Not a man or a woman was to be found on the premises; not a cow or a horse; not a pig or a hen. And though the trap-door to the cellar had been flung wide to assist them in their search, it was in vain they sought for the bales among which Tregenna had stood on the previous night. Not a keg or a bale was there in the whole place, though they searched it from garret to cellar! The brigadier was ferociously facetious, tauntingly jocose. “Hey-day, Tregenna, I fear they gave thee too much of their contraband _aqua vitæ_, and that it has bred visions in thy brain!” said he, with an ugly smile on his red face, and a vicious look in his eyes. He was in no very good humor with the young man for having outrun himself in zeal, and was at heart rather pleased that this expedition, designed by his rival, should have been as complete a failure as the last. “Well, at any rate, you see, General, that there was something wrong with the place, for them all to have deserted it like this,” said the lieutenant, reasonably enough. “More like they have deserted it from fear of quarter-day!” retorted the brigadier. “’Tis a common thing enough a flitting like to this, at such seasons!” “A least,” said Tregenna, who was hot and furious at this fresh rebuff, “you will find the ship under the barn-floor!” But even as he uttered the words, a chill seized him as he remembered, in a fresh light, a mysterious incident of the previous evening. He was, therefore, more disgusted than surprised when, in searching the barn, the soldiers discovered that the flooring was indeed loose, as he had said, and that there was a crypt beneath: but that though there were traces of the cradle in which the smugglers’ boat had been hauled up and down, and some tools lying about in dark corners with logs and screws, ropes and mallets, the vessel itself had disappeared. Tregenna took almost in silence the taunts with which the brigadier now saluted him. Leaving the soldiers to return to Rye, the young man, with a shrewd suspicion that the mammoth beast he had dimly seen crawling through the village in the dark on the previous evening was the smugglers’ boat, resolved to try to track it to its new resting-place. Such a weighty thing as the unfinished vessel, and the wagon or wagons on which it must have been removed, could not, he argued, but have left its mark on the roads it traversed. And so it proved. Following the deep wheelmarks which were easily discernible even now in the mire of the Hurst road, he arrived at that village, went through it, still tracing the wheelmarks; and finally, to his consternation, tracked the wagons to the stables of Hurst Court.