A couple of hundred yards away, and for half a mile beyond that, the green turf was populous with soldiery!

For some miles east and west of our haven the coast-front runs, as it were, in two tiers.  From the sea rises a sheer face of naked rock, averaging some two hundred feet in height, for the most part unscaleable, but here and there indented with steep gully-ways, down each of which, through thickets of cow-parsley, flax, kale, and brambles, matted curtains of ground-ivy, tussocks of thrift and bladder-campion, a rivulet tumbles to the brine.  Above this runs a narrow terrace or plat of short turf, where a man may walk with his hands in his pockets; and here, with many ups and downs, runs the track used by the coastguard, who blaze the stones beside it at intervals with splashes of whitewash, for guidance on dark nights.  Above this plateau, which here expands to a width of twenty or thirty feet and anon contracts almost to nothing, the cliff takes another climb, right away now to the skyline; but the acclivity is gentler, with funnel-shaped turfy hollows between bastions of piled rock not unlike Dartmoor tors or South African kopjes in miniature.  On top of all runs a second terrace, much broader than the first, and a low hedge, beyond which, out of sight, the cultivated land begins.

Hard by the foot of one of these rock-bastions, on a fan-shaped plat of green, backed by clumps of ivy and wind-tortured thorns, a group of tents had sprung up like a cluster of enormous mushrooms.  More tents aligned the upper terrace, under the lee of the hedge:  and here also five or six waggons stood against the sky-line, with men busy about them.  Smaller knots of men in khaki toiled in the hollows, dragging down poles, sleepers, bundles of rope, parcels of picks and entrenching spades for the lower camp.  Twos and threes, perched precariously on the rock-ridges, held on to check-ropes, guiding the descent of the heavier gear.  The sound of voices shouting orders came borne on the clear morning air; and above it, as Nicky-Nan halted, rose the note of a bugle, on which somebody was practising to make up for time lost in days of peace.

Nicky-Nan pulled his wits together and stumbled forward, terror in his heart.  Could he reach the ’taty-patch and snatch his treasure before these invaders descended upon it?

The patch (as has been told) lay in a hollow, concealed from sight of the pilot-house.  The cliff-track crossed a sharp knoll and brought you upon it suddenly.  Nicky-Nan’s heart beat fast, and unconsciously he accelerated his hobble almost to a run.  As he pulled up short on the edge of the dip a sob broke from him—­almost a cry.

Below him a couple of men in khaki were measuring the hollow with a field-tape; while a third—­an officer—­stood almost midway between them pencilling notes in a book.  The tape stretched clean across the potato-patch.

“Right!” announced the officer, not perceiving Nicky, whose shadow, of course, lay behind on the path.