e gentlemen, not thief-catchers."

The Irishman agreed to this at once, but Bowler was not well pleased
with it. "Our duty is to give him up," he said.

"Your duty is to take my orders," answered Nettlebones, severely. "If
there is a fuss about it, lay the blame on me. I know what I am about in
what I say. Gentlemen, good-by, and good luck to you."

After long shivers in teeth of the wind and pendulous labor of rolling,
the three cutters joyfully took the word to go. With a creak, and a
cant, and a swish of canvas, upon their light heels they flew round,
and trembled with the eagerness of leaping on their way. The taper boom
dipped toward the running hills of sea, and the jib-foreleech drew a
white arc against the darkness of the sky to the bowsprit's plunge.
Then, as each keen cut-water clove with the pressure of the wind upon
the beam, and the glistening bends lay over, green hurry of surges
streaked with gray began the quick dance along them. Away they went
merrily, scattering the brine, and leaving broad tracks upon the closing
sea.

Away also went, at a rapid scamper, three men who had watched them from
the breast-work of the cliffs--one went northward, another to the south,
and the third rode a pony up an inland lane. Swiftly as the cutters flew
over the sea, the tidings of their flight took wing ashore, and before
the night swallowed up their distant sails, everybody on the land whom
it concerned to know, knew as well as their steersmen what course they
had laid.

CHAPTER XXX

INLAND OPINION

Whatever may be said, it does seem hard, from a wholly disinterested
point of view, that so many mighty men, with swift ships, armed with
villainous saltpetre and sharp steel, should have set their keen faces
all together and at once to nip, defeat, and destroy as with a blow,
liberal and well-conceived proceedings, which they had long regarded
with a larger mind. Every one who had been led to embark soundly and
kindly in this branch of trade felt it as an outrage and a special
instance of his own peculiar bad luck that suddenly the officers should
become so active. For long success had encouraged enterprise; men who
had made a noble profit nobly yearned to treble it; and commerce, having
shaken off her shackles, flapped her wings and began to crow; so at
least she had been declared to do at a public banquet given by the Mayor
of Malton, and attended by a large grain factor, who was known as a
wholesale purvey