The voice interrupted sharply, “No names, now. I don’t want hanging.” The hand left my arm; there was a pause in the motion of the procession. I caught a moment’s sound of whispering. Then a new voice cried, “Strip the runners to the shirt. Strip ’em. That’s it.” I heard some groans and a cry, “You won’t murder us.” Then a nasal drawl, “We will sure--_ly_.” Someone else, Rangsley, I think, called, “Bring ’em along--this way now.” After a period of turmoil we seemed to come out of the crowd upon a very rough, descending path; Rangsley had called out, “Now, then, the rest of you be off; we’ve got enough here”; and the hoofs of heavy horses sounded again. Then we came to a halt, and Rangsley called sharply from close to me: “Now, you runners--and you, John Kemp--here you be on the brink of eternity, above the old quarry. There’s a sheer drop of a hundred feet. We’ll tie your legs and hang you by your fingers. If you hang long enough, you’ll have time to say your prayers. Look alive, lads!” The voice of one of the runners began to shout, “You’ll swing for this--you------” As for me I was in a dream. “Jack,” I said, “Jack, you won’t----” “Oh, that’s all right,” the voice said in a whisper. “Mum, now! It’s all _right_.” It withdrew itself a little from my ear and called, “‘Now then, ready with them. When I say three....” I heard groans and curses, and began to shout for help. My voice came back in an echo, despairingly. Suddenly I was dragged backward, and the bandage pulled from my eyes, “Come along,” Rangsley said, leading me gently enough to the road, which was five steps behind. “It’s all a joke,” he snarled. “A pretty bad one for those catchpolls. Hear ’em groan. The drop’s not two feet.” We made a few paces down the road; the pitiful voices of the runners crying for help came plainly to my ears. “You--they--aren’t murdering them?” I asked. “No, no,” he answered. “Can’t afford to. Wish we could; but they’d make it too hot for us.” We began to descend the hill. From the quarry a voice shrieked: “Help--help--for the love of God--I can’t....” There was a grunt and the sound of a fall; then a precisely similar sequence of sounds. “That’ll teach ’em,” Rangsley said ferociously. “Come along--they’ve only rolled down a bank. They weren’t over the quarry. It’s all right. I swear it is.” And, as a matter of fact, that was the smugglers’ ferocious idea of humour. They would hang any undesirable man, like these runners, whom it would make too great a stir to murder outright, over the edge of a low bank, and swear to him that he was clawing the brink of Shakespeare’s Cliff or any other hundred-foot drop. The wretched creatures suffered all the tortures of death before they let go, and, as a rule, they never returned to our parts. CHAPTER THREE