The Duchy, being appealed to, told the two parties (in effect) to fight it
out. The Highway Board was ready enough to maintain the road down to
high-water mark, but, on legal advice, declined to go farther.
The Harbour Commissioners held that to repair a private ferry was no
business of theirs, and, although the condition of the slipway had for
years been a scandal, refused to meddle. The whole dispute raised the
nice legal points, What is a ferry? Does the term include not only the
boat but access to the boat? And, incidentally, if anyone broke a leg on
the town shore on his way between highwater mark and the boat, from whom
could he recover damages?

In short, Nicky felt easy enough about landing and embarking his
passengers on the town shore. Rosewarne could not challenge him without
raising the whole question of the slipway. But on the near shore he must
act circumspectly. To be sure the approach to the water here was part of
the king's highway. The whole village used it, and moored their boats
without let or hindrance off the slip which (since the land belonged to
the Killiow estate) the Rosewarnes had kept in good repair, and without
demur. But it was clearly understood--and Nicky, a few hours ago, would
have asserted it as stubbornly as anyone--that the sole right of taking a
passenger on board here for hire and conveying him across to the town
appertained to the Killiow ferryman.

As it happened, however, at the back of Nicky's cottage a narrow lane,
public though seldom used, ran down to the waterside, to a shelf of rock
less than a stone's throw from the slip, and, when cleared of weed below
the tide-mark, by no means inconvenient for embarking passengers.
A rusty ring, clamped into the living rock, survived to tell of days
before steam-tugs were invented, when vessels had painfully to warp their
way up and down the river. Through this ring, no man forbidding him, Mr.
Hosken had run a frape, on which he kept his blue boat, now leased to
Nicky for a nominal rent of sixpence a week.

"And why not use this for your ferry-landing?" Mr. Hosken suggested.
"Rosewarne can't touch ye here."

"Sure?"

"I reckon I ought to know the tithe-maps by heart; and, by them, this
parcel of shore belongs to nobody, unless it be to Her Majesty."

Nicky chuckled with a wheezy cunning.

It happened as he had promised the new ferryman. Mr. Sam's unpopularity
had been growing in the village since the eviction of Mr