"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

The spirit of the age has changed; everything has changed so utterly
that one can hardly believe in the existence of one's earlier self. But