Page:Joan, the curate.djvu/233

Rh and down, and some tools lying about in dark corners with logs and screws, ropes and mallets, the vessel itself had disappeared.

Tregenna took almost in silence the taunts with which the brigadier now saluted him. Leaving the soldiers to return to Rye, the young man, with a shrewd suspicion that the mammoth beast he had dimly seen crawling through the village in the dark on the previous evening was the smugglers' boat, resolved to try to track it to its new resting-place.

Such a weighty thing as the unfinished vessel, and the wagon or wagons on which it must have been removed, could not, he argued, but have left its mark on the roads it traversed.

And so it proved. Following the deep wheelmarks which were easily discernible even now in the mire of the Hurst road, he arrived at that village, went through it, still tracing the wheelmarks; and finally, to his consternation, tracked the wagons to the stables of Hurst Court.

It was a disconcerting discovery enough, but Tregenna, furious at the conspiracy thus formed against the representatives of law and order,