Chapter IX: Part 9

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.