The sun had gone down over the cairn and night had drawn its curtain across the lingering afterglow, when the Earthstopper, with a lantern in each hand and the hunting-horn in his pocket, set out for his ambush in the bottoms.
He did not pass through the village, but reached the park by an unfrequented path, and was soon threading his way amongst the trees in front of the Castle. The stars were out, and the moon, now at its full, was climbing the cloudless vault and silvering the countryside with its rays.
“Grand night, couldn’t be better: wonder ef he’s on hes way up,” said Andrew to himself as he reached the furze-bush on the bank of the stream, which he had chosen as a hiding-place. After concealing the lanterns in a bed of nettles and looking round to see that he was not observed, he forced his way into the prickly bush and lay down at full length. He was not quite hidden, though he thought he was, as his bright hob-nailed soles projected a little, and nearly touched the edge of a footbridge leading to a farmhouse whose gable showed against the sky. To have a clear view of the ground, with his clasp knife he cut two peepholes in the furze, through which he could see the rough track on his left and a smooth pool on his right. An ivy-clad ash cast a deep shadow on the stream and track, but bright belts of lighted ground lay on each side of it, and the pool shone like quicksilver. Seldom does the footfall of wayfarer disturb the silence of the spot at night. About ten o’clock, however, a country housewife, returning late from market, trudges past; thoughts of cream neglected during her absence, or of geese not securely housed from the fox, hurrying her along despite the heavy basket she carried. Luckily for her, Andrew has got over a fit of sneezing, and she passes the bush unconscious of his presence. When her footsteps die away, night and its shy denizens claim the earth for their own. A rabbit runs along the space between the wheel-ruts and pauses for a moment on the further bright space. To the Earthstopper its ears are in a line with a big stone that holds the gate leading into a rough meadow bordering the stream. The rabbit has scarcely passed out of sight before a stoat follows, like a murderer on the trail of his victim, and is lost to view in the shadow of a hedgerow. Nothing escapes the vigilant eyes of the Earthstopper behind the furze screen, and his ears are strained to catch any tell-tale sound along the course of the stream. As yet there is no sign of the otter, and every minute that goes by lessens the chance of its appearing, for it is nearly midnight now and dawn is but a few hours off. Wearying a little from the strain of his vigil and his cramped quarters the old man begins to fear that the poacher may not be coming, and again it makes him as “vexed as fire” to remember the iris and the huge print on the silt.
All at once he becomes alert. Nothing has darkened the lighted space but the tiny shadow of a circling bat: not a ripple has broken the silvery surface of the pool. What can it be that has wrought this sudden change?
The cry of a moorhen, startled from her nest among the sags some two furlongs down stream; and if we may judge from his state of excitement, the Earthstopper must feel pretty confident that the otter is the cause.
Lamorna showing Cairn Dhu Headland. [Face page 52.
At dusk the otter had left his holt near the base of Cairn Dhu. Ravenous after the long day’s fast, he hurried down the steep face of the rock, and reaching a ledge which the waves lashed, dived through the surf in quest of his prey. The sea teemed with fish, but a ground-swell that stirred the bottom and discoloured the water baffled his attempts to seize them. A greyhound might as well have hoped to catch a hare in a fog as the otter to capture peal in the cove or turbot on the sandy bottom near the Bucks. Ever vigilant against such raids, the fish were only scared by the dreaded and indistinct form of the marauder as he glided past them in the clouded depths. Convinced at length of the hopelessness of his efforts, the otter landed on the Mermaid Rock to consider where he should go to get his supper. He is within reach of two streams and the lake; and their waters are as clear as crystal. Lamorna stream is close at hand; but the trout, owing to frequent raids on them since the gale, are very wary. Newlyn stream is some four miles away, and attracts him because of its larger fish; but what appeals to him most is the lake with its bright Loch Levens, then in the pink of condition. It was several days since he feasted on them, for the taint of human scent on the iris had alarmed him; but, as he rested on the rock, hunger proved stronger than fear, and despite the distance he decided to go there, fully intending to be back in some coast fastness before dawn. By skirting the base of the cliffs, and running along the shore where a beach invited him, he at length reached the mouth of Newlyn stream. There was nothing to arouse his suspicions: the last loiterer had left the old bridge, candles were out, and the moonlit village lay wrapped in slumber. Passing under the arch, the otter stole up the coombe, keeping to the shadows of the bushes that fringed the stream. Within winding distance of the clump of iris he paused, but detecting no taint, passed between the flags, made his way up the hill, and dropped down to the Lareggan stream, on the bank of which the Earthstopper lay in ambush. Threading his way among the reeds at the upper end of the mill pool, he disturbed the moorhen, but heedless of her cry, crossed the stream, and pressed on at his best pace towards the lake. A few moments later—for the creature’s progress was rapid—the Earthstopper, who has been shifting his glance from track to pool, becomes as rigid as the stems about him. His gaze is fixed on a shadowy patch, no bigger than your hand, under the lowest bar of the gate. He has not a doubt that it is the mask of the otter, for a minute ago that patch was not there. He tries to make out its long body, but the bars, and the shadows they cast, conceal it. What dread of its enemy the beast must have, to hesitate thus on the skirt of this rude track in the depth of night! It cannot be that it winds the Earthstopper, for the breeze that rustles the leaves of the ash, fans his flushed face, and stirs his bushy eyebrows. At length the creature comes noiselessly across the open space, as if making for the furze-bush, the moonbeams catching the glossy hair on its arched back, and lighting the dust it raises. Human eye has never seen it before, so well has it kept the secret of its existence. In the shadow of the tree it is almost lost to view, and then as it brushes past the furze, the Earthstopper gets a glimpse of its long glistening whiskers, and is sorely tempted to lay hold of its trailing tail. Why it did not wind him is, like other mysteries of scent, beyond the power of explanation.
Far from being scared back as the Squire feared, the otter, unconscious of a lurking foe, pursues its way to the lake. Not for some minutes does the Earthstopper back out of his ambush. “What a beety! ef I can only keep un up, we shall see summat to-day: ef!” says he under his quick breath as he brushes himself down with his hands. Then he lights his clay pipe and tries to calm himself, for he has seldom been more excited. Unable to stand still, he walks up and down the grassy bank above the footbridge, as a sailor paces to and fro on a jetty, only more hurriedly. It is nothing but his nervousness that makes him puff so vigorously at the ’baccy, that stops him every few minutes to listen. Not a mouse may move in the hedge or a cricket chirp in the crofts above without his thinking it is the otter returning, though the raider is at the time seeking its prey in the depths of the lake and spreading terror amongst its finny tenants.
At length tired of his pacings, the Earthstopper feels that he must be doing something towards keeping the otter up. So he gets the two lanterns, stinging his fingers as he gropes for them. Notice, as he lights them, the change in his face since we saw him sitting over his tea. Had he committed a crime he could scarcely look more agitated. Even his uncertain stride as he moves along the track betrays his disquietude, and the blind way he stumbles over the wall of the croft is as unlike him as the smothered oath he vents on the unoffending stones. One lantern he suspends from a rude granite slab spanning the stream, so that it hangs within a few inches of the rippling water. The other he fastens to a branch of a blackthorn on the far side of the croft. This done he climbs a mound amidst the furze and looks towards the lake now barely a furlong away. The surface is like a sheet of silver. No glimpse of living creature does he get, no sound reaches his ears but the voice of the fall and the song of a sedge-warbler. Retracing his steps he takes up a position on the rugged slope near the corner of the park.
It was close on two o’clock, judged by the stars, before he took the horn from his pocket. He might well have postponed blowing it a little while, but he could stand the strain of waiting no longer. Only by great self-restraint had he prevented himself from beginning an hour earlier; for more than once he thought he heard the otter breaking back, and each time his trembling hand had sought the horn. It was a relief to him when at last he raised it to his lips.
Now the Earthstopper is deep-chested and sound of lung, and he was so fearful that the otter might not hear the notes, that he blew with needless vigour and frequency. How groundless his fears were! In the stillness those blasts were heard for miles. So near did they seem to old Jenny at the park gates that she thought they came from the plantation behind the lodge. The Earthstopper had not handled a hunting-horn since his boyhood, much less blown one in the dead of night; and it never entered his head that his noisy proceedings could alarm the countryside and lead to a breach of the peace between his harmless neighbours. But so it was. Presently he heard the door of the farmhouse violently slammed. “Hullo, T’wheela’s movin’ early thes mornin’.” Certainly, unless the farmer suspected that a poaching hedgehog was the cause of the falling off in the cow’s milk, it was early for him to be moving.
Old Jenny and farmer Trewheela, however, are by no means the only persons in the parish roused by the untimely music, which had made the Squire’s hunters prick their ears and set all the cocks a-crowing. “Maddern” Churchtown is less than a mile away as sound travels, the wind was not unfavourable, and the notes of the horn were so penetrating that the Earthstopper might nearly as well have been serenading the villagers from the heaping stock of the “One and All.” Little wonder that the heavy sleepers were turning under their blankets before he had been blowing many minutes, and that the old men were lifting their stiff limbs out of bed and opening their windows.
“What be et, Jim?” said the parish clerk, whose white-nightcapped head was set in a framework of thatch, to a silver-haired veteran across the narrow street.
“Caan’t saay, I’m sure. Ef et happened when I wore a boay I should ha’ ben afeerd that Boney had landed.”
Toot, toot, toot. “He’s goin’ for’n braave an’ no mistake. Wonder who eh es?”
Toot, toot, toot.
By this time heads were sticking out of all the upper windows save one behind which a poor woman lay sick.
In the street below, Trudger, the constable, whom the first blast of the horn had stricken with the trembles, was now parading as if the incessant tooting were as ordinary an occurrence as the midnight chiming of the village clock.
“Well, doan’t ee hear nawthin’?” said the parish clerk, taking upon himself, in the absence of the parson, the duty of spokesman. Toot, toot. “Iss, iss, I hear un right enuf. ’Tes no business o’ mine, ’tes outside my beat.” Toot, toot, toot. “?’Tes in the corner o’ the park, I tell ee, down below the bastion. I’m sartin on et.”
“No tedn, ’tes over in Paul parish.”
“Ain’t afeerd of the auld Squire and his hounds, are ee?” said a woman with a shrill voice. “I’ll come wy ee ef thee art.”
At length the constable, stung by many taunts, was driven out by the force of upstairs opinion, and set off at the rate of about two miles an hour, to show that he was not to be hurried.
Thus it chanced that the farmer and the constable, attracted by the same cause, but impelled by different motives, were approaching the Earthstopper from opposite directions. Trewheela’s naturally high temper was not sweetened by his sudden awakening out of a dream in which he found himself selling basket after basket of butter at half-a-crown a pound, and the way he strode across his bridge augured badly for the disturber of the peace if the farmer could set hands on him.
Hearing him coming, the Earthstopper, on whom the truth slowly broke, blew a stirring blast—for was there not the otter to be kept up?—and hid himself where, without being seen himself, he could see what should happen. In a very few minutes Trewheela was standing on the very spot from which the tooting had seemed to come, and a casual observer might have thought from the eager way he looked here, there, and everywhere, that he was mightily taken by the landscape. The scene was indeed very beautiful, and chastened as it was by the silvering rays it would have calmed many a savage breast. It worked no soothing effect on the farmer, whose anger at not finding the offender became unbounded. He regretted that he had not brought his sheep-dog as well as a horse-whip. In all the impotence of baffled rage he stood still under the shadow of a tree, but to his great relief soon heard someone stealing along the other side of the thick-set hedge which separated him from the park. “Ah, the’rt theere, arta, Maister Boogler? Out of breeth with blawin’, are ee? Thee’ll be singin’ a defrant toon in a minit, I reckon,” he whispered to himself with malicious delight as his hand tightened on the handle of the whip. Within a few yards of where he had been standing was a narrow gap; and the farmer, who was moving as stealthily as his unlaced boots would permit, at the same pace as the constable, in making for the gap nearly trod on Andrew’s head. We will not, however, dwell on the feelings of the latter, for the constable, undignified as is the way he is being stalked, claims our attention.
He has had a terrible time since leaving the village. Half-way down the long avenue he heard, or thought he heard, a light footfall as of one pursuing him. The more he hurried his steps, the more distinctly he heard it, and the closer it seemed to be. Near the haunted terrace, just past the marble statue, the thing, whatever it was, was all but on him, and he felt inclined to scream. There was another way out of the difficulty, and this he took. As fast as “regulation” boots could carry him, athwart the great park he fled to the one outlet he knew of except the road he came by. Breathless with his efforts he is following the hedge to find the gap. The farmer is already crouching there.
On the scuffle that followed there is no need to dwell. Little is known of it, as the combatants have never opened their mouths on the subject, and Andrew confesses to being so overcome that tears filled his eyes and prevented him from seeing through the hedge which of the two was oftenest uppermost. The combat was too furious to last long, and the opponents rose to their feet after a short time; but not before the farmer, who had by this worked off some of the rage that blinded him, had caught the glint of the constable’s buttons.
“What ded ee haave to me with that there whip for?” said the constable gasping for breath.
“I’ll tell ee what for. Dust a think I be goin’ to have me skull scat abroad wi’ that theere troonshun of yourn?”
“I must do me dooty, an’ I shud like to knaw what you’m a’ doin’ hereabouts disturbin’ the paace of the parish.”
“What do ee maan? I heerd a most ghastly noise down in the bottoms, an I’ve coomed out in the middel of the night to see what et es. The scoundrel what maade that unearthly row ought to be thrashed, an’ I took thee for un. What was ee a doin’ crawlin’ like a rabbot down the hedge like this here”—he imitated the movement of the constable—“ef thee’s nawthin’ to do with et?”
Despite his attempt to put the constable in the wrong there was a distinct change in the tone of his voice; for visions of Bodmin gaol floated before his eyes. Fortunately both saw that the least said would be the soonest mended; and after all, as the farmer would be able to recover his boots at daybreak, the only damage done was to the constable’s helmet.
“Well, look here,” said the farmer, “summons me ef thee’s got a mind to, but thee’ll be the laafin’ stock of the court. Semmen to me, we’ve made fools won of t’other; but what I do waant to knaw es, who the devil have been too—tooting ef et edden thee?—Who es eh? and wheere be un gone to?”
“Dedn thee saa no wan?”
“No wan but thee.”
“Well, I’ve had my own mispicions about who eh es from the furst.”
“Who do ee maan?”
“Don’t et strike ee who eh might be?” said the constable in a chilling whisper.
“No,” was the whispered reply, after a pause.
“Who do ee maan?”
“Ded ee ever hear tell ef the auld Squire blawed the horn?”
“Man alive, I niver thought o’ thet. Moast likely you’m right. Moore nor wance my auld woman has wok’ me up in the dead of night to listen to cry o’ hounds. Passel o’ nonsonce, I’d say, but ’pend upon et her heerd summat.”
“Good Lor’! wha—what’s thet glidin’ along by they theere trees?”
“Wheere? wheere? Lor’ a mercy. I’m turned cold as a quilkan a’ moast. Feel my hand.”
The Earthstopper was biting a bit of furze to prevent himself from exploding with laughter, and fearing he could control himself no longer he resolved to give them a toot on the horn and to trust to their state of perturbation for a satisfactory issue.
At a distance of fifteen paces he blew such a blast as otter or hound has seldom heard.
For a moment farmer and constable were rooted to the spot, then together they took the gap, but that being small for two big men, they struggled as violently to get clear of one another as a few minutes before they had struggled to come to close quarters. Though convulsed where he lay, the Earthstopper heard the farmer banging at his door, for his wife had locked him out for her own safety.
A crash of glass which followed drowned the gasps of the constable as he bounded along Boscathna Lane, scaring the villagers who had come out to see the fun.
“Well, ef that doan’t keep the otter up,” said Andrew, “nawthin’ will”; and gathering up the lanterns and putting the horn in his pocket, he returned home the way he came.