I ran in quickly this time, intending to put the trick into immediate play. As I expected, he shot out his left hand and caught my wrist, and I saw the word "Rash!" forming on his lips, but before it was uttered I slipped the knife into my left hand, and with a sideways jab crushed the paper weapon against his breast, feeling my hand go thump against his ribs as though I had struck him. "Well!" he exclaimed, and dropped his own weapon to the floor. "Well!" He sat down. "I _have_ seen it done, Tommy; but where did you learn it?" I evaded the answer by dancing about him and exclaiming, "The knife, the knife, I've won the knife!" "And you shall have it," he said. And so at last the shining prize lay in my hand, and with fond fingers I felt along its delicious edge. When should I need to use it in earnest, I wondered. I turned a radiant face to my father, and throwing an arm round him I kissed him vigorously, and drawing away said, "If I ever meet Shadow-of-Fear, or the old witch, Bite-in-the Dark...." I didn't need to finish the sentence, but slipping the knife from my upraised right hand into my left I practised the feint in mid air. My father smiled and said, "Don't be satisfied yet, Tommy. You're not a man till you can use a pistol too." In honour of the occasion he told me a wonderful tale that night; and I sat at his feet long after the sun had gone down, and the window had become a black square, and the strange voices of the night were ominous of dark and secret things, listening to my father as he told a story of desperate smuggling and battles and arrests and rescues. The story, I remember, was particularly vivid, because it was set locally, and all the caves and creeks I knew and the old tumble-down jetty became alive with savage men; and especially I remember how the gate at Ebb-Tide Cave gave up its secret, swinging away from the wall, and leaving revealed a passage into the cliff. And one cruel incident dwelt in my memory for many a day because of my father's vivid description. It was an old smuggler's vengeance on a traitor, the wretched victim being torn asunder between earth and sea, with a rope around him from a cave roof, and a heavy log tied to his feet and floating on the water, weighing him down to a lingering death as the tide slowly ebbed. When at last I crept into bed it was a real comfort to me to slip the knife under my pillow, for the tale had been unusually stirring, and my mind was in a strange confusion. More than once I awoke startled, and felt swiftly under the pillow for the reassuring touch of my newly-won friend; for it may have been the effect of my father's story, or it may have been an uneasy premonition of coming things, but I seemed to hear a sort of stifled shuffling through the house, and knockings and smothered voices; and the trees outside shook unsettled branches, and a swaying bough kept brushing furtively across the pane.