‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s a light!’

’Twas but the faintest twinkle, or not even that; only something that told there was a light behind drift and darkness.  It grew clearer as we looked at it, and again was lost in the mirk, and then Elzevir said, ‘Maskew’s Match!’

It was a long-forgotten name that came to me from so far off, down such long alleys of the memory, that I had, as it were, to grope and grapple with it to know what it should mean.  Then it all came back, and I was a boy again on the trawler, creeping shorewards in the light breeze of an August night, and watching that friendly twinkle from the Manor woods above the village.  Had she not promised she would keep that lamp alight to guide all sailors every night till I came back again; was she not waiting still for me, was I not coming back to her now?  But what a coming back!  No more a boy, not on an August night, but broken, branded convict in the November gale!  ’Twas well, indeed, there was between us that white fringe of death, that she might never see what I had fallen to.

’Twas likely Elzevir had something of the same thoughts, for he spoke again, forgetting perhaps that I was man now, and no longer boy, and using a name he had not used for years.  ‘Johnnie,’ he said, ’I am cold and sore downhearted.  In ten minutes we shall be in the surf.  Go down to the spirit locker, drink thyself, and bring me up a bottle here.  We shall both need a young man’s strength, and I have not got it any more.’

I did as he bid me, and found the locker though the cabin was all awash, and having drunk myself, took him the bottle back.  ’Twas good Hollands enough, being from the captain’s own store, but nothing to the old Ararat milk of the Why Not?  Elzevir took a pull at it, and then flung the bottle away.  ‘Tis sound liquor,’ he laughed, ’"and good for autumn chills”, as Ratsey would have said.’

We were very near the white fringe now, and the waves followed us higher and more curling.  Then there was a sickly wan glow that spread itself through the watery air in front of us, and I knew that they were burning a blue light on the beach.  They would all be there waiting for us, though we could not see them, and they did not know that there were only two men that they were signalling to, and those two Moonfleet born.  They burn that light in Moonfleet Bay just where a little streak of clay crops out beneath the pebbles, and if a vessel can make that spot she gets a softer bottom.  So we put the wheel over a bit, and set her straight for the flare.

There was a deafening noise as we came near the shore, the shrieking of the wind in the rigging, the crash of the combing seas, and over all the awful grinding roar of the under-tow sucking down the pebbles.