bad as that you folk up at the Den aren't safe."

"Which means that you threaten the captain, my uncle," cried Aleck,
defiantly.

"Are you going to tell him what I said?"

"Perhaps I am," said Aleck; "perhaps I'm not. I'm going to do just as I
please all along this coast, for it's free to everybody, and my uncle
has ten times the rights here that you people at the fishermen's
cottages have. You've just been talking insolence to me, so let's have
no more of it. This comes of the captain, my uncle, being kind and
charitable to you people time after time when someone has been ill."

The man growled out something in a muttering way.

"Ah, you know it, Eben Megg! It's quite true."

"Who said it warn't?" growled the man; "but if he'd done ten times as
much I'm not going to have you spying and prying about here. What is it
you want to know?"

"That's my business," said Aleck, defiantly. "I say, you haven't made a
fortune out of smuggling, have you, and bought the estate?"

"You keep your tongue quiet, will yer?" growled the man, fiercely.
"What do you know about smuggling?"

"Just as much as you do, Eben Megg," cried the boy, laughing. "Just as
much as everyone else does who lives here. Didn't our old maid come in
scared one night after a holiday and walking across from Rockabie and go
into a fit because she had seen, as she said, a whole regiment of ghosts
walking over the moor, leading ghostly horses, which came out of the sea
fog and crossed the road without making a sound? Jane said they were
the spirits of the old soldiers who were killed in the big fight and
buried by the four stones on Black Hill, and that as soon as they were
across the stony road they were all swallowed up in a mist. She keeps
to it till now, and believes it."

"Well, why shouldn't she?" growled the man. "She arn't the first as has
seen a ghost. Why shouldn't she?"

"Because it's so silly, when it was a party of smugglers leading their
horses, with kegs slung across their backs and bales on pack saddles."

"Bah!" cried the man. "Horses loaded like that would clatter over the
rough stones."

"Yes," said Aleck, "if their hoofs weren't covered over with bits of
canvas and a few handfuls of hay."

"What!"

"I found one that a horse had kicked off on the road one morning, Eben,"
said the boy. "Ah! I see now."

"See--see what?" said the rough, fisherman-like fellow, sharply.

"See why Ness Dunning was so anxious that I sh