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Tummels made a motion to draw out a musket from under the straw where Dan’l lay. “If I thought that,” he growled, “I’d walk straight over to Porthleah, wait for him, and blow his scheming brains out.”

“You’d be a bigger fool, then, than I take ye for,” answered the doctor quietly, “and I know you’ve but wits enough for one thing at a time. Your business now is to keep Dan’l hidden till you can smuggle him out of the country: and if Dr. Martyn or I can help, you may count on us, for I hate such foul play as Deiphobus Geen’s, and so, I believe, does my assistant.”

With that the doctor took his leave of Dan’l and was driven home by Tummels, William Sleep remaining to stand guard: and next day, according to promise, Dr. Martyn was told the secret and trusted with the case.

II.

Sure enough, Dr. Martyn turned out to be most clever and considerate; a man that Dan’l took to and trusted from the first. His one fault was that when Dan’l began to converse with him on religious matters, he showed himself a terrible free-thinker. The man was not content to be a doctor: night after night he’d sit up and tend Dan’l like a nurse, and would talk by the hour together when the patient lay wakeful. But his opinions were enough to cut a religious man to the heart.

Dan’l had plenty of time to think over them, too. From daybreak (when the young doctor took his leave), till between ten and eleven at night (when he came again) was a terrible lonely while for a man shut in an empty house and unable to move for pain. As the days wore on and his wound bettered, he’d creep to the door and sit watching the fields and the ships out at sea and William Sleep moving about the slope below. Sometimes he would spend an hour in thinking out plans for his escape; but his money had gone with the lugger, and without money no plan seemed workable. Sometimes he’d think upon the girl Amelia Sanders. But that was crueller pain; for if he could not even escape, how on earth was he to get married? So he fell back on thoughts of religion and in making up answers to the doctor’s terrible arguments; and these he would muster up at night, tackling the young man finely, till the two were at it like a pair of wrestlers. But when Dan’l began to grow flushed and excited, and stammered in his speech, the talk would be turned off somehow to smuggling, or sport, or natural history–in all of which the doctor had a hundred questions to ask. I believe these discussions worked the cure faster than any ointments or lotions: but Dan’l used to say afterwards that the long days came nigh to driving him mad; and mad they would have driven him but for a small bird–a wheatear–that perched itself every day on the wall of the court and chittered to him by the hour together like an angel.

Tummels, all this while, kept quiet at Porthleah, like a wise man, and sat watching Phoby Geen like a cat before a mousehole. Phoby had turned up at the Cove in the Nonesuch on the fourth day after the lugger was lost, and at once began crying out, as innocent as you please, upon the mess that Dan’l had made through his wrongheadedness. Also the crew of the Nonesuch couldn’t make out where the plan had broken down. But Tummels, piecing their information with what Dr. Chegwidden had told him, saw clearly enough what trick had been played. Also by pumping old Bessie Bussow (who had already been pumped by Phoby) he learned that Phoby knew of Dan’l’s return to the Cove and disappearance into hiding. Tummels scratched his head. “The fellow knows that Dan’l is alive,” he reasoned. “He knows, too, there’s a price on his head. Moreover he knows my share in hiding the man away. Then why, if he’s playing honest even now, doesn’t he speak to me? . . . But no: he’s watching to catch me off my guard, in the hope that I’ll give him the clue to Dan’l’s hiding.” Thus Tummels reasoned, and, though it went hard with him to get no news, he decided that ’twas safer to trust in no news being good news than, by making the smallest move, to put Phoby Geen on the track. In this he did wisely; but he’d have done wiser by not breathing a word to Amelia Sanders of where he’d stowed her sweetheart. For what must the lovesick woman do–after a week’s waiting and no news–but pack a basket and set out for St. Ives, under the pretence of starting for Penzance market? She carried out the deception very neatly, too; actually went into Penzance and sold two couple of fowls, besides eggs of her own raising; and then, having spent the money in a few odds-and-ends her sweetheart would relish, slipped out of the town and struck away north.