Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/290

282 The moon had no sooner disappeared than I shifted my ground, and pulling slowly down in the shore's shadow (I had greased the leathers of my oars for silence), ran the boat in by the point under Gunner's Meadow, beached her cunningly between two rocks, and pulled a tarpaulin over to hide her white-painted interior. My only danger now lay in blundering against the coastguard: but by dodging from one big boulder to another and listening all the while for footsteps, I gained the withy bed at the foot of the meadow. The night was almost pitch-black, and no one could possibly detect the boat unless he searched for it.

I followed the little stream up the valley bottom, through an orchard, and struck away from it across another meadow and over the rounded shoulder of the hill to my right. This brought me in rear of a kitchen-garden and a lonely cob-walled cottage, the front of which faced down a dozen precipitous steps upon the road leading from Lansulyan to the Porth. The cottage had but one window in the back, in the upper floor; and just beneath it jutted out a lean-to shed, on the wooden side of which I rapped thrice with my knuckles.

"Hist!" The Vicar leaned out from the dark window above. "Right: it's all ready. We must stow it in the outhouse. Trudgeon is down in the road below, waiting for me to finish."

No more was said. The Vicar withdrew: after a minute I heard the planking creak: then