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.

As for Malcolm Mor, even after canny and tight-fisted Tam Lagg discharged the old pirate, Mary MacAskival kept in touch with him by a sepulchral line of communications. Their system was this: on her walks, Mary would slip a note into the receptacle in Sir Alastair’s tomb at the chapel, and Malcolm would pick it up when next he climbed over the cliff-head from his boat moored in the cave far below. Malcolm Mor, though he was ashamed of the accomplishment as a decadent concession to modern civilization, could write a primitive English, and he would scrawl in his crabbed hand brief and respectful replies to The MacAskival’s communications, giving news of his family to the lonely girl, and of how the fishing had gone. So long as she was permitted to ramble at will in Carnglass, Mary MacAskival could send letters to the outer world through this tomb postbox, for old Duncan would post them in Loch Boisdale on the few occasions when the lobster boat crossed the rough waters to South Uist. Thus she had contrived to send her last message, the unsigned note, crumpled and water-stained, which reached Duncan MacAskival in Michigan. After that she had been too closely watched by Jackman and his men to make the attempt, and toward the end she had not been able to leave the Old House at all.

Before the coming of Jackman, and while Lady MacAskival retained some vigor and Lagg had the management of the island in his hands, two or three reasonably zealous gamekeepers made the poaching by the Daldour men a career of danger and daring, which they dared not attempt more than once a month, at best. The keepers’ shotguns had wounded two or three of old Malcolm’s sons and grandsons, and once the keepers almost had seized the boat moored in the cave.

But after Jackman’s men replaced the old servants, the people at the Old House scarcely visited the hinterland of Carnglass. Donley, nominally the new keeper, ordinarily stuck fairly close to his cottage near the Old House, and the regions round Dalcruach and St. Merin’s Chapel, especially, became safe ground for the poachers. More and more of the queer, long-legged, long-necked, soft-fleeced sheep of Carnglass, and now and then a deer, were borne off triumphantly in the lobster boat to hungry Daldour.

Only one aspect of the new regime in Carnglass troubled the Daldour MacAskivals: Dr. Jackman and his ways. They spied upon him from the bracken, and sometimes crept close enough to perceive the curious spot in his forehead--which, among these misty folk who told legends over their peat fires and never saw the penny press and never heard a wireless, was at once recognized as the supernatural Third Eye of a Carnglass warlock. They saw the rough crew of town toughs he had gathered round him, too, and their suspicions grew. And Mary MacAskival rarely came forth from the Old House; at last she did not come at all, though they could glimpse her sometimes at the summit of the tower or in the little walled garden. For the people of Daldour, Miss Mary MacAskival was the symbol of their identity, and the hope of their salvation: for she had told old Malcolm, more than once that, when she was mistress in the island, she would bring back the MacAskivals to the farms and the crofts from which her aunt had expelled the last of them in 1914. The man with the third eye, they told one another, meant Mary MacAskival no good. They continued to watch. None of them were cowards, but they were shy of the law, for the law had expelled them from Carnglass; and besides, they were poachers, and in Daldour secret distillers of whiskey on which they paid no duty.

There were not many of them in Daldour, and few of the men were young. Of the men who should have been in their thirties, several had died during the war as naval or merchant seamen; and nearly all the rest, acquiring new tastes during their military service or unable to find places for themselves in the island, had gone off to Glasgow or America. The old and middle-aged MacAskival men in Daldour, for lack of young blood, withdrew more and more from the modern world, so far as modernity ever had touched them at all. They were shy of the law, shy of people from the mainland, shy of townsfolk, shy even of crofters and fishermen from the other islands.

A week ago, four MacAskivals, Malcolm Mor leading them, had put out in their boat, cloaked by fog and the setting of the sun, to land again at the foot of the cliffs below St. Merin’s Chapel. Only the MacAskivals of Daldour could sail those treacherous waters in such weather. As they had been about to moor the boat in the cave under the cliff, Dumb Angus had taken Malcolm by the shoulder and pointed excitedly. Caught between two rocks near the cave’s mouth, and awash in the ebbing tide, was the body of a man. They drew the corpse into their boat. It was Tam Lagg, who had been factor of Carnglass, and his corpse was terribly battered; he must have fallen from the cliffs. His hat they found a little later, lodged in a clump of ferns a few yards up the cliff.

“The sea casts its dead upon Carnglass,” a proverb of the Islands runs. Many men have drowned on the reefs in those waters, or have been caught in the currents and hurled against the cliffs in their boats; but it is a strange truth that the whirlpools and eddies in that merciless sea seem to bring up drowned men from miles round, and lodge what is left of them among the rocks or on the narrow beaches of the island called the Heap of Stones. The four men in the Daldour lobster boat had looked often upon drowned corpses; and they never failed to give those derelicts decent burial, that they themselves might one day need in their turn. The graveyard round the chapel in Carnglass, and the smaller graveyard by the bare beach in Daldour, were dotted with little wooden crosses marking the graves of seamen and soldiers from torpedoed transports that had gone down between Uist and Carnglass.

Bury Tam Lagg, then, the MacAskivals must. But they were afraid of the man with the third eye, at the Old House of Fear, who might lay the blame of this strange death upon them, since they had enjoyed an old vendetta with the factor of Carnglass; so they made no attempt to report the discovery of the body to the people in the Old House. They thought it best not to bury Lagg in Daldour, lest the body be found by strangers there and the MacAskivals be accused of foul play. So they wrapped Lagg in an old piece of canvas and, with great difficulty, got the body to the top of the cliffs, where they buried it in St. Merin’s Chapel. On the grave they left a saucer of salt and nails, with a rowan twig atop it, to keep Lagg’s wraith from wandering, should it be restless; for they thought it strange that a man so long familiar with Carnglass should fall to his death.

They were not sorry that Lagg was dead: they had detested him. And Dumb Angus, who dug the grave, took Lagg’s clothes by way of compensation, and put them on, so that he looked for all the world like a stout scarecrow in those torn and stained garments. Malcolm Mor feared that this act might bring ill luck, but did not interfere, for they were accustomed to let poor Angus have his way in all reasonable things. And besides, Angus looked wonderfully comic in Lagg’s clothes, and made the MacAskivals laugh, and so was happy. Many of the jokes of Dumb Angus were no stranger than this.

Logan learned these matters from Malcolm Mor there on the edge of the New House plantation of firs and aspens, while every ten minutes or so a rifle went off on the landward side of the Old House; Kenneth and John firing at the windows. Logan’s men had no great supply of ammunition, but it was necessary to keep Jackman’s people in constant uneasiness, so that the final rush on the Old House might have some chance for success. As Logan and Malcolm lay talking, Dumb Angus crawled up to join them, having finished his work of loading the farm cart and getting it into the New House plantations.

“Dumb Angus is simple,” Malcolm Mor said, smiling at the burly man, “but also he is clever. He made the joke better by a doing all his own. Show Mr. Logan what it was you made, Angus.”

Very cheerfully, Angus took off the injured green porkpie hat he had inherited from Thomas Lagg. Then he reached into a little leather bag that hung suspended from one of his shoulders, and drew out a thing seemingly shapeless. He pulled the thing all the way over his head, as if it had been a rubber mask, and clapped his hat back on. Then, gobbling unintelligibly, he looked Logan full in the face.

The effect was the more horrid because at first Logan could not recognize the origin of this dreadful mask Dumb Angus had assumed. It was not human, and yet had a semblance of humanity. It hung loosely on the head. It had nostrils, but no true nose, and a drooping dreadful mouth, and holes where its eye-sockets should be, with Dumb Angus’s eyes glowing behind them. Angus wriggled with happiness at the effect he produced upon Logan. It was the face of one of the peculiar sheep of Carnglass, painstakingly skinned from the whole skull of the beast and made a loathsome mask by Angus MacAskival.

If this was what Rab had seen in the gloaming, with the dead Lagg’s clothing on the heavy body below it, it was no wonder that dull-witted Rab had gone frantic with dread. “Poor Angus makes this on every Hallowe’en,” Malcolm Mor was saying, “but this time he made it in the spring, because he had taken Mr. Lagg’s clothes, and wished to make us laugh.”

On the same evening that the MacAskivals buried Lagg, they had caught a glimpse of Donley skulking among boulders near Dalcruach, and they had hurried back to their boat and returned to Daldour, thinking that Donley might have seen them as well. But they had found they could not restrain their curiosity, and so sailed to Carnglass early the following morning, and from the bracken had seen Donley pursued by men from the Old House. They had debated among themselves whether they ought to reveal themselves to Donley and carry him off safely to Daldour; but they did not know the right and wrong of the feud between Donley and his pursuers, and also they had an ancient grudge against all gamekeepers; so they let the chase continue, only watching it from a fairly safe distance. Two or three times both Donley and the men from the Old House seemed to suspect that they were being tracked and watched, and to be correspondingly nervous. This tickled the fancy of the MacAskivals, especially Dumb Angus, and, without showing themselves distinctly, they dogged the Carnglass men like bogles.

These MacAskivals had seen Donley and Logan together on the shore, the night Donley had taken the dinghy. They had watched Logan for a part of the way as he followed the line of cliffs to the Old House. They had lingered near the searching parties that went out of the Old House in pursuit of Donley while Logan had been inside. And on one of these occasions, three of the MacAskivals--Robert, John, and Dumb Angus--had been imprudent. Carruthers and Rab, cautiously poking through the bracken near the ruined farmhouse where Lagg had been caught, had stumbled upon the Daldour men. Carruthers, in the lead a few yards, had found himself right in the midst of the three MacAskivals, and had shouted in astonishment to Rab. Instantly, Malcolm’s two sons had dragged him down and begun to bind him, snatching away his gun; they were old hands at such fights with keepers. Rab had come running up, and Dumb Angus, wearing his sheep-mask and Lagg’s clothes, had risen out of the bracken to confront him. Turning tail, the shocked and screaming Rab had run all the way back to the Old House, now and then firing into the bracken, but never hitting the delighted Angus, who had followed at a prudent distance. Logan knew the rest.

By this time, Malcolm Mor had become convinced that something was gravely wrong at the Old House, and was bent on helping Mary MacAskival if only he could determine what to do. He and the others took Carruthers back to Daldour in their boat, at the risk of a prosecution for kidnapping, and locked him in a byre, where they fed him well and asked him questions quite civilly; but the man was so terror-stricken that they could get nothing sensible from him. The day after the capture, the MacAskivals spent in Daldour asking these fruitless questions of their prisoner. Three hours before dawn on the present day, they had sailed once more toward Carnglass, with the intention of going straight up to the Old House, if necessary, and demanding to see Miss MacAskival.

Then, when almost under the northern headland of Carnglass, the MacAskivals had seen flaming against the night sky the fire which Logan and the girl had kindled. That beacon must be close by St. Merin’s Chapel; and at the chapel Malcolm Mor had collected Mary MacAskival’s letters, and the Cross of Carnglass had been the point of rendezvous when Malcolm, now and then, had met with the girl face to face. The odds were that this fire was a sign from Mary herself. Mooring the boat, the MacAskivals went warily up the cliff, reaching the summit just after dawn.

All the time, then, Logan realized, the girl must have entertained hope of the MacAskivals’ coming. Why she had given him only hints, never speaking out, he could not say. In part, perhaps, she had hesitated to speak because she feared that, after all, nothing would come of this. And in part, likely enough, her pride as The MacAskival had prompted her to make the decision herself, without consulting even the man she loved. But most of all, Logan suspected, a certain lingering schoolgirl love of secrets had been at work. From the time Carruthers was missed and Rab ran shrieking into the Old House, Mary MacAskival must have been sure that the MacAskivals of Daldour were in the island. Her only chance of finding them hurriedly if they were in the island the next night, or of attracting their attention away in Daldour or out at sea, was to light the beacon, whatever the risk of attracting Jackman’s notice. That act had saved Logan, but not yet Mary herself.

Well, Malcolm Mor and the others had got their heads over the summit of the sea-cliff just as Logan had been fighting with Jackman and his men at the door of the broch. The men of Daldour had crouched behind the tumbling drystone wall at the brink of the cliff, unnoticed by Jackman’s gang during the scuffle. In that moment, Malcolm had sent his nephew Kenneth scurrying stealthily round the kirkyard wall and down the brae, to create a diversion. And Kenneth, seeing two more of Jackman’s men in the valley below, had fired on them to draw Jackman’s party off at the time Logan and Mary MacAskival were held prisoners in the graveyard and the chapel. When Malcolm had watched the girl led away on a rope, he was ready to fight, law or no law. So he and the others had surrounded St. Merin’s Chapel, stunned Powert, and discovered, to their astonishment, the betrothed of Mary MacAskival.

“Mr. Logan,” said old Malcolm Mor, apparently quite confident of the issue of the fight that was coming, “when Carnglass is the lady’s and yours to do with as you will, Dumb Angus would be a good gardener for you. It is a keeper that I myself would rather be. Dumb Angus is wise with animals and plants”--here he patted Angus approvingly on a burly shoulder--“and he would keep you always laughing.”

Dumb Angus had put the animal-mask back into his bag. He also had slung over his shoulder, on a strap, the wooden spade that Logan had seen thrust into the earth in the chapel; Angus had forgotten it there when he dug Lagg’s grave, but now had retrieved it as the only weapon ready to his hand. The wearing of such masks, Malcolm had remarked, was common among the few remaining MacAskival children, in Daldour and formerly in Carnglass, about Hallowe’en. Covered by that dead animal face, Angus had looked mightily like the picture of the Firgower on the ceiling of Jackman’s study in the old tower. Whether this custom was some dim survival of a practice older than the Christian rites at the Cross of Carnglass, Logan could not tell. It might have been that the dead Pictish chiefs of Carnglass had worn such masks in heathen times, at ceremonies in the chamber within the rock beneath the Old House, or by the great broch on the cliff, the Pict’s House. Be this as it might, the horrid false face that was Angus’s delight, like so much else in Carnglass and Daldour, came as the last faint echo of an old Gaelic song.

* * * * *

All that long afternoon Logan lay in wait hidden by the fir trees, outwardly calm to hearten the MacAskivals, inwardly in torment at Mary MacAskival’s danger within the Old House. As the sun began to set, he dispatched the boy to Kenneth and John, still sniping on the landward side of the Old House, with the word that they were to join him under the trees close to the gate of the Victorian block, the moment it was fairly dark.

When the light was almost gone, Malcolm and Angus harnessed the Barra horses--which had been tethered behind the New House--to the straw-loaded farm cart. The long ladder was carried to the edge of the plantation; the run with it to the first-story windows of the Victorian wing would be very risky, even if Logan’s whole plan went smoothly, but the thing was possible. Climbing up the straw, the boy poured the tins of paraffin over the loaded cart. Angus crept under the cart, to urge on the horses so far as they dared use them. Kenneth, John, and Robert were to be stationed behind the cart. When the cart had been drawn to the edge of the trees, the horses must be cut out of their harness, and the men, keeping their heads down, must push the cart the remaining distance across naked rock to the gate of the Old House.

Malcolm Mor, Malcolm Gille, and Logan himself took position at the edge of the trees, prone, with guns ready to fire into the windows above the gate. These movements seem to have attracted attention from whomever was on duty at those windows, for one shot was fired from the Old House. But Logan’s men did not reply, and as the dark descended, the great gray bulk of the castle of the MacAskivals lay still and ominous, with not one light showing. Now, Mary, Hugh Logan thought, I’ll go to you. The MacAskivals beside him knew what they had to do, and none of them had shown much sign of fear.

The cart would be set afire against the gate, and Logan and the two Malcolms would blaze away at the adjacent windows, as if the assault were to come there. That was, after all, a venerable Highland and Island military device, especially beloved by Rob Roy; and though if the cart burned well it might char through the gate, there was no danger of the great house, which was all stone, catching fire. But Logan did not intend really to rush the gate. The true attack would be on the flank, around the corner: while the attention of the defenders was concentrated on the gate, Logan and his men would carry the ladder to the windows of the landward side and break in, if they could. And then, presumably, there would be shooting within the house; and the odds were not in Logan’s favor. But this was the best he could do. It was all he could do for Mary MacAskival, and it might be too late.

Now the cart had been pulled by the horses to the edge of the trees. Someone inside the house must have heard the jingle of harness and the whinnying of horses, for a shot fired at a venture passed through the branches above their heads. “Now, Kenneth MacAskival, Angus!” Logan said. They cut the horses out of the harness, and four men commenced, shoving with all their strength, to run with the cart across the little plateau of rock to the door of the Old House. As yet, the straw was not alight, for they would need the advantage of darkness so long as they could keep it.

Into the quiet night came a hoarse shout of alarm from the house: Royall’s voice, Logan thought in that instant. Two rifles fired at the cart, and then a third. Logan and his companions fired as fast as they could into the windows above the gate, and Logan heard a man scream. Still the cart ran on, and then crashed into the gate itself. The riflemen in the house were firing straight down into the cart now, and three of the MacAskivals ran out from behind it, leaping and rolling for the shelter of the trees; Logan and the Malcolms covered them with the best barrage they could contrive. That left Dumb Angus under the cart.

Logan had given Angus careful instructions, through Malcolm Mor. Angus had been handed a length of charred rope, and a supply of matches. Crouching under the cart, he was to light the frayed rope, throw it into the straw, and run for it. For Angus was very quick of body. Now Logan saw a tiny flame spring up beneath the cart; it grew; still Angus lingered. Next a flaming coil was flung upon the dry straw, which caught. Two or three minutes passed, the firing from the house--were there only two rifles now?--sporadic. Then a mass of flame roared up from the cart, kindling the lumber among the straw also, and the light from it shown fiercely across the empty windows of the façade. Angus scooted from under the cart and down across the rock, Logan and the others firing to cover him; but there was no answer from the windows by the gate.

Now for the worst part. John MacAskival was useless, shot in one arm, and dazed with shock; Logan flung his gun to the boy, telling him to fire at will, for three minutes, into the windows by the gate; the boy was utterly delighted. The rest of them, seizing the ladder, swung out of the plantation toward the right, veered round the corner of the Victorian block, and set the ladder against a first-story window, Angus holding it firm at the bottom. Someone fired a shot from above them, but no one seemed to be hit.

Logan leaped up, the others behind him, and in two seconds was smashing out of the window-frame the shattered remnants of the plate glass, using his gun-butt, and expecting any moment to get a bullet in his chest. But the room within was silent. He flung himself into that room, and the four MacAskivals were at his heels. And now, indeed, there were gunshots; but they came from deep within the house, and no one opposed Logan as they burst into the corridor.

15

Someone yelled in the corridor as Logan entered. But it was only a little paper-white man, dragging a rifle feebly as if it were a ball and chain: Tompkins. At sight of Logan, the butler dropped the rifle altogether, falling to his knees, and cried, “O Gawd! Mr. Logan, sir, don’t ’urt me, don’t! I’m your slaive, Mr. Logan! O Gawd, Jackman’s mad, and they’re murderin’ heach hother below stairs.”

Clutching at Logan’s legs, Tompkins babbled on as to how he was only an honest butler and part-time burglar, unaccustomed to killing. Logan jerked him to his feet and forced him in the direction of the gunfire within the house. “In the billiard room, Mr. Logan, sir!”

Urging Tompkins before them, Logan and the MacAskivals ran to the end of the passage, rounded the corner to the left, and came to the door of the billiard room. Dead or dying, Royall lay face down across the threshold. Reckless, Logan strode over him. The big room, with its long windows looking toward the harbor, had three more men in it. One was Anderson, shot through the belly, writhing with his back against a leg of the billiard table. One was Rab, sprawled in the middle of the red Victorian carpet, a bullet hole between his eyes. The third was a man Logan had not seen before, lying on a sofa, his eyes bandaged, sightless, moaning in fear--Till, of course, the burned boatman. Where was Jackman? Two or three more shots, in quick succession, sounded within the house, somewhere below.

“Tompkins, tell me where Jackman’s gone, or I’ll finish you,” Logan said. The butler, stammering and choking, could only point toward the cellars below. Malcolm Mor ran in.

“In the room above the gate,” Malcolm said--he slipped here into Gaelic, and with difficulty found his English again--“there is a man with long hair, like a gypsy, and he has been shot through the shoulder, and can do no harm.” That would be Niven; and that left Jackman and Simmons and Ferd Caggia. And Mary, Mary.

“Tompkins,” Logan said, taking the man by the throat, “show me where the crypt with the explosives is.” The butler reeled in Logan’s grip along the passage, and down a flight of stairs, and then pointed to an open doorway, from which stone steps led into shadows. Angus was behind Logan; the other MacAskivals were poking into the rooms.

Releasing Tompkins, Logan went down those steps to a little landing, and started to turn to the remaining flight that would take him to the crypt. A rifle cracked, and the bullet ricocheted from the wall. Logan flung himself back, nearly upsetting Angus.

“Jackman,” Logan called down, “drop your gun and come up, and I’ll promise you a trial. Otherwise we’ll promise nothing.”

But it was not Jackman that answered from the crypt. “Ah! Meester Logan, that is you?” The voice was rather faint.

“Who’s there?”

“Fernando Caggia, your fren’. Meester Logan, you owe me a pardon for what I do.”

“Drop your gun, Caggia, and come up.”

A rifle was flung to the foot of the stairs. “Meester Logan, I can not come up, for Dr. Jackman, he shoot me twice. But I save you.”

Logan leaped down those stairs. A barricade of boxes and chairs stood before a little iron door, and between door and barricade lay Caggia, covered with blood. “In this room,” Caggia said, trying to grin, “is the gelignite. Dr. Jackman, he try to reach it, but I, Fernando Caggia, do not let him. He shoot, I shoot, he shoot. I hit him once.”

“Where is he?”

Caggia gave a weak shrug. “One minute ago, he runs.”

Leaving Angus to watch the iron door, Logan dashed back up the stairs, and at the top Malcolm met him. “We can not find that man,” Malcolm said. “Will he be in the old tower?”

“Mary?”

“The door of the room of Lady MacAskival is locked, but there are people inside.”

Now the boy had joined them, and as they ran into the Renaissance building, Kenneth and Robert came out of a passage and followed. They were at the door of the room which was hung with Spanish leather. Logan tried the knob fiercely; it would not turn. He smashed at the door with his rifle-butt, using all the strength that was in him, and it burst inward. Someone leaped for him. “Hugh, Hugh!” Before them all, Mary MacAskival covered him with kisses.

* * * * *

Later, from Mary and Tompkins and Till, Logan got an understanding of what had passed within the Old House since morning. Wild with fury and bewilderment, Jackman had dragged her back to the Old House from the chapel, the three men with him as much afraid of their master as of the shadowy armed men whom Anderson had seen before the chapel. According to Anderson, there were twelve or fifteen of them, armed to the teeth. At the moment of his triumph, of his taking of Logan, suddenly Jackman had been undone. There was no way out.

Like a man in the grip of nightmare, Jackman scarcely could speak. For a few moments, just after they had got back within the shelter of the Old House, a flash of his old power returned to him. Seeing Jackman bemused, Anderson and Rab and Caggia and Simmons made for the girl: they would beat out of her the truth about those armed men by the chapel. But turning on them, “like Rumpelstiltskin again,” Jackman broke that mutiny, and hurried Mary MacAskival through the passages to her aunt’s room. Thrusting her inside, he gave her a long look. “Well,” Jackman said, passing his hand across his forehead, “I wish I had known you long ago. Now you are going to die. We all are about to die.” He went out, locking the door behind him.

All that day, Mary knelt praying in the room hung with Spanish leather. Lady MacAskival, wasted beyond belief, lay motionless in her big bed, not seeming to hear the bullets striking the walls in the rooms across the gallery. Old Agnes sobbed in a corner. From the windows of this room, Mary could see only the harbor, with the burned yacht, and the empty sea beyond. And she prayed for Hugh Logan and for Carnglass.

It was Tompkins who told Logan much of what followed. Jackman, uncertain in movements and speech, as if half paralyzed, stationed Anderson, Rab, and Caggia in rooms on the landward side of the Old House, to reply to the sniping from the bracken. Simmons he put into the study, guarding the door of the old tower. He ordered Niven and Tompkins to duty in the rooms above the gate. For a time he went himself to the roof of the old tower and fired at the riflemen slinking among the distant rocks and heather and bracken; but all this was done as if he were sleep-walking. Then he went down to the billiard room, which was safe from gunfire, and sat at a table with his head in his hands. Royall tried to talk with him, but Jackman would not reply. Thereafter Royall conducted the defense, so far as there was any organized resistance.

Caggia, who had gone below stairs to get the men food, did not reappear. Rab and Anderson, driven from the landward rooms by the sniping, got at the rum. They drank it in the billiard room where Jackman sat, and cursed at Jackman, and Jackman did not answer. And the hours passed.

Royall, left alone in the landward rooms, had his cheek laid open by a splinter of glass, but he kept on firing. When the sniping ceased on that side, he went to the billiard room and again tried to rouse Jackman. At gun-point, Royall ordered Rab up to the room over the gate, to reinforce Niven and Tompkins. Anderson went below stairs, and Tompkins heard him crying defiantly to Royall--something about explosives.

When the attack on the gate came, and the cart was burning under the windows, Niven was hit by a bullet. In panic, Rab fled to the billiard room, screaming out, “The hoose! They’re burnin’ a’ the hoose!” Royall and Anderson hurried in. This was told to Logan by the blinded boatman Till, who had lain helpless during the billiard-room fight.

“O aye, we’re done!” Anderson roared. “Gie it ower, Jackman, we’ve had it!”

Then Jackman rose from his chair. “Royall,” Jackman said, “keep the men here.”

“Gude God,” Till heard Anderson say, “the auld de’il’s for the explosives! Jackman, damn ye, dinna open that door.”

“Rab,” cried Royall, “drop your gun.” Shooting began then, Till cowering on the sofa. There must have been four or five shots, and after them running steps. Till could hear Anderson groaning and cursing. After that, Logan and his men came.

Edmund Jackman had made for the cellars and the gelignite. Down there, Ferd Caggia crouched behind a little barricade in front of the iron door; for Ferd had remembered Logan’s words about Jackman’s madness, and he, cat-like, had been watching Jackman. “Dr. Jackman,” Caggia had said, “you don’ blow me to hell.” Jackman had fired at him promptly, and had hit him, but Caggia had fired back. After a minute’s exchange of shots, the Maltese, wounded, still gripped his rifle behind the boxes and chairs. Jackman had leaped back up the stairs and was gone through the passages. Even his try for annihilation had failed.

* * * * *

Simmons they found still in the study in the old tower, and took him without difficulty. But Dr. Edmund Jackman they did not find. The door to the garden was open, and Simmons said that from the window he had seen Jackman go over the garden wall, favoring one side as if he were slightly wounded.

“I think, Mr. Logan,” Malcolm Mor said, “that because he is a clever man, he will have gone to look for our boat below the chapel.”

Yes, he would have, Logan thought. In the course of the fight, Jackman must have recognized some of the attackers, perhaps old Malcolm; and, having seen them that morning near the chapel, he would guess that the boat was below those cliffs. That the wounded man could find his way down, Logan doubted. Yet so long as Jackman was at large, no one in Carnglass could be safe. The hound had become the fox now.

“Mary,” Hugh Logan said, “I must be after him.” She had an arm around him.

“I know the island best,” she told him, “and from this night I am going to stay with you always, Hugh.”

He looked down at her. “And who would guard the Old House, then, and do something for the men who’ve been shot, and put out the embers at the gate, and give the MacAskivals something to eat?”

Knowing that this was no moment for argument if Jackman were bound for the boat, Mary MacAskival looked proudly into Logan’s eyes. “Then take Malcolm Mor,” she said, “for he will know where to search, and I will send other men so soon as I can.” The MacAskivals, having locked Simmons and Tompkins in a cellar, crowded round her deferentially for instructions. “Dr. Jackman shot my dog, Hugh, to hurt me. But do you come back to me, forever.”

One last kiss, and then he left her in her strength and beauty, as the tears were starting down her cheeks. “Before sunrise, Mary girl, I’ll be with you.” Logan and Malcolm Mor went through the garden--for the great gate still was a charred and smoking hulk--and over the garden dyke below the old tower, the way that Jackman had gone, and they strode toward St. Merin’s Chapel. Now and then Logan stumbled: he had been without sleep for twenty-four hours.

“If he can go down the cliffs,” Malcolm Mor panted, “then the man with the third eye is more than man.” Malcolm was a wonder: he had been on his feet nearly as long as Logan, and he was past seventy.

Beyond Cailleach, they flung themselves down for a brief rest. Their rifles seemed immensely heavy. Carnglass, in its nocturnal beauty, was at peace. The bleating of sheep, disturbed by the men, echoed from the heights where the chapel stood. “Malcolm Mor,” Logan said, “I believe you think Jackman really is something not human.”

“It would be well to have silver bullets for our guns.” The old man muttered something in Gaelic. “But devil or not, he will have climbed up there.” Malcolm Mor gestured toward the headland. They took up their guns again, and in less than an hour made out the shape of St. Merin’s Chapel, and of the Pict’s House, the Firgower’s House, beyond it.

“If he has tried the path here,” Malcolm said very low, “he will not reach the shore alive, not knowing the way, and having a bullet in him.” Both Logan and Malcolm Mor moved slowly now; Logan doubted whether even Malcolm, while so weary, could descend this precipice, and he was certain that he himself could not. They climbed over the ruinous drystone wall close by the broch; from the dyke to the crumbling cliff-edge was less than a yard. A thousand feet and more below, the ocean heaved northward to the pole.

Then something rose from behind the dyke. Malcolm Mor tried to bring up his rifle, but a bullet struck the stock and sent the gun spinning from his hand. Logan had his rifle over his shoulder. He pulled at it desperately. And Jackman shot Hugh Logan.

Logan fell backward, and his head struck nothing at all, for he lay right on the cliff’s edge, with only infinite space at the back of his head. There was a fierce pain in his right thigh, where the bullet from the little pistol had caught him. Edmund Jackman stepped over the broken dyke and stood only seven or eight feet distant from them, his left arm pressed hard against his side. The moonlight was full on Jackman’s face, and the eyes were slits, and the face was that of a man lost in a nightmare. Malcolm Mor stood fixed by the spot where Logan lay.

“Young Askival and Old Askival,” Jackman said. “I have the two of you.” He pointed the pistol at Malcolm. “Put him over the edge, Old Askival.”

Malcolm Mor bent slowly over Logan. He took Logan by the shoulders, and drew him back from that terrible cliff-lip, and propped him against a stone fallen from the dyke. Silent, Malcolm stared at Jackman. I am done, Logan thought, but if I can catch his ankle, Jackman may go over the edge with me, and Mary will be safe.

“Both of you at once, then,” Jackman said dismally. “Old Askival and Young Askival.” He took aim at Malcolm. Hugh Logan tried to hurl himself forward, but his smashed thighbone failed him.

There came, at that instant, a kind of gurgling cry, and a sound of running, of something hurrying right along the cliff’s edge, at Jackman’s back. Edmund Jackman turned his head. Malcolm and Logan and Jackman saw all at once the thing that was coming.

It was a burly man in tattered corduroy breeches, a long green jacket, and a yellow waistcoat, with a porkpie hat on his head, his arms flapping as he ran. He mouthed as he came, but what noise he uttered was not speech. And his face was a dead mask, and not human. The thing made straight for Jackman.

Mary had sent Angus after Logan. And, with the heroism of children and simpletons, Angus sought to put his body between Logan and his enemy.

But what Edmund Jackman saw in that dreadful masked figure, Logan knew: the shape of his victim, and the face of his nightmare horror. With a moan, Jackman turned to run. He took one bound in that high place, and upon the brink the heather gave beneath him; and where Lagg had gone down, there Jackman fell.

Though they say that the ocean yields up all its dead upon the skerries of Carnglass, no man found Jackman after. As from the cliff-head at Gadara, the unclean spirit was cast into the sea. And Logan, with Malcolm Mor kneeling beside him and Dumb Angus shivering with fright against the dyke, heard no sound from below but the suck of the tide upon the weary stones.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.