, with a pudding to follow; would
_that_ do? Colwyn replied smilingly that would do excellently, and Ann
withdrew, promising to serve the meal within an hour.

Colwyn passed that time in the bar parlour. The innkeeper, of his own
accord, brought in some of the famous smuggled brandy, and willingly
accepted the detective's invitation to drink a glass of it. With an
old-fashioned long-footed liqueur glass of the brown brandy in front of
him, the innkeeper waxed more loquacious than Colwyn had yet found him,
and related many strange tales of the old smuggling days of the inn,
when cargoes of brandy were landed on the coast, and stowed away in the
inn's subterranean passages almost under the noses of the excise
officers. According to local history, the inn had been built into the
hillside to afford better lurking-places, for those who were continually
at variance with His Majesty's excise officers. There was one local
worthy named Cranley, the lawless ancestor of the yeoman who had sold
the piece of land to Mr. Glenthorpe, who was reported to be the most
brazen smuggler in Norfolk, which was saying something, considering the
greater portion of the coastal population were engaged in smuggling in
those days.

Cranley was a local hero, with a hero's love for the brandy he smuggled
so freely, and tradition declared of him that on one occasion he set
light to some barns and hayricks in order to warn some of his smuggling
companions who were "running a cargo" that a trap had been laid for
them. The farmers who had suffered by the blaze had sought to carry
Cranley before the justices, but he, with a few choice spirits, had
barricaded himself in the inn, defying the countryside for months,
subsisting on bread and brandy, and shooting from the circular windows
on the south side of the house at the soldiers sent to take him. Local
tradition varied as to the ultimate fate of Cranley and his desperate
band.

According to some authorities, they escaped through the marshes and put
to sea; but another version of the story declared that they had been
captured and tried in the inn, and then ingloriously hanged, one after
the other, from the stanchion outside the door from which the anchor
suspended. This version added the touch that Cranley's last request was
for a bumper of the famous old brandy he had lost his life for, and when
it was given him he quaffed it to the bottom, dashed the cup in the
hangman's face, and swung himself off in