Clash! clash! upon his ears, in his place of vantage, came the sound of the driving in of the iron bolts. He saw the brawny bare arms of the men go up above their heads, hammer in hand, to come down with a thud upon the ship’s groaning sides. He saw the great skeleton monster shiver under the blows; heard the hoarse laugh, the muttered oaths, which the men, cautious even at their toil, exchanged as they worked. And presently, as he got used to the din, to the waving, smoking lights, to the excitement of his strange position, he began to distinguish the words they uttered, and presently to discover that he himself was one of the subjects of their conversation. “Curse me if I think the boat’ll ever swim, with all these eyes afore and behind us what we’ve got now!” cried one voice, which Tregenna knew that he had heard before. It was a difficult matter to recognize faces and figures so much foreshortened as they were from the lofty perch he occupied: but he presently perceived that the speaker was the little mean-looking man with the pimply face, who had taken part in the last fray, and who was known as “Bill Plunder.” “Ods rabbit it! What matters the eyes?” sang out the burly giant, Robin Cursemother, as he dealt a sounding blow on the head of the bolt he was driving in. “There’s but one pair to signify, and we mean to close them, don’t we, lads, so as they shan’t see naught to hurt no more!” Then up spoke a third man, who was seated on a barrel in a corner, with a pipe between his lips, and holding a torch in one hand. He limped when he moved, and Tregenna guessed that this was the “Gardener Tom” whom he had himself wounded, and whom the parson and his daughter had sheltered under their roof. He was a young fellow of not more than five or six and twenty, well made and handsome, with an open, honest face and manly voice: a man too good for a smuggler, Tregenna decided. “Nay, the young officer does but his duty in running us down. And I don’t want to see no harm come to him, though ’twas he shot me through the leg. So we can but keep clear of him,’tis all I want. Miss Joan ’ud be main sorry any harm should come to him; and for her sake I’d have no hand in doing him a hurt.” “Zoons, then we’ll do without thee, Tom, when we give the lubber his deserts!” said Robin. “Though what you should want to spare him for I know not, since you’re sweet on Ann; and ’tis ten chances to one she’ll turn sheep’s eyes upon him if we don’t settle his business while she’s hot against him, as she is now.” “Ay, Tom,” said the mean-looking Bill, coming close up to him, and sniggering in his face, “you’ve already got Ben to settle with; you don’t want no more rivals, my lad. You’d best let us do her bidding, and carry him off and let him down the monks’ well, when he shows his nose up here again!”