Chapter VIII: Part 8

After all, Logan found when he followed her, the water came only to their knees. At high tide, the passage would be impossible. He scratched a foot on some sharp submerged stone. Roof and floor of the cave now angled downward, and the water deepened; but by the time they reached the entrance, it was no higher than their waists. “In the old days,” Mary said, “little coracles came into this at low tide. There is another cave like this on the northern shore, but larger, and far harder to reach from the land.” She plucked a bit of seaweed from a rock. “This is the carrageen. In a better time, I will make you a pudding of it.” Then she ducked through the low mouth of the cave, Hugh Logan behind her, and they were in the night, by the ocean, a cliff at their backs, a splendid moon overhead.

For the first time in many days, the mist and drizzle had lifted from Carnglass altogether; and for these islands, the sea was calm. But the clear beauty of the night was small comfort to these two fugitives: Jackman and his gang might hunt them down by that round moon. Mary splashed through a rock pool toward the relatively low cliff of gray stone that met the ocean at this point. “I think, Hugh, that by this time they will have searched the Old House for us, and Jackman will know we have got out. But they will not know the way that we have gone, and perhaps Jackman cannot make the men follow him out of the house this night, for they are afraid of every shadow now. Here we’re too close to the Old House for safety. We’ll pass between Cailleach and the sea-cliffs, and so up to St. Merin’s Chapel; that’s best.” When the two of them had got to the foot of a faint path that seemed to wind up the cliff, Mary put on shoes and stockings. “Now, Mr. Barrister Logan, you pillar of respectability, you may wear trousers again.”

They climbed; they scrambled; they trotted; when they could, they ran. From the cliffs they descended into the glen that twisted round the hill of Cailleach, and hurried through heaps of stones along a forgotten trail; here, once, had been a village, and Duncan MacAskival’s people had lived under the thatch of one of these ruins. The girl was agile as a deer; it was all Logan could do to keep up with her, for his rucksack was curiously heavy. The moonlight helped them to make speed, but also it would leave them naked unto their enemies, should Jackman and the rest come this way. For more than an hour they hurried, until they had crossed a valley and saw before them the steep way up to the highest point of Carnglass, the headland on which stood St. Merin’s Chapel, with the graveyard round it. Then Mary flung herself exhausted on the heather, and Logan sank down panting beside her. Two or three strange white shapes scurried away from them; Logan started. “Are those things deer or goats?”

The tired girl laughed at him. “Carnglass sheep, like no other sheep on earth. Long legs and long necks, and great leapers, and altogether wild.” Everything in this forgotten island, it seemed, defied the tooth of time.

But it was no hour for philosophical observations. So soon as they had got a little strength back, they must be away to the top of the island. And what they could hope for there, aside from a brief respite, was more than Logan could see. Unarmed, they would be much easier game than Donley had been. Jackman and the rest would have their blood up. This girl, it might be, had destroyed herself by trying to save him. “Here, Hugh,” Mary said, “you’ll want this.” She took from the rucksack a paper in which were wrapped some scraps of meat, two boiled potatoes, and a piece of bread, all this salvaged furtively from Lady MacAskival’s dinner-tray. Logan, indeed, was ravenous, and he ate the lot, Mary insisting that she had got down a late supper. As he ate, she told him what had passed since he went down the Whiskey Bottle.

When Jackman and Royall had taken Logan to the study at gun-point, Mary MacAskival had run to her room and locked herself in. It was only much later in the day, when Jackman and most of the men were searching for Carruthers, that she had bullied out of Niven the fact that Logan was shut in the Whiskey Bottle. In her room, she had taken out of a chest the only weapon she had, the ancient dirk that was said to have been Askival’s, and had sat with it in her lap, expecting all the time to have Jackman and Royall turn upon her next. But Jackman had only tried her door; and, not being able to enter, had called out that he would deal with her later. And then he had gone out to comb the island for Carruthers, whom they did not find; nor did they find anyone else. The men returned after sunset, Jackman and Royall going back to the study, where they sat talking for hours. The girl had crept to the study door and had caught fragments of their argument.

No, they had not found Carruthers; but they had turned up something else. When Donley’s body was searched in the cellar, one of the men discovered in a pocket a water-soaked note. It was nearly illegible; but they could make out Logan’s signature, and that it was addressed to the police. On this evidence, Jackman and Royall abandoned their notion that Logan was an agent of Vlanarov; they now took him for a detective. The question remained as to what they ought to do with the man in the Whiskey Bottle. Royall thought it best to hold him there until they could get some boat, and then to run for it, abandoning their whole project. But Jackman was for death: Logan knew too much, and must go over the cliff. The two exhausted fanatics still were debating when the girl slipped away, but she believed they would dispose of Logan in the morning, if not sooner.

So she took Logan’s pack, with what food she could get her hands upon, and a pint bottle of paraffin, and Askival’s dirk; and she bullied and wheedled Niven, on guard in the old tower; and to her immense satisfaction, she had got Logan clean away. Jackman and his people had no notion of the existence of that passage out of the cistern; Lady MacAskival herself had not known of it. When she ran, Mary knew that she left her aunt in danger, but Jackman’s fanatic voice behind the study door convinced her she dared not delay; Jackman would act before his time ran out altogether. And here she was, lying beside Hugh Logan on the heather.

Behind them hulked the northern heights where St. Merin’s Chapel stood. They could hear a little waterfall tumbling, in that still night, from the cliff-tops. The burn ran through the heather and bracken close by them, lower down joining a stream that entered the sea by Askival harbor. Now they must climb to their last forlorn refuge. First they drank from the peaty burn; then Logan shouldered the rucksack, and up they started. They hardly spoke in the course of that hard nocturnal climb.

From the summit, nearly an hour later, most of Carnglass was dimly visible to them in the moonlight. They could make out specks of light away to the southwest: lamps burning in the Old House. “Hugh,” Mary said, laying a hand on his arm, “Carnglass is the oldest place in the world, and the loveliest. Do you hate it? You’ve seen only fright and death here. But it was Dr. Jackman that brought the terror. If--if we live, Hugh, I’ll show you Carnglass as you ought to see it. Can you forgive me for having drawn you into this terror?”

“One crowded hour of glorious life,” Logan told her, “really is worth an age without a name. And if I’d not come, I’d never have met Miss Mary MacAskival, would I?”

“No,” she said, with a little sob, “no. But we can’t loiter here.” She took Askival’s dirk from the rucksack. “Hugh, take this, and cut some branches off the trees around the chapel, as quickly as you can; and I’ll scrape together some dead sticks and bits of dry heather; I made a little pile of them here weeks ago, on the chance that I might need to light them one day. We can burn the rucksack, too, and my jacket. They’ll make no grand beacon, but we can do no more. The paraffin I brought will start them blazing.”

Logan stared at her. “Who’d see the fire, except Jackman’s boys?”

“There’s a chance, Hugh. The night is clear. Besides, what other scheme is there? And my people will come. They may not come soon enough, but they will come.”

“Your people?” The girl must be sunk in a Carnglass fantasy.

“Hurry, Hugh,” was all she said. “It won’t be long before dawn.”

They built their poor futile beacon, with what fuel they had on that hilltop, and they poured the paraffin upon it, and they set it alight with one of Logan’s matches, and they added to it the rucksack and Mary’s tweed jacket and Hugh’s coat. It flared somewhat better than Hugh had expected. But what possibility existed of this being seen by any vessel passing in the night, or of being acted upon? And it was almost certain that it would guide Jackman.

“We’re only targets here,” Logan said. “At the chapel, we’d have some shelter.” They climbed still higher on that cliff-plateau, until they came to a low drystone dyke. Beyond it were tombstones, white in the moonlight. This was Carnglass graveyard; and in the middle of the graveyard stood a long, low medieval building, St. Merin’s Chapel, battered by five centuries. Away to their right, a tall ruin, infinitely older than the chapel, round, nearly forty feet high, windowless and roofless, loomed at the brink of the cliff.

On its rough stones flickered the light of their little impromptu beacon. “They call that the Pict’s House,” said Mary, “or sometimes the Firgower’s House.” The tower’s circular wall slanted slightly inward, all round, for some twenty feet of its height; then it shot perpendicularly to its summit. It was what was called a broch, a strong place, Pictish work beyond question. “I do not think that really the Pictish chief lived here,” Mary went on, “for that room and the passages under the Old House have the look of his palace. The Picts lived underground, you know. This was a watchtower, and a place of refuge.”

She turned toward the chapel. The firelight was reflected, between them and the medieval building, upon a great Celtic cross, perhaps fifteen feet high, carved with grotesques and convoluted interlacing bands; and it leant heavily to one side. This was the Cross of Carnglass, set up by the missionaries of St. Columba in the dim Irish age, St. Merin’s Cross. Mary led Logan toward it; and, as they came close up, she pulled from one of the stunted rowan trees which brooded over that windswept graveyard a little twig, on which the first leaves of spring had opened. She thrust it into the topmost buttonhole of Logan’s shirt. “The rowan keeps off wraiths and evil spirits, Hugh,” she said, “and St. Merin’s kirkyard is famous for them. Niven thinks I am the chief of them. Look at me: am I a witch?”

Mary MacAskival stood before the Cross of Carnglass, her red hair brushing the white stone, her haughty nose and firm chin marking her as the last of an old, old, fierce line: perhaps, truly, the descendant of the Merin whose bones lay beneath one of these grass-grown grave mounds. “If anyone could call spirits from the vasty deep, you could, Mary,” Hugh told her.

She smiled queerly. “It may be I will do just that, Hugh Logan. But here, I’ll show you the chapel.” She took him through a Gothic doorway--the wooden door, ajar, sagged on its hinges--and flashed the torch-beam over the tombs within. A grotesque stone face, rudely carved, stared at them from a niche. Directly before them stood up an ornate modern tomb of marble. “Sir Alastair is beneath that. And here’s his postbox.” She pointed to a slot in the marble, surrounded by a carved funerary wreath; and she slid her hand into the opening. “Oh, there’s nothing within now!” she said, as if really disappointed. “For years, you know, my aunt used to send letters by the butler or footman to Sir Alastair in his tomb. And I used to post my letters here, too, when I wasn’t watched.”

Post her letters there! Mary must have read the amazement on his face, for she added, as if to reassure him of her sanity, “Oh, yes. The letter I sent Duncan MacAskival, that brought you here, was posted here in Sir Alastair’s postbox.” Was this some macabre witticism of the uncanny little beauty, or a delusion grown out of dreams and isolation? “But we daren’t linger here, Hugh. If Dr. Jackman sees our fire, he’ll come up the cliff straight away.” She pointed to the old dirk, which Hugh Logan had thrust into his belt. “That was Askival’s. You must be my Askival, Hugh. I am Merin, you know: Merin of Carnglass, who’s haunted this place since time began.” She was half playful, half in earnest. The dirk, Logan thought, might be small use against the guns of Jackman’s men, but it was some comfort. Then he followed Mary MacAskival out of the silent chapel, and toward the towering broch by the precipice. Their fire still leaped against the night sky of lonely Carnglass, but in a few minutes only embers would remain.

“The Pict’s House,” Mary was saying, “is the best place we can hide. By the sea, away below these cliffs, is a great cave; but even I could not lead you down the path to it in darkness; and besides, the tide is coming in now, and the cave will be full almost to the top. It must be the Pict’s House for us. One still can climb the stair to the top of it.” She was quite calm, as if, having done all that she could do, she abandoned herself to fate and fortune. “And from the Pict’s House, we can see nearly all of Carnglass, once the sun is up.”

They entered the tower through a square doorway ten feet above the ground; a worn timber, sea-drift, propped against the wall just below the door, made this scramble possible. The doorway was capped, by way of lintel, by a great stone slab; the Picts had not known the arch. Empty and roofless, the round interior cavern of the broch was before them, but Mary turned into the wall itself: a circling stair led upward, its steps vast rude slabs. By it they came to the crumbling summit of the broch, and Logan observed, while they climbed, that no mortar lay between the cunningly-placed stones of the tower; this was the work of men in the dawn of history, and beside it the Old House across the island was a thing of yesterday.

Round the top of the broch ran a stone platform. “Stoop down behind the parapet, Hugh,” the girl told him, “so Jackman won’t see us, if he comes this way.” The earliest hint of a spring dawn glimmered in the east; a corncrake fluttered up from the parapet. Right below them, the tremendous cliffs, the cliffs over which Lagg had gone, fell sheer away to the ocean. From this point, the last Pict chieftain may have watched the long ships of the Vikings as they swept inexorably out of the sea-mist to the north. On that sea, nothing was visible this morning but whitecaps breaking on a submerged reef.

“No, there’s nothing, no sail,” Mary MacAskival said anxiously, almost as if she had expected one. “Do you know the tale of the fairy boat, Hugh, that sails through the mists? If a girl glimpses it, she vanishes before nightfall. I wish one could carry me off--and you. Now you see my Carnglass, Hugh Logan.”

He looked landward. Far to the west-southwest, beyond Cailleach, the Old House stood grim on its rock; lower down, the New House, among its plantations. Between them and the Old House stretched glen and hill, heather and bracken, boulder and peat-bog, waterfall and burn. On this lovely morning, the mists were quite gone, and there was revealed to him the unearthly beauty of the forgotten island. The girl took his arm. “Hugh, were it yours, would you live here always--or almost always?”

“That I would, Mary MacAskival.” Carnglass, for good or evil, set its mark on men.

She faced him squarely, putting her hands on his shoulders. “We may be under that sea tonight, Hugh Logan. But if we are not, why shouldn’t Carnglass be yours? I’ve known you but thirty-six hours, Hugh. You’re all the man I need to know. Do you fear me? Some men do, though I’m so little.” She kissed him then, and said, “Hugh Logan, I have kissed you more times than I have kissed all other men in all my life. Do you mean to ask me to marry you?”

Torn between love and doubt, in that high place, Logan looked long into her green eyes. “They would say, Mary, that I took advantage of a lonely girl who had barely met me, for the sake of her money.”

She tossed her bright hair at that. “Don’t be so canny, Hugh! Do you know the MacAskival motto, over the door of the old tower? ‘They have said and they will say; let them be saying.’ The MacAskivals, man or woman, have no concern for what they say in Glasgow or Edinburgh or London or all the wide world.” Then a look of fright came into her flashing eyes. “Is it that you are married already, Hugh?”

“No,” he said, “but I will be, if we get alive out of this.” And as the sun rose, he took her in his arms. Rash, proud, and strange that girl was, perhaps a little mad; but in that moment he loved her more than all the kingdoms of the earth.

She clung to him, sobbing and laughing softly in her moment of triumph and surrender. But abruptly he thrust her back, and pulled her below the level of the parapet. “Mary, Mary! They’ve come!” For three armed men were climbing the slope toward the chapel, and Jackman was the first of them. Logan thought that they two had not been seen. No shots were fired, at least.

His arm around the girl’s waist, he ventured a second glance between two heavy stones that teetered precariously on the parapet’s brink. Yes, Jackman and Anderson and Powert. The men got over a low wall that ran round the graveyard, close by the remnants of the burned-out futile beacon. Then they entered the chapel.

“Mary, girl,” he whispered, “they’ll be on us in three or four minutes, I think.” She did not cry, but kissed him once more, and then composed her young face, as if the MacAskival ought to meet enemies without flinching.

“Hugh,” she said, “every second we can delay may help us.” He did not see why, but she gave him no time to dissent. “Back down the stair, Hugh, and if they try to come in, we’ll cast down the timber by the door.” Yes, they could do that, though without guns they could do no more than delay Jackman briefly. Back down the stair they went, and crouched by the empty archaic doorway. It wouldn’t do to push away the timber-gangplank that led up from the ground unless they must, for the noise of its fall would bring Jackman and his men.

Now they heard Jackman’s voice; he was coming right round the broch from the chapel. Anderson’s sullen Gallowgate mutter replied to Jackman. And in a moment the hunters stood just below the broch’s door, though Logan dared not look out. “All right, Powert,” Jackman said, “up with you.” At that, Logan and Mary MacAskival shoved against the timber with all their strength. It slid sideways and fell to the ground. They showed themselves for an instant as they pushed, and someone fired, but the bullet passed over their heads into the broch.

“Ah, well,” came Jackman’s voice from below, “you _did_ lead us a chase, didn’t you? Anderson, Powert, take hold there.” The timber was heaved back into place; Logan could not risk rising again to push it off, for Jackman would have a gun trained on the doorway. “Powert, Mr. Logan is not armed,” said Jackman. “Quick, now!” A man sprang up the timber and through the door.

Thrusting at him with the dirk, Logan got home to Powert’s upper arm, and the man cried out and grappled with him. Before he could slash Powert again, Jackman was up, and poked the little pistol Meg right into Logan’s face. “Gallant, Logan, very gallant; but drop that.” Logan flung down the dirk. Mary MacAskival was struggling in Anderson’s arms. “A pleasant morning, eh, Logan?” Jackman said. “You’ll not see another.”

13

They took Hugh Logan and Mary MacAskival out of the Pict’s House. Anderson tied Logan’s wrists together, behind his back, with a length of heavy cord, pulling the knots savagely tight. Jackman held the girl by the arm meanwhile; and when Anderson had finished with Logan, under Jackman’s instructions he tied a cord to Mary’s right wrist, and retained the other end of the cord in his hand while Jackman removed Powert’s jacket and bandaged the flesh-wound with a strip torn from the tail of Powert’s shirt. This done, Jackman had Anderson tie the other end of Mary’s cord to Jackman’s own left wrist.

“There!” Jackman said, contentedly, “a brisk morning’s run, and no harm done. Anderson, Powert and I will take this charming couple to the Old House while you trot down the brae and call back Ferd and Niven; I think they should be near the sheiling this side of Cailleach.”

Anderson glowered at Logan. “Ye said I wud hae the thrashin’ o’ that clot, Doctor.”

“That you shall, Anderson, my man, that you shall--once we’re at the Old House. I do believe Anderson will learn all we need to know from you, Logan, in short order. Our treatment of you, Miss MacAskival, will need to be rather more laborious: the washing of the brain, as our Chinese friends say. But it will all come out in the wash, won’t it? And Powert, too, will be given his fair turn at you, Logan: fair shares for all, eh?” Jackman ran his tongue over his thin lips. “In one thing, at least, you seem to have told me the truth, Logan: you’ve no people in Carnglass, for you’d not have been cowering in that ruin if there were any. There’s Carruthers to be accounted for; but I suppose he may have missed his footing in the dark and have gone over the cliffs. I must confess that my estimate of your abilities has diminished, Logan. Whatever possessed you to light that fire here by the chapel? You might have eluded us four or five hours longer if you hadn’t done that. Well, drive him along, Powert.”

With his unwounded arm, Powert gave Logan a fierce shove in the back, setting him stumbling in the direction of the Old House; and Jackman tugged on Mary’s cord, pulling her with him behind Logan and Powert. The girl’s face was quite drained of color, but very haughty. “My dear,” Jackman said to her, casually, “how changed you are going to be within a few days! How very changed!”

Then, from somewhere below in the nearer valley, there came to them the crack of a rifle-shot. It was answered by another, apparently from a different gun. Next was a burst of firing, and then a faint cry.

Jackman’s satisfied smile altered horribly; he was Rumpelstiltskin again. “Logan,” he muttered, “is there a man of yours in Carnglass, after all? Or is that only Niven’s or Caggia’s nerves playing them tricks? Anderson, you and I must go down to see. Powert, we’ll leave you with Logan; he can’t do you harm. The girl will come with me. We’ll send back a man to help you get Logan to the Old House, Powert.”

Powert most obviously did not relish the plan. “Coom, Dr. Jackman, I’ve a bad arm, and this cove’s a queer one.”

“Nonsense,” Jackman said, “we’ll bind his feet, too, until we send Anderson or someone else for you.” Away below, there was only silence, but Jackman ran his hand across his forehead uneasily. “Here: we’ll put him inside the chapel with you, and you can watch the door, with your back to the wall: that’s safe enough.” Powert scowled, but shoved Logan toward the door of St. Merin’s Chapel. Jackman herded the four of them inside.

Now that the dawn came through the broken tracery of the chapel’s pointed windows, Logan could see that the single room contained seven or eight tombs raised above the floor, some of them very old; and a number of the flagstones, deeply incised by some rude stonecarver, apparently covered other graves. “Wha’ in hell’s yon!” cried Anderson, abruptly, pointing.

Near the northeast corner of the room, one of the flagstones had been raised, and now was leant against the wall. Where it had lain, a little mound of earth, freshly dug, protruded above the floor; and in the earth was thrust a curiously primitive wooden spade. The mound was about six feet long. They all crowded close to it. An earthenware dish had been set atop the mound, and the dish was filled with, of all things, nails and what looked like salt. Across the dish lay a branch from a rowan tree. “That,” Mary MacAskival said softly to Dr. Jackman, “is how the spirits of the newly dead are laid in these islands.”

“Wha’ fule’s been diggin’ graves?” Anderson growled, looking back over his shoulder toward the empty doorway.

Jackman stood rigid; then, “I think Carruthers must be under that clay. Anderson, take the spade and uncover him.” Mary MacAskival shivered slightly.

Anderson cursed, but under Jackman’s hard eye he began to shovel. The grave was very shallow. In a minute or two, a heavy shape could be made out, wrapped in a big piece of tarred canvas. “That will be the head at the far end,” Jackman whispered. “Powert, draw the canvas from the face.”

Mary had turned away, but Logan, dreadfully fascinated, saw clearly the smashed and fallen face of a man he never had looked upon before. And Jackman screamed: he screamed twice, and so terribly that his men shook, for the screams were worse than the ruined face in the grave. “Lagg! It’s Lagg!”

Quivering, Anderson dropped the spade. “Aye,” he said, “Tam Lagg, that we pit ower the cliff into the sea. For the love o’ God, Powert, cover his mug.”

Powert, his teeth chattering, let the canvas drop back over the corpse.

“Logan,” shrieked Jackman, turning a frantic face on him, “Logan, what are you? What are you? Do you make dead men rise from the sea? Was it you that put this thing here?” He had the pistol in his hand, and thrust it against Logan’s middle.

He will fire now, Logan thought, for he’s quite out of his head. There was the sound of a shot. But I’m not hit, Logan realized; I feel nothing. Jackman sprang away and looked out the doorway; the shot, after all, had come from outside, though in his tension Logan had thought, for an instant, that Jackman had pulled the trigger. Yet surely a gun had gone off fairly close at hand.

“Anderson, watch this door,” Jackman ordered; he had a measure of control over himself. “Powert, give me that rope.” He forced Logan to sit, and tied his ankles together. “We’ll return for you in a few minutes, Powert.”

“Me? I’ll not sit here by the dead man.” Powert scarcely could hold his rifle.

Jackman sent him a deadly look from those glowering black eyes of his. “You’ll be another dead man yourself, Powert, if I hear another word from you. Now, Anderson, we’ll look into this. Miss MacAskival, if you cry out, I’ll be forced to put a bullet through your head.” He shoved her through the doorway.

“Hugh,” Mary called back, reckless of Jackman, “Hugh, I love you!” Then she and Jackman and Anderson were out of sight.

Powert, left with Logan and the corpse, still shook; and he cursed Logan and Jackman and Carnglass while he made his preparations as if for siege. He pushed the helpless Logan roughly against Sir Alastair’s tomb, facing away from the doorway, and parallel with the open grave and the awful thing under the canvas. Then he pulled shut the sagging door of the chapel, so that some force would be required to budge it; and he himself leaned against a tombstone that came up to his shoulders, with his face toward the door, and his rifle in his hands, the barrel resting upon the head of another tombstone. So situated, Powert could watch the door, keep an eye on Logan and the sheeted thing, and have the comforting feel of stone at his back.

Logan himself, after the repeated shocks of that fair morning, was in little better state than Powert. Silent, he lay motionless against the tomb of Sir Alastair MacAskival, his brain dull, dull, dull. There were no more shots outside: only the rustle of a breeze in the rowan trees. The stillness was a trying thing. Powert was mumbling to himself: obscenities, blasphemies, scraps of nearly-forgotten prayer. The sunlight was pouring into the chapel through the unglazed Gothic windows. Five or six minutes passed thus.

Then a faint sound came. Was something stirring in the high graveyard grass, just outside the closed door? Did the door itself creak, as if very gently tried? “Anderson,” Powert cried out, choking, “is it you, man? Dr. Jackman?” Nothing answered. Did the door creak again, ever so slightly, or was it the breeze? “Sing out,” Powert shouted, glaring wild-eyed at the flimsy door, “or I’ll shoot!”

High in the wall behind Powert was one of the pointed windows, its stone tracery for the most part broken away. It must be at least eight feet above the level of the graveyard. Though Logan could see this window, Powert, intent on the doorway, could not. And as something rose cautiously above the windowsill, from outside, Logan bit his lip to keep back a cry.

It was a man’s head that cut off the morning light: a lean man, keen-eyed; and there was a long white beard on his chin; and there was a little black knife between his teeth. His eyes took in the room. Steadying himself by clutching the broken tracery with his left hand, stealthily he rose until his shoulders came above the window-ledge. In his brown right hand he held a large stone.

As if someone had thrust tentatively against it, the rotten door creaked shrilly. “Damn you,” Powert was crying, “speak up, or I’ll shoot.” The white-bearded man outside the window drew back his arm and flung the stone with great force, as if letting fly at a rabbit. The rock caught Powert at the back of his head; he fell to his knees, the rifle clattering on the flagstones. At that the door burst open, and two men tumbled into the room, and were upon Powert before he could recover. A boy followed them, and, kneeling by Logan, looked shyly into his face. These were the two men and the boy, MacAskivals from Daldour, that Logan had seen in Loch Boisdale, four days before.

Then there strode through the doorway a very tall old man, erect and vigorous and bearded to his chest, with a shotgun in his hand. He was worth looking at; but another man, hard on his heels, was still stranger. This was a burly, broad-shouldered fellow, with a heavy, jolly face, and mild eyes that were exceedingly odd, though it would have been difficult to say why. Something in the look of his face was queer enough. Yet it was his clothing that made him conspicuous. The other men wore the caps and canvas cloaks and rough homespun tweeds of the crofters and fishermen in the remoter Isles. This burly man, in strong contrast, was dressed in what seemed to be the garments of a laird or prosperous farmer: green tweed jacket, green corduroy breeches and long stockings, good heavy shoes. Under the open jacket was a soiled yellow waistcoat; and on his head was a battered porkpie hat. These clothes were in wretched repair, with dark stains here and there upon them. The breeches, seemingly split at the seams, were held together by pins. One sleeve of the jacket was ripped open from shoulder to wrist. And although the clothes had been got on, they did not fit the man who wore them.

Resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, the tall old man bent over Logan and spoke in Gaelic. Logan shook his head: “I know only English.” Frowning, the old man muttered through his splendid beard to the boy beside him.

The boy stammered a little, as if overwhelmed with shyness; but there was no fear in him. He spoke to Logan in good, if careful, English. “Malcolm Mor MacAskival of Daldour asks what is your name, and what do you do in Carnglass.” The pirate-like old man looked hard at Logan.

These, then, were Mary MacAskival’s people! She had not been woolgathering when she spoke of them. How she had summoned them, Hugh Logan did not know; but the five of them--two had gagged Powert, and were sitting on the man--were staring at Logan intently. This was no time for long explanations. “Untie me,” Logan said. “I am Hugh Logan, and I am to marry Miss Mary MacAskival.”

There was a murmur from the men, and all five MacAskivals of Daldour took off their caps deferentially, and then put them back on again. With a fisherman’s deftness, old Malcolm Mor undid the cords about Logan’s wrists and ankles, and the two men who looked like twins promptly bound Powert with them. As he released Logan, Malcolm Mor said, in decent English, “Then I am your man, sir, and so are my sons and my grandson, and my nephew Angus, and my nephew Kenneth who is not here. We saw the man with the third eye lead the lady away. Will we go after her?” Malcolm Mor tapped his shotgun. Malcolm Mor’s two sons had old rifles; the boy and Angus, the queer burly man in the queerer clothes, were unarmed. One of the sons, almost bowing, handed Powert’s rifle to Logan as he stood up and tried to get the blood to circulate in his tingling wrists and ankles.

Hugh Logan surveyed his little army. “Yes, we will,” he said, “if they don’t come after us first. Just now they’re down in the valley hunting someone; but some of them will come back to the chapel.” These men, he thought, would be good shots; and to live in Daldour, they must be hardy and probably courageous, though he doubted whether they had much experience at man-killing.

“It is my nephew Kenneth that they are hunting,” Malcolm Mor observed. “I sent him to watch them from the bracken. It was Kenneth who shot his gun to lead them away from the chapel. They will not find him. We have watched them for a week, but we did not understand what they did, and there was no gentleman to lead us. We would have shot the man with the third eye when he took the lady away, but we were afraid that she might be hurt. Is it so that they are robbers and murderers?”

“That they are,” Logan said, emphatically.

“Then,” Malcolm Mor went on, in the slow, gentle Island English, “it would be lawful for us to hunt them?” Logan suspected that the people of Daldour were extremely shy of the law.

“It would,” Logan told him. “I am a lawyer, and I give you my authority.”

Malcolm Mor MacAskival’s old eyes lit up, and he smiled as some Norse rover might have smiled. “Then, sir,” he said, “we will go after the lady, and take the Old House of Fear.” He seemed to have no doubt whatsoever of the success of this undertaking by five or six men and a boy. “There are three more able-bodied men in Daldour, but we have no time to fetch them. Kenneth, my nephew, will come to us soon. Will we go down into the valley now, Mr. Logan?”

“Let’s have a look about,” Logan said. The men followed him through the chapel doorway. When Logan had thrown his rucksack on the fire, he had stuffed his binoculars into a trouser-pocket; and now he pulled them out and stared through them in the direction of the Old House; but, what with hills, rocks, and clumps of trees and thickets of bracken, he could see no one moving.

Then, a hundred yards away, and ascending toward the chapel, Anderson came into view. Logan dropped the binoculars and snatched up his rifle, but Anderson had seen them before he could get the gun to his shoulder. For a second, Anderson stared aghast; then, flinging himself around, he leaped downhill, vanishing into bracken, reappearing on a knoll, slipping, almost rolling down a talus-slope, merging with the blur of gray rock and purple heather and green bracken. Logan fired twice, but could not have hit him. At that, Malcolm Mor and his two sons brought up their guns and fired also. They did not really take aim, and Logan thought they meant to frighten, rather than to wound; but also he thought that they could be brought to shoot to kill if they must.

“We can catch him,” Malcolm Mor said, like a dog eager for the word from his master. “He is a town man, and we are faster.”

“No,” Logan decided, shaking his head, “no, there’ll be three others down there, and they have Miss MacAskival with them, on a rope. We’ll go down and after them, but together; and no one must shoot if the lady might be hurt.” This deliberation was agony to Logan himself, but he had been an officer, and he knew something of tactics.

The MacAskivals nodded. “My nephew Kenneth will be watching them from the bracken,” Malcolm Mor said. “We will go down, and he will join us; and if they take the lady to the Old House, then we will follow them into the house.”

Malcolm Mor’s nephew Angus, the burly man in the dirty yellow waistcoat, was nodding and smiling at every word his old uncle uttered. “Do you have a gun?” Logan said to him. The man opened his mouth, but words did not come out: only mouthed grunts, rather horrid. Malcolm Mor seemed somewhat embarrassed.

“He can not speak,” the boy--Malcolm Gille was his name--said apologetically. “He is called”--here the boy seemed to seek the English equivalent of a Gaelic term, and emerged triumphantly--“he is called Dumb Angus.” Dumb Angus nodded enthusiastically at the mention of his name. “And,” the boy went on, “he is simple. Dumb Angus is simple, and does not have a gun, but he is very strong, and he is honest, and he makes many jokes.” Dumb Angus bowed and smiled, and tapped himself on the head to prove that he knew he was simple. “He cannot speak,” the boy said, “but he makes jokes in other ways.”

Logan checked Powert’s rifle, and reloaded; one of Malcolm’s sons--their names, it turned out, were John and Robert--brought him a cartridge-pouch that Powert had worn. What ought they to do with Powert? Malcolm Mor, now assured that the majesty of the law sheltered the persecuted sept of MacAskival, speculatively fingered the little black knife in his belt. “No,” said Logan, “we’ll bring them all to trial, if we can.”

“There is one already taken and locked away,” Malcolm Mor offered. “His name, I think, is Carruthers. We took him the night before last night, and carried him to Daldour, and locked him in a byre, and he is afraid, for he thinks that we will eat him. Dumb Angus made him think so; that is one of the jokes of Dumb Angus. It is pleasant to have Dumb Angus in Daldour. We could carry this man, too, to Daldour, but there is not time.”

Dumb Angus was gesturing and beckoning, and pointing upward. At the east end of the chapel, behind the altar, ran a kind of low loft or gallery, of wood, probably built when the chapel was re-roofed by Sir Alastair MacAskival. “Yes,” said Logan, “that will do. Put Powert there, at the back, and no one is likely to notice him until we need him.” The sons of Malcolm carried Powert up the short flight of wooden steps, and tightened the cords and his gag. Dumb Angus might be simple, but he had eyes in his head.

And now they could start in pursuit of Jackman, for Mary MacAskival’s sake. Anderson probably would have warned Jackman and the others by this time; but the warning might do no mischief, for those four guns going off at his heels must have sounded to Anderson as if half the constabulary of Scotland were after him. They could not catch Jackman and the rest before they reached the Old House, the odds were, nor would it have been safe to fire at the retreating gang with Mary MacAskival in their midst. But by night, Logan was resolved, he and the Daldour people would make their try. “Well, gentlemen,” he said to Malcolm Mor and the others, “if you’re ready, I am.” And they started down the brae.

As they trotted and scrambled toward the valley, the boy running by Logan’s side, Logan said to Malcolm Gille, “Why does Dumb Angus wear such clothes?”

“Those clothes were not his.” The boy smiled broadly. “It is one of the jokes of Dumb Angus. They are the clothes of Mr. Lagg, the factor, that we found broken below the cliffs and buried in the chapel of St. Merin. For Dumb Angus, it is always Hallowe’en.”

The humor of Daldour, Logan took it, had its grisly side. Dumb Angus it must have been that Rab had encountered two nights before. If even the simpletons of Daldour--and the whole band of Daldour MacAskivals was a remarkably odd-looking lot--were this resourceful, it might be just possible for Logan to get Mary alive out of the Old House.

14

On the flank of Cailleach, a little ferret-like man rose out of the heather to join Logan and the MacAskivals: Kenneth MacAskival. Like the rest of his family, he really understood English, when he chose, and could speak it tolerably well when he had to. On learning from Malcolm Mor that this gentleman was the betrothed of The MacAskival, Kenneth gave Logan his report.

After firing twice that morning to draw Jackman away from the chapel, Kenneth MacAskival had contented himself with creeping through the bracken and spying on the retreating party. The lady, Kenneth said, never spoke, so far as he could hear; though the men thrust her roughly along when, led on a cord as she was, she stumbled. They would be at the Old House within a few minutes, the man with the third eye and the rest, and could not be intercepted.

Logan and his men did not move toward the Old House so fast as they could have. For Jackman might have laid an ambush, which had to be watched for among the rocks and dens of rugged Carnglass. Once, through his binoculars, Logan caught a glimpse of a hurrying figure, very close to the Old House; then it was hidden again by a low intervening ridge.

Either of two courses he might take, Logan thought. He might send the MacAskivals in their lobster boat to Loch Boisdale or whatever other port they could reach that had a police station, and ask for prompt help. But this would take hours, many hours, and meanwhile Jackman would have Mary MacAskival in the Old House. And Jackman would be thinking of the ruin of his scheme, and of the gelignite in the cellars. Besides, would any police constable believe such a story, from such a crew as the MacAskivals, without telegraphing to Glasgow or Edinburgh for orders, which would mean delays? No, that plan wouldn’t do.

So there remained to Logan only the storming of the Old House. Briefly, he thought of trying to enter through the passage in the rock by which Mary and he had escaped; but that was no go, since one of Jackman’s riflemen at the cistern-mouth could kill anyone who tried to ascend. They would have to rush the place from outside.

The thing could not be tried until evening, for Jackman had more men within the Old House than Logan had without, and Jackman’s men were desperate, well armed, and probably experienced in killing. By day, it would have been mad. The oldest tower, with its little windows and iron bars, would have been impossible to take even if defended by only one or two riflemen, unless the attackers had mortars. The Renaissance block was nearly as strong. But the Victorian addition was another matter. The gate was stout, and the ground-floor windows were small, covered by iron grills, and shuttered within. The plate-glass windows of the first floor, however, were immense and undefended, and could be reached with a long ladder--after dark. Even supposing Logan and his men got inside the Old House, they still would be outnumbered. Their hope was that before they should make their rush, they might be able to demolish the morale of Jackman’s people, already badly shaken.

To help Mary, Logan would have taken any risk: if getting himself shot would have saved her, he would have rushed the Old House that hour. But the best chance for saving her, it seemed to him, lay in keeping Jackman’s people very much on edge, and busy--and in praying that Jackman himself might not go mad altogether. And this meant that some eight hours, eight intolerable hours for Logan, must pass before he could act.

But meanwhile he could prepare. Giving the Old House a wide berth, he led the MacAskivals to the farm steading nearest the castle. Before the troubles had begun, Simmons had kept the steading in some order, though there were only two animals about the place: two shaggy and ill-tempered little Barra horses, grazing in a small field. Having caught the horses, the MacAskivals harnessed them to a farm cart. This they loaded with straw, and with what loose lumber they could find; also they put two gallon tins of paraffin, discovered in the farmhouse, into the cart. In a shed they came upon a long ladder, which they piled atop straw and lumber. Then, keeping out of range of fire from the Old House, Dumb Angus and Malcolm Gille took the horses and cart circuitously round to the wooded policies of the New House, which was as close to the Victorian wing of the Old House as they could get without being fired upon.

While this operation was going forward, Logan sent Kenneth and John MacAskival to the rocky and bracken-covered hillsides that were barely within extreme firing range of the Old House. And there the two veteran poachers commenced a desultory fire against the windows of the Old House. Logan gave Powert’s rifle to Kenneth, as the best weapon available, taking Kenneth’s shotgun for himself. Concealed as they were by dense bracken, and shifting position after every shot, there was little danger of the MacAskivals being hit by retaliatory fire from the Old House. For their part, the MacAskivals were instructed not really to attempt to hit anyone, but to spend their time shattering panes and nerves. The windows of Mary’s room in the old tower they left untouched. Lady MacAskival’s room was on the seaward side of the Old House, and so safe. For that matter, the whole garrison of the Old House could retreat to the seaward rooms and temporary security, except for what luckless sentinels Dr. Jackman might leave to guard against a sudden rush. By early afternoon, every pane on the eastern side of the Old House had been shattered, except those in Mary MacAskival’s windows.

For the first hour of this, three or four marksmen replied from the Old House. But they could have seen almost nothing to shoot at, and their risk of being struck by flying windowglass, if not by bullets, was considerable. The return fire slackened perceptibly in the second hour, and after that there came only infrequent shots from a single rifle on the second floor, as if to demonstrate that the defenders were still awake. Another rifleman on the roof of the old tower was driven below early in the game. What all this did to the nerves of Jackman’s men--this sniping by an unknown body of enemies, who had not even made a formal demand for the surrender of the Old House--Logan could only surmise. The loss of Powert, too, coming on the heels of Carruthers’ disappearance and the discovery of Lagg’s body, must have made an impression.

Logan sent Robert MacAskival round to keep an eye on the back of the old tower, to make sure no one slipped out by the garden gate; the man hid himself behind an outcrop of rock and bided his time, leaving the shooting to the others. Accompanied by Malcolm Mor, Logan himself watched the main entrance from the plantation that stretched from the New House nearly to the rock of the Old House. And from Malcolm Mor, as they lay on their bellies under cover, that warm and fatal spring day, Logan pieced together a good deal more of the history of the recent troubles in Carnglass.

* * * * *

Poaching in Carnglass the shy twilight folk of Daldour took for a natural right. The older people of the Daldour MacAskivals, like Malcolm Mor, had been born in Carnglass and looked upon it as Eden; several of them, from time to time, right down to the coming of Dr. Jackman as Lady MacAskivals guest and master, had been servants at the Old House or on the two farms. Life in that windswept peat-bog Daldour was precarious at best, and the dwindling race of the MacAskival crofters and fisherfolk had considered the killing of a sheep or a deer in Carnglass as no more than getting back a bit of their lost patrimony. That the sheep and the deer nominally belonged to old Lady MacAskival was little to them: she was a mere Lowlander, a MacAskival only by marriage--a bad marriage at that--and their enemy.

So whenever they dared--especially in the early morning or the evening, when the gamekeepers might be in their cottages--the Daldour men, for years, had landed in Carnglass under cover of darkness or fog, most commonly mooring their lobster-boats in a great cave under the headland on which St. Merin’s Chapel stood. The cave was known to very few; and though the ascent was precarious even for MacAskivals, still the descent was so risky as to daunt even the boldest hired gamekeeper, most of the time.

And it seemed that the taking ways of the Daldour MacAskivals, in recent years, had been winked at by The MacAskival herself, Miss Mary. For she had been a little girl on a barren island croft, and knew the rigors of the Daldour life. Besides, she was adored by, and adored, old Malcolm Mor, the chief man in Daldour, who for some years turned from fishing and poaching to being the gardener at the Old House, until Lagg gave him the sack. Malcolm Mor told her tales of the vanished glories of the MacAskivals, and of the witcheries of Carnglass, and showed the schoolgirl, during her Carnglass summers, the secrets of the Old House and of the Carnglass caves. What Malcolm Mor’s kith and kin did, Mary MacAskival overlooked when overlooking was discreet. Now and again, on lonely rambles to the further reaches of the deserted island, Mary would meet with the furtive deer-stalkers and sheep-stealers from Daldour, who blended with gorse and heather and bracken when anyone else showed his face; and they would tip their caps, and offer the girl strange things washed up from the sea, such as “Mary’s Nut,” a Molucca bean, come by the Gulf Stream all the way from the Caribbean--for it brought good fortune, if worn on a chain round the neck.