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“Be you talkin’ of the rockets?”

“‘Course I be.”

“Well then, I didn’t fire them, nor anyone belongin’ to the Cove. I didn’t set anyone to fire them, and they waren’t fired to warn anybody. Let alone I have proof they was sent up by a Methody preacher to relieve his feelin’s. You’ve known me too long, Roger Wearne, to think me fool enough to waste a whole future joy[3] over so simple a business as warnin’ a boat.”

“What are you tellin’ me?”

“The truth, as I always do; and I advise you to believe it, or ‘twon’t be the first time you’ve seen too far into a brick wall.”

Wearne knew well enough what Captain John meant. Just a year before he had paid a surprise visit to the Cove, ferreted out a locked shed and asked to be shown what was inside. The King refused. “It held nothing,” he said, “but provisions for his brother Henry’s vessel.” Of course Wearne couldn’t believe this; a locked store in Prussia Cove was much too sure a thing. So first he argued, and then he broke the door open, and, sure enough, found innocent provisions inside just as he’d been promised. Next morning the shed was empty. “Didn’ I warn ‘ee,” said John, “against breaking in that door and leaving my property exposed. Now I’ll have to make ‘ee pay for it;” and pay for it Wearne did.

“All I know,” the captain went on, “is that a Methody preacher paid me a visit last night, with the objic (so far as I can make out, for things have been movin’ so fast I hadn’t time to question en as I wished) o’ teachin’ me what was due to King George. In pursooance o’ which–it being His Majesty’s birthday–he took and fired a dozen rockets I keep on the off-chance of wantin’ one of these days to signal the Custom House at Penzance. I own ’twas a funny thing to do, but folks takes their patriotism different. I daresay, now, you didn’t even remember ’twas His Majesty’s birthday.”

Wearne tried a fresh tack. “We’ll take that yarn later on,” he said. “You can’t deny a cargo was run this morning.”

“We’ll allow it for the moment. But that only proves that no boat was warned away.”

“And when I sent a boat in to capture it, you deliberately opened fire; in other words, tried to murder me, His Majesty’s representative.”

“Tried to murder you? Look here.” Captain John stepped to one of his still loaded guns and pointed it carefully at a plank floating out at the mouth of the Cove–a plank knocked by the cutter’s guns out of Uncle Bill Leggo’s ‘taty patch, and now drifting out to sea on the first of the ebb. He pointed the gun carefully, let fly, and knocked the bit of wood to flinders. “That’s what I do when I try,” he said. “Why, bless ‘ee, I was no more in earnest than you were!”

This made Wearne blush for his marksmanship. “But you’ll have to prove that,” he said.

“Why, damme,” said John Carter, and fined himself another sixpence on the spot; “if you are so partic’ler, get out there in the boat again, and I will.”

Well, the upshot was that after some palaver Wearne agreed to walk up to the captain’s house and reckon the accounts between them. He had missed a pretty haul and been openly defied. On the other hand he hadn’t a man hurt, and he knew the King’s Government still owed John Carter for a lugger he had lent two years before to chase a French privateer lying off Ardevora. Carter had sent the lugger round at Wearne’s particular request; she was short handed, and after a running fight of three or four hours the Frenchman put in a shot which sent her to the bottom and drowned fourteen hands. For this, as Wearne knew, he had never received proper compensation. I fancy the two came to an agreement to set one thing against another and call quits. At any rate, John was put to no further annoyance over that day’s caper. As for the preacher, I’m told that no person in these parts ever set eyes on him again. And Ann Geen drove home that evening with her Phoby beside her. “I’m sorry to let ‘ee go, my son,” said John; “but ‘twould never do for me to have your mother comin’ over here too often. I’ve a great respect for all the Lemals; but on the female side they be too frolicsome for a steady-going trade like mine.”

[1] Drinking-house.
[2] Huguenot’s house.
[3] Feu de joie.