Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/98

90 hour can be persuaded, terrified, forced; but London is always a long way off, and London lawyers are the devil. I say freely that (knowing no more than they did, or I) these two gentlemen followed a reasonable policy.

But, after we had fitted Sir Nicholas with our common story, and as I was mounting my horse in Clowance courtyard, Mr. Saint Aubyn came close to my stirrup and said this by way of parting:

"You will understand, Mr. Tonkin, that to-day's tale is for to-day. But by God I will come and take my share—you may tell your master—and a trifle over! And the next time I overtake you I promise to put a bullet in the back of your scrag neck."

For answer to this—seeing that Master Porson stood at an easy distance with his eye on us—I saluted him gravely and rode out of the courtyard.

Now the manner of the wreck was this, and our concern with it. So nearly as I can learn, the Saint Andrew came ashore at two hours after noon: the date, the 2oth of January, 1526, and the weather at the time coarse and foggy with a gale yet blowing from the south-west or a good west of south, but sensibly abating, and the tide wanting an hour before low water.

It happened that Mr. Saint Aubyn was riding, with twenty men at his back, homeward from Gweek, where he had spent three days on some private business, when he heard news of the wreck at a