# Joan, The Curate/Chapter 7

Luckily for Tregenna, the ground was wet and slippery with the mist. As the lad flew at him, therefore, the force with which he knocked up the pistol in the lieutenant's hand caused him to slip on the slimy ground.
In a moment Tregenna had seized him by the wrist and flung him down.
All this time the lad had not uttered a single word. The rest of the smugglers never ceased shouting and swearing as they fought, using their lungs quite as lustily as they did their arms and legs, and making a deafening din. But the pale boy never uttered a sound, even when he was flung down. He was up again in a second, attacked Tregenna again, and succeeded this time in inflicting a slight wound on his arm. But the lieutenant was ready with his sword, and, just as the lad aimed a savage ​thrust at his breast, he parried it, and returned it by a cut across the lad's head, which brought the blood flowing in a blinding stream down the side of his face.
At that moment the hand-to-hand fight caught the attention of the rest of the combatants, who were struggling and scuffling in the tangle of gorse and bramble which choked up the dell at the bottom of the slope.
And a second figure, as unlike as possible to the first, rose up out of the mêleé, and came to help his young comrade. A giant he was, this loose-limbed, heavy-built sea-dog, with grizzled hair and coarse, sullen red face, who swore loud and deep as he came on, and made for Tregenna with a run, pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other.
"Hey, Jack! Bill! Up with ye, lads, and let the cursed hound have as good as he's given us! 'Tis the lubber that shot poor Tom! Up, lads!"
Up started from the gorse bushes a fresh couple of ruffians, the one a long, lean, lanky fellow in corduroy breeches and an old rug-coat, that had rather the air of a highwayman than of a son of the sea; the other a little, ​pimply-faced rogue in loose jacket and slops, who carried a pipe in his mouth, and a bludgeon in one hand.
This latter uttered a savage oath on perceiving who it was that they were to attack.
"Tis the chief, the captain. Let's cut his throat and carry him out, and hang him to's own bowsprit, mates!" cried he, in a hoarse rasping voice, as he swung his bludgeon round his head and dashed up the slope after his comrades.
"Ay, that will we, and serve him well for his devotion to's duty," sang out the burly giant who led the attack.
"Have at 'un! Slash at 'un, Robin!" piped out the lean man, in a thin high voice that had a tone of unspeakable savagery in it.
Meanwhile, the lad, blinded by the blood that flowed from the wound in his head, had staggered aside, out of the way of Tregenna and his new assailants.
On they all came, quickly, eagerly, thirsting for revenge on the man who was, they considered, the leading spirit in the crusade carried on against their nefarious enterprises. But Tregenna did not flinch. He had the advan​tage of the ground, and his own men were within call.
Planting his feet firmly in the soil, and grasping his sword, to which he chose rather to trust than to his pistol, he shouted to his men in the bushes below, and dealt a swashing blow at the burly giant, whom he guessed to be the redoubtable "Robin Cursemother," of whose exploits he had heard.
Robin parried the blow with his cutlass, while the small man with the bludgeon, whom they addressed as Bill, came to his assistance with a swinging blow, which would have felled the lieutenant to the earth had he not sprung aside just in time to avoid the full force of it.
At the same moment the tall, thin man, whom they called "Jack," aimed at him a blow, with the butt-end of the huge horse-pistol he carried in his belt, which made Tregenna reel.
Luckily for him, his own men had by this time seen him and recognized his peril. His arrival had made the numbers on both sides more equal; and the revenue-men, who had been getting the worst of it, took heart from the courageous stand he was making single-handed against the smugglers, and, racing up ​the slope in the rear of the assailants, diverted their attack.
There ensued a short, sharp hand-to-hand conflict, in which the lieutenant found himself face to face with a fresh opponent in that very "Ben the Blast" whom he had met in such strange circumstances in front of the Frigate at Hurst some days before.
Ben came up with the last batch, panting, roaring like a bull, his face and hands dyed with blood, his teeth set hard, and his eyes blood-shot and aflame.
"The damned lubber that I caught with Ann! I'll settle him! Let me but get at him!" said he, furiously, as he came up.
By this time, however, Tregenna had gathered his men round him, so that they presented a strong front to the smugglers, who, being on lower ground than they, and somewhat overmatched in skill, if not in strength, began to give way.
The lieutenant noted this, and presently gave the signal for a simultaneous rush. Down they came, driving the cursing smugglers like sheep before them over the rough, broken ground of the slope, until Ben the Blast ​stumbled and fell over a stone, spraining his ankle in the fall.
He got up, turned once upon his foes, with a last vicious blow of his cutlass, which inflicted a nasty cut on the forearm of one of the revenue-men, and yelled out—
"Off, mates, off! Game's played!"
Then there was a stampede. The smugglers threw away such weapons as they found cumbersome, and took to flight with as much vigor as they had shown in the fight. Making for the dell at the bottom, Ben the Blast, the lithe, pimply-faced Bill, and two others who were evidently seamen, made for their boats, which, still half-full of the cargo they had been in the act of landing when they were disturbed by the revenue-men, was lying snug among the rocks in charge of a lad.
The tall, thin man in the rug-coat, with the rest of his companions, went up the slope in a northeasterly direction, towards the road.
As they were all far nimbler of foot over the ground, which they knew well, than were their opponents, Lieutenant Tregenna stopped the pursuit of the smugglers when he saw how ​fast they gained ground, and directed his men to seize such of the contraband goods as were already landed.
When, however, they reached in their turn the bottom of the dell, where they expected to find the booty, they discovered that it had all been safely removed, under cover of the mist, and of the excitement of the fight, and that the boat which had brought it had got out of sight also.
In the meantime Tregenna had been looking about him for the lad who had been the first to attack him, and whom he had himself, in self-defense, somewhat severely wounded. He felt something like admiration of the courage the boy had shown in attacking him single-handed, and was sincerely anxious to learn whether the wound he had been forced to inflict was likely to have lasting consequences.
In answer to the lieutenant's questions, one of the men said that he had seen one man stagger down the slope some minutes before the conclusion of the struggle, in the direction of the shore.
"He looked, sir," said the man, "as if he'd ​had enough of it. He didn't hardly fare to seem to know whither he was going."
Tregenna went down towards the shore, trying to find some track which he might follow; but the mist and the darkness were creeping on together, and the traces of the conflict being on all sides, in trampled, blood-stained grass and roughened ground, he found nothing to guide his steps.
But when he got down to the beach he was more fortunate. He found footmarks and little red spots on the broken sandstone rocks, and, following these indications, he came round a jutting point of frowning cliff, to a cave, partly hollowed out by the action of the sea, and partly by human hands, the walls of which were green with the slime left by the tides.
Half in and half out of the cave, lying on the shingle and broken rocks, lay the body of the lad of whom he was in search.
It was with something like tenderness that Tregenna stooped, and, full of dread that his own blow had killed him, raised the lad from the ground, turning him, and looking into his white and livid face, with the half-dried blood making disfiguring patches on one side of it.
​For the first moment he thought the boy was dead; but on further examination he found that the heart was still beating, and at the same moment the lad, who had been in danger of suffocation from the fact that he had fallen face downwards, showed by a movement of the eyelids, and by a quivering of the muscles of the mouth, that he was alive, and recovering.
Tregenna cleansed his face as well as he could from the blood and sand with which it was disfigured. There was no need to loosen his clothes, for his shirt was open at the neck, confined only by a flowing neckerchief, which now hung wet and bedraggled on his breast.
"What cheer, mate!" cried Tregenna, as he supported the lad by the shoulders against his knee, and felt in his own pocket for the flask he usually carried there, and which was as much a necessity of his adventurous life as the pistol at his belt or the sword at his side.
The lad opened his eyes, stared at him for a moment dully, then with a gleam of returning consciousness. It was at that moment that Tregenna put the flask of aqua vitæ to his lips.
"Drink, lad, drink. 'Twill bring thy senses together. And fear not. We'll not let a brave ​boy hang, smuggler though he may be! Drink, and fear not. But take this warning, not to meddle with the affairs of lawless folk again."
Still the boy maintained the dead silence which had been such a strangely marked characteristic of him during the fight. He gulped down the spirit put to his lips, and then sat, with his head bent upon his hand, as if still half stupid, either from the blow which had wounded him or from consequent loss of blood.
Tregenna thought there was something of despair in his attitude, and in the wild gaze with which he looked about him, staring first at the gray sea, the edge of which was like a roll of white vapor, and then at the frowning cliff above him. He seemed to be listening for some voice, some footstep.
"Come," said the lieutenant, in a cheery tone, "don't lose thy spirit, boy; thou showedst enough and to spare but an hour since. Thy comrades are gone, 'tis true, and thou art left alone. But, give but thy word to refrain from such company for the future, and I'll pardon thee, and see thee on thy way, for the sake ​of the courage thou hast shown, ill as thy cause was."
Still the lad said nothing in answer. But he looked around him with returning intelligence, not at his captor indeed, but at everything else, and particularly at the cliffs, with their jutting points and scrubby growth of reed and flowering weed.
Tregenna followed the direction of his eyes, but saw nothing in particular to attract his attention. But as he took a step away the lad suddenly sprang up, snatching up the lieutenant's pistol, which he had deposited on the ground while tending the wounded boy, and made for a point where the cliff was steepest and apparently most inaccessible.
As soon as he reached it he placed his foot on a ledge of the rock, and, seizing a rope which was evidently well-known to him, began to climb up the face of the cliff with astounding agility, considering his recent dazed condition.
Tregenna followed quickly. But the lad, who was by this time a good way up, drew up the end of the rope after him, and fastened it into a knot so that it was far out of his ​pursuer's reach. To attempt to climb the cliff without it was impossible and Tregenna could only stand and shake his fist at the lad in impotent rage at the daring with which he had been again outwitted.
But the lad's impudence and audacity did not stop there. The moment he reached the summit of the cliff, he dislodged a loose mass of earth and sandstone which was lying loose in one of the crevices at the edge, and, with a deft kick, hurled it down upon his generous enemy below.
Tregenna stepped back hastily, receiving thus only some fragments of dust and earth upon his head, instead of the heavy mass which had been intended for him.
And he swore to himself, as he turned away and made for his own boat, that he would never again be so soft-hearted as to spare one of these ruffians, who, even in early youth, were dead to every generous human feeling.