cannot lie up in this hole much longer," said Stair, digging his
heels into the sand.

"I do not see that you do much lying up," retorted Godfrey McCulloch,
his eyes dark and beady in the semi-dark; "you are off ashore more than
half the time--"

"After that little slip of a Ferris girl, Patsy," said an Irishman from
Antrim. "I saw the pair of you go down the glen together, and may I
never see Cushendal more if you had not your arm about her waist behind
the dyke--"

Stair's clenched fist shut in the remainder of the sentence. The
Rathlain man choked as he swallowed a couple of teeth, and felt his raw
lip acrid upon the gap.

"Tell them you lie--tell them before you spit--or I will send the rest
of your teeth after those two!"

The man gasped out that "Sure it was only a joke--"

"A joke, was it?" said Stair fiercely; "then I hope you will consider
the teeth you have swallowed as the cream of it!"

The men were silent--not from fear at all, but because any two of them
had a right to settle such differences in their own way.

"Will the Irishman not sell us because of Stair Garland's fist closing
his mouth so awkward like?" inquired a second Rerrick man, lying at the
shoulder of Godfrey McCulloch.

"Not by a great deal," said Godfrey, "perhaps he will kill Stair if he
can, though Stair is more likely to kill him. But he will not lay
information as to the lads of the Free Trade. He will remember what
happened to Luke Finney and James Tynan when they thought to lift the
hundred pound reward out for Captain Maxwell of the Scaur."

"What was that?" said the youth at his elbow.

"Have you not heard? It is a Colvend story, too," said McCulloch. "We
took them out into mid-channel and tied each man to an old anchor with
his fifty pounds in jingling gold about his neck. For which cause Luke
Finney and James Tynan, two rusty anchors and a hundred guineas of
unrusted gold lie in the gut of the North Channel to this day."

"Is the water deep?" the young man asked.

"Deeper than any diver will reach till the judgment day," quoth Godfrey.
"This Rathlin man will think twice before he plays Judas to the lads of
the Trade."

"It must have been worst when they were over the side before the anchors
went plunk!" The young fellow shuddered. A clean death in a fair fight
he did not mind more than another, but dangling there tied to an
anchor--"_Ugh!_" said the lad.

That night a cargo was to be run into the Abbey Burnfoot Ba