A dark object looms near. There is the sound of muffled oars, a word is passed along to the carriers, and almost before the boat-keel grates the beach, she is surrounded. Each man seizes and slings a brace of kegs around him; there are words of command from the freighters, a sound of trampling feet, of shipping oars, and the hurried breathing of an eager crowd, working in the dark.
And then a lighter sound, the jingle of bridles, and horses hoofs upon the sand.
“The mounted gang,” mutters Crumblejohn, as he stands upon the shingle, looking down upon the tangled crowd of jostling men.
Here and there he sees a lantern, and the light of one bald, flaring torch, held high in the prow of the boat by Thurot. The torch flares vividly, the flame is taken sideways by the wind. It throws its jagged shadows; the sea crawls grey round the beached boat.
And then a pistol-shot cracks out upon the air, followed by another, and another, and the man who stands high in the boat with the torch uplifted, falls heavily among the crowd.
“God ...”--it is Crumblejohn who stumbles forward; “God....”
The air rings now with the sound of fire-arms, there is a stampede among the villagers--they are caught and bound. One man in a mask runs here and there in the crowd, a demon of agility. He is followed by a man on horseback, and wherever he leads, the smugglers are thickest. He passes the villagers, he lets these go by; but of the sixteen men that were in the galley, he has crept, and run, and striven among them, and always at his heels the man on horseback, whose followers secure the chief men. They overpower them, three to one, wherever the man in the mask has given the signal. And the swingles, the ash bludgeons, these have been turned against the men who bore them, wrenched from their hands. And where a stand among the men has been attempted, the mounted officers have ridden them down.
The night, so dark and quiet, has been given over to confusion. Oliver Charlock crouches low in the smuggling boat.
And now the tumult lessens. Most of the villagers have fled, and ten men of those who had manned the _Lapwing_ stand bound upon the beach. Crumblejohn has long since staggered off, and subsided, blue with fright, in a ditch, to be picked up by the Excise men some fifty yards or more from the scene of the encounter, to be marched more briskly than his failing senses would have thought possible, along the road, hands bound, to his own Inn.