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.”