sitting, was illuminated by three or four candles. He was partly stunned by the heaviness of his fall, but vaguely heard shouts of surprise and alarm, and was, a minute later, roughly seized and dragged along. Then he felt that he was being tightly bound. For some minutes he was left to himself, but he could see three men with guns in their hands standing near the door by which he had entered, listening attentively. Presently he heard steps coming down the passage and two other men came through the door, shut and bolted it carefully, and then came down the steps into the cabin.
They spoke to their comrades as they came in, and the news was evidently satisfactory, for the men leaned their guns against the wall and came to the table. There was some talk for a few minutes, and then Julian was raised and placed in a sitting position on the head of a cask by the table. One of the men then addressed him in French. Julian, who by this time had recovered from the effects of his fall, shook his head. The other then spoke to the poacher, who had seated himself opposite Julian, and the latter then said:
“You are the young fellow who was tried in court three weeks ago, are you not?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I thought so; I was there. It was the very day I got to Weymouth. Well, what the deuce are you doing here? You are the chap who has followed me all the way up the hill?”
Julian nodded.
“What did you follow me for?”
“Because I was in the road when you shot Faulkner. I heard the gun, and ran in and found him dead. I caught sight of you in the wood, and went in chase of you.”
“What did you intend to do, you young fool?”
“I intended to capture you,” Julian said fearlessly.
“What for? I have done you a good service as well as myself. You had no reason to bear him any good-will, and some of the men who were there told me that though Downes got you off, it was true that you were going to throw Faulkner into the fire.”
“So I was; but he had just struck me and I was in a furious passion; but that was a different thing altogether to shooting a man in cold blood.”
“He got me two years’ imprisonment,” the man said, “which to my mind was a good reason for shooting him when I got the chance; and another thing was he would never leave us alone, but was always on our heels. There are two or three men in prison now that he got sent there, and eight more are waiting their trial. He made war on us, and I have turned the tables on him.
“I heard that you had been at several of the runs, and of course you are in with some of our fellows. How did you get to know about the entrance to this place?”
“I only knew that there was a cave here, that it was used by the smugglers, and that it had an entrance somewhere. The man who told me knew well that I was to be trusted, but it was only because you disappeared among those bushes, and that there were no footprints to show that you had left them, that it appeared to me that the passage might be there, and so I looked about unt
il I found the handle to the trap-door.”
“Why didn’t you go and call the coast-guard? There was a station not a quarter of a mile away.”
“Because I could not have done that without betraying the secret of the cavern. I found the entrance myself, but I should never have done so, if I had not been told about the cave and the secret passage, and I felt that it would be an act of treachery to betray it.”
“And you were really fool enough to think that if you captured me single-handed I should walk with you like a lamb to the gallows?”
“I didn’t intend to give you a chance of making a fight. I intended to rush straight in and covered you with my gun.”
“Well, you have plenty of pluck, young fellow, if you haven’t much wisdom; but if you think that after getting in here, I shall let you go out again to bring the constables down on me you are mistaken altogether.”
CHAPTER IV
THE SMUGGLER’S CAVE
Joe Markham had, as soon as he arrived, told the French smugglers that he had shot the magistrate who had for the last five or six years given them so much trouble and caused them so much loss, and who had, as the last affair showed, become more dangerous than ever, as he could only have obtained information as to the exact point of landing by having bribed someone connected with them.
“It was a case of his life or our business,” he said. “If he had not been got out of the way we must have given up the trade altogether on this part of the coast; besides, he has been the cause, not only of several seizures of cargoes, but of the death of eight or ten of our comrades and of the imprisonment of many others. Now that he is out of the way we shall find things a great deal easier.”
“It served him right,” the leader of the party said, “and you have rendered good service; but what are you going to do? Do you think that any suspicion will fall upon you?”
“Yes; I have put myself in an awkward position, I am afraid. I thought that the job had been so well managed that it could never be traced to me, but when I got up to the top of the hill I saw a fellow just starting from the bottom. I did not think much of it at the time, but he came up so quickly after me that he must have run all the way up. He has chased me hard, and as he got nearer I could see that he had a gun too. He was not more than a quarter of a mile away when I got to the trap-door.”
“Why didn’t you hide yourself in the bushes and put a bullet into him, Markham?”
“For several reasons. In the first place, the gun might have been heard by some of those cussed revenue men. Then there would be an inquiry and a search. They would have seen by the direction he had been going, that he must have been shot from the bushes, and as no one would have been in sight when they ran up, the thing would have been such a puzzle to them that you may be sure they would have suspected there must be some hidden way out of the clump. Besides, they would probably have hunted every inch of the ground to see if they could find anything that would give them a clue as to who had fired the shot. That is one reason.”
“And quite good enough without any others,” the Frenchman said.
“Well, there was another one that went for almost as much with me. I shot down Faulkner because he was a curse to us all. He had imprisoned several of my pals, and done a lot of damage to the trade, and was likely to break it up altogether, besides which I had a big grudge against him on my own account. But I should not have liked to shoot down this fellow in cold blood. I had no feeling against him; he has done me no harm; I did not even know who he was. If he had overtaken me in the open, you may be sure that I should have made a fight of it, for it would have been my life against his. I don’t pretend to be soft; there is little enough of that about me, and I have fought hard several times in the old days when we were surprised; but I could not have shot down that fellow without giving him a chance of his life. If there had not been the trap-door to escape by I should have stood up, given him fair warning, and fought it out man to man. As it was—” at this point the conversation had been arrested by the sudden entrance of Julian.
“Who is he?” the chief of the smugglers asked Joe when he had finished his conversation with the prisoner. “Is he a spy?”
“No; he is a young chap as lives down in the town. He is a pal of some of our friends there, and has been with them at the landings of goods. He was caught in that last affair, but got off because they could not prove that he was actually engaged in the business. He is an enemy of Faulkner’s too; they had a row there, and Faulkner hit him in the face. You can see the mark still; and he would have thrown Faulkner on to the bonfire they had lit if he had not been prevented by some of the coast-guards. It is through what he had heard from our friends of this cavern, and there being an entrance to it somewhere, that he came to look for the trap-door. I certainly pushed the bolt forward when I came down, but I was in a hurry, so I suppose it could not have caught rightly.”
“Well, what is to be done, Joe?”
“I don’t know. You see he knows about my shooting Faulkner. I would trust him not to peach about this cavern or the trap-door, but I don’t know as I would about the other thing. It seems to me that he is just as likely to be suspected of having a hand in it as I am. His row with Faulkner is the talk of the place, and when Faulkner is found with a bullet in him, he will be the first fellow to be suspected. Well, if that was so, and you see he would not be able to account for himself for three or four hours afterwards, he might be driven to peach on me to save his own life, and he would be obliged to give all the story about following me and coming down here. There would be an end of the best hiding-place in the country, and I should not be able to show my face on this side of the Channel again.”
“I should say the safest plan would be to cut his throat and chuck him into the sea, and have done with it.”
“No, I won’t have that,” the poacher said positively. “Your lugger will be in tonight, and we will take him across with us to France.”
“That is all very well,” one of the men said; “but what is to prevent his coming back again?”
“We could prevent it somehow or other. We could get up a tale that he was an English sailor we had picked up at sea, and hand him over to the authorities, and tell them his story was, that he had fallen overboard from an English ship of war. Then they would send him away to some place in the interior where they keep English prisoners of war, and there he might lie for years; perhaps never get back again. He does not know a word of French, as you saw when you spoke to him, so he can’t contradict any story we may tell, and if by chance any questions should be asked, I can just say what suits us.”
“He might ruin us all if he came back,” the smuggler growled.
“It ain’t likely that he will come back,” the poacher said. “I have heard that they die off like flies in those prisons of yours; and, besides, I will guarantee if he does, he will never split about this place. He is a gentleman, and I will get him to swear to me, and you may be sure he will not break his oath.”
“But how about yourself?”
“Well, as he won’t come back for some years, I will take my chance of that. He has got no evidence against me; it would be his word against mine. He would tell his story and I should tell mine, and mine would be the most likely. I should say I met him on the hills with his gun, and, knowing who I was, and what cause I had got to hate Faulkner, he told me that he had shot him, and asked me to get him on board a smuggler craft and across the Channel, and that I had done so: and that is all I should know about it. No, I am not afraid of anything he might say when he comes back again.”
Julian had watched the speakers anxiously during this conversation. He was wholly ignorant of French, but from the tone and manner of the speakers, he gathered that the poacher was speaking in his favour. He had expected no mercy; his life was nothing to these French smugglers; and he was surprised to find the man, whose life he thought he held in his hand if released, apparently pleading his cause.
“Look here, young fellow!” the po
acher said, turning towards him. “In the first place, these men are afraid that you may betray the existence of this place, and their opinion is that the best thing to make us safe would be to cut your throat and throw you out of the mouth of the cave into the sea. I told them that you knew of the cave from one of our friends, and could be trusted to keep the secret; at any rate they demand, in the first place, that you shall take an oath never to split about it.”
“I will do that willingly enough,” Julian said, with a great feeling of relief.
Joe Markham then dictated a terrible oath, which had been always taken by all those made acquainted with the existence of the cave, and this Julian repeated after him. The poacher then told the smugglers what Julian had sworn to.
“Now, young fellow, I may tell you that we are going to take you over to France tonight. You may think I shall be asking you to take another oath, like that, not to say anything against me, but I ain’t going to. I shot the man, and I don’t pretend to be sorry for it. He was a hard, bad chap, and he got what he deserved. I owed him a long score, not only for myself, but for others, and if I had not shot him, someone else would have done so sooner or later. I shall do what I can to prevent you coming back here, though I don’t think you will say anything against me when you do come back. In the first place, like enough I shall take to the sea again, and may be settled in France before you return. In the next place, I may be dead; and, most of all, you have got no evidence against me. If I were here, and you told the story, of course I should say that it was a lie, and that you had shot the man yourself, and I had got you out of the way by sending you across to France in a lugger, so I think you will see that it is best to keep a quiet tongue in your head; anyhow I am ready to take my chance of it.”