Page:Moonfleet - John Meade Falkner.pdf/19

 David's death, and it was yet in every mouth. He was only child to Elzevir Block, who kept the Why Not Inn at the bottom of the village, and was with the contrabandiers when their ketch was boarded that June night by the Government schooner. People said that it was the Magistrate Maskew of Moonfleet Manor who had put the Revenue men on the track, and anyway he was on board the Elector as she overhauled the ketch. There was some show of fighting when the vessels first came alongside of one another, and Maskew drew a pistol and fired it off in young David's face, with only the two gunwales between them. In the afternoon of Midsummer's Day the Elector brought the ketch into Moonfleet, and there was a posse of constables to march the smugglers off to Dorchester Jail. The prisoners trudged up through the village ironed two and two together, while people stood at their doors or followed them, the men greeting them with a kindly word—for we knew most of them as Ringstave and Monkbury men—and the women sorrowing for their wives. But they left David's body in the ketch, so the boy paid dear for his night's frolic.

"Ay, 'twas a cruel, cruel thing to fire on so young a lad," Ratsey said, as he stepped back a pace to study the effect of a flag that he was chiselling on the Revenue schooner; "and trouble is likely to come to the other poor fellows taken, for Lawyer Empson says three of them will surely hang at next Assize. I recollect," he went on, "thirty years ago, when there was a bit of a scuffle between the Royal Sophy and the Marnhull, they hanged four of the contrabandiers, and my old father caught his death of cold what with going to see the