te the desperate clutch of the lad upon his
stirrup leather, as, with the perspiration dripping from his face, and
panting breath, he struggled to keep up the pace alongside.

Marched with tremendous ceremony into the magistrate's study and
directed to stand right opposite the light, while Mr. Landale
installed himself in an arm-chair with a blood-curdling air of
judicial sternness, Johnny Shearman, at most times as dare-devil a
pickle of a boy as ever ran, but now reduced to a state of mental and
physical jelly, underwent a terrible cross-examination. It was
comparatively little that he had to say, and no doubt he wished most
fervently he had greater revelations to make, and could thus
propitiate the arbiter of the appalling fate he firmly believed might
lie in store for him. Meagre as his narrative was, however, it quite
sufficed for Mr. Landale.

"I think, Johnny," he said more pleasantly, well knowing the
inducement that a sudden relaxation from fear offers to a witness's
garrulity, "I think I may say you will not hang this time--that is,"
with a sudden hardening of his voice, and making a great show of
checking the answers with pen and ink in his most magisterial manner,
"that is if you have really told me _all_ you know and it be all
_true_. Now let us see, and take care. You saw no one at the peel
to-day but Renny Potter, Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Crackenshaw?"

"No, sir."

"But you heard other voices in the next room--a man's voice--whilst
you were waiting?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then Renny Potter came back and gave you a message for your brothers.
This message they made you repeat, over and over again. How did it
go?" And as Mr. Landale frowningly looked at his paper, the boy
tremblingly repeated:

"I mun tell brothers Will an' Rob, that one or t'other mun watchen the
light o' nights, to-night, to-morrow night, an' ontil woord coom
again. If light go out they mun setten forth in they ketch thot
moment, fettled op for a two-three days' sailing. If wind is contrairy
like, they mun take sweeps. This for the master's service--for Sir
Adrian's service!"--amending the phrase with a sharp reading of the
blackness of Mr. Landale's swift upward look.

"Yes," murmured the latter after a pause. "And you were to tell no one
else. You were to keep it above all from getting to my ears. Very
good, Johnny. If you have spoken the truth, you are safe."

There was a special cell, off the official study, with high windows,
bolts