Here they struck into a rough track made by the feet of the fishermen and less inoffensive characters, and before they had gone far they saw the hulk of the cutter, tossing like a little drifting spar amid the foam of the waves, and showing dark against the leaden, faint moonlight on the sea beyond. The parson asked a few questions, and elicited the usual story—a contraband cargo was being run in a little creek just where the cliffs broke off and the marsh began, when the lookout man on the cutter spied the smugglers, and a boat was sent out to give chase. There had been a smart brush, almost half in and half out of the water, between the smugglers on the one side and the cutter’s men on the other. But, on the whole, as the narrator was forced ruefully to admit, the smugglers had got the best of it, as they all got away, leaving not so much as a keg behind them, while one of the cutter’s men had had to be carried off seriously wounded. “Zoons, and it was main odd they did get off so well!” went on the sailor, as if in some perplexity; “for the lieutenant himself landed a bullet in the leg of one of the rascals, that should have brought him down, if he hadn’t had the devil himself—saving your presence, mistress—to help him.” In the momentary pause which followed the man’s words, a sound suddenly came to the ears of them all, above the whining of the wind in the trees and bushes. It made Joan stop short for the space of a second, and turn her eyes hastily and furtively in the direction of a little dell on their left, where the bracken grew high about the trunks of a knot of beeches. “Eh!” cried the sailor, stopping short, also to listen. “What was that? ’Twas like the groan of a man.” As he turned his head to listen, the parson and his daughter quickly exchanged a glance expressive both of alarm and of warning. Then the former seized the sailor by the arm, pushing onward towards the shore at a better pace than ever. “Sure,” said he, in a deep, strong, resonant voice that would have drowned any fainter sound in the ears of his listener; “’tis but the screech of a hawk. This woody ground’s alive with the creatures.”