Chapter XIX: The Tangled Web Unwoven (5)

Bewildered and in silent horror, we stood for a time looking at it, and in each other's blanched faces. Old Magnus Kolbainson alone took off his fur cap, and said:

"The Lord receive his soul! Mind ye o' his parting words, that at four o'clock he would be on board, _dead or alive_, and he hath kept his word!"

We knew not what to think of all this, and sat by the margin of the dreadful place, utterly crushed.

Not so old Magnus. Aided by his sons and grandsons, all hardy Islemen, who now came to our assistance, he was slung by a rope down into that watery profundity. He fastened a line to the body; it was drawn reverently upward, and laid on the grassy slope. Then we found that the face and hands had been sorely bruised by the rocks, and that his right arm was broken in three places, just as it had appeared in that of the figure we had followed on board the steamer.

Poor Jack had kept his promise; but at the moment we were questioning the skipper, he had been for three hours a drowned corpse.

Slowly and sadly we bore him down from that frightful place to the _Laura_. When we brought him on board, the ghostly moon was shining clearly; and that a complete fulfilment of the strange foreshadowing of his fate might not be wanting, it chanced that we laid him down by the capstan, and spread a handkerchief over his pallid face; and as we did so, the last night's vision of Magnus Kolbainson rushed vividly and painfully on the memory of us all.

Poor Jack Milman, the king of good fellows, lay there!

After such an adventure as this, it may well be conceived that the next morning found us running, as fast as steam, and wind could take us, on our homeward path, towards the Orkneys and the mainland of Scotland.

THE END.

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.