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man who could carry two
tubs on a dark night. There was a jealous watch, too, for informers and
babblers (though, in truth, they were rare enough), so that, for their own
sakes, few displayed an ambition to contract relations of any sort with the
coastguard, and there was a great difficulty in finding lodging for the men
and their families.
    John Martin and Reuben Thorn had long househunting troubles, and got over
them at last by renting between them the cottage over Hadleigh Castle Lane.
It was empty and badly out of repair, and it had a vaguely evil name, in some
indistinct way acquired from the memory of the man who hanged himself in the
castle barn. But it had advantages. First, after so long lying empty, it was
cheap; it enabled the two related couples to live together, and share
expenses; and it was some little way removed from other cottages, so that the
men could come and go without being under common observation. It was the
property of one Simon Cloyse, of Leigh, a man of Dutch descent, like many
hereabout. He was a “warm” man, of various trades; he kept an inn and a shop;
he held shares in divers fishing craft; sometimes he lent money; but it was
said that he, as well as his father before him, had done best out of
smuggling. Not as an active smuggler, taking personal risks, for it was never
Sim Cloyse’s way to take a risk of any sort; but as a freighter, who found as
much of the money needed as would enable him to take to himself the best part
of the profits. To keep such transactions wholly secret in such a community
as that of Leigh were an impossibility, but it was a fact that nowhere, and
at no time, could the keenest eye have detected a single scrap of positive
evidence connecting Sim Cloyse with a contraband operation of any sort. Still
matters seemed so to fall out that few of the active and more daring
smugglers, the boatcaptains and the like, but found themselves, in some
mysterious way, in Sim Cloyse’s debt—a condition no Leigh man was ever
known to get out of. Golden Adams, in particular, a daring and perhaps a
rather quarrelsome young fellow, was said to have run a rare rig on Sim
Cloyse’s money for a while, and now to be growing desperate in
consequence.
    In other circumstances the superior officers might have looked with
disfavour upon the relation of tenant and landlord between the coastguardsmen
and this honest jobber. But it was this house or none, and a regular
inspection of rent receipts made debt on that score an impossibility. So John
Martin and Reuben Thorn took up their quarters and brought their wives and
Martin’s little son, young John; and perhaps, on the whole, the women
quarrelled less than might have been expected. After a little more than two
years, indeed, they quarrelled not at all, for Mrs Thorn died; died in giving
Reuben Thorn the child who was called Dorrily. She was the second, but the
first had died at a day old.
    So Mrs Martin took the child and reared it, and little John and his cousin
Dorrily grew up together and played together, much apart from the other
children of Lady Sparrow’s School at Leigh; for the Leigh fishermen were a
desperate hard lot, the coastguardsmen were their natural enemies, and their
children carried the feud to school with them; though, indeed, not many of
the fishermen’s children went to school at all at that time.
    By the time that John the younger was twelve and Dorrily eight, there had
been no change in the fortunes at the cottage. Martin and Thorn had rowed
guard, walked patrol, and once or twice fought fiercely with smugglers, and
they were much as ever save for a trifle of ageing and a scar or two. Then
there came a wild winter night when the brothers-in-law went out together for
guard and never came back. It was not till the morning that Martin’s wife
knew they had gone off shore, for none of the men themselves knew his own
night’s duty till he was told off. And six hours