The man who had come forward so miraculously and so dramatically to save Duke’s life was James Cowland, and the reason he had so acted was out of gratitude to Duke, who had taken his part in a certain incident twelve months ago.  And this is the sole redeeming feature in a glut of brutality.  It must have required no small amount of pluck and energy for Cowland to have done even so much amid the wild fanaticism which was raging, and smuggler and ruffian though he was, it is only fair to emphasize and praise his action for risking his own life to save that of a man by whom he had already benefited.

But Cowland did nothing more for his friend than that, and after the crowd had indulged themselves on the two men they went off to their homes.  Duke then, suffering and bleeding, weak and stunned, crawled to the place where he had been first attacked—­a little higher up the cliff—­and there he saw Knight’s petticoat trousers, but there was no sign of his officer himself.

After that he gradually made his way down to the beach, and at the foot of the cliff he came upon Knight lying on his back immediately below where the struggle with the smugglers had taken place.  Duke sat down by his side, and the officer, opening his eyes, recognised his man and asked, “Is that you?” But that was all he said.  Duke then went to tell the coastguards and Lieutenant Stocker on the beach, who fetched the dying man, put him into Lipscomb’s boat, and promptly rowed him to his home at Lulworth, where he died the next day.  It is difficult to write calmly of such an occurrence as this:  it is impossible that in such circumstances one can extend the slightest sympathy with a race of men who probably had a hard struggle for existence, especially when the fishing or the harvests were bad.  The most one can do is to attribute such unreasoning and unwarranted cruelty to the ignorance and the coarseness which had been bred in undisciplined lives.  Out of that seething, vicious mob there was only one man who had a scrap of humanity, and even he could not prevent his fellows from one of the worst crimes in the long roll of smugglers’ delinquencies.

The days of smugglers were, of course, coincident with the period of the stage-coach.  In the year 1833 there was a man named Thomas Allen, who was master and part-owner of a coasting vessel named the Good Intent, which used to trade between Dover and London.  In February of that year Thomas Becker, who happened to be the guard of the night coaches running between Dover and London, came with a man named Tomsett to Allen, and suggested that the latter should join them in a smuggling transaction, telling him that they knew how to put a good deal of money into his pocket.  At first Allen hesitated and declined, but the proposal was again renewed a few days later, when Allen again declined, as it was too risky a business.  But at length, as “trade was very bad,” both he and a man named Sutton, one of his crew, agreed to come into the scheme.  What happened was as follows:—­