decisions must be yours; I decline any responsibility. But this I will
suggest: disarm your men, lock up the guns, and give me the keys to the
gunroom and the cellars where you keep the gelignite. Send all the men
down to the New House except Tompkins and Royall. Light a beacon, or
send up flares, and put Carnglass in communication with the mainland
through ordinary channels. Leave me in charge of the Old House. Then
wait the turn of events. If you do this, I’ll put in my good word for
you with my superiors.”
This was spreading it perilously thick, Logan thought, but one might as
well be taken for a tiger as for an alley-cat.
Jackman sucked in his breath. “You ask too much, Logan, whoever
or whatever you are. Is this some plan to make Royall and me the
scapegoats? To hand us over to the police or intelligence, possibly, by
way of covering some one else’s blunders? I’ve been treated that way
before, Logan, and I’ll not endure it again. Sooner than that--sooner
than the gaol or the gallows--I’d walk into the cellars and detonate
the gelignite. I’d rather blow Carnglass into pebbles than be the dupe
once more.”
“You asked for suggestions, Jackman. I told you I’d assume no
responsibilities.” Logan had not dared to hope that Jackman actually
would fall into his impromptu snare; but at least it served to bewilder
Jackman and Royall.
“And if we did disarm the men,” Royall volunteered, “who would keep
off your friends outside? The ones that made away with Carruthers,
and sent Rab mad? What’s your scheme, Logan--to liquidate all of us
in Carnglass? To send us to join Gare and Dowie and Jock Anderson
and Donley? To make sure that no one here ever has an opportunity to
furnish evidence to the government?”
Inadvertently, he might have carried the game too far, Logan saw: he
might get himself drowned for a commissar instead of a police-agent.
“Damn it,” Jackman almost shouted, the patch in the middle of his
forehead twitching, “are you really from Vlanarov? Do you have another
name?”
“I’ll tell you when there’s need for it,” was all Logan answered him.
For Jackman was losing control of himself, and it was conceivable that
he might shoot Logan where he stood.
“Now, now, Dr. Jackman,” Royall murmured, “if he _is_ from Vlanarov,
we’d best not....”
“No!” Jackman cried, his air of power returning to him. “No, you’ll
tell me soon enough. If you’re sent by that mutual-admiration circle
in the Continent, I’ll have that news out of you, and make you pay
for it. And if you’re something worse, I’ll twist that truth from you.
I know your medicine, Logan. You’re going into the Whiskey Bottle;
there’s no man who can endure that place long. You’ll talk with me, and
thank me for the chance.”
“Dr. Jackman, I really do think ...” Royall began, uneasily. But
Jackman cut him off.
“Mr. Royall, get Anderson and Caggia. We’ll put our friend Logan away
below stairs. The responsibility is mine. And while I’m at the Whiskey
Bottle, you make the rounds of the house, Royall, and make sure all the
men have ammunition enough.”
It never would do to let Jackman see any sign of weakness in him, for
the man subsisted on others’ dread, and was most merciless, Logan
guessed, when they were most piteous. Deliberately Logan gathered up
the Table-Men and set them in their casket. “I thought you had a taste
for sherry, Jackman,” he said, “but you seem to have whiskey in mind
for me.” Jackman answered nothing. Then Anderson and Ferd entered.
Anderson’s jaw was bound up in a bloody handkerchief, and the man
looked murder at Logan.
In silence, Jackman and Anderson and Ferd Caggia took Logan down the
worn stair in the thickness of the wall. They took him to the ground
floor of the old tower, where first he had met Mary MacAskival only
yesterday about this hour, though it seemed an age ago. And they shoved
him toward one corner of that great vaulted empty room. In that corner,
flush with the flagstones, a small stair twisted downward, below the
level of the rock on which the Old House stood. Anderson thrust him
forward with a curse, so that Logan staggered down the short flight,
the three men behind him.
The place below was wholly dark. Caggia carried a petrol lantern, and
he lit it and swung it round. This crypt, hollowed from the rock,
apparently contained nothing but what looked like a broken windlass in
a far corner, and what seemed to be a coil or heap of rope in a near
corner. And in the middle of the floor was a circular lid or cover of
stone, with an iron ring set into it. Caggia and Anderson commenced to
drag back this lid.
This being, perhaps, his last appearance above ground, Logan thought
he ought to improve the shining hour. “I do hope, Anderson,” he said,
“that your jaw doesn’t pain you.” Anderson responded with an obscenity.
“I am acquainted with your brother Jock in the Gallowgate,” Logan went
on. “A lively man, Jock. He kicked me in the jaw not long ago.”
“Gude for Jock,” growled Anderson. “I’ll soon gie ye anither.”
“But we caught him, Davie Anderson,” Logan continued, “and put him
where he’ll kick no more. We caught Jim Dowie and his wife Jeanie,
too, and the others. And now all the world knows of the criminals of
Carnglass.”
“Enough of that, Logan,” Jackman put in. Anderson and Ferd were
standing by the open mouth of a pit or cistern, staring attentively at
Logan. Jackman pressed the muzzle of the little pistol into Logan’s
back and urged him toward the gulf. This must be the pit, for dead
herring or dead men, described in Balmullo’s account of the Old House.
“Dr. Jackman,” Logan said in some haste, “I do trust that when,
tomorrow or the next day, you decide in despair to blow up the Old
House, yourself, and everyone round about, you will allow these two
fine fellows to join me in this well of yours. It will probably be the
safest place for some miles round. I doubt whether Anderson and Caggia
are so ready to die as you are.”
Ferd Caggia’s perpetual grin diminished. He glanced appraisingly at Dr.
Jackman. “Ferd,” said Logan, “presumably you will be brought to trial
for treason, at the least, even if you escape Dr. Jackman’s gelignite.
They tell me that you are an excellent shot. If I were you, I should
endeavor to persuade Dr. Jackman to remain a comfortable distance from
the crypt where he keeps the explosives.”
“Logan,” Jackman muttered in his ear, “do you want a bullet in your
spine?”
“By no means, Dr. Jackman. And try not to forget that there will be
people asking after me, very soon.” Would they try to throw him into
the pit that stood open right by his feet?
“Kneel down,” Jackman told him, “and you may have a glimpse of the
Whiskey Bottle. Do you know the Mamertine prison in Rome? This is very
like, Logan, but deeper.”
Caggia had tied a long cord to the lantern, which now he lowered into
the hole and swung in a circle, slowly, so as to show the interior of
the place. Kneeling reluctantly, Logan made out an immense dry depth.
The pit was shaped roughly like a bottle, narrow at the mouth and
gradually widening, and going down, down. It was irregular, however,
with bulges and depressions here and there in its sides, as if more
the work of nature than of man. From the mouth, one could not get a
clear view of the whole interior. The lantern sank lower and lower
into the abyss, and still Logan could not perceive the bottom; then
Caggia hauled it up. In this place, according to Balmullo’s history of
Carnglass, had been found the deformed skeleton that the crofters had
called the Firgower. If ever the pit had been filled with salt herring,
it must have enabled the Old House to withstand a siege of months,
supposing there was fresh water enough to drink.
Logan stood firm upon the lip of the Whiskey Bottle. Nothing but
audacity, he felt, would discourage Jackman from indulging in a new
atrocity at this moment. “Look sharp that our friend Dr. Jackman
doesn’t put you, too, down this well, Caggia,” he remarked. “It must
tell on one’s nerves to have a lunatic bent upon self-destruction for
an employer.”
“There you’ll stay, Logan, until you feel inclined to talk with us,”
Jackman said, rolling the words thickly. “If I don’t forget you. You’ll
not eat or drink until we let you out--if we do. I won’t say when we’ll
come back to inquire after you: it may be hours, or it may be days. A
man does not stay sane very long in the Whiskey Bottle. If you come out
in time, there’s no harm done. Scream when you wish to come out, and
perhaps we will hear you. Better men than you have gone down and not
come up alive. Down with you, now.”
Anderson had dragged from the corner a long rope ladder. He made it
fast to two iron rings sunk in the floor of the crypt, and let the rope
fall into the pit. “There you go,” said Jackman. “Goodnight to you, Mr.
Logan.”
“I think I’ll not go,” Logan told them. They scarcely could carry him
down the swaying rope ladder.
“In that event,” Jackman remarked--and Anderson sniggered--“we would
have to pitch you in, and it’s nearly fifty feet to the bottom, so you
would be broken. Or we would have to lower you in at a rope’s end, head
first, with risk to your skull. I advise you to choose the ladder.”
There was nothing else for it. Logan set his feet and hands on the
swaying ladder, and began to descend. As he went down, the feet of the
three men disappeared from view, and presently he was in blackness.
After what seemed eternity, swinging and twisting about on the ropes,
he felt no rung-slat under his foot, and halted, twirling back and
forth like a top in space. Did they mean him to fall and break his legs
or back? “It doesn’t reach,” he called up. The echo was melancholy.
“Jump for it,” Jackman’s voice sounded ever so faintly above.
“I’ll be damned if I do,” Logan roared back.
“You’ll be damned if you don’t,” called Jackman, “for we’ll loose the
ladder at this end, and you’ll fall anyhow, and there’ll be no way
back.”
Waiting was no comfort. Logan relinquished his hold on the ladder,
expecting his end. But he fell only six or seven feet, bruising his
back on the jagged stone floor, which was quite dry. He could hear
the rustle of the ladder being hauled up. The light of the lantern
glimmered at the top of the Bottle, and a head was thrust over the
mouth of the shaft, silhouetted against the petrol glare.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” Jackman said, “shriek when you
care for our company.” He laughed. Then he said something else, more
faintly; but Logan thought it was, “Once you put me here, Askival.”
There came a scraping sound from above, and the lid was dragged back
over the Bottle’s mouth, cutting off Logan from the world. He was shut
into the tomb now, as in his dream on the second night in Carnglass.
As if the stone cover had not been coffin-lid enough, an iron door had
stood ajar, Logan remembered, at the entrance to the crypt, a big key
in the lock. No doubt they would turn the key. Goodbye, Mary MacAskival.
12
In the Whiskey Bottle, it would not do to brood more than a man might
help, for that way lay despair: especially when one thought of what
might be done to Mary MacAskival, high above. So Logan busied himself,
at first, in creeping round the circumference of the Bottle’s floor,
feeling everywhere. There was nothing to feel but lumpy naked rock,
everywhere gouged by ancient chisels.
The batter of the circular sides made it impossible for him even to
think of climbing, fly-like, toward the mouth. These pleasures soon
were exhausted. His watch had not worked well since he splashed ashore
in Carnglass, and perhaps that was to the good. Already he was hungry
and thirsty; but this last must be chiefly a psychological oppression,
as the damp air of Carnglass made it unnecessary for a man to drink
much water a day.
Although he had been in the place but a quarter of an hour, probably,
the problem of fresh air began to worry Logan. It was silly to think
about it so soon, of course: the immense cubic capacity of the Bottle
would give him oxygen enough for a long time, and conceivably enough to
support life leaked beneath the rude stone at the mouth, anyway. But
one thought about such things in the Bottle, for lack of aught else to
do.
In all that dead island, the Whiskey Bottle was the deadest place. Not
even an insect could live here; and the place was so dry that, perhaps,
not even a lichen could cling to the sloping walls. One could think
only of dead things: of the deformed skeleton found on this floor, and
the presences that drifted through Jackman’s guilty brain. It wouldn’t
do for a man to think such thoughts: not for a man who meant to keep
his wits about him. If ever they let him out of the Bottle, he would
need all the wits and all the strength he could muster. The best thing
to do, then, was to sleep. Luckily, Logan was very tired from the
strain of the past several days, and from having had so little sleep
last night, what with his colloquy with Mary MacAskival. And sleep
never had come hard to him, in the worst of times and places. He groped
about the rough floor until he found a tolerable area upon which to
stretch himself, and there he lay down, his head on his arm, and soon
drifted off. Dreams came, hideous dreams; but afterward they were all a
blur to him. Now and then he tossed and woke imperfectly; then, like a
sick man, he sank back into the sanctuary of the unconscious.
How many hours later it was that a noise woke him, he could not say.
What could make a noise in the Bottle? Nothing living. It was a faint
dragging noise. Then high overhead, he could perceive the faintest
half-moon of light. Someone was dragging back the stone lid of the
Bottle, slowly.
Would Jackman and Royall pull him out and put him to more direct
torture? If they had tormented the truth about him out of Mary
MacAskival, the odds were that they would put him into the sea, as a
man who knew too much of them, and whose death might be explained with
tolerable ease. It might be easier for him to refuse to come up, and
hope that aid might come from the mainland in time. They could descend,
of course, and tie him, and haul him to the top; but that would mean a
fight. If they shot him, that would be evidence of foul play, supposing
his body ever were washed up.
Now something scraped and rustled, and barely brushed the top of his
head: it must be the rope ladder. Reaching up, he grasped the thin
strip of wood that was the bottom rung. Still Jackman, if he were
above, said nothing. But a light probed downward toward Logan; someone
up there held an electric torch. He had might as well take this
dubious chance. Although it had been long since Logan had gone in for
gymnastics, he had strong arms, and so contrived to pull his chin up to
the level of the bottom rung, get a fresh grip, and bring up his legs.
And then he commenced the swaying climb toward the Bottle’s mouth.
As he neared the top, the torch dazzled him. Then a hand caught his,
helping him over the edge to the floor of the crypt. No sooner had
Logan got to his feet than a pair of arms was flung around his neck,
and a small body hung for a moment upon his, in fright and delight.
“They’ve broken no bone of you, Hugh?” said Mary MacAskival. Before he
could reply, she kissed him, and then flashed the electric torch the
length of his body, as if to be sure he were all there. “Don’t speak
above a wee whisper,” she murmured in his ear, “and come over here, for
we must be off.” Taking his hand, she led him through the dark toward a
corner of the crypt.
“One glimpse of you, anyway,” said Hugh. Taking the torch, he sent the
beam over and behind her. She was barefoot, but with a pair of little
walking-shoes slung round her neck. On her back she had Logan’s own
rucksack, looking as if it were crammed with things. Her back was to
what seemed to be the low circular coping of a well, with a derelict
windlass above it.
“We daren’t talk now,” the girl said, “for we’ll have but a quarter
of an hour, at best, before Niven gives the alarm. He’s sentry at the
garden door on the floor above. I told him I was taking you food and
water, which you’re not supposed to have, and he let me pass, for he
knows I am a red-haired witch. Jackman will thrash the poor fellow
within an inch of his life when he finds we’re gone. Niven never
thought I could get out with you, of course. If he’d known that, even I
couldn’t have seduced him.”
“Seduced him?”
She chuckled. “Oh, don’t be silly. Has Dr. Jackman been telling you
more lies about me? I mean, subverted his loyalty to Jackman. I gave
Niven five pounds and nearly a full bottle of rum. All right now, Hugh:
take off your trousers.”
He was bemused. “Whatever for?”
“Why, silly, we’re going down the cistern, and there’s water in it, and
you might catch your death of cold outside, with wet trousers. I think
you may keep your shirt on; we sha’n’t go so deep, I hope. Here, take
the pack, and carry it, and stuff your trousers in it. I can kilt up my
skirt once we’re at the level of the water, but you could hardly slip
off your trousers in the middle of the shaft. You’d best take off your
shoes and stockings, and sling them round your neck, the way I have,
too. You needn’t be shy: I’ll go down first, and I’ll point the torch
the other way.”
Logan stared into the cistern. In the beam of the torch, he could see
rusted iron rungs set into the masonry, leading downward; but they
ended in still water. “If we’re to drown, Mary,” he said, “it had might
as well be in the sea.”
“What with the gutters of the tower being half clogged,” she went on,
“the water level down there is very low nowadays--twelve or fifteen
feet, at best--and I feared they might find the arch, but they haven’t.
It’s perfectly feasible: Malcolm Mor and I did it four years ago,
like a bomb. Why, it’s a lark, Hugh; come along. The last one down
is an old maid.” Hiking her skirt halfway up her white thighs, Mary
MacAskival stepped over the well-coping, swung round, and began to
descend the slimy iron rungs. “I locked the crypt door on the inside,
for I have keys, you know,” she whispered up, “but Niven may be
pounding on it any second, so be quick with you.”
There was nothing for it but to obey this madcap. Down Logan went into
the cistern; he hoped the old rungs would hold. Once his foot caught
the girl’s fingers, and she suppressed a cry. He heard a faint splash
of water below, and turned the torch downward, looking between his
bare legs. Mary MacAskival, her skirt held up almost to her shoulders,
was more than waist-high in the black water. “There is nothing in the
world,” she volunteered, “quite like a cold tub. Now do as I do, and
mind your head, for from floor to ceiling is scarcely more than four
feet.” She vanished.
Dismayed, Hugh Logan descended to his waist in the cold water. Then,
on his left, he saw the arch of which Mary had spoken: a round-headed
masonry arch, very old. The cistern water came to within two feet of
the crown of it. Gingerly, Logan stretched out a leg, found the floor
of a passage under the arch, gripped Mary’s outstretched hand thrust
back from the passage, and swung himself from the iron rungs to a low
tunnel nearly filled with water; he had to stoop so that his face
cleared the surface by only a few inches, and his little pack, strapped
to his back, scraped against the roof.
Squeezing his hand, Mary MacAskival pulled him along the black passage,
the torch-beam gleaming on the water. She had her skirt twisted round
her neck. “One thing’s certain,” she panted, “they’ll not hear us here.
In the old days, this place was flooded altogether, except when The
MacAskival let water out of the cistern so that men could enter the
passage. Malcolm Mor--he was the old gardener, remember?--told me
that his father’s father’s father’s uncle knew of this place, though
no living man had seen it for a hundred years and more. Malcolm and I
found it out together. We had grand larks.”
After six yards or so, the floor began to slope upward, fairly sharply;
and after a dozen yards, they were free of the water. “No trousers
for you yet, modest Hugh,” Mary said, though she had let her skirt
fall into place. “There is water still to come.” A moment later, they
entered a small square rock chamber, beyond which loomed another narrow
passage. “The Picts made this, as they made the Whiskey Bottle, Hugh.
Look there.” She pointed the torch toward one wall, and by it Hugh
made out a faint band of carving on the wall: little hooded and caped
figures, faceless, some riding on queer little ponies. “This was a
chapel, I think, or a tomb; but we haven’t a moment to spare just now.”
She led the way into the further passage, the floor of which sloped
downward again. “We’re far beyond the Old House now, Hugh.”
The passage shot abruptly downward, and then ended in a solid barrier
of living rock. Did the girl mean them to crouch here indefinitely, on
the chance that help might come from the mainland before they starved?
“I think the Picts dug all this for a temple,” she was saying, “or a
king’s tomb; but the MacAskivals used it as a sortie-port in time of
siege, or a way of escape if worst came to worst. Oh, I’m not strong
enough. Tug at it, Hugh!” She was kneeling on the rough floor. Handing
the torch back to her, Hugh Logan felt under his hands a thick stone
slab, roughly rectangular. He tugged. It could be slid to one side, far
enough to allow them to squeeze through to whatever lay beneath. And
beneath was more water. But this water splashed and sucked, and the
strong stench of seaweed came up from it; and from beyond came the roar
of the wild Carnglass tide.
“We’re to go into that, Mary?” But Mary MacAskival already had swung
her handsome bare legs through the gap. The water just below snarled
and surged in the cave, as if full of murderous desire. “It’s past
midnight, Hugh, and the tide has ebbed.” She jumped down.
After all, Logan found when he followed her, the water came only
to their knees. At high tide, the passage would be impossible. He
scratched a foot on some sharp submerged stone. Roof and floor of the
cave now angled downward, and the water deepened; but by the time they
reached the entrance, it was no higher than their waists. “In the old
days,” Mary said, “little coracles came into this at low tide. There
is another cave like this on the northern shore, but larger, and far
harder to reach from the land.” She plucked a bit of seaweed from a
rock. “This is the carrageen. In a better time, I will make you a
pudding of it.” Then she ducked through the low mouth of the cave, Hugh
Logan behind her, and they were in the night, by the ocean, a cliff at
their backs, a splendid moon overhead.
For the first time in many days, the mist and drizzle had lifted from
Carnglass altogether; and for these islands, the sea was calm. But the
clear beauty of the night was small comfort to these two fugitives:
Jackman and his gang might hunt them down by that round moon. Mary
splashed through a rock pool toward the relatively low cliff of gray
stone that met the ocean at this point. “I think, Hugh, that by this
time they will have searched the Old House for us, and Jackman will
know we have got out. But they will not know the way that we have gone,
and perhaps Jackman cannot make the men follow him out of the house
this night, for they are afraid of every shadow now. Here we’re too
close to the Old House for safety. We’ll pass between Cailleach and the
sea-cliffs, and so up to St. Merin’s Chapel; that’s best.” When the two
of them had got to the foot of a faint path that seemed to wind up the
cliff, Mary put on shoes and stockings. “Now, Mr. Barrister Logan, you
pillar of respectability, you may wear trousers again.”
They climbed; they scrambled; they trotted; when they could, they
ran. From the cliffs they descended into the glen that twisted
round the hill of Cailleach, and hurried through heaps of stones
along a forgotten trail; here, once, had been a village, and Duncan
MacAskival’s people had lived under the thatch of one of these ruins.
The girl was agile as a deer; it was all Logan could do to keep up with
her, for his rucksack was curiously heavy. The moonlight helped them
to make speed, but also it would leave them naked unto their enemies,
should Jackman and the rest come this way. For more than an hour they
hurried, until they had crossed a valley and saw before them the steep
way up to the highest point of Carnglass, the headland on which stood
St. Merin’s Chapel, with the graveyard round it. Then Mary flung
herself exhausted on the heather, and Logan sank down panting beside
her. Two or three strange white shapes scurried away from them; Logan
started. “Are those things deer or goats?”
The tired girl laughed at him. “Carnglass sheep, like no other sheep
on earth. Long legs and long necks, and great leapers, and altogether
wild.” Everything in this forgotten island, it seemed, defied the tooth
of time.
But it was no hour for philosophical observations. So soon as they had
got a little strength back, they must be away to the top of the island.
And what they could hope for there, aside from a brief respite, was
more than Logan could see. Unarmed, they would be much easier game
than Donley had been. Jackman and the rest would have their blood
up. This girl, it might be, had destroyed herself by trying to save
him. “Here, Hugh,” Mary said, “you’ll want this.” She took from the
rucksack a paper in which were wrapped some scraps of meat, two boiled
potatoes, and a piece of bread, all this salvaged furtively from Lady
MacAskival’s dinner-tray. Logan, indeed, was ravenous, and he ate the
lot, Mary insisting that she had got down a late supper. As he ate, she
told him what had passed since he went down the Whiskey Bottle.
When Jackman and Royall had taken Logan to the study at gun-point, Mary
MacAskival had run to her room and locked herself in. It was only much
later in the day, when Jackman and most of the men were searching for
Carruthers, that she had bullied out of Niven the fact that Logan was
shut in the Whiskey Bottle. In her room, she had taken out of a chest
the only weapon she had, the ancient dirk that was said to have been
Askival’s, and had sat with it in her lap, expecting all the time to
have Jackman and Royall turn upon her next. But Jackman had only tried
her door; and, not being able to enter, had called out that he would
deal with her later. And then he had gone out to comb the island for
Carruthers, whom they did not find; nor did they find anyone else. The
men returned after sunset, Jackman and Royall going back to the study,
where they sat talking for hours. The girl had crept to the study door
and had caught fragments of their argument.
No, they had not found Carruthers; but they had turned up something
else. When Donley’s body was searched in the cellar, one of the men
discovered in a pocket a water-soaked note. It was nearly illegible;
but they could make out Logan’s signature, and that it was addressed to
the police. On this evidence, Jackman and Royall abandoned their notion
that Logan was an agent of Vlanarov; they now took him for a detective.
The question remained as to what they ought to do with the man in the
Whiskey Bottle. Royall thought it best to hold him there until they
could get some boat, and then to run for it, abandoning their whole
project. But Jackman was for death: Logan knew too much, and must go
over the cliff. The two exhausted fanatics still were debating when the
girl slipped away, but she believed they would dispose of Logan in the
morning, if not sooner.
So she took Logan’s pack, with what food she could get her hands upon,
and a pint bottle of paraffin, and Askival’s dirk; and she bullied
and wheedled Niven, on guard in the old tower; and to her immense
satisfaction, she had got Logan clean away. Jackman and his people had
no notion of the existence of that passage out of the cistern; Lady
MacAskival herself had not known of it. When she ran, Mary knew that
she left her aunt in danger, but Jackman’s fanatic voice behind the
study door convinced her she dared not delay; Jackman would act before
his time ran out altogether. And here she was, lying beside Hugh Logan
on the heather.
Behind them hulked the northern heights where St. Merin’s Chapel stood.
They could hear a little waterfall tumbling, in that still night, from
the cliff-tops. The burn ran through the heather and bracken close
by them, lower down joining a stream that entered the sea by Askival
harbor. Now they must climb to their last forlorn refuge. First they
drank from the peaty burn; then Logan shouldered the rucksack, and up
they started. They hardly spoke in the course of that hard nocturnal
climb.
From the summit, nearly an hour later, most of Carnglass was dimly
visible to them in the moonlight. They could make out specks of light
away to the southwest: lamps burning in the Old House. “Hugh,” Mary
said, laying a hand on his arm, “Carnglass is the oldest place in the
world, and the loveliest. Do you hate it? You’ve seen only fright and
death here. But it was Dr. Jackman that brought the terror. If--if we
live, Hugh, I’ll show you Carnglass as you ought to see it. Can you
forgive me for having drawn you into this terror?”
“One crowded hour of glorious life,” Logan told her, “really is worth
an age without a name. And if I’d not come, I’d never have met Miss
Mary MacAskival, would I?”
“No,” she said, with a little sob, “no. But we can’t loiter here.” She
took Askival’s dirk from the rucksack. “Hugh, take this, and cut some
branches off the trees around the chapel, as quickly as you can; and
I’ll scrape together some dead sticks and bits of dry heather; I made
a little pile of them here weeks ago, on the chance that I might need
to light them one day. We can burn the rucksack, too, and my jacket.
They’ll make no grand beacon, but we can do no more. The paraffin I
brought will start them blazing.”
Logan stared at her. “Who’d see the fire, except Jackman’s boys?”
“There’s a chance, Hugh. The night is clear. Besides, what other scheme
is there? And my people will come. They may not come soon enough, but
they will come.”
“Your people?” The girl must be sunk in a Carnglass fantasy.
“Hurry, Hugh,” was all she said. “It won’t be long before dawn.”
They built their poor futile beacon, with what fuel they had on that
hilltop, and they poured the paraffin upon it, and they set it alight
with one of Logan’s matches, and they added to it the rucksack and
Mary’s tweed jacket and Hugh’s coat. It flared somewhat better than
Hugh had expected. But what possibility existed of this being seen by
any vessel passing in the night, or of being acted upon? And it was
almost certain that it would guide Jackman.
“We’re only targets here,” Logan said. “At the chapel, we’d have some
shelter.” They climbed still higher on that cliff-plateau, until
they came to a low drystone dyke. Beyond it were tombstones, white
in the moonlight. This was Carnglass graveyard; and in the middle
of the graveyard stood a long, low medieval building, St. Merin’s
Chapel, battered by five centuries. Away to their right, a tall ruin,
infinitely older than the chapel, round, nearly forty feet high,
windowless and roofless, loomed at the brink of the cliff.
On its rough stones flickered the light of their little impromptu
beacon. “They call that the Pict’s House,” said Mary, “or sometimes
the Firgower’s House.” The tower’s circular wall slanted slightly
inward, all round, for some twenty feet of its height; then it shot
perpendicularly to its summit. It was what was called a broch, a strong
place, Pictish work beyond question. “I do not think that really
the Pictish chief lived here,” Mary went on, “for that room and the
passages under the Old House have the look of his palace. The Picts
lived underground, you know. This was a watchtower, and a place of
refuge.”
She turned toward the chapel. The firelight was reflected, between them
and the medieval building, upon a great Celtic cross, perhaps fifteen
feet high, carved with grotesques and convoluted interlacing bands;
and it leant heavily to one side. This was the Cross of Carnglass,
set up by the missionaries of St. Columba in the dim Irish age, St.
Merin’s Cross. Mary led Logan toward it; and, as they came close up,
she pulled from one of the stunted rowan trees which brooded over that
windswept graveyard a little twig, on which the first leaves of spring
had opened. She thrust it into the topmost buttonhole of Logan’s shirt.
“The rowan keeps off wraiths and evil spirits, Hugh,” she said, “and
St. Merin’s kirkyard is famous for them. Niven thinks I am the chief of
them. Look at me: am I a witch?”
Mary MacAskival stood before the Cross of Carnglass, her red hair
brushing the white stone, her haughty nose and firm chin marking her as
the last of an old, old, fierce line: perhaps, truly, the descendant
of the Merin whose bones lay beneath one of these grass-grown grave
mounds. “If anyone could call spirits from the vasty deep, you could,
Mary,” Hugh told her.
She smiled queerly. “It may be I will do just that, Hugh Logan.
But here, I’ll show you the chapel.” She took him through a Gothic
doorway--the wooden door, ajar, sagged on its hinges--and flashed
the torch-beam over the tombs within. A grotesque stone face, rudely
carved, stared at them from a niche. Directly before them stood up an
ornate modern tomb of marble. “Sir Alastair is beneath that. And here’s
his postbox.” She pointed to a slot in the marble, surrounded by a
carved funerary wreath; and she slid her hand into the opening. “Oh,
there’s nothing within now!” she said, as if really disappointed. “For
years, you know, my aunt used to send letters by the butler or footman
to Sir Alastair in his tomb. And I used to post my letters here, too,
when I wasn’t watched.”
Post her letters there! Mary must have read the amazement on his face,
for she added, as if to reassure him of her sanity, “Oh, yes. The
letter I sent Duncan MacAskival, that brought you here, was posted
here in Sir Alastair’s postbox.” Was this some macabre witticism of
the uncanny little beauty, or a delusion grown out of dreams and
isolation? “But we daren’t linger here, Hugh. If Dr. Jackman sees our
fire, he’ll come up the cliff straight away.” She pointed to the old
dirk, which Hugh Logan had thrust into his belt. “That was Askival’s.
You must be my Askival, Hugh. I am Merin, you know: Merin of Carnglass,
who’s haunted this place since time began.” She was half playful, half
in earnest. The dirk, Logan thought, might be small use against the
guns of Jackman’s men, but it was some comfort. Then he followed Mary
MacAskival out of the silent chapel, and toward the towering broch by
the precipice. Their fire still leaped against the night sky of lonely
Carnglass, but in a few minutes only embers would remain.
“The Pict’s House,” Mary was saying, “is the best place we can hide.
By the sea, away below these cliffs, is a great cave; but even I could
not lead you down the path to it in darkness; and besides, the tide is
coming in now, and the cave will be full almost to the top. It must be
the Pict’s House for us. One still can climb the stair to the top of
it.” She was quite calm, as if, having done all that she could do, she
abandoned herself to fate and fortune. “And from the Pict’s House, we
can see nearly all of Carnglass, once the sun is up.”
They entered the tower through a square doorway ten feet above the
ground; a worn timber, sea-drift, propped against the wall just below
the door, made this scramble possible. The doorway was capped, by way
of lintel, by a great stone slab; the Picts had not known the arch.
Empty and roofless, the round interior cavern of the broch was before
them, but Mary turned into the wall itself: a circling stair led
upward, its steps vast rude slabs. By it they came to the crumbling
summit of the broch, and Logan observed, while they climbed, that no
mortar lay between the cunningly-placed stones of the tower; this was
the work of men in the dawn of history, and beside it the Old House
across the island was a thing of yesterday.
Round the top of the broch ran a stone platform. “Stoop down behind
the parapet, Hugh,” the girl told him, “so Jackman won’t see us, if he
comes this way.” The earliest hint of a spring dawn glimmered in the
east; a corncrake fluttered up from the parapet. Right below them, the
tremendous cliffs, the cliffs over which Lagg had gone, fell sheer away
to the ocean. From this point, the last Pict chieftain may have watched
the long ships of the Vikings as they swept inexorably out of the
sea-mist to the north. On that sea, nothing was visible this morning
but whitecaps breaking on a submerged reef.
“No, there’s nothing, no sail,” Mary MacAskival said anxiously, almost
as if she had expected one. “Do you know the tale of the fairy boat,
Hugh, that sails through the mists? If a girl glimpses it, she vanishes
before nightfall. I wish one could carry me off--and you. Now you see
my Carnglass, Hugh Logan.”
He looked landward. Far to the west-southwest, beyond Cailleach, the
Old House stood grim on its rock; lower down, the New House, among its
plantations. Between them and the Old House stretched glen and hill,
heather and bracken, boulder and peat-bog, waterfall and burn. On this
lovely morning, the mists were quite gone, and there was revealed
to him the unearthly beauty of the forgotten island. The girl took
his arm. “Hugh, were it yours, would you live here always--or almost
always?”
“That I would, Mary MacAskival.” Carnglass, for good or evil, set its
mark on men.
She faced him squarely, putting her hands on his shoulders. “We may be
under that sea tonight, Hugh Logan. But if we are not, why shouldn’t
Carnglass be yours? I’ve known you but thirty-six hours, Hugh. You’re
all the man I need to know. Do you fear me? Some men do, though I’m so
little.” She kissed him then, and said, “Hugh Logan, I have kissed you
more times than I have kissed all other men in all my life. Do you mean
to ask me to marry you?”
Torn between love and doubt, in that high place, Logan looked long
into her green eyes. “They would say, Mary, that I took advantage of a
lonely girl who had barely met me, for the sake of her money.”
She tossed her bright hair at that. “Don’t be so canny, Hugh! Do you
know the MacAskival motto, over the door of the old tower? ‘They have
said and they will say; let them be saying.’ The MacAskivals, man or
woman, have no concern for what they say in Glasgow or Edinburgh or
London or all the wide world.” Then a look of fright came into her
flashing eyes. “Is it that you are married already, Hugh?”
“No,” he said, “but I will be, if we get alive out of this.” And as the
sun rose, he took her in his arms. Rash, proud, and strange that girl
was, perhaps a little mad; but in that moment he loved her more than
all the kingdoms of the earth.
She clung to him, sobbing and laughing softly in her moment of triumph
and surrender. But abruptly he thrust her back, and pulled her below
the level of the parapet. “Mary, Mary! They’ve come!” For three armed
men were climbing the slope toward the chapel, and Jackman was the
first of them. Logan thought that they two had not been seen. No shots
were fired, at least.
His arm around the girl’s waist, he ventured a second glance between
two heavy stones that teetered precariously on the parapet’s brink.
Yes, Jackman and Anderson and Powert. The men got over a low wall that
ran round the graveyard, close by the remnants of the burned-out futile
beacon. Then they entered the chapel.
“Mary, girl,” he whispered, “they’ll be on us in three or four minutes,
I think.” She did not cry, but kissed him once more, and then composed
her young face, as if the MacAskival ought to meet enemies without
flinching.
“Hugh,” she said, “every second we can delay may help us.” He did not
see why, but she gave him no time to dissent. “Back down the stair,
Hugh, and if they try to come in, we’ll cast down the timber by the
door.” Yes, they could do that, though without guns they could do no
more than delay Jackman briefly. Back down the stair they went, and
crouched by the empty archaic doorway. It wouldn’t do to push away the
timber-gangplank that led up from the ground unless they must, for the
noise of its fall would bring Jackman and his men.
Now they heard Jackman’s voice; he was coming right round the broch
from the chapel. Anderson’s sullen Gallowgate mutter replied to
Jackman. And in a moment the hunters stood just below the broch’s door,
though Logan dared not look out. “All right, Powert,” Jackman said,
“up with you.” At that, Logan and Mary MacAskival shoved against
the timber with all their strength. It slid sideways and fell to the
ground. They showed themselves for an instant as they pushed, and
someone fired, but the bullet passed over their heads into the broch.
“Ah, well,” came Jackman’s voice from below, “you _did_ lead us a
chase, didn’t you? Anderson, Powert, take hold there.” The timber was
heaved back into place; Logan could not risk rising again to push it
off, for Jackman would have a gun trained on the doorway. “Powert, Mr.
Logan is not armed,” said Jackman. “Quick, now!” A man sprang up the
timber and through the door.
Thrusting at him with the dirk, Logan got home to Powert’s upper arm,
and the man cried out and grappled with him. Before he could slash
Powert again, Jackman was up, and poked the little pistol Meg right
into Logan’s face. “Gallant, Logan, very gallant; but drop that.” Logan
flung down the dirk. Mary MacAskival was struggling in Anderson’s arms.
“A pleasant morning, eh, Logan?” Jackman said. “You’ll not see another.”
13
They took Hugh Logan and Mary MacAskival out of the Pict’s House.
Anderson tied Logan’s wrists together, behind his back, with a length
of heavy cord, pulling the knots savagely tight. Jackman held the
girl by the arm meanwhile; and when Anderson had finished with Logan,
under Jackman’s instructions he tied a cord to Mary’s right wrist, and
retained the other end of the cord in his hand while Jackman removed
Powert’s jacket and bandaged the flesh-wound with a strip torn from the
tail of Powert’s shirt. This done, Jackman had Anderson tie the other
end of Mary’s cord to Jackman’s own left wrist.
“There!” Jackman said, contentedly, “a brisk morning’s run, and no harm
done. Anderson, Powert and I will take this charming couple to the Old
House while you trot down the brae and call back Ferd and Niven; I
think they should be near the sheiling this side of Cailleach.”
Anderson glowered at Logan. “Ye said I wud hae the thrashin’ o’ that
clot, Doctor.”
“That you shall, Anderson, my man, that you shall--once we’re at the
Old House. I do believe Anderson will learn all we need to know from
you, Logan, in short order. Our treatment of you, Miss MacAskival, will
need to be rather more laborious: the washing of the brain, as our
Chinese friends say. But it will all come out in the wash, won’t it?
And Powert, too, will be given his fair turn at you, Logan: fair shares
for all, eh?” Jackman ran his tongue over his thin lips. “In one thing,
at least, you seem to have told me the truth, Logan: you’ve no people
in Carnglass, for you’d not have been cowering in that ruin if there
were any. There’s Carruthers to be accounted for; but I suppose he may
have missed his footing in the dark and have gone over the cliffs. I
must confess that my estimate of your abilities has diminished, Logan.
Whatever possessed you to light that fire here by the chapel? You might
have eluded us four or five hours longer if you hadn’t done that. Well,
drive him along, Powert.”
With his unwounded arm, Powert gave Logan a fierce shove in the back,
setting him stumbling in the direction of the Old House; and Jackman
tugged on Mary’s cord, pulling her with him behind Logan and Powert.
The girl’s face was quite drained of color, but very haughty. “My
dear,” Jackman said to her, casually, “how changed you are going to be
within a few days! How very changed!”
Then, from somewhere below in the nearer valley, there came to them the
crack of a rifle-shot. It was answered by another, apparently from a
different gun. Next was a burst of firing, and then a faint cry.
Jackman’s satisfied smile altered horribly; he was Rumpelstiltskin
again. “Logan,” he muttered, “is there a man of yours in Carnglass,
after all? Or is that only Niven’s or Caggia’s nerves playing them
tricks? Anderson, you and I must go down to see. Powert, we’ll leave
you with Logan; he can’t do you harm. The girl will come with me. We’ll
send back a man to help you get Logan to the Old House, Powert.”
Powert most obviously did not relish the plan. “Coom, Dr. Jackman, I’ve
a bad arm, and this cove’s a queer one.”
“Nonsense,” Jackman said, “we’ll bind his feet, too, until we send
Anderson or someone else for you.” Away below, there was only silence,
but Jackman ran his hand across his forehead uneasily. “Here: we’ll put
him inside the chapel with you, and you can watch the door, with your
back to the wall: that’s safe enough.” Powert scowled, but shoved Logan
toward the door of St. Merin’s Chapel. Jackman herded the four of them
inside.
Now that the dawn came through the broken tracery of the chapel’s
pointed windows, Logan could see that the single room contained seven
or eight tombs raised above the floor, some of them very old; and a
number of the flagstones, deeply incised by some rude stonecarver,
apparently covered other graves. “Wha’ in hell’s yon!” cried Anderson,
abruptly, pointing.
Near the northeast corner of the room, one of the flagstones had
been raised, and now was leant against the wall. Where it had lain,
a little mound of earth, freshly dug, protruded above the floor; and
in the earth was thrust a curiously primitive wooden spade. The mound
was about six feet long. They all crowded close to it. An earthenware
dish had been set atop the mound, and the dish was filled with, of all
things, nails and what looked like salt. Across the dish lay a branch
from a rowan tree. “That,” Mary MacAskival said softly to Dr. Jackman,
“is how the spirits of the newly dead are laid in these islands.”
“Wha’ fule’s been diggin’ graves?” Anderson growled, looking back over
his shoulder toward the empty doorway.
Jackman stood rigid; then, “I think Carruthers must be under that clay.
Anderson, take the spade and uncover him.” Mary MacAskival shivered
slightly.
Anderson cursed, but under Jackman’s hard eye he began to shovel. The
grave was very shallow. In a minute or two, a heavy shape could be made
out, wrapped in a big piece of tarred canvas. “That will be the head
at the far end,” Jackman whispered. “Powert, draw the canvas from the
face.”
Mary had turned away, but Logan, dreadfully fascinated, saw clearly
the smashed and fallen face of a man he never had looked upon before.
And Jackman screamed: he screamed twice, and so terribly that his men
shook, for the screams were worse than the ruined face in the grave.
“Lagg! It’s Lagg!”
Quivering, Anderson dropped the spade. “Aye,” he said, “Tam Lagg, that
we pit ower the cliff into the sea. For the love o’ God, Powert, cover
his mug.”
Powert, his teeth chattering, let the canvas drop back over the corpse.
“Logan,” shrieked Jackman, turning a frantic face on him, “Logan, what
are you? What are you? Do you make dead men rise from the sea? Was
it you that put this thing here?” He had the pistol in his hand, and
thrust it against Logan’s middle.
He will fire now, Logan thought, for he’s quite out of his head.
There was the sound of a shot. But I’m not hit, Logan realized; I
feel nothing. Jackman sprang away and looked out the doorway; the
shot, after all, had come from outside, though in his tension Logan
had thought, for an instant, that Jackman had pulled the trigger. Yet
surely a gun had gone off fairly close at hand.
“Anderson, watch this door,” Jackman ordered; he had a measure of
control over himself. “Powert, give me that rope.” He forced Logan
to sit, and tied his ankles together. “We’ll return for you in a few
minutes, Powert.”
“Me? I’ll not sit here by the dead man.” Powert scarcely could hold his
rifle.
Jackman sent him a deadly look from those glowering black eyes of his.
“You’ll be another dead man yourself, Powert, if I hear another word
from you. Now, Anderson, we’ll look into this. Miss MacAskival, if you
cry out, I’ll be forced to put a bullet through your head.” He shoved
her through the doorway.
“Hugh,” Mary called back, reckless of Jackman, “Hugh, I love you!” Then
she and Jackman and Anderson were out of sight.
Powert, left with Logan and the corpse, still shook; and he cursed
Logan and Jackman and Carnglass while he made his preparations as if
for siege. He pushed the helpless Logan roughly against Sir Alastair’s
tomb, facing away from the doorway, and parallel with the open grave
and the awful thing under the canvas. Then he pulled shut the sagging
door of the chapel, so that some force would be required to budge
it; and he himself leaned against a tombstone that came up to his
shoulders, with his face toward the door, and his rifle in his hands,
the barrel resting upon the head of another tombstone. So situated,
Powert could watch the door, keep an eye on Logan and the sheeted
thing, and have the comforting feel of stone at his back.
Logan himself, after the repeated shocks of that fair morning, was in
little better state than Powert. Silent, he lay motionless against
the tomb of Sir Alastair MacAskival, his brain dull, dull, dull.
There were no more shots outside: only the rustle of a breeze in the
rowan trees. The stillness was a trying thing. Powert was mumbling to
himself: obscenities, blasphemies, scraps of nearly-forgotten prayer.
The sunlight was pouring into the chapel through the unglazed Gothic
windows. Five or six minutes passed thus.
Then a faint sound came. Was something stirring in the high graveyard
grass, just outside the closed door? Did the door itself creak, as if
very gently tried? “Anderson,” Powert cried out, choking, “is it you,
man? Dr. Jackman?” Nothing answered. Did the door creak again, ever
so slightly, or was it the breeze? “Sing out,” Powert shouted, glaring
wild-eyed at the flimsy door, “or I’ll shoot!”
High in the wall behind Powert was one of the pointed windows, its
stone tracery for the most part broken away. It must be at least eight
feet above the level of the graveyard. Though Logan could see this
window, Powert, intent on the doorway, could not. And as something rose
cautiously above the windowsill, from outside, Logan bit his lip to
keep back a cry.
It was a man’s head that cut off the morning light: a lean man,
keen-eyed; and there was a long white beard on his chin; and there was
a little black knife between his teeth. His eyes took in the room.
Steadying himself by clutching the broken tracery with his left hand,
stealthily he rose until his shoulders came above the window-ledge. In
his brown right hand he held a large stone.
As if someone had thrust tentatively against it, the rotten door
creaked shrilly. “Damn you,” Powert was crying, “speak up, or I’ll
shoot.” The white-bearded man outside the window drew back his arm and
flung the stone with great force, as if letting fly at a rabbit. The
rock caught Powert at the back of his head; he fell to his knees, the
rifle clattering on the flagstones. At that the door burst open, and
two men tumbled into the room, and were upon Powert before he could
recover. A boy followed them, and, kneeling by Logan, looked shyly into
his face. These were the two men and the boy, MacAskivals from Daldour,
that Logan had seen in Loch Boisdale, four days before.
Then there strode through the doorway a very tall old man, erect and
vigorous and bearded to his chest, with a shotgun in his hand. He
was worth looking at; but another man, hard on his heels, was still
stranger. This was a burly, broad-shouldered fellow, with a heavy,
jolly face, and mild eyes that were exceedingly odd, though it would
have been difficult to say why. Something in the look of his face was
queer enough. Yet it was his clothing that made him conspicuous. The
other men wore the caps and canvas cloaks and rough homespun tweeds
of the crofters and fishermen in the remoter Isles. This burly man,
in strong contrast, was dressed in what seemed to be the garments
of a laird or prosperous farmer: green tweed jacket, green corduroy
breeches and long stockings, good heavy shoes. Under the open jacket
was a soiled yellow waistcoat; and on his head was a battered porkpie
hat. These clothes were in wretched repair, with dark stains here and
there upon them. The breeches, seemingly split at the seams, were
held together by pins. One sleeve of the jacket was ripped open from
shoulder to wrist. And although the clothes had been got on, they did
not fit the man who wore them.
Resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder, the tall old man bent over Logan
and spoke in Gaelic. Logan shook his head: “I know only English.”
Frowning, the old man muttered through his splendid beard to the boy
beside him.
The boy stammered a little, as if overwhelmed with shyness; but there
was no fear in him. He spoke to Logan in good, if careful, English.
“Malcolm Mor MacAskival of Daldour asks what is your name, and what do
you do in Carnglass.” The pirate-like old man looked hard at Logan.
These, then, were Mary MacAskival’s people! She had not been
woolgathering when she spoke of them. How she had summoned them, Hugh
Logan did not know; but the five of them--two had gagged Powert, and
were sitting on the man--were staring at Logan intently. This was no
time for long explanations. “Untie me,” Logan said. “I am Hugh Logan,
and I am to marry Miss Mary MacAskival.”
There was a murmur from the men, and all five MacAskivals of Daldour
took off their caps deferentially, and then put them back on again.
With a fisherman’s deftness, old Malcolm Mor undid the cords about
Logan’s wrists and ankles, and the two men who looked like twins
promptly bound Powert with them. As he released Logan, Malcolm Mor
said, in decent English, “Then I am your man, sir, and so are my sons
and my grandson, and my nephew Angus, and my nephew Kenneth who is not
here. We saw the man with the third eye lead the lady away. Will we
go after her?” Malcolm Mor tapped his shotgun. Malcolm Mor’s two sons
had old rifles; the boy and Angus, the queer burly man in the queerer
clothes, were unarmed. One of the sons, almost bowing, handed Powert’s
rifle to Logan as he stood up and tried to get the blood to circulate
in his tingling wrists and ankles.
Hugh Logan surveyed his little army. “Yes, we will,” he said, “if they
don’t come after us first. Just now they’re down in the valley hunting
someone; but some of them will come back to the chapel.” These men,
he thought, would be good shots; and to live in Daldour, they must be
hardy and probably courageous, though he doubted whether they had much
experience at man-killing.
“It is my nephew Kenneth that they are hunting,” Malcolm Mor observed.
“I sent him to watch them from the bracken. It was Kenneth who shot his
gun to lead them away from the chapel. They will not find him. We have
watched them for a week, but we did not understand what they did, and
there was no gentleman to lead us. We would have shot the man with the
third eye when he took the lady away, but we were afraid that she might
be hurt. Is it so that they are robbers and murderers?”
“That they are,” Logan said, emphatically.
“Then,” Malcolm Mor went on, in the slow, gentle Island English, “it
would be lawful for us to hunt them?” Logan suspected that the people
of Daldour were extremely shy of the law.
“It would,” Logan told him. “I am a lawyer, and I give you my
authority.”
Malcolm Mor MacAskival’s old eyes lit up, and he smiled as some Norse
rover might have smiled. “Then, sir,” he said, “we will go after the
lady, and take the Old House of Fear.” He seemed to have no doubt
whatsoever of the success of this undertaking by five or six men and a
boy. “There are three more able-bodied men in Daldour, but we have no
time to fetch them. Kenneth, my nephew, will come to us soon. Will we
go down into the valley now, Mr. Logan?”
“Let’s have a look about,” Logan said. The men followed him through the
chapel doorway. When Logan had thrown his rucksack on the fire, he had
stuffed his binoculars into a trouser-pocket; and now he pulled them
out and stared through them in the direction of the Old House; but,
what with hills, rocks, and clumps of trees and thickets of bracken, he
could see no one moving.
Then, a hundred yards away, and ascending toward the chapel, Anderson
came into view. Logan dropped the binoculars and snatched up his rifle,
but Anderson had seen them before he could get the gun to his shoulder.
For a second, Anderson stared aghast; then, flinging himself around,
he leaped downhill, vanishing into bracken, reappearing on a knoll,
slipping, almost rolling down a talus-slope, merging with the blur of
gray rock and purple heather and green bracken. Logan fired twice, but
could not have hit him. At that, Malcolm Mor and his two sons brought
up their guns and fired also. They did not really take aim, and Logan
thought they meant to frighten, rather than to wound; but also he
thought that they could be brought to shoot to kill if they must.
“We can catch him,” Malcolm Mor said, like a dog eager for the word
from his master. “He is a town man, and we are faster.”
“No,” Logan decided, shaking his head, “no, there’ll be three others
down there, and they have Miss MacAskival with them, on a rope. We’ll
go down and after them, but together; and no one must shoot if the lady
might be hurt.” This deliberation was agony to Logan himself, but he
had been an officer, and he knew something of tactics.
The MacAskivals nodded. “My nephew Kenneth will be watching them from
the bracken,” Malcolm Mor said. “We will go down, and he will join us;
and if they take the lady to the Old House, then we will follow them
into the house.”
Malcolm Mor’s nephew Angus, the burly man in the dirty yellow
waistcoat, was nodding and smiling at every word his old uncle uttered.
“Do you have a gun?” Logan said to him. The man opened his mouth, but
words did not come out: only mouthed grunts, rather horrid. Malcolm Mor
seemed somewhat embarrassed.
“He can not speak,” the boy--Malcolm Gille was his name--said
apologetically. “He is called”--here the boy seemed to seek the English
equivalent of a Gaelic term, and emerged triumphantly--“he is called
Dumb Angus.” Dumb Angus nodded enthusiastically at the mention of his
name. “And,” the boy went on, “he is simple. Dumb Angus is simple, and
does not have a gun, but he is very strong, and he is honest, and he
makes many jokes.” Dumb Angus bowed and smiled, and tapped himself on
the head to prove that he knew he was simple. “He cannot speak,” the
boy said, “but he makes jokes in other ways.”
Logan checked Powert’s rifle, and reloaded; one of Malcolm’s
sons--their names, it turned out, were John and Robert--brought him
a cartridge-pouch that Powert had worn. What ought they to do with
Powert? Malcolm Mor, now assured that the majesty of the law sheltered
the persecuted sept of MacAskival, speculatively fingered the little
black knife in his belt. “No,” said Logan, “we’ll bring them all to
trial, if we can.”
“There is one already taken and locked away,” Malcolm Mor offered. “His
name, I think, is Carruthers. We took him the night before last night,
and carried him to Daldour, and locked him in a byre, and he is afraid,
for he thinks that we will eat him. Dumb Angus made him think so; that
is one of the jokes of Dumb Angus. It is pleasant to have Dumb Angus
in Daldour. We could carry this man, too, to Daldour, but there is not
time.”
Dumb Angus was gesturing and beckoning, and pointing upward. At the
east end of the chapel, behind the altar, ran a kind of low loft or
gallery, of wood, probably built when the chapel was re-roofed by Sir
Alastair MacAskival. “Yes,” said Logan, “that will do. Put Powert
there, at the back, and no one is likely to notice him until we need
him.” The sons of Malcolm carried Powert up the short flight of wooden
steps, and tightened the cords and his gag. Dumb Angus might be simple,
but he had eyes in his head.
And now they could start in pursuit of Jackman, for Mary MacAskival’s
sake. Anderson probably would have warned Jackman and the others by
this time; but the warning might do no mischief, for those four guns
going off at his heels must have sounded to Anderson as if half the
constabulary of Scotland were after him. They could not catch Jackman
and the rest before they reached the Old House, the odds were, nor
would it have been safe to fire at the retreating gang with Mary
MacAskival in their midst. But by night, Logan was resolved, he and
the Daldour people would make their try. “Well, gentlemen,” he said to
Malcolm Mor and the others, “if you’re ready, I am.” And they started
down the brae.
As they trotted and scrambled toward the valley, the boy running by
Logan’s side, Logan said to Malcolm Gille, “Why does Dumb Angus wear
such clothes?”
“Those clothes were not his.” The boy smiled broadly. “It is one of the
jokes of Dumb Angus. They are the clothes of Mr. Lagg, the factor, that
we found broken below the cliffs and buried in the chapel of St. Merin.
For Dumb Angus, it is always Hallowe’en.”
The humor of Daldour, Logan took it, had its grisly side. Dumb Angus it
must have been that Rab had encountered two nights before. If even the
simpletons of Daldour--and the whole band of Daldour MacAskivals was
a remarkably odd-looking lot--were this resourceful, it might be just
possible for Logan to get Mary alive out of the Old House.
14
On the flank of Cailleach, a little ferret-like man rose out of the
heather to join Logan and the MacAskivals: Kenneth MacAskival. Like the
rest of his family, he really understood English, when he chose, and
could speak it tolerably well when he had to. On learning from Malcolm
Mor that this gentleman was the betrothed of The MacAskival, Kenneth
gave Logan his report.
After firing twice that morning to draw Jackman away from the chapel,
Kenneth MacAskival had contented himself with creeping through the
bracken and spying on the retreating party. The lady, Kenneth said,
never spoke, so far as he could hear; though the men thrust her roughly
along when, led on a cord as she was, she stumbled. They would be at
the Old House within a few minutes, the man with the third eye and the
rest, and could not be intercepted.
Logan and his men did not move toward the Old House so fast as they
could have. For Jackman might have laid an ambush, which had to be
watched for among the rocks and dens of rugged Carnglass. Once, through
his binoculars, Logan caught a glimpse of a hurrying figure, very close
to the Old House; then it was hidden again by a low intervening ridge.
Either of two courses he might take, Logan thought. He might send
the MacAskivals in their lobster boat to Loch Boisdale or whatever
other port they could reach that had a police station, and ask for
prompt help. But this would take hours, many hours, and meanwhile
Jackman would have Mary MacAskival in the Old House. And Jackman would
be thinking of the ruin of his scheme, and of the gelignite in the
cellars. Besides, would any police constable believe such a story, from
such a crew as the MacAskivals, without telegraphing to Glasgow or
Edinburgh for orders, which would mean delays? No, that plan wouldn’t
do.
So there remained to Logan only the storming of the Old House. Briefly,
he thought of trying to enter through the passage in the rock by which
Mary and he had escaped; but that was no go, since one of Jackman’s
riflemen at the cistern-mouth could kill anyone who tried to ascend.
They would have to rush the place from outside.
The thing could not be tried until evening, for Jackman had more men
within the Old House than Logan had without, and Jackman’s men were
desperate, well armed, and probably experienced in killing. By day,
it would have been mad. The oldest tower, with its little windows and
iron bars, would have been impossible to take even if defended by only
one or two riflemen, unless the attackers had mortars. The Renaissance
block was nearly as strong. But the Victorian addition was another
matter. The gate was stout, and the ground-floor windows were small,
covered by iron grills, and shuttered within. The plate-glass windows
of the first floor, however, were immense and undefended, and could be
reached with a long ladder--after dark. Even supposing Logan and his
men got inside the Old House, they still would be outnumbered. Their
hope was that before they should make their rush, they might be able
to demolish the morale of Jackman’s people, already badly shaken.
To help Mary, Logan would have taken any risk: if getting himself shot
would have saved her, he would have rushed the Old House that hour.
But the best chance for saving her, it seemed to him, lay in keeping
Jackman’s people very much on edge, and busy--and in praying that
Jackman himself might not go mad altogether. And this meant that some
eight hours, eight intolerable hours for Logan, must pass before he
could act.
But meanwhile he could prepare. Giving the Old House a wide berth, he
led the MacAskivals to the farm steading nearest the castle. Before
the troubles had begun, Simmons had kept the steading in some order,
though there were only two animals about the place: two shaggy and
ill-tempered little Barra horses, grazing in a small field. Having
caught the horses, the MacAskivals harnessed them to a farm cart.
This they loaded with straw, and with what loose lumber they could
find; also they put two gallon tins of paraffin, discovered in the
farmhouse, into the cart. In a shed they came upon a long ladder, which
they piled atop straw and lumber. Then, keeping out of range of fire
from the Old House, Dumb Angus and Malcolm Gille took the horses and
cart circuitously round to the wooded policies of the New House, which
was as close to the Victorian wing of the Old House as they could get
without being fired upon.
While this operation was going forward, Logan sent Kenneth and John
MacAskival to the rocky and bracken-covered hillsides that were barely
within extreme firing range of the Old House. And there the two
veteran poachers commenced a desultory fire against the windows of the
Old House. Logan gave Powert’s rifle to Kenneth, as the best weapon
available, taking Kenneth’s shotgun for himself. Concealed as they were
by dense bracken, and shifting position after every shot, there was
little danger of the MacAskivals being hit by retaliatory fire from
the Old House. For their part, the MacAskivals were instructed not
really to attempt to hit anyone, but to spend their time shattering
panes and nerves. The windows of Mary’s room in the old tower they
left untouched. Lady MacAskival’s room was on the seaward side of the
Old House, and so safe. For that matter, the whole garrison of the Old
House could retreat to the seaward rooms and temporary security, except
for what luckless sentinels Dr. Jackman might leave to guard against a
sudden rush. By early afternoon, every pane on the eastern side of the
Old House had been shattered, except those in Mary MacAskival’s windows.
For the first hour of this, three or four marksmen replied from the
Old House. But they could have seen almost nothing to shoot at, and
their risk of being struck by flying windowglass, if not by bullets,
was considerable. The return fire slackened perceptibly in the second
hour, and after that there came only infrequent shots from a single
rifle on the second floor, as if to demonstrate that the defenders were
still awake. Another rifleman on the roof of the old tower was driven
below early in the game. What all this did to the nerves of Jackman’s
men--this sniping by an unknown body of enemies, who had not even made
a formal demand for the surrender of the Old House--Logan could only
surmise. The loss of Powert, too, coming on the heels of Carruthers’
disappearance and the discovery of Lagg’s body, must have made an
impression.
Logan sent Robert MacAskival round to keep an eye on the back of the
old tower, to make sure no one slipped out by the garden gate; the
man hid himself behind an outcrop of rock and bided his time, leaving
the shooting to the others. Accompanied by Malcolm Mor, Logan himself
watched the main entrance from the plantation that stretched from the
New House nearly to the rock of the Old House. And from Malcolm Mor, as
they lay on their bellies under cover, that warm and fatal spring day,
Logan pieced together a good deal more of the history of the recent
troubles in Carnglass.
* * * * *
Poaching in Carnglass the shy twilight folk of Daldour took for a
natural right. The older people of the Daldour MacAskivals, like
Malcolm Mor, had been born in Carnglass and looked upon it as Eden;
several of them, from time to time, right down to the coming of Dr.
Jackman as Lady MacAskivals guest and master, had been servants at the
Old House or on the two farms. Life in that windswept peat-bog Daldour
was precarious at best, and the dwindling race of the MacAskival
crofters and fisherfolk had considered the killing of a sheep or a
deer in Carnglass as no more than getting back a bit of their lost
patrimony. That the sheep and the deer nominally belonged to old Lady
MacAskival was little to them: she was a mere Lowlander, a MacAskival
only by marriage--a bad marriage at that--and their enemy.
So whenever they dared--especially in the early morning or the evening,
when the gamekeepers might be in their cottages--the Daldour men, for
years, had landed in Carnglass under cover of darkness or fog, most
commonly mooring their lobster-boats in a great cave under the headland
on which St. Merin’s Chapel stood. The cave was known to very few;
and though the ascent was precarious even for MacAskivals, still the
descent was so risky as to daunt even the boldest hired gamekeeper,
most of the time.
And it seemed that the taking ways of the Daldour MacAskivals, in
recent years, had been winked at by The MacAskival herself, Miss Mary.
For she had been a little girl on a barren island croft, and knew the
rigors of the Daldour life. Besides, she was adored by, and adored, old
Malcolm Mor, the chief man in Daldour, who for some years turned from
fishing and poaching to being the gardener at the Old House, until Lagg
gave him the sack. Malcolm Mor told her tales of the vanished glories
of the MacAskivals, and of the witcheries of Carnglass, and showed the
schoolgirl, during her Carnglass summers, the secrets of the Old House
and of the Carnglass caves. What Malcolm Mor’s kith and kin did, Mary
MacAskival overlooked when overlooking was discreet. Now and again,
on lonely rambles to the further reaches of the deserted island, Mary
would meet with the furtive deer-stalkers and sheep-stealers from
Daldour, who blended with gorse and heather and bracken when anyone
else showed his face; and they would tip their caps, and offer the girl
strange things washed up from the sea, such as “Mary’s Nut,” a Molucca
bean, come by the Gulf Stream all the way from the Caribbean--for it
brought good fortune, if worn on a chain round the neck.
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.