“Horses,” said Jacky’s George. “Lookee, Cap’n Nick, the money’s good and I do respect it as much as the next man. I aren’t ’fraid of riders nor anything else—save tumors—and if it were only a matter of landing, why, I’d land ’s much stuff as you’ve a mind to. But carry goods to St. Just for ’e, I won’t, for that means horses, and horses means farmers. I’m bred to the sea myself and I can’t abide farmers. I’ve tried it before and there’s always trouble. It do take a week walking round the earth collecting ’em, and then some do show up and some don’t, and where are we then? Why, where the cat was—in the tar-barrel. Paul farmers won’t mix wid Gwithian, and Sancreed can’t stomach neither. And, what is more, they do eat up all your profits—five shillings here, ten shillings there—and that ain’t the end of it. When you think you’ve done paying a farmer, slit me, you’ve only just begun. I won’t be plagued wid ’em, so that’s the finish.”
“Listen to me a minute,” King Nick purled on, quite undeterred. “I’ll tell ’e. . . .”
“T’eddn no manner of use, cap’n,” said Jacky’s George, standing up. “There’s the light showing. Way all! Bend to it!”
The manner in which the Baragwanath family disposed of a run contained the elements of magic. It was a conjuring trick, no less—“now you see it, now you don’t.” At one moment the slip-head was chockablock with bales and barrels; at the next it was bare. They swooped purposefully out of nowhere, fell upon the goods and—hey, presto!—spirited themselves back into nowhere, leaving the slip wiped clean.
Including one son and two daughters-in-law, the tribe mustered fourteen in all, and in the handling of illicit merchandise the ladies were as gifted as the gentlemen. Ortho was laboriously trundling a cask up the slip when he encountered one of the Misses Baragwanath, who gave him a push and took the matter out of his hands. By the time he had recovered his balance she had gone and so had the cask. It was too dark to see which way she went. Not that he was interested; on the contrary, he wanted to think. He had a plan forming in his head, a money-making plan.
He strode up and down the bare strip by the boat capstan getting the details clear. It did not take him long, being simplicity itself. He hitched his belt and marched up the little hamlet hot with inspiration.