A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh

“Well, that’s a fu

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“Perhaps it is, Jerry.”

Now the mist was so thick that they did not get a far view of Jerk’s gallows; indeed they had crossed the one-planked bridge over the dyke and half climbed Gallows Tree Hill before they viewed it at all. But as soon as they did Jerry sprang forward crying: “Who’s been messing with my bag o’ sticks?”

The sacking had been torn, and from the slit appeared a hand. Jerry seized the hand and pulled. The rusty chain squeaked, and one of the rotten links “gave,” and the ghastly fruit of the gallows tree fell upon the young hangman, who was borne to the ground beneath the falling weight. Imogene, with a cry, pulled it from him, and Jerk scrambled to his feet. Then they both looked.

The mildewed sacking, wet with the dense mist, had severed in the fall; the threads had rent at a hundred points, and from the fragments of scattered debris the dead face of Rash looked up with protruding eyes that stared from the blood-streaked flesh.

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Jerk’s gallows had borne fruit.

For minutes they stood looking. The cloak had fallen from the girl’s shoulders, and the shrieking wind flapped in her rough dress and tore at her streaming hair. Jerk, with his ambitions fulfilled, found himself most uncomfortably scared. For minutes neither of them spoke. They could only stare. Stare at the huddled horror and listen to the jangle of the broken gibbet chain. Suddenly Imogene remembered something which brought her back to consciousness, for she spoke:

“Jerry, after seeing that, are you afraid to return to the village alone?”

Jerry had not yet found his voice, so he shook his head.

“Then go to the Court House and report what we’ve found to the squire, and tell him that Imogene has gone out to keep the rest of her promise.”

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Jerry got her to repeat the sentence again, and he watched her leap from the dyke and disappear into the mist, and then from behind the scaffold stepped the captain.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, potboy,” he said, seizing Jerk’s arm and leading him away from the scaffold. “I’ve other work for you to do. We’re going back to the village to make our experiment.”

As they stumbled across the Marsh, scrambling the dykes that skirted the fields, the wind got up off shore, scattering he mists and driving them across the sea toward the beacons of France. Half an hour later, as the captain and Hangman Jerk approached the vicarage, a small fishing boat, carrying no light but much sail, raced before the screaming wind toward Dungeness, and with a firm hand grasping the tiller and a great heart beating high, stood Imogene, blinded with lashing spray and her drenched streaming hair, fighting the cruel sea to keep her word to the squire.

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Chapter 32

The Captain’s Experiment

They entered the vicarage by the back door and found the bo’sun roasting chestnuts on the bars of the kitchen fire. There was another man there, with his back to the door, and by his black clothes and scholarly stoop Jerry recognized the vicar. So quietly had the captain opened the door that neither of the men roasting chestnuts was aware of their presence. They went on roasting the nuts, when an astonishing thing happened: The vicar, in trying to take out a hot chestnut from the fire, knocked three of the bo’sun’s into the red-hot coals, which so enraged the bo’sun that he administered with his forearm a

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resounding clump on the back of the cleric’s head. Jerry thought this a distinct liberty, but the vicar only laughed, and when he turned round Jerry saw that it was Morgan Walters dressed in an entire clerical suit, and not Doctor Syn at all.

Morgan Walters looked sheepish and uncomfortable when he beheld the captain, but the latter remarked that his “get-up” was magnificent, and that his black hair, which had been carefully sprinkled by the bo’sun with flour to make it gray, so nearly resembled that of the cleric, that Morgan Walters was evidently intended by Providence to be a parson, for such a capital one did he make. Thus encouraged, Morgan Walters strutted about the kitchen, and the likeness to Doctor Syn (for he was of the same build and Doctor Syn had always the sailor’s rolling gait) was so perfect that Jerk began to laugh, but was speedily hushed by the captain.

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“Now remember, Walters,” the captain said, “there’s no danger in this if you do exactly as I told you, but you will have to be spry, of course.”

“If he sticks me, then I deserves to be stuck,” replied Morgan Walters. “I’ve been Aunt Sally at the county fairs afore now, and never got whacked, not once. I always could bob down in time in those days, and I didn’t have no bo’sun’s whistle to help me.”

And then began the captain’s experiment, a most curious game, and, in spite of its tragic purpose, a humorous game it was.

The bo’sun, whistle in mouth, was hidden in the little front garden; the captain and Jerk crouched in the corner of the room of which the window had no view; while Morgan Walters, in all points resembling Doctor Syn, sat reading in the ingle seat by the fire—sat reading a book with his back to the window, from which the shutters had been thrown open and the broken casement set ajar. It was a weird occasion: the captain crouching down in the

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corner holding on to young Jerk with a warning hand, the bo’sun with his whistle hidden in the garden, and the firelight aided by one candle upon the table throwing the two wavering shadows of the pseudo parson upon the whitewashed wall. Jerk could hardly persuade himself that it was not the Doctor, so clever was the rig-out of Morgan Walters, and he could hardly forbear letting out a laugh as the crafty seaman kept turning the pages of the book. But he had ample time to control himself before anything happened; indeed, a whole hour he had to wait—an hour which seemed a lifetime; and then the occurrence was swift and terrible.

A shrill whistle sounded from the garden; down went Morgan Walters’s head; and with a thud which broke the surrounding wall plaster into a thousand powdery cracks, a great harpoon trembled in the wall, exactly one foot above the settle.

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“Gone!” shouted the bo’sun from the garden, and he immediately tumbled up through the window, closing the shutters behind him.

“Well, sir,” said Morgan Walters, “it wasn’t the ducking I minded when it came to it, but the waiting wasn’t pleasant.”

“You did well, my man,” said the captain. “And now, potboy, after that little experiment I’ll know how to proceed, how to prescribe like an analyzing apothecary, so, as it’s Sunday to-morrow, which ain’t so far off now, we’ll get back to the Ship I