Chapter II: Part 2

Of that gentleman, and of his business in Carnglass, however, Logan said nothing to the Glasgow police, who took his deposition and promised action. Already they had been looking for Jock and his lads, but with no luck. It was odd, the constable named Donald said: to get out of town, or to find some snug hidie-hole, Jock and his gang would have required more money than they took from the gentleman. Yet somehow they had gone to earth, and so had Dowie.

Logan told the sergeant that he was touring Scotland, and would be in Oban a few days, at the Station Hotel. “Never place money with lads like Jim Dowie,” they told him.

An hour later, in bed at Todd’s Hotel, and tired though he was, Logan took up “A Summary History of Carnglass and Daldour.” Balmullo, the old minister, might have been a bigot; yet he had a keen eye and ear. There was a page of description of the New House of Fear, built down by the harbor by Donald MacAskival--one of the extravagances that had ruined him--in 1777.

“It had been the MacAskival’s design,” Balmullo wrote, “to have demolished _in toto_ the Old House. But the chieftain’s means did not permit of this undertaking. Accordingly,--and to the chagrin of every connoisseur of the arts who sets foot upon the mole of Askival harbour,--the rude Gothic construction has been permitted to loom intact upon its ruder eminence, denuded of its plenishing save for the gigantic carven chimneypieces. There remains also, above the principal entrance to the Old House, a tremendous escutcheon, its bearings in some part defaced, but yet displaying the graceless figure of a Wild Man, armed with a dirk, which Wild Man the vulgar name Askival, the reputed founder of the fortress; and beside the Wild Man a female figure in a state of undress, whom, with still less authority, the folk of the island call Marin or Merin. Below these sculptures, in the letters of a later period, is inscribed the legend, ‘They have said and they will saye. Let them be saying.’

“Of baseless rumor and frantic conjecture, the island of Carnglass has no stint. In contempt, I must record that the natives of this island, blind to the perfections of the New House, continue to allege that Donald MacAskival built afresh not out of an elevated taste, but rather because, in the Old House, he had dwelt in dread of the wraiths of his fathers, said to have waxed wroth with their descendant for his prudent decision to expel from Carnglass the superfluous population. A gaunt and bearded spectre, to which is given the appellation of Old Askival, is reputed to stalk the empty corridors and chambers, in particular the subterranean portions of the oldest tower. An obscure tradition asseverates that a hidden passage leads from these cellars to a recess, and thence to the outer world. Yet the Old House having been builded upon the living rock, as has been observed elsewhere in these pages, this supposition can have no more substance than the Kingdom of the Fairies.”

Here Logan turned out the light. For all his aches and pains, he never had slept sounder in his life.

On his second Scottish morning, Hugh Logan took the train for Oban. The wind had gone down somewhat, and the rain was over, though grim gray clouds still lay to the west. Through Larbert and Stirling, past the Castle high on its rock, the train puffed up to Callender. Logan sat in a compartment where two old ladies dozed over their knitting. Half the time he looked at the hills and villages, and half the time he read in Balmullo’s “Summary History.” And so the train swept into the West Highlands.

As they approached Loch Awe, someone paused outside the glass door of Logan’s compartment. Looking up, Logan saw the man clear: the man in the bowler, the “military gentleman” with the little black bird-eyes. That military gentleman was observing him; but the furtive look moved on to the two somnolent old ladies opposite. For a moment, Logan thought the man was about to pull back the door and enter. Yet the face turned away, and the military gentleman was gone from the corridor. Logan had enjoyed a thorough look at his face: the swollen long nose; the red and purple veins that bulged against the coarse skin; and those tiny, frightened, frightening black eyes, sunk into the skull. About fifty years old, Logan estimated, though seeming older. And a cashiered British officer, some intuition suggested.

Cashiered, yes. Logan made almost a hobby of collecting clippings from newspapers about curious cases of criminal law, strange points of evidence, failures to convict despite strong testimony. It was power of memory, as much as anything else, that had brought Logan success at the bar while he still was young. Now he tried to dredge up from memory that repugnant face of the military gentleman. Cashiered, cashiered. Hadn’t he read of a captain or major cashiered in India, and subsequently tried by a criminal court for some separate, though related, offense--and got off by a very clever barrister? A barrister with somewhat unsavory political connections? The case had been nasty, remarkably nasty--and the officer’s acts nastier still. Hadn’t some London friend, years ago, sent Logan the penny-press clippings about the case, with a picture or two of the accused? What had the fellow’s name been? Something short? Gale, or Hare? No, even Logan’s trained memory could not recall the details. Yet the face of the military gentleman at the hotel and in the corridor, Logan felt, was curiously like the nasty face he half-recollected from the smudgy newspaper photograph. Had there been espionage hinted at the military hearings? The man had been a bad lot in many ways. But Logan couldn’t feel quite sure he had not fancied the resemblance.

By Ben Cruachan, through the Pass of Brander; across the river at Bridge of Awe; then Connel Ferry. The mountains loomed nobly as the train approached the coast. The military gentleman did not return. A few minutes more, and the train swung into the resort and fishing-port of Oban, on the Firth of Lorn. Now the Western Isles were in plain sight--Kerrera, at least, right opposite Oban. Logan could see its treeless bulk from the window of his hotel. Of the military gentleman, no trace. Logan looked for him in the railway station, but he must have got off hurriedly from a forward coach and have gone into the town. Not that Logan much desired to see the military gentleman again.

3

“You might inquire at the North Pier, Mr. Logan,” said the Reverend Andrew Crawford, “but I do not believe any fisherman will undertake to set you ashore in Carnglass. All the boats will be gone from the harbour until sunset: the storm kept them in port for three days, and they won’t wish to waste another day in carrying a passenger to Carnglass.”

The Reverend Andrew Crawford, minister of St. Ninian’s Church, was a knowledgeable man. The people at the Station Hotel had sent Logan to him, not knowing themselves how he might get to Carnglass. Mr. Crawford had set foot in most of the Outer Isles that still were inhabited. Now he and Logan stood at the door of the manse, looking down the hill to Oban town and the piers, with the dim gray Hebrides far beyond the blue sea.

“I’d pay whatever they might ask,” Logan told him.

“It’s not wholly a matter of _l.s.d._, Mr. Logan. The swell round Carnglass and Daldour always is heavy. I had difficulty in getting ashore in Daldour, the day I visited, and I never have seen Carnglass, except from Daldour or a boat. Lady MacAskival does not let even the minister or the priest ashore. She has her own style of religion. And these trawlers from the mainland aren’t popular with the island folk. Once the keepers fired at an Oban boat that tried to put into Askival harbour; nor are the men in Daldour much more hospitable. No, I think you’d best take MacBrayne’s steamer to Loch Boisdale: the South Uist fishermen know the Carnglass waters. The reefs off Carnglass are murderous.”

“Who lives in Daldour, Mr. Crawford?”

“There is but one name in Daldour--MacAskival. An inbred folk. In Daldour there is a little machair--that’s the sandy land of the Island--and the island people fertilize it with seaweed, and grow potatoes. Also they gather seaweed and sell it; in the season, a drifter puts close into shore, and the Daldour men bring out the seaweed in their lobster-boats and load it aboard, and it is sold on the mainland. On the day I visited Daldour, all the folk were at the beach with their carts, running straight into the surf to gather the tangle. Theirs is a poor life. The Daldour women weave a few decent rugs and sweaters. They speak a strange Gaelic, with some Norse words in it. For a month, one of our missionaries lived in Daldour, but he was half daft when he left. ‘Mr. Crawford, I have served my time among the Mau Mau,’ he said to me. And that though he was a Highlander and a Gaelic speaker.”

“Can you tell me anything about Lady MacAskival, Mr. Crawford?” Logan asked. But--after a slight discreet pause--Mr. Crawford could not. Logan, leaving him, went down to the North Pier to make inquiries after any boat that might carry him to Carnglass.

He had no luck. It would have to be MacBrayne’s steamer to Loch Boisdale in the morning, he thought, for already it was late afternoon. If the sea should be calm tomorrow, even a big motor-launch ought to be able to carry him from South Uist to Carnglass. After a stroll along the esplanade to the cathedral, Logan went back to his hotel at the other end of the town and had dinner. The trawlers were in the harbor now, unloading their catch upon the quay. But the fishermen were too busy to be bothered with eccentric Americans that wanted passage to Ultima Thule, Logan suspected. A light rain was coming down. Despite that, after dinner Logan put his oilskin cape over his shoulders, took up his stock, and--for lack of anything better to do--climbed the hill behind the town.

At the summit there was a strange building, Logan had noticed as soon as he had come out of Oban railway station: a circular roofless affair, like a ruined temple. This, according to the hotel people, was called McCaig’s Folly, and had been built long ago as an observation-tower, but never finished. Now, in the gloaming, Logan found himself close beside the Folly. The season being too early for tourists at Oban, the area round the Folly was deserted, so that Logan walked alone in the drizzle, thinking idly of the Old House of Fear and old Duncan MacAskival and his own solitary and work-laden life. A scrap from Scott came into his head:

“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.”

Was that the way it went? Even leading his battalion, Logan never had known that crowded hour. And as he thought of how some men are drunken with drink, and others drunken with work, he heard steps in the darkness behind him.

Looking over his shoulder, Logan made out a familiar figure, a few paces distant: the military gentleman. When Logan slackened pace, the military gentleman hesitated for a moment, and then strode on toward him. “Captain Gare!” the military gentleman called out, by way of introduction.

“Good evening, sir,” Logan said. Captain Gare, coming very close up to him with a swagger of sorts, looked down from his stork-height upon Logan. Flickering from side to side, the disconcertingly mobile little black bird-eyes never paused for more than a fraction of a second to meet Logan’s stare. The man struck his long stick against his own trousers-leg. He opened his mouth, paused, gripped his stick more firmly, and then spoke in a reedy educated voice.

“Look here,” said Captain Gare. “I say--I.... That is, cigarettes--yes, cigarettes....” There was an aroma of whiskey about Captain Gare, but Logan did not think he was drunk. Certainly Gare was exceedingly nervous, and he seemed disposed toward bullying.

“I’m sorry,” Logan told him mildly, “but I don’t have any cigarettes about me.”

“No, no.” Captain Gare, scowling, paused afresh, perhaps trying to take a new tack. “No, I don’t require cigarettes, not really. I don’t smoke--nor drink, either. I say: you’re an American, are you not?”

“Why should you think so, sir?”

“Don’t take offense,” said Captain Gare. “Are you ashamed of being an American? I’m not a chap people can take liberties with. You’re an American chap, I know. Your name is Logan.”

“I saw you at Todd’s Hotel,” Logan observed.

“Did you? Did you really? I travel a great deal, Mr. Logan: private means, you know. Yes, that’s it: I saw your name in the hotel register, and thought we might have something in common.”

“What might we have in common, Captain Gare?” Logan spoke evenly. Captain Gare swept his bird-eyes across Logan’s face again, seeming to gain heart. He slapped the stick against his leg, below the short mackintosh he wore.

“I say--don’t know India, I suppose? Never tried pig-sticking? No, I suppose not; not you American chaps. True sport, you know. I was rather good.” He towered belligerently above Logan. “There’s nothing like steel. See here.” Captain Gare tugged at the head of his stick, and it came away from the wood. It was a sword-stick, two or three inches of blade showing above the cane. Logan had an amusing momentary vision of a fencing-match there in the rain, complete with cries of “touché!” Captain Gare, glowering upon him, rammed the blade back into its stick-scabbard.

“I take it that you know the world, Captain Gare,” Logan said, smiling slightly.

“Rather better than you do, I fancy, Logan.” It was clear that Captain Gare now felt himself master of the situation. “I say, we needn’t beat about the bush, eh? I’m told you’ve been at the pier inquiring after passage to Carnglass.”

“You’re an astute man, Captain Gare.”

“That’s as it may be.” Captain Gare’s swollen features bent toward Logan. “Look here: it’s quite pointless for you to go to Carnglass, you know--quite. I suppose you’re a solicitor-chap, are you not?”

“That’s as it may be,” said Logan. “My father and grandfather were Writers to the Signet. You have an interest in Carnglass, Mr.--that is, Captain--Gare?”

“One of my friends has an interest there, sir. He knows Lady MacAskival very well. Handles her affairs, as a matter of fact. Saves her annoyance. She never welcomes callers, you understand.”

“I’m afraid my business is with Lady MacAskival herself.”

Captain Gare edged still closer. “Lady MacAskival is not competent to transact business, Mr. Logan. I mean to say that she’s infirm. Quite old, you know. No taste for American trippers.”

“She has been in correspondence with my principal.”

“Nonsense!” Captain Gare brandished his stick. “Mean to say, that’s rubbish, you know. Lady MacAskival never writes. Infirm, a very elderly party. Come, now, Logan: I dare say you’ve gone to moderate expense in this fool’s errand. You’ll never see Carnglass. My friend is a liberal man, and very close to Lady MacAskival. Money’s little object to him or her. Suppose, now, on their behalf, I give you three hundred pounds, if you like? Simply by way of reimbursement, we may put it, Logan. Fair enough, eh? And then back to Brooklyn with you, eh?”

“You have the money in your pocket?” Logan inquired.

“Of course not.” Captain Gare gave him a supercilious smile. “A man doesn’t carry such sums on his person, you know. Come back into town with me, like a good chap, and I’ll write a cheque in your favor.”

“I do happen to carry such sums on my person, Captain Gare,” Logan told him.

The military gentleman’s little eyes widened and flickered. His left hand stole nervously along the sword-stick. “Not really? Hundreds of pounds in notes in your pocket? I say....”

“Not in notes, Captain Gare: in traveller’s cheques.” Here Captain Gare sighed slightly, and his grip on the stick slackened. “Now could you be interested, Captain Gare, in some such sum as six hundred pounds?”

“Six hundred pounds?” Captain Gare drew a sudden breath. “Really, my dear fellow, are you suggesting that you might pay me six hundred pounds? Whatever for?”

“For certain information.”

“What manner of information, my dear sir?” Captain Gare turned slightly, there in the dark, as if to make sure no one was at hand.

“For instance,” Logan said, “detailed information concerning the past, present, and future of Jackman.”

That bow, drawn at a venture, sent its arrow home. On Gare’s unpleasant face the mottled veins seemed to swell; the man stepped back. “Who the devil are you?” cried Captain Gare, with a quaver in the reedy voice.

“I take it that you know now what I am,” said Logan, still quietly. “Whatever made you think I might accept money?”

“I beg your pardon, sir; really, I ...” Captain Gare was stumbling over his words. “That is, you did not seem precisely an American. All a pose, eh? I say, you don’t mean that you’re ... that I’m....”

“If you tell me about Jackman,” Logan went on, “we need say no more of all this, so far as you are concerned. We already know a great deal about Dr. Jackman, of course, but conceivably you might add something or other. You’re the fellow who was cashiered, I take it. We know enough about you.”

“I swear it was a miscarriage of justice, Mr. Logan--or whatever your name is, sir. I mean that affair in Madras.” Gare was almost panting. “But Jackman--no, really, I can’t say anything, not for six thousand pounds. My life wouldn’t--but you know that quite as well as I do.”

The swollen face had gone deathly pale. Even had he been able to probe deeper without giving away his game, Logan reflected, this man would have been too frightened to be of any real help. It had been a good random thrust, that mention of Jackman, whoever Jackman might be.

“Very well, Gare,” Logan said. “If you don’t choose to clear yourself, that’s not my concern. Very likely you’d be of no use to us. We’ll have Dowie and Anderson any hour now.” Gare shivered. That shot, too, had gone home. “As for you, Gare, you understand that if you don’t sever all connection with this business, we’ll see that you’re taken into custody? Perhaps the Continent would be a safer place for you at present. And throw away that silly sword-stick: you couldn’t frighten babies with it.” Logan snatched the thing from Gare’s hand and flung it toward the lip of the hill; the steel flashed in the moonlight, and then blade and stick were lost in the gorse. “Be off, now; I’ve tired of you.”

Gare, backing further away, muttered pitifully, “Then you’re.... Then I’m not under...?” Logan gestured impatiently toward the town below.

“You can go to the devil, Gare.”

Captain Gare turned with clumsy haste, all his swagger gone, and scuttled heavily down the path toward town; after he had gone a few paces in the dark, Logan thought he heard him break into a run. Yes, it had been a thoroughly satisfying random shot. He did not think he would see Captain Gare again.

Yet whoever thought it worthwhile to offer Logan three hundred pounds to steer clear of Carnglass? Gare had bungled the business badly; he must have been acting without instruction from his principal, Logan thought--whoever that principal might be. Dowie? Or Lagg? Or this fellow Jackman? There were depths in this business, surely, unplumbed by old Duncan MacAskival. Trying to piece the thing together, Logan walked slowly back to the Station Hotel. There the night porter gave him tea and biscuits, and afterwards Logan went up to his rather chilly high-ceilinged room, and stared at the plaster cornice for half an hour before he went to sleep. But he could form no clear picture of what he had begun to call to himself the Carnglass Case.

* * * * *

As he dressed, next morning, Logan saw from his window the steamer “Lochness” at the pier: it would take him to Loch Boisdale, and he hurried into his clothes and gulped down tea at 5:45. This was Wednesday, his third morning in Scotland. Thus far, only frustration: and yet the sort of frustration which roused Logan’s energies. To judge from the impromptu and ineffectual measures that Dowie and Gare had adopted, he was dealing only with an ill-organized and eccentric opposition--though with adversaries sufficiently unscrupulous. And it seemed to be an ill-informed opposition. Either that, or else Dowie and Gare were out of touch with the real intelligence at work, for some reason, supposing that they _had_ principals for whom they were acting. Certainly neither of those two had seemed quite the man to concoct a scheme to keep an American from his prospective purchase of Carnglass. If there were a principal, would he be in the island? Lagg, the factor? The storm of two days ago might have kept the people in Carnglass from communicating with the mainland; but presumably messages now could be sent and received by boat. Whatever messages might be sent, it scarcely was possible that he should receive in Carnglass the sort of rude welcome he had got in Mutto’s Wynd. Even if Carnglass was Ultima Thule, still it was part of Britain, the most law-abiding of nations; and there would be Lady MacAskival for surety.

At six o’clock the “Lochness” steamed away from the pier toward the Sound of Mull. They crossed the Firth of Lorne; and then, to the south, they skirted the great rocky mass of Mull, while the wild shores of Morven frowned upon them from the north. Several islanders were among the passengers, and for the first time in years Logan heard the Gaelic spoken naturally, that beautiful singing Gaelic of the Hebrides. It went with the cliffs, the sea-rocks, the ruined strongholds of Mull and Morven, the damp air, the whitewashed lonely cottages by the deep and smoothly sinister sea.

As the hours passed, the steamer put into Tobermory, and later touched at the flat islands of Col and Tiree. It crossed the broad rough waters of the Little Minch, with the romantic line of the Outer Isles before them, and the round bulk of Barra drawing closer. After Castlebay, in Barra, the “Lochness” steamed north past Eriskay, and into the splendid dark anchorage of Loch Boisdale, in South Uist, that sprawling low island of peat.

It was nearly midnight now. Going ashore, Logan got himself a room at the homely, cordial inn above the harbor. There was a schoolmaster in Loch Boisdale village, the hotelkeeper said, who might know of a drifter that could put Logan ashore in Carnglass.

Once more alone in a rented room with only conjectures for company, Hugh Logan settled himself in bed and took up that battered pamphlet by the Reverend Samuel Balmullo. Mr. Balmullo’s taste certainly had run to old bones. Here was a tidbit:

“Even in the fierce chronicles of the Western Isles, the chieftains of MacAskival are distinguished by a repute for deeds of blood and passion exceedingly disproportionate to the wealth and power of their sept. In the last century, upon the removal of the plenishing of the Old House to the New House of Fear, there were discovered in a curious pit or oubliette in the crypts the skeletal remains of a human being, still bearing the marks of violence. This pit long had been put to the office of a brine-tub, and it is supposed, accordingly, that the bones had lain hid at the bottom for a great while, perhaps some centuries. By any person inured to the sorry superstitions of the people of Carnglass, it might have been anticipated--as, indeed, it befell--that the vulgar peasantry, upon the exhibition of these sad relics of mortality, would allege the bones--some of which were curiously injured or deformed--to be those of a Firgower, or Man-Goat. A legend less incredible, however, relates that the skeleton is that of an illicit lover of a lady of MacAskival, seized by stealth at his abode in North Uist, transported to Carnglass, subjected to indescribable torments, and at length drowned in the brine of the oubliette. What the Duke of Clarence suffered in a butt of Malmsey, some obscure chieftain of the barbarous Hebrides, about the same period of antiquity, may have endured in a darksome pit filled to its brink with pickled herring.”

At the close of this charming paragraph, Logan settled himself to sleep.

In the morning, on his way to seek out the schoolmaster who might help him to a passage to Carnglass, Logan was surprised to find Loch Boisdale and its neighborhood bursting with activity. Navvies were unloading enormous crates from a freighter; two new bulldozers rumbled down the road toward the interior of the island; recently-built huts of corrugated iron, an age away from the primitive thatched Uist cottages of field-stone that stood scattered over the oozy plain, shouldered one another near the pier. The hotelkeeper had said briefly that something important, in a military way, was in progress in the heart of South Uist. A range for guided missiles, perhaps; and perhaps something even newer. Idle policemen, the hotelkeeper had said, lounged about the approaches to the construction-area. He did not like it. It would spoil the snipe-shooting, and also evict honest families from their crofts. “Those men in London are spoiling the best places and the best people.”

About the middle of the morning, Logan plodded up the soggy road to the schoolhouse. The sky was very gray again, and a fairly heavy rain was falling; but even the guidebook confessed that the climate of South Uist was the worst in Britain. MacLean, the rawboned schoolmaster, would do what he could to assist the gentleman. Leaving the schoolroom in charge of a senior boy, he went back with Logan toward the harbor. Yes, Mr. MacLean knew the master of a drifter, now in Loch Boisdale, who might conceivably engage to land Mr. Logan in Carnglass. This fisherman, though akin to the schoolmaster, was a very remote cousin, mind, and in need of money, to pay a fine. A fine for what? For poaching. Logan wanted to know what sort of poaching--fishing in forbidden waters?

“No,” said MacLean, shortly, “sheep. Judge not that ye be not judged. My cousin Colin knows all the shore of all the lonely islands, and on some of the islands there are sheep, and deer. Whatever Colin is or is not, there is no better pilot in all the Outer Isles.”

Although Colin’s boat was in the harbor, the man himself was not in sight when the schoolmaster and Logan got down to the pier. “He will be drinking somewhere,” the schoolmaster said. “But here are some people to interest you: people from Daldour.”

Seated on the clammy pier, eating bread and butter in the drizzle, were three men in rough island dress and rubber boots--or, rather, two men and a bright-eyed boy. All three had about them a twilight look. Their bodies were lean, their cheeks were hollow, their teeth protruded slightly; a Lowlander might have said that they were not canny.

They seemed so much alike that, but for differences in age, they might have been triplets. “MacAskivals,” the schoolmaster murmured. “A dying breed. In Daldour, now, most are old bachelors and old maids; they have seen too much of one another, and will not marry. The last of an old song. That big lobster boat by the pier is theirs; the MacAskivals have but a naked beach at Daldour. I will speak the Gaelic to them, for they will speak no English, although this boy knows the English well enough. Among themselves, Mr. Logan, they speak a dialect as strange to me as the Gaelic is to you.”

Except for the boy’s bright glance, the three MacAskivals had given no sign of recognition as the schoolmaster and Logan approached. Now, as Mr. MacLean spoke to the three in Gaelic, there came very faint shy smiles to all three narrow faces; the two men nodded, and the boy replied in the slow flowing Gaelic. Presently, in a cautious tone, the schoolmaster seemed to say something significant. The boy turned to the elder of the two men, who spoke curtly, and the boy translated for him to the schoolmaster. As he finished speaking, over the boy’s eyes came a kind of glaze, and the two men turned again to munching bread and butter, as if they had forgotten the existence of everyone else.

“I asked them,” the schoolmaster told Logan, “whether they would take you with them to Daldour, and then to Carnglass. They are in Loch Boisdale for this day only, to buy what few things they do buy, from month to month. They said they would not take you to Carnglass; it is not a good place for a man to go.”

“Not for fifty pounds?” Logan asked.

“For no price, I believe. But if money speaks, my cousin Colin is the man for you. And here he comes.” A squat man was sauntering along the pier. “Colin is not overly civil, and he is fond of the drink; but he knows the waters and the coasts.” They turned away from the three silent MacAskivals and walked to meet the fisherman-poacher.

What is uncommon among the people of the Isles, Colin MacLean seemed surly. He did not acknowledge the schoolmaster’s introduction of Logan. “Colin,” said the schoolmaster, “Mr. Logan asks you to set him ashore in Carnglass. I will leave you to make your bargain.” Logan shook his hand, and the schoolmaster strode up the hill.

Colin MacLean gave Logan a long hard look from under the brim of his sou’wester. “Carnglass, is it?” The only polish about Colin was his careful English speech, no doubt learned from the British Broadcasting Company, and uttered with a musical Gaelic intonation. Colin MacLean spat upon the pier. “Carnglass: and so Lagg and his keepers would shoot holes in my boat. You may go to hell, Mr. Logan.”

Logan drew from his billfold ten big colorful notes of the Royal Bank of Scotland: five-pound notes. “This is yours, Mr. MacLean,” he said, “if you’ll set me ashore anywhere in Carnglass. It needn’t be Askival harbor. Is there no other spot where a boat might put in?”

Colin stared at the notes. “There is a place, Dalcruach, in the east, where at high tide a boat--a small boat--can pass over the reefs, if the sea is calm. All the rest is cliff. But I would not risk my drifter among the rocks. You would need to row over the reefs alone. Here: I have an old dinghy. For twenty pounds more, I would sell it to you. I would bring you as close to Dalcruach as I could, and then you would take the dinghy and fend for yourself, Mr. Logan. Are you a seaman?”

“I’ve rowed before,” Logan said. “Here’s another twenty pounds for the dinghy.”

“The swell about Carnglass is a fearful thing,” Colin went on, shaking his heavy head in doubt, “and the reefs are like knives. Now would you sign a paper to say that Colin MacLean would be in no way responsible for the possible drowning of Mr. Hugh Logan?”

“I would,” Logan answered. “Take me aboard your drifter, and I’ll write it now.”

Colin tucked the five-pound notes into his pocket. “Midnight, Mr. Logan: come aboard at midnight, and we will make for Carnglass. It is not good to be seen landing in Carnglass; there might be a keeper with a rifle, even at Dalcruach. I will land you at Dalcruach early in the morning, with the tide in flood, the weather permitting. And then I wash my hands of it.”

That afternoon, Logan borrowed from the hotelkeeper an old knapsack, into which he put some socks and underclothing, a shirt, sandwiches and chocolate, and a thermos of coffee. He would leave his suitcase at the hotel. He put on heavy waterproof boots and an old cap, and wore his oilskin and carried his stick. And he was ready long before midnight.

Colin MacLean, with two less dour South Uist men who made up his crew, received him solemnly aboard the drifter. They puffed out of Loch Boisdale into the sea, with only two lights showing; and after that, for hours, Logan could perceive nothing but the obscurity of the night sky, clouds shutting out moon and stars. Before dawn, they stopped the engine, and Logan thought he could make out, vaguely, an enormous land-mass to the south. The drifter rolled heavily in a menacing swell; and there came the noise of that swell breaking upon rocks. “I will give you back your money for this dinghy,” said Colin, with a sour grin, “if you have changed your mind.”

“Let me into the dinghy,” Logan told him, “and I’ll cast off.”

“The more fool you,” Colin growled. They picked their way over the uneasy little deck to the stern, where the dinghy was in tow. MacLean let down a rope ladder into the little boat; he held an electric torch to light Logan’s descent. “Here,” said Colin, in a last-minute access of charity, “I will make you a present of the torch, Mr. Logan. And here is something else for you.” Colin took a bottle of whiskey from a jacket-pocket and thrust it into Logan’s canvas pack. “You will be wetted in beaching the boat, and the sea is cold. Row straight for the cliff ahead. The tide will carry you over the reef, but you must watch sharp for the needle-rocks. At Dalcruach clachan there is a keeper’s cottage, and perhaps you can dry yourself there.” Under his breath, Colin muttered something like “God help you.”

Then Logan cast off and took the dinghy’s oars. The drifter receded into the night.

For a moment, breaking through the pall of cloud, the moon showed him the cliff-head above Dalcruach. What with oars, tide, and a slight breeze at his back, Logan swept in toward Carnglass, the Heap of Gray Stones.

4

At Logan’s back, as he rode the crest of that grim darkling swell, the forlorn hope of sunrise was fighting upward in the sky. By that pallid light, diffused through a gray mist, he saw that he was in perilous waters. Had the breeze been higher, he could have had no hope for making shore, amateur oarsman that he was. Sweeping round the reefs toward the sheer cliffs just visible in the west, a current tugged in ugly mood at the oars; and he pulled hard against this current, for it would have hurried him against that fearsome wall. Still coming in toward shore, the tide helped him against the current. And now he was among rocks.

From the white heave of the water, he perceived that he was passing over skerries which would be dry at low tide. What was worse to the eye, here and there stuck up sharp rocks like swords menacing the sky, the “needles” of which Colin had spoken. Had it not been dawn, surely he would have run straight upon one. All about them--they lay all too close, and suddenly he was passing some by--were wicked immense swirls and eddies, enough to bring a man’s heart into his mouth. And Logan’s heart did come into his mouth.

Once only, in all his life before, had he been so frightened; and that had been in a place very different, though equally eerie--a broken tomb in Okinawa, where he had crouched with two other cut-off soldiers while the Japanese scouts shuffled and whispered in the dark all about. This fearsome coast was worse than the tomb had been, for here he was utterly alone, in a hostile element. The mind-picture of the Okinawan tomb, hurrying through his brain in this horrid wet moment, vanished when the dinghy swung toward one of the smaller needles as if drawn by a magnet. Logan thrust the tip of an oar hard against the rock, and the boat slipped past. A wild scraping sound and a trembling assailed him then: the dinghy hesitated, in the flood of the tide, right upon a reef barely submerged. Yet her bottom held; and next she was off that rasping bed and hurtling on toward the dim line of the beach.

Logan was nearly powerless. What a fool he had been! This one crowded hour of glorious life he would have exchanged, gladly, for a lifetime of servitude in the law-office. Yet there seemed to be sand dead ahead; and if he could pull hard enough against the weakened current, he might yet get ashore.

In the growing light, the island of Carnglass loomed like one tremendous barrier of naked and sheer precipice, except for a kind of fissure or den which was his goal, vague beyond the whitecaps. The needles were gone now; the swell was full and heavy, as if the skerries were past; and he could make out the waves flinging themselves upon a dark beach, fighting high toward some grass and stunted trees, and then retreating to the terror of the abyss. Two minutes more, and the dinghy was tossed by those waves right upon the sand.

Leaping out, Logan tugged with all his remaining strength at a line attached to the bow, to draw the boat as high upon the shore as he might, the water swirling about his waist. Back came the surf, flinging the dinghy higher yet, and blinding and drenching Logan, almost taking his feet from under him. Yet, persisting, he dragged the little boat over the sand with a power he had not known was in him; and when he thought she might be safe, he reached over the gunwale, grasped the heavy chunk of rusted iron that was her anchor, and flung it into the oozing sand. More he could not do; if the waves swept her out again, that was beyond his power to remedy. He staggered from the boat toward the tide-line and the grass beyond. When the sand grew firm under his feet, he fell nerveless to the beach, a spent man. And there he lay perhaps five or ten minutes, like a stranded jellyfish.

It was done. The thing was done. He was ashore in Carnglass, and a whole man, though shivering and shaking with the reaction from his fright among the needles. Perhaps the game, after all, might be worth the candle.

As some strength returned to him, his first thought was for the dinghy, in which his knapsack lay. Her anchor having held, the little boat rested askew upon the sand; he must have come in at the very flood of the tide, for already the combers broke further out, and the dinghy’s bows were altogether out of the water. Reeling to the boat’s side, Logan hauled out the knapsack and then plodded up the beach to the place where the heather and the gorse began to grow. He was in a kind of cove or pocket between thousand-foot cliffs, a triangle of land sloping steeply upward toward a third range of cliff at the back; and upon the face of that rearward cliff, not so beetling as its sea-neighbors, he thought he could make out the faint line of an ancient path.

Something more welcome, however, now huddled close before him: a line of low rubble walls, the work of man. These were primitive cottages, no doubt the clachan of Dalcruach. They were larochs, roofless ruins, deserted these many years.

All but one. Toward the end of the row of forlorn dwellings, a single thatched roof remained, kept secure against the Hebridean gales by a wide-meshed net spread over the rough thatch and anchored by big stones lashed to the net-ends. The hut had no chimney, but only a hole in the middle of the thatch; it had no windows, and a single door; this must be the “black house” of the Isles, one of those Viking-age cottages still inhabited, squat, thick-walled, snug, out of the childhood of the race. People dwelt in them still, Logan had been told, here and there in Uist and Barra. And this one might be the cottage of the keeper or gillie that Colin MacLeod had mentioned. Incautious in his weariness, Logan limped to the heavy door and pounded. No one answered: the hut seemed to be as empty as its roofless neighbors. And then Logan observed that the door had been secured by a padlock and hasp, but the hasp had been ripped away from the door-frame, the screws hanging impotent in their holes. Lifting the latch, Logan entered.

Yes, it was a black house. Lacking proper fireplace or chimney, the peat smoke had eddied round the single room for centuries, perhaps, turning stone walls and beams and thatch to ebony. But it was dry, and it was furnished. There were a table and shelves, and a chair or two, and a heap of dry peats by the rough hearth below the gap in the thatch. And in a corner stood that rare object, the old-fashioned cotter’s closet-bed, built of boards up to the roof to keep off the draughts, with only a wide hole for the occupant to crawl in upon his mattress, and a curtain over that aperture. Logan pulled back the curtain. There was no one inside, but there were decent blankets upon the bed. Feeling like Goldilocks in the house of the Three Bears, Logan flung down his pack.

Some dry bits of driftwood lay by the peats. Logan tested the cigar-lighter he had kept in an inner pocket of his jacket, to see if it would work; it still would. Making a little heap of kindling upon the hearth, he banked peats about it, and lit a fire; in three or four minutes, some of the brown and springy squares of peat had begun to smoulder, and Logan piled more peat upon them to keep the fire going while he slept. Only then did he throw off his drenched clothes, laying them upon a chair near the fire, and drag himself naked into the venerable bed, rolling deep into its blankets. Swiftly Logan sank into unconsciousness.

* * * * *

The sea-water having affected his watch, Logan could not tell what time it was, precisely, when at length he woke; but surely it was well into the afternoon. Some vigor had returned to his body. The slow-burning peats still glowed upon the hearth; the house was warm, and thick with the sweet smoke; daylight--the sun must be free of the clouds for a time--came through the smoke-gap in the thatch. There was no sound but the unending wash of the sea upon the beach, deadened here by the thickness of the walls of rubble. His clothes, still very damp but wearable, lay faintly steaming on the chair by the fire. This was the loneliest spot Logan ever had known.

Having dressed, Logan turned out the contents of his knapsack, which had not suffered badly from the sea. A pair of binoculars he had bought before leaving America was intact, and he had his shaving-things, and the ordnance-map and old Balmullo’s pamphlet, and what mattered most to him, the thermos of coffee, Colin’s bottle of whiskey, and the big parcel of sandwiches from the hotel. Of those sandwiches, he promptly ate all but a reserve of two. Pouring the coffee into a pan he found upon the shelves, he set it to warm by the peats. Life was liveable again. And opening the door with the broken hasp, Logan went out into the Carnglass afternoon.

The ghostly clachan of Dalcruach lay silent in a cul-de-sac formed by the sea, the two sea-cliffs, and the inland cliff. Just now the sun was peeping through the gray blanket above. Everywhere water was running: little torrents foamed from the lip of the cliffs, and springs sent tiny streams down to the rocky bay, through gorse and heather and bracken. Between cliffs and tide, this bit of lowland must have been cultivated intensively for centuries, but now a towering forest of green bracken, high as Logan’s head, came right down to the backs of the ruined cottages. Except for some gulls, the only animate thing which Logan could see was a shape high up the face of the landward cliff: a goat, or perhaps a deer. Primroses already flowered upon the cliff-face. Upon these scanty and isolated acres, a little village of MacAskivals had subsisted from time out of mind. But they were gone, and Logan stood in this wet green desolation as if he were the last man on earth.

He went down to the dinghy. The receding tide had left her high enough, but soon the sea would return; so he took off shoes and stockings and tried to drag her to a more sheltered place by a shelf of rock that ran up from the skerries into the silver sands of the beach. But though he bailed her out, she was too heavy for him; only the tide could budge her. Her oars he carried back to the black house. And now he would make his way across the island to the Old House, before evening came. The sun had withdrawn again, but surely he could find his way up the cliff, despite the mists, and so across brae and valley and hill to the Old House and Lady MacAskival. Already he had been nearly six days on the way.

Sitting on a boulder by the door of the black house, he examined the ordnance survey map of Carnglass, Daldour, and the waters round about. Carnglass really was a peculiar island. A ring of tremendous cliffs seemed to guard her from the sea at all points, except here at Dalcruach and at Askival harbor, a larger opening at the opposite extremity of Carnglass, away to the southwest. To judge by the contour-lines, these sea-cliffs also had an inner face, standing some five hundred feet high above a kind of central valley or moor. Halfway between Dalcruach and the Old House by Askival harbor, this valley was interrupted by a tall, sharp hill, ridges from which extended across the valley to the cliffs on either side of the island, a sort of watershed.

As the gull flies, it could not be more than three miles from Dalcruach to the Old House. But there was the hard climb of the landward cliff behind Dalcruach; then the valley or moor would be boggy; and the ridge in the middle of the island must be surmounted; and between that ridge and the Old House were some markings which Logan took to indicate a bad bog. The trip would require some hours, and he had best set off. The dotted line of a minor path, on the map, suggested that some track ran across the island, but surely nothing like a road. Then Logan took up his thorn stick and began the ascent of the landward cliff.

Up this dim path, surely little but sheep, goats, and deer had gone for many years. Here and there a hazel bush clung to the cliff’s edge. Though the day was cool, that sharp climb made Logan pant. After half an hour, he was at the summit, and much of Carnglass spread out before him--or would have been visible, had not the mist been growing thicker. He could make out the big hill--on the map it was called Mucaird--in the middle of the island, but the ridge and hill would have shut off Old House and New House, even had the day been clear. As a gust of wind in this high place dissolved the fog for a few moments, he glimpsed a derelict farm or sheep-steading nestled against Mucaird. And the valley between him and the high hill was not an even plateau, but rugged and broken with spurs of rock, though the bracken waved over the higher parts of it. He turned his glasses toward the south. There, across the deep blue of the Sound of Carnglass, lay the low isle of Daldour.

Now he would have to descend the inner face of the cliff, perhaps four hundred feet high, to the green valley: a descent more precarious than the climb from Dalcruach, for boulders lay tumbled upon the inner face, as if ready to fall to the valley floor, and their shapes were hidden by a dense growth of fern. He must step with care. Down he started.

But about three boulders down, he halted again. The mist--here it hung cloud-like--lay just over his head, the sunlight coming through in a dim religious way. At the moment, the valley beneath him, nevertheless, was quite clear of fog. And almost straight down, in the part of the valley at the foot of his cliff, men were moving. Logan turned his binoculars upon them.

Away to his left, a small puppet that must be a very big man was running frantically across the valley floor, just here rocky and bare. Some two hundred yards behind him, three other men trotted. These were armed men: it was rifles they seemed to be carrying. None of them were looking upward toward Logan. One of the three halted, knelt, brought his gun to his shoulder, and fired. The report echoed uncannily from the cliffs. He had shot at the big man leaping toward the further rocks: there could be no doubt of it.

But the big man was not hit. He had reached some boulders near the southern cliff, and now crouched behind one of them, drawing something from the long cloak or coat he wore. As his three pursuers came on--the man must have been hidden from their view, Logan thought--a report came from behind the cluster of boulders: the big man had a pistol. Immediately after firing, the man in the coat darted on to the next clump of boulders, and waited there. Stooping and taking what cover they could in the bracken, his three adversaries cautiously pushed forward, about ten yards from one another. The big man held the advantage of higher ground. As the three neared the rocks he had just left, and so came within range of his pistol, the big man fired a second time. Now the three pursuers fell flat on their faces, for the bullet seemed to have ricocheted against a boulder perilously close to the foremost rifleman. And taking advantage of their discomfiture, the big man scrambled on toward the mouth of a small ravine that appeared to twist into the southern cliff.

Swinging his glasses toward the three riflemen, Logan thought he caught some movement to _their_ rear. He focused the binoculars. Though he could not be sure, it seemed to him that someone or something was stealthily drawing closer, through bracken and gorse, to the three men. Whatever it might be--and if it was not an optical illusion--it kept hid in the green stuff; no head ever showed. If there, it must be moving on all fours, beast-like; what one detected was not a form, but a trail of movement through the dense bracken, to be discerned only by an observer who, like Logan, was perched high above.

Logan looked back toward the big man, who was just disappearing into the gully or den at the southern cliff. Two of the pursuers, who now had got to their feet, fired at him as they stood. The big man stumbled, recovered, and was gone into the recess. And the riflemen resumed, at a walk, their tracking. Then the bank of mist settled over Logan’s head and lower into the valley, cutting Logan off from sight of whatever was happening below. He heard two more shots, though; and then silence followed. Through all this, no human voice had drifted up to him.

Logan clung astonished to his perch. Here in Carnglass were wheels within wheels. He had suspected something was amiss in the island: but to discover, as if he were an Olympian looking down upon the follies of humankind, this curious sport of island man-hunting was bewildering even to Hugh Logan, who had been around. This, after all, was a small corner of Great Britain, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty. In Mutto’s Wynd, his own struggle with Jock Anderson’s gang conceivably might have been only a chance encounter; and even if it had been part of someone’s design, no more had been meant, perhaps, than a brutal robbery. The sinister-ludicrous figure of Captain Gare had come to him at Oban through no chance encounter, but that insubstantial personality had vanished before a little chaffing. This affair in the valley of Carnglass was deadly serious--this stalking of a man as if he were a rabbit. And Logan had not the faintest notion of what pursuers and pursued might be.