Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/409

 in an amphitheatre; its chimneys lifting their smoke over against the dawn. The tiers curved away southward to a round castle and a spit of rock, oil which a brig under white canvas stood out for the line of the open sea.

We swept across the roadstead towards the town, trailing our grapnel as it were a hooked fish, a bare hundred feet above the water. Faces stared up at us from the ships' decks. The crew of one lowered a boat to pursue; we were half a mile away before it touched the water. Should we clear the town? At Byfield's orders we stripped out our overcoats and stood ready to lighten ship: but seeing that the deflected wind in the estuary was carrying us towards the suburbs and the harbour's mouth, he changed his mind.

"It is devil or deep sea," he announced. "We will try the grapnel. Look to it, Ducie, while I take the valve." He pressed a clasp-knife into my hand. "Cut, if I give the word." We descended a few feet. We were skimming the ridge. The grapnel touched, and in the time it takes you to wink, had ploughed through a kitchen garden, uprooting a regiment of currant bushes; had leaped clear, and was caught in the eaves of a wooden outhouse, fetching us up with a dislocating shock. I heard a rending noise and picked myself up in time to see the building collapse like a house of cards and a pair of demented pigs emerge from the ruins and plunge across the garden beds. And with that I was pitched off my feet again as the hook caught in an iron chevaux-de-frise, and held fast.

"Hold tight!" shouted Byfield, as the car lurched and struggled, careening desperately. "Don't cut, man! What the devil!" Our rope had tautened over the coping of a high stone wall; and the straining Lunardi—a very large and