they had gained on their comrades, and it was they who first came up with the smugglers.
Over Tregenna there had suddenly come a frightful sense of a new and sickening danger, that of killing a woman in open fight. Unsexed creature as she had seemed, when he had heard her cursing and uttering threats against him at the farmhouse, he could not but remember, at this fearful moment, how she had conversed with him in the garden at Hurst Court, with all the sweet tones and soft looks, the pleading words and winning ways, of a very woman.
The feeling was paralyzing; it went near to making a coward of him. Then, just as his boat was drawing in its turn alongside that of the smugglers, he saw one of his own men, from the other boat, in actual conflict with "Jem."
He saw the gleam of knives; he saw the two boats rocking like cradles on the surface of the water. Then it was "Jem" who uttered a cry; the red blood gushed forth over the white shirt she wore, and the next moment she staggered, and fell, not back into her comrades' boat but into that of the revenue-men.
