Isaac remained with the old woman half an hour or more, the sound of their voices stealing out on the morning silence. He appeared in the best of tempers when he emerged from the cottage, slapped Dan on the shoulder, and limped away with him towards the hamlet, smiling to himself as though pleased with his own cleverness.
“The money’s tickled her into a good temper, lad,” he said. “I told her about the wench, and she took it very quiet.”
Dan cocked an eye shrewdly at his father.
“We waste a powerful lot of patience on the women,” he retorted.
Isaac wagged his head and looked particularly wise and saintly for the moment.
“I reckon we’d better shift the money,” he said.
As they rounded the corner of Ursula’s cow-house Isaac’s glance lighted on a man who was standing in the garden before his cottage. The fellow was busy throwing pebbles at the upper casements, imagining that the owner was still asleep within. As Dan and Isaac crossed the open stretch of grass-land that ran like a broad highway through the hamlet, the man standing in the garden caught sight of them as he turned to gather a fresh handful of pebbles from the path. He looked at them suspiciously for the moment, then waved his cap and came striding towards them over the grass. He was a rough, strongly built fellow, with the keen yet foxy air of a born poacher, his bushy brown beard and whiskers hiding fully half of his red and sun-tanned face.
“Hallo, Jim! What brings you this way, eh?”
The man grinned, and glanced first at Isaac and then at Dan.
“It be probable, Master Grimshaw, that we shall be running the ‘osses’ through to-morrow.”
“Mus Garston be a-wanting to see ye both down at Thorney Chapel. There be a fat load comin’ through, and Mus Garston he’ll share like a gentleman.”
Isaac’s gray eyes gave that peculiar twinkle that told those who knew him that he was in the sweetest of tempers. He was never backward where money might be made, and he had no objection to cheating the Customs occasionally, provided that the adventure was worth the risk. Mus Garston was one of the finest land smugglers on the southern coast—a keen, black-eyed fellow, who loved the game better than he loved his soul. Bess, too, was safe, bound to the chair in Dan’s cottage. They could join Garston’s men and leave the girl to be dealt with at their leisure.