here, Master Aleck," he said; "man who goes to sea has to take his
chance o' being drownded."

"Of course."

"And one who tries to dodge the Revenue sailors has to take his chance
of getting a cut from a bit o' steel or a bullet in him."

"I suppose so."

"That's quite bad enough, arn't it?"

"Yes."

"Bad enough for me, sir, so I'm not going to do what might mean being--
you know what I mean?"

"What--"

"Yes, that's it. A bit o' smuggling's not got much harm in it, but they
call it murder when a man kills a man."

"By pushing him off a cliff, Eben?" said Aleck. "Yes."

CHAPTER NINE.

It was about a fortnight later when Aleck Donne went down the garden
directly after breakfast with the full intent, after thinking it over a
good deal, of charging old Onesimus Dunning, the gardener, with being
leagued with the Eilygugg smugglers.

"If I told uncle," he argued, "he would be sent away at once; but that
would be doing the poor fellow a lot of harm and perhaps make him worse.
Perhaps, too, it would make him nurse up a feeling of spite against us,
and he would set the Eilygugg people against us as well. So I won't do
that, but I'm not going to have the nasty old imposter smiling at me and
pretending to be so innocent. I just want him to understand that I'm
not such a child as to be ignorant of his tricks. I'll let him see that
I know why he wanted me not to go along yonder by the west cliff."

Aleck knew exactly where the man was likely to be, for he had been
mowing the lawn, sweeping up the fragment result, and wheeling it away.

"He'll be stacking it round the cucumber frame," thought Aleck, "to keep
in the heat. By the way, I wonder what became of the beautiful cuke
that lay, at the back under the big leaves--we didn't have it indoors!
I'm sure he takes some of them away. Uncle never misses anything out of
the garden, but I do."

The lad went round to the kitchen garden, which sloped round towards the
south, so beautifully sheltered that it was a perfect hot-bed of itself
in the summer, and there, sure enough, was the heaped-up barrow of fresh
green mowings, and one armful had been piled up to half hide a part of
the rough wooden frame.

But no gardener was visible.

"Not here," thought Aleck. "Well, perhaps I was wrong about that cuke."

The next minute he had raised the clumsily-glazed sliding sash, with a
hot puff of moist air smelling delicious as it reached his nostrils,
while he pr