But happening to glance up at the latticed window under the eaves of the nearest cottage he caught sight of two faces, a man’s and a woman’s, in convulsions of laughter. A cursory examination of such other windows as were near enough for him to see revealed similar phenomena. And the question darted into his mind: Was the respectable-looking woman a friend of the smugglers? And was it her intention to lead the soldiers into an ambuscade? CHAPTER IV. FRESH OUTRAGES. Tregenna debated with himself whether he should run after the brigadier and put him on his guard. But a moment’s reflection convinced him that a word of warning from a young man like himself would be received with resentment rather than with gratitude by the old soldier. After all, the soldiers were well armed, and were presumably prepared for emergencies. So he turned his back on the village, and made his way over the cliffs to the creek where the gig was lying to take him to the cutter. It was at the mouth of the little ravine down which Parson Langney and his daughter had gone on the preceding evening. It was dark in this cleft between the sandstone hills, dark and cool, with a breeze that rushed through from the sea and whistled in the scrubby pines and through the arching briers of the blackberry bushes. The stream which flowed swiftly down, making little trickling waterfalls from rock to rock, was swollen by recent rains, and made little patches of morass and mire at every few steps. The lieutenant found the water over his ankles half a dozen times on his way down. He had just come in sight of the opening where the gig lay when, drawing his right foot out of a mossy swamp that squelched under his tread, he saw, with a sudden chill, that his boot was dyed a deep, murky red. Scenting another outrage, he uttered an exclamation, and looked about him. Trickling down the side of the ravine into the mud and water of the little patch of swamp was a dark red stream—and the stream was blood. He uttered a cry, a call; no one answered. The next moment he was scrambling up the side of the ravine. At the top, lying in a patch of gorse that fringed the edge of the broken cliff, was the body of a coastguardsman, his head nearly severed from his body, and with the blood still oozing from the ghastly wound which had killed him. The poor fellow’s hands and limbs were ice cold; he had been dead some time. A sheath-knife, such as sailors use, apparently the weapon with which the murder had been effected, lay among the bushes a few paces off.