CHAPTER VI

The Skirts of the Coolin

Obviously I must keep away from the railway. If the police were after

me in Morvern, that line would be warned, for it was a barrier I must

cross if I were to go farther north. I observed from the map that it

turned up the coast, and concluded that the place for me to make for

was the shore south of that turn, where Heaven might send me some luck

in the boat line. For I was pretty certain that every porter and

station-master on that tin-pot outfit was anxious to make better

acquaintance with my humble self.

I lunched off the sandwiches the Broadburys had given me, and in the

bright afternoon made my way down the hill, crossed at the foot of a

small fresh-water lochan, and pursued the issuing stream through

midge-infested woods of hazels to its junction with the sea. It was

rough going, but very pleasant, and I fell into the same mood of idle

contentment that I had enjoyed the previous morning. I never met a

soul. Sometimes a roe deer broke out of the covert, or an old blackcock

startled me with his scolding. The place was bright with heather, still

in its first bloom, and smelt better than the myrrh of Arabia. It was a

blessed glen, and I was as happy as a king, till I began to feel the

coming of hunger, and reflected that the Lord alone knew when I might

get a meal. I had still some chocolate and biscuits, but I wanted

something substantial.

The distance was greater than I thought, and it was already twilight

when I reached the coast. The shore was open and desolate—great banks

of pebbles to which straggled alders and hazels from the hillside

scrub. But as I marched northward and turned a little point of land I

saw before me in a crook of the bay a smoking cottage. And, plodding

along by the water’s edge, was the bent figure of a man, laden with

nets and lobster pots. Also, beached on the shingle was a boat.

I quickened my pace and overtook the fisherman. He was an old man with

a ragged grey beard, and his rig was seaman’s boots and a much-darned

blue jersey. He was deaf, and did not hear me when I hailed him. When

he caught sight of me he never stopped, though he very solemnly

returned my good evening. I fell into step with him, and in his silent

company reached the cottage.

He halted before the door and unslung his burdens. The place was a

two-roomed building with a roof of thatch, and the walls all grown over

with a yellow-flowered creeper. When he had straightened his back, he

looked seaward and at the sky, as if to prospect the weather. Then he

turned on me his gentle, absorbed eyes. “It will haf been a fine day,

sir. Wass you seeking the road to anywhere?”

“I was seeking a night’s lodging,” I said. “I’ve had a long tramp on

the hills, and I’d be glad of a chance of not going farther.”

“We will haf no accommodation for a gentleman,” he said gravely.

“I can sleep on the floor, if you can give me a blanket and a bite of

supper.”

“Indeed you will not,” and he smiled slowly. “But I will ask the wife.

Mary, come here!”

An old woman appeared in answer to his call, a woman whose face was so

old that she seemed like his mother. In highland places one sex ages

quicker than the other.

“This gentleman would like to bide the night. I wass telling him that

we had a poor small house, but he says he will not be minding it.”

She looked at me with the timid politeness that you find only in

outland places.

“We can do our best, indeed, sir. The gentleman can have Colin’s bed in

the loft, but he will haf to be doing with plain food. Supper is ready

if you will come in now.”

I had a scrub with a piece of yellow soap at an adjacent pool in the

burn and then entered a kitchen blue with peat-reek. We had a meal of

boiled fish, oatcakes and skim-milk cheese, with cups of strong tea to

wash it down. The old folk had the manners of princes. They pressed

food on me, and asked me no questions, till for very decency’s sake I

had to put up a story and give some account of myself.

I found they had a son in the Argylls and a young boy in the Navy. But

they seemed disinclined to talk of them or of the war. By a mere

accident I hit on the old man’s absorbing interest. He was passionate

about the land. He had taken part in long-forgotten agitations, and had

suffered eviction in some ancient landlords’ quarrel farther north.

Presently he was pouring out to me all the woes of the crofter—woes

that seemed so antediluvian and forgotten that I listened as one would

listen to an old song. “You who come from a new country will not haf

heard of these things,” he kept telling me, but by that peat fire I

made up for my defective education. He told me of evictions in the

year. One somewhere in Sutherland, and of harsh doings in the Outer

Isles. It was far more than a political grievance. It was the lament of

the conservative for vanished days and manners. “Over in Skye wass the

fine land for black cattle, and every man had his bit herd on the

hillside. But the lairds said it wass better for sheep, and then they

said it wass not good for sheep, so they put it under deer, and now

there is no black cattle anywhere in Skye.” I tell you it was like sad

music on the bagpipes hearing that old fellow. The war and all things

modern meant nothing to him; he lived among the tragedies of his youth

and his prime.

I’m a Tory myself and a bit of a land-reformer, so we agreed well

enough. So well, that I got what I wanted without asking for it. I told

him I was going to Skye, and he offered to take me over in his boat in

the morning. “It will be no trouble. Indeed no. I will be going that

way myself to the fishing.”

I told him that after the war, every acre of British soil would have to

be used for the men that had earned the right to it. But that did not

comfort him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but about the

men who had been driven from it fifty years before. His desire was not

for reform, but for restitution, and that was past the power of any

Government. I went to bed in the loft in a sad, reflective mood,

considering how in speeding our newfangled plough we must break down a

multitude of molehills and how desirable and unreplaceable was the life

of the moles.

In brisk, shining weather, with a wind from the south-east, we put off

next morning. In front was a brown line of low hills, and behind them,

a little to the north, that black toothcomb of mountain range which I

had seen the day before from the Arisaig ridge.

“That is the Coolin,” said the fisherman. “It is a bad place where even

the deer cannot go. But all the rest of Skye wass the fine land for

black cattle.”

As we neared the coast, he pointed out many places. “Look there, Sir,

in that glen. I haf seen six cot houses smoking there, and now there is

not any left. There were three men of my own name had crofts on the

machars beyond the point, and if you go there you will only find the

marks of their bit gardens. You will know the place by the gean trees.”

When he put me ashore in a sandy bay between green ridges of bracken,

he was still harping upon the past. I got him to take a pound—for the

boat and not for the night’s hospitality, for he would have beaten me

with an oar if I had suggested that. The last I saw of him, as I turned

round at the top of the hill, he had still his sail down, and was

gazing at the lands which had once been full of human dwellings and now

were desolate.

I kept for a while along the ridge, with the Sound of Sleat on my

right, and beyond it the high hills of Knoydart and Kintail. I was

watching for the _Tobermory_, but saw no sign of her. A steamer put out

from Mallaig, and there were several drifters crawling up the channel

and once I saw the white ensign and a destroyer bustled northward,

leaving a cloud of black smoke in her wake. Then, after consulting the

map, I struck across country, still keeping the higher ground, but,

except at odd minutes, being out of sight of the sea. I concluded that

my business was to get to the latitude of Ranna without wasting time.

So soon as I changed my course I had the Coolin for company. Mountains

have always been a craze of mine, and the blackness and mystery of

those grim peaks went to my head. I forgot all about Fosse Manor and

the Cotswolds. I forgot, too, what had been my chief feeling since I

left Glasgow, a sense of the absurdity of my mission. It had all seemed

too far-fetched and whimsical. I was running apparently no great

personal risk, and I had always the unpleasing fear that Blenkiron

might have been too clever and that the whole thing might be a mare’s

nest. But that dark mountain mass changed my outlook. I began to have a

queer instinct that that was the place, that something might be

concealed there, something pretty damnable. I remember I sat on a top

for half an hour raking the hills with my glasses. I made out ugly

precipices, and glens which lost themselves in primeval blackness. When

the sun caught them—for it was a gleamy day—it brought out no colours,

only degrees of shade. No mountains I had ever seen—not the Drakensberg

or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white peaks around

Erzerum—ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about Ivery. There

seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being, dwelling in villas

and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of precipices. But I felt

there was, for I had begun to realise the bigness of my opponent.

Blenkiron had said that he spun his web wide. That was intelligible

enough among the half-baked youth of Biggleswick, and the pacifist

societies, or even the toughs on the Clyde. I could fit him in all

right to that picture. But that he should be playing his game among

those mysterious black crags seemed to make him bigger and more

desperate, altogether a different kind of proposition. I didn’t exactly

dislike the idea, for my objection to my past weeks had been that I was

out of my proper job, and this was more my line of country. I always

felt that I was a better bandit than a detective. But a sort of awe

mingled with my satisfaction. I began to feel about Ivery as I had felt

about the three devils of the Black Stone who had hunted me before the

war, and as I never felt about any other Hun. The men we fought at the

Front and the men I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even

old Stumm himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable

enough, but you could gauge and calculate their capacities. But this

Ivery was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into

unexpected crannies and that you couldn’t fight in an upstanding way.

Till then, in spite of Blenkiron’s solemnity, I had regarded him simply

as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent enemy,

intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on that sunny

hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups calling, I got a

chill in my spine when I thought of him.

I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry. There was

something about the war that made me ravenous, and the less chance of

food the worse I felt. If I had been in London with twenty restaurants

open to me, I should as likely as not have gone off my feed. That was

the cussedness of my stomach. I had still a little chocolate left, and

I ate the fisherman’s buttered scones for luncheon, but long before the

evening my thoughts were dwelling on my empty interior.

I put up that night in a shepherd’s cottage miles from anywhere. The

man was called Macmorran, and he had come from Galloway when sheep were

booming. He was a very good imitation of a savage, a little fellow with

red hair and red eyes, who might have been a Pict. He lived with a

daughter who had once been in service in Glasgow, a fat young woman

with a face entirely covered with freckles and a pout of habitual

discontent. No wonder, for that cottage was a pretty mean place. It was

so thick with peat-reek that throat and eyes were always smarting. It

was badly built, and must have leaked like a sieve in a storm. The

father was a surly fellow, whose conversation was one long growl at the

world, the high prices, the difficulty of moving his sheep, the

meanness of his master, and the godforsaken character of Skye. “Here’s

me no seen baker’s bread for a month, and no company but a wheen

ignorant Hielanders that yatter Gawlic. I wish I was back in the

Glenkens. And I’d gang the morn if I could get paid what I’m awed.”

However, he gave me supper—a braxy ham and oatcake, and I bought the

remnants off him for use next day. I did not trust his blankets, so I

slept the night by the fire in the ruins of an arm-chair, and woke at

dawn with a foul taste in my mouth. A dip in the burn refreshed me, and

after a bowl of porridge I took the road again. For I was anxious to

get to some hill-top that looked over to Ranna.

Before midday I was close under the eastern side of the Coolin, on a

road which was more a rockery than a path. Presently I saw a big house

ahead of me that looked like an inn, so I gave it a miss and struck the

highway that led to it a little farther north. Then I bore off to the

east, and was just beginning to climb a hill which I judged stood

between me and the sea, when I heard wheels on the road and looked

back.

It was a farmer’s gig carrying one man. I was about half a mile off,

and something in the cut of his jib seemed familiar. I got my glasses

on him and made out a short, stout figure clad in a mackintosh, with a

woollen comforter round its throat. As I watched, it made a movement as

if to rub its nose on its sleeve. That was the pet trick of one man I

knew. Inconspicuously I slipped through the long heather so as to reach

the road ahead of the gig. When I rose like a wraith from the wayside

the horse started, but not the driver.

“So ye’re there,” said Amos’s voice. “I’ve news for ye. The _Tobermory_

will be in Ranna by now. She passed Broadford two hours syne. When I

saw her I yoked this beast and came up on the chance of foregathering

with ye.”

“How on earth did you know I would be here?” I asked in some surprise.

“Oh, I saw the way your mind was workin’ from your telegram. And says I

to mysel’—that man Brand, says I, is not the chiel to be easy stoppit.

But I was feared ye might be a day late, so I came up the road to hold

the fort. Man, I’m glad to see ye. Ye’re younger and soopler than me,

and yon Gresson’s a stirrin’ lad.”

“There’s one thing you’ve got to do for me,” I said. “I can’t go into

inns and shops, but I can’t do without food. I see from the map there’s

a town about six miles on. Go there and buy me anything that’s

tinned—biscuits and tongue and sardines, and a couple of bottles of

whisky if you can get them. This may be a long job, so buy plenty.”

“Whaur’ll I put them?” was his only question.

We fixed on a cache, a hundred yards from the highway in a place where

two ridges of hill enclosed the view so that only a short bit of road

was visible.

“I’ll get back to the Kyle,” he told me, “and a’body there kens Andra

Amos, if ye should find a way of sendin’ a message or comin’ yourself.

Oh, and I’ve got a word to ye from a lady that we ken of. She says, the

sooner ye’re back in Vawnity Fair the better she’ll be pleased, always

provided ye’ve got over the Hill Difficulty.”

A smile screwed up his old face and he waved his whip in farewell. I

interpreted Mary’s message as an incitement to speed, but I could not

make the pace. That was Gresson’s business. I think I was a little

nettled, till I cheered myself by another interpretation. She might be

anxious for my safety, she might want to see me again, anyhow the mere

sending of the message showed I was not forgotten. I was in a pleasant

muse as I breasted the hill, keeping discreetly in the cover of the

many gullies. At the top I looked down on Ranna and the sea.

There lay the _Tobermory_ busy unloading. It would be some time, no

doubt, before Gresson could leave. There was no row-boat in the channel

yet, and I might have to wait hours. I settled myself snugly between

two rocks, where I could not be seen, and where I had a clear view of

the sea and shore. But presently I found that I wanted some long

heather to make a couch, and I emerged to get some. I had not raised my

head for a second when I flopped down again. For I had a neighbour on

the hill-top.

He was about two hundred yards off, just reaching the crest, and,

unlike me, walking quite openly. His eyes were on Ranna, so he did not

notice me, but from my cover I scanned every line of him. He looked an

ordinary countryman, wearing badly cut, baggy knickerbockers of the

kind that gillies affect. He had a face like a Portuguese Jew, but I

had seen that type before among people with Highland names; they might

be Jews or not, but they could speak Gaelic. Presently he disappeared.

He had followed my example and selected a hiding-place.

It was a clear, hot day, but very pleasant in that airy place. Good

scents came up from the sea, the heather was warm and fragrant, bees

droned about, and stray seagulls swept the ridge with their wings. I

took a look now and then towards my neighbour, but he was deep in his

hidey-hole. Most of the time I kept my glasses on Ranna, and watched

the doings of the _Tobermory_. She was tied up at the jetty, but seemed

in no hurry to unload. I watched the captain disembark and walk up to a

house on the hillside. Then some idlers sauntered down towards her and

stood talking and smoking close to her side. The captain returned and

left again. A man with papers in his hand appeared, and a woman with

what looked like a telegram. The mate went ashore in his best clothes.

Then at last, after midday, Gresson appeared. He joined the captain at

the piermaster’s office, and presently emerged on the other side of the

jetty where some small boats were beached. A man from the _Tobermory_

came in answer to his call, a boat was launched, and began to make its

way into the channel. Gresson sat in the stern, placidly eating his

luncheon.

I watched every detail of that crossing with some satisfaction that my

forecast was turning out right. About half-way across, Gresson took the

oars, but soon surrendered them to the _Tobermory_ man, and lit a pipe.

He got out a pair of binoculars and raked my hillside. I tried to see

if my neighbour was making any signal, but all was quiet. Presently the

boat was hid from me by the bulge of the hill, and I caught the sound

of her scraping on the beach.

Gresson was not a hill-walker like my neighbour. It took him the best

part of an hour to get to the top, and he reached it at a point not two

yards from my hiding-place. I could hear by his labouring breath that

he was very blown. He walked straight over the crest till he was out of

sight of Ranna, and flung himself on the ground. He was now about fifty

yards from me, and I made shift to lessen the distance. There was a

grassy trench skirting the north side of the hill, deep and thickly

overgrown with heather. I wound my way along it till I was about twelve

yards from him, where I stuck, owing to the trench dying away. When I

peered out of the cover I saw that the other man had joined him and

that the idiots were engaged in embracing each other.

I dared not move an inch nearer, and as they talked in a low voice I

could hear nothing of what they said. Nothing except one phrase, which

the strange man repeated twice, very emphatically. “Tomorrow night,” he

said, and I noticed that his voice had not the Highland inflection

which I looked for. Gresson nodded and glanced at his watch, and then

the two began to move downhill towards the road I had travelled that

morning.

I followed as best I could, using a shallow dry watercourse of which

sheep had made a track, and which kept me well below the level of the

moor. It took me down the hill, but some distance from the line the

pair were taking, and I had to reconnoitre frequently to watch their

movements. They were still a quarter of a mile or so from the road,

when they stopped and stared, and I stared with them. On that lonely

highway travellers were about as rare as roadmenders, and what caught

their eye was a farmer’s gig driven by a thick-set elderly man with a

woollen comforter round his neck.

I had a bad moment, for I reckoned that if Gresson recognised Amos he

might take fright. Perhaps the driver of the gig thought the same, for

he appeared to be very drunk. He waved his whip, he jiggoted the reins,

and he made an effort to sing. He looked towards the figures on the

hillside, and cried out something. The gig narrowly missed the ditch,

and then to my relief the horse bolted. Swaying like a ship in a gale,

the whole outfit lurched out of sight round the corner of hill where

lay my cache. If Amos could stop the beast and deliver the goods there,

he had put up a masterly bit of buffoonery.

The two men laughed at the performance, and then they parted. Gresson

retraced his steps up the hill. The other man—I called him in my mind

the Portuguese Jew—started off at a great pace due west, across the

road, and over a big patch of bog towards the northern butt of the

Coolin. He had some errand, which Gresson knew about, and he was in a

hurry to perform it. It was clearly my job to get after him.

I had a rotten afternoon. The fellow covered the moorland miles like a

deer, and under the hot August sun I toiled on his trail. I had to keep

well behind, and as much as possible in cover, in case he looked back;

and that meant that when he had passed over a ridge I had to double not

to let him get too far ahead, and when we were in an open place I had

to make wide circuits to keep hidden. We struck a road which crossed a

low pass and skirted the flank of the mountains, and this we followed

till we were on the western side and within sight of the sea. It was

gorgeous weather, and out on the blue water I saw cool sails moving and

little breezes ruffling the calm, while I was glowing like a furnace.

Happily I was in fair training, and I needed it. The Portuguese Jew

must have done a steady six miles an hour over abominable country.

About five o’clock we came to a point where I dared not follow. The

road ran flat by the edge of the sea, so that several miles of it were

visible. Moreover, the man had begun to look round every few minutes.

He was getting near something and wanted to be sure that no one was in

his neighbourhood. I left the road accordingly, and took to the

hillside, which to my undoing was one long cascade of screes and

tumbled rocks. I saw him drop over a rise which seemed to mark the rim

of a little bay into which descended one of the big corries of the

mountains. It must have been a good half-hour later before I, at my

greater altitude and with far worse going, reached the same rim. I

looked into the glen and my man had disappeared.

He could not have crossed it, for the place was wider than I had

thought. A ring of black precipices came down to within half a mile of

the shore, and between them was a big stream—long, shallow pools at the

sea end and a chain of waterfalls above. He had gone to earth like a

badger somewhere, and I dared not move in case he might be watching me

from behind a boulder.

But even as I hesitated he appeared again, fording the stream, his face

set on the road we had come. Whatever his errand was he had finished

it, and was posting back to his master. For a moment I thought I should

follow him, but another instinct prevailed. He had not come to this

wild place for the scenery. Somewhere down in the glen there was

something or somebody that held the key of the mystery. It was my

business to stay there till I had unlocked it. Besides, in two hours it

would be dark, and I had had enough walking for one day.

I made my way to the stream side and had a long drink. The corrie

behind me was lit up with the westering sun, and the bald cliffs were

flushed with pink and gold. On each side of the stream was turf like a

lawn, perhaps a hundred yards wide, and then a tangle of long heather

and boulders right up to the edge of the great rocks. I had never seen

a more delectable evening, but I could not enjoy its peace because of

my anxiety about the Portuguese Jew. He had not been there more than

half an hour, just about long enough for a man to travel to the first

ridge across the burn and back. Yet he had found time to do his

business. He might have left a letter in some prearranged place—in

which case I would stay there till the man it was meant for turned up.

Or he might have met someone, though I didn’t think that possible. As I

scanned the acres of rough moor and then looked at the sea lapping

delicately on the grey sand I had the feeling that a knotty problem was

before me. It was too dark to try to track his steps. That must be left

for the morning, and I prayed that there would be no rain in the night.

I ate for supper most of the braxy ham and oatcake I had brought from

Macmorran’s cottage. It took some self-denial, for I was ferociously

hungry, to save a little for breakfast next morning. Then I pulled

heather and bracken and made myself a bed in the shelter of a rock

which stood on a knoll above the stream. My bed-chamber was well

hidden, but at the same time, if anything should appear in the early

dawn, it gave me a prospect. With my waterproof I was perfectly warm,

and, after smoking two pipes, I fell asleep.

My night’s rest was broken. First it was a fox which came and barked at

my ear and woke me to a pitch-black night, with scarcely a star

showing. The next time it was nothing but a wandering hill-wind, but as

I sat up and listened I thought I saw a spark of light near the edge of

the sea. It was only for a second, but it disquieted me. I got out and

climbed on the top of the rock, but all was still save for the gentle

lap of the tide and the croak of some night bird among the crags. The

third time I was suddenly quite wide awake, and without any reason, for

I had not been dreaming. Now I have slept hundreds of times alone

beside my horse on the veld, and I never knew any cause for such

awakenings but the one, and that was the presence near me of some human

being. A man who is accustomed to solitude gets this extra sense which

announces like an alarm-clock the approach of one of his kind.

But I could hear nothing. There was a scraping and rustling on the

moor, but that was only the wind and the little wild things of the

hills. A fox, perhaps, or a blue hare. I convinced my reason, but not

my senses, and for long I lay awake with my ears at full cock and every

nerve tense. Then I fell asleep, and woke to the first flush of dawn.

The sun was behind the Coolin and the hills were black as ink, but far

out in the western seas was a broad band of gold. I got up and went

down to the shore. The mouth of the stream was shallow, but as I moved

south I came to a place where two small capes enclosed an inlet. It

must have been a fault in the volcanic rock, for its depth was

portentous. I stripped and dived far into its cold abysses, but I did

not reach the bottom. I came to the surface rather breathless, and

struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and looked at the great

rampart of crag. I saw that the place where I had spent the night was

only a little oasis of green at the base of one of the grimmest corries

the imagination could picture. It was as desert as Damaraland. I

noticed, too, how sharply the cliffs rose from the level. There were

chimneys and gullies by which a man might have made his way to the

summit, but no one of them could have been scaled except by a

mountaineer.

I was feeling better now, with all the frowsiness washed out of me, and

I dried myself by racing up and down the heather. Then I noticed

something. There were marks of human feet at the top of the deep-water

inlet—not mine, for they were on the other side. The short sea-turf was

bruised and trampled in several places, and there were broken stems of

bracken. I thought that some fisherman had probably landed there to

stretch his legs.

But that set me thinking of the Portuguese Jew. After breakfasting on

my last morsels of food—a knuckle of braxy and a bit of oatcake—I set

about tracking him from the place where he had first entered the glen.

To get my bearings, I went back over the road I had come myself, and

after a good deal of trouble I found his spoor. It was pretty clear as

far as the stream, for he had been walking—or rather running—over

ground with many patches of gravel on it. After that it was difficult,

and I lost it entirely in the rough heather below the crags. All that I

could make out for certain was that he had crossed the stream, and that

his business, whatever it was, had been with the few acres of tumbled

wilderness below the precipices.

I spent a busy morning there, but found nothing except the skeleton of

a sheep picked clean by the ravens. It was a thankless job, and I got

very cross over it. I had an ugly feeling that I was on a false scent

and wasting my time. I wished to Heaven I had old Peter with me. He

could follow spoor like a Bushman, and would have riddled the

Portuguese Jew’s track out of any jungle on earth. That was a game I

had never learned, for in the old days I had always left it to my

natives. I chucked the attempt, and lay disconsolately on a warm patch

of grass and smoked and thought about Peter. But my chief reflections

were that I had breakfasted at five, that it was now eleven, that I was

intolerably hungry, that there was nothing here to feed a grasshopper,

and that I should starve unless I got supplies.

It was a long road to my cache, but there were no two ways of it. My

only hope was to sit tight in the glen, and it might involve a wait of

days. To wait I must have food, and, though it meant relinquishing

guard for a matter of six hours, the risk had to be taken. I set off at

a brisk pace with a very depressed mind.

From the map it seemed that a short cut lay over a pass in the range. I

resolved to take it, and that short cut, like most of its kind, was

unblessed by Heaven. I will not dwell upon the discomforts of the

journey. I found myself slithering among screes, climbing steep

chimneys, and travelling precariously along razor-backs. The shoes were

nearly rent from my feet by the infernal rocks, which were all pitted

as if by some geological small-pox. When at last I crossed the divide,

I had a horrible business getting down from one level to another in a

gruesome corrie, where each step was composed of smooth boiler-plates.

But at last I was among the bogs on the east side, and came to the

place beside the road where I had fixed my cache.

The faithful Amos had not failed me. There were the provisions—a couple

of small loaves, a dozen tins, and a bottle of whisky. I made the best

pack I could of them in my waterproof, swung it on my stick, and

started back, thinking that I must be very like the picture of

Christian on the title-page of _Pilgrim’s Progress_.

I was liker Christian before I reached my destination—Christian after

he had got up the Hill Difficulty. The morning’s walk had been bad, but

the afternoon’s was worse, for I was in a fever to get back, and,

having had enough of the hills, chose the longer route I had followed

the previous day. I was mortally afraid of being seen, for I cut a

queer figure, so I avoided every stretch of road where I had not a

clear view ahead. Many weary detours I made among moss-hags and screes

and the stony channels of burns. But I got there at last, and it was

almost with a sense of comfort that I flung my pack down beside the

stream where I had passed the night.

I ate a good meal, lit my pipe, and fell into the equable mood which

follows upon fatigue ended and hunger satisfied. The sun was westering,

and its light fell upon the rock-wall above the place where I had

abandoned my search for the spoor.

As I gazed at it idly I saw a curious thing.

It seemed to be split in two and a shaft of sunlight came through

between. There could be no doubt about it. I saw the end of the shaft

on the moor beneath, while all the rest lay in shadow. I rubbed my

eyes, and got out my glasses. Then I guessed the explanation. There was

a rock tower close against the face of the main precipice and

indistinguishable from it to anyone looking direct at the face. Only

when the sun fell on it obliquely could it be discovered. And between

the tower and the cliff there must be a substantial hollow.

The discovery brought me to my feet, and set me running towards the end

of the shaft of sunlight. I left the heather, scrambled up some yards

of screes, and had a difficult time on some very smooth slabs, where

only the friction of tweed and rough rock gave me a hold. Slowly I

worked my way towards the speck of sunlight, till I found a handhold,

and swung myself into the crack. On one side was the main wall of the

hill, on the other a tower some ninety feet high, and between them a

long crevice varying in width from three to six feet. Beyond it there

showed a small bright patch of sea.

There was more, for at the point where I entered it there was an

overhang which made a fine cavern, low at the entrance but a dozen feet

high inside, and as dry as tinder. Here, thought I, is the perfect

hiding-place. Before going farther I resolved to return for food. It

was not very easy descending, and I slipped the last twenty feet,

landing on my head in a soft patch of screes. At the burnside I filled

my flask from the whisky bottle, and put half a loaf, a tin of

sardines, a tin of tongue, and a packet of chocolate in my waterproof

pockets. Laden as I was, it took me some time to get up again, but I

managed it, and stored my belongings in a corner of the cave. Then I

set out to explore the rest of the crack.

It slanted down and then rose again to a small platform. After that it

dropped in easy steps to the moor beyond the tower. If the Portuguese

Jew had come here, that was the way by which he had reached it, for he

would not have had the time to make my ascent. I went very cautiously,

for I felt I was on the eve of a big discovery. The platform was partly

hidden from my end by a bend in the crack, and it was more or less

screened by an outlying bastion of the tower from the other side. Its

surface was covered with fine powdery dust, as were the steps beyond

it. In some excitement I knelt down and examined it.

Beyond doubt there was spoor here. I knew the Portuguese Jew’s

footmarks by this time, and I made them out clearly, especially in one

corner. But there were other footsteps, quite different. The one showed

the rackets of rough country boots, the others were from un-nailed

soles. Again I longed for Peter to make certain, though I was pretty

sure of my conclusions. The man I had followed had come here, and he

had not stayed long. Someone else had been here, probably later, for

the un-nailed shoes overlaid the rackets. The first man might have left

a message for the second. Perhaps the second was that human presence of

which I had been dimly conscious in the night-time.

I carefully removed all traces of my own footmarks, and went back to my

cave. My head was humming with my discovery. I remembered Gresson’s

word to his friend: “Tomorrow night.” As I read it, the Portuguese Jew

had taken a message from Gresson to someone, and that someone had come

from somewhere and picked it up. The message contained an assignation

for this very night. I had found a point of observation, for no one was

likely to come near my cave, which was reached from the moor by such a

toilsome climb. There I should bivouac and see what the darkness

brought forth. I remember reflecting on the amazing luck which had so

far attended me. As I looked from my refuge at the blue haze of

twilight creeping over the waters, I felt my pulses quicken with a wild

anticipation.

Then I heard a sound below me, and craned my neck round the edge of the

tower. A man was climbing up the rock by the way I had come.