8
On those cold and dark stairs, Miss Mary MacAskival met them, her quick and rounded little body, her rosy cheeks and lively eyes defying the barbarous spell of the old tower. She sent Logan a darting, inquiring glance, but it was to Jackman she spoke. “I heard the men outside,” she said. “Really, you ought to let me lead the search. I know every bush and cranny of Carnglass, but they’re stupid townfolk.”
Jackman frowned. “I may have to lead them myself, Miss MacAskival: Rab and Carruthers seem to have lost their way. I’ll have a word with Royall. Will you be good enough to take Mr. Logan to see Lady MacAskival for a moment? And then bring him to the study for dinner. Don’t be long.” He sent out a hand as if to touch her lightly on the shoulder, but the girl drew back cleverly, almost as if unintentionally, against the curving stair-wall, and Jackman passed by her, ignoring the repulse. “Don’t forget the advice I gave you, Mr. Logan,” he said softly, disappearing down the spiral of the stair.
At that instant, a most unpleasant recollection came into Logan’s head. An hour earlier, in the painted study, he had given his rucksack to Tompkins to be carried to his room. And in that pack were his passport and other papers. That man Tompkins, by the look of him, would pry into everything, even had he been only butler in a normal country house; and this was no normal place. The moment Jackman talked with Tompkins, Logan’s real identity would be known; and then there would be trouble—though just what sort of trouble, Logan was not quite sure. His dismay showed in his face.
Mary MacAskival was looking at him in concern. “What is it, Hugh?” (So it was “Hugh” even in private now, Logan thought, and on very short acquaintance, which seemed to confirm Dr. Jackman’s account of this odd little girl’s very forward ways with men.) Whatever else she was, she had a quick mind, though; for she added, after a moment’s pause, “Are you thinking of your rucksack? You needn’t. I met Tompkins on the stair and took it from him before he had any chance of a look into it. And I took your papers and put them into a hidie-hole—the Old House is mostly hidie-holes—where only I could possibly find them again. Then I put the rest of your things into your room. Do you mind? I can get the papers for you whenever you like, but we mustn’t let Dr. Jackman know you’re from America. You’d not be safe then. You’re not particularly safe even now. I’m sorry.” Those mobile red lips framed the “sorry” with a pathetic beauty. Indeed, it was a pity that Mary MacAskival was what she was.
“Thank you, Miss MacAskival,” Logan said. “Probably I’ll need the papers after dinner. Shall we go down to Lady MacAskival now?” His voice sounded cold even to himself. He needed a little time to think. The girl’s charm—her glamour, literally—was too near to him on this clammy sepulchral stair. How did those rosy little feet of hers endure the damp, attractively bare as they were? But he must get his mind off the girl: she was only fifteen, and bad medicine.
“Hugh!” Mary MacAskival spoke his name reproachfully, and now a little haughtily. “Hugh! It’s not only your papers you’re thinking of. What is it? This is a house of secrets, but you and I mustn’t have secrets from each other. You weren’t sent to me to keep secrets from me. What is it?” Logan hesitated, and the girl’s mind leaped swiftly to the usual conclusion any woman reaches when two men have been talking seriously in her absence. “What is it? Were you and Dr. Jackman talking of me?” In this instance, the woman’s instinct spoke truly.
Logan looked her full in the face. “Yes, we were.”
Over the girl’s delicious heart-shaped face, with its high cheek-bones and rather deep-set green eyes, spread a crimson flush, suffusing all the delicate white skin. It would have been a beautiful thing to watch, Logan thought, if it had not been a mark of guilt. The finely-moulded nose and chin went up. “Then you heard nothing good,” said Mary MacAskival, deliberately. She turned, as if to avert her telltale young face, and led the way down the stairs. “Dr. Jackman is the father of lies. But now I will take you to my aunt.”
A doorway in the immense thickness of the medieval tower-wall led into the Renaissance range of the Old House. Here the plaster ceiling of a great book-lined corridor was moulded into baroque shells and swags and Lord knows what fantastic designs. An odor of damp and musty leather came from the shelves; this library could have been used little since Sir Alastair’s time. The little barefoot beauty walked beside him, still a trifle flushed and defiant, but apparently not hopeless of winning him over; Logan thought for a moment she actually meant to take his hand; but if she did have that impulse, she thought better of it. “After dinner,” she murmured, “if we can be alone, there are things that must be told you. Not here: there’s not enough time, and we could be overheard.” She noticed his glance at her exquisitely narrow bare feet, which here trod upon Oriental carpet, in utter silence; she smiled a trifle coquettishly, and said, “I was reared barefoot, and don’t like shoes and stockings in the house. Besides, when I’m this way, I can scamper all over the house, and they don’t know where I am—nor when I’m listening to them. Do you mind? I know it’s not the way to receive foreign guests; but you are our first foreign guest, and I don’t think you stand on ceremony. Here’s my aunt’s bedroom; she never leaves it now. Only Agnes will be with her.” The girl pushed open a heavy carven door, and they entered an immense gloomy room.
There the walls were hung from cornice to floor with square panels of leather, stamped in gold leaf with some intricate pattern of dancing figures; Logan thought he made out the figure of a capering goat in this design, but could not be sure in the twilight of the room. These hangings must have been long neglected, for splotches of white water-stain showed here and there, and some of the panels had pulled almost loose from the stitching that held them one to another, so that the stone of the walls showed through the gaps. Nearly in the middle of the room stood a vast ancient canopied bed, the curtains drawn back. Beside it, huddled on a stool, an old serving-woman looked with lacklustre eyes at Logan, cringing aside to let him approach the bed: this would be Agnes, the shawlie. Certainly she was timid—could she be trembling, or was it a slight palsy? Then he made out the shape under the rich covers upon the bed.
Lady MacAskival lay with closed eyes, and she was very nearly a corpse: almost bloodless, and her face and hands grotesquely wrinkled. Could this pallid immobile thing once have been a beautiful woman of fashion, no better than she should have been—like little Mary MacAskival, perhaps? At their best, Logan suspected, the features must have been slightly vulgar. Mary MacAskival slid between him and the bed-rail. “Aunt!” she whispered, very low. “Aunt, Mr. Logan has come.”
The wrinkled eyelids slid back, snakelike. The fingers of the desiccated left hand stirred slightly. The withered lips writhed, almost as if the ancient creature would have burst into a scream, but no sound came forth.
“Aunt,” said Mary MacAskival, “he may be trusted.”
Those purblind eyes of the failing woman flickered, for a moment or two, with intelligence. But Logan could not have meant much to her; possibly he was but a dream within a dream, drifting through limbo, less unpleasant than the terrors that often clustered round the bedstead. For either this old woman was drugged, Logan thought, or else she existed, tortoise-like and impotent, in a realm of perpetual terror. In those weary eyes was frozen fright, fright grown so familiar that it was almost identical with consciousness. What kept her alive? Surely she would have been happy to escape from this terror—unless she fancied that worse horrors lay in wait for her beyond the grave.
Now her lips moved, and very faint sounds came forth. “Not Alastair,” Lady MacAskival whispered. “Not Alastair. Good. Go—go with him, Mary. When I am done. He is not the goat, no. Is he Askival? Is he flesh? In Carnglass it is all mist.” The lids slid back again; the left hand ceased to claw at the covers; one would have thought the woman dead, had not nostrils and chest stirred ever so slightly with her labored breathing. Mary MacAskival drew Logan through the still room to the door.
They were back in the book-lined corridor. “Is she under drugs?” Logan asked.
“No,” said the girl, calmly enough, “only hypnotism—and terror. If you had seen the chairs rise up of themselves in this house, and eyes glowing in the dark where no living thing could be, and heard the footsteps in this hall, and if you were very old—why, I think even you would lie there like my aunt, Hugh.”
“Who did these things?”
“Dr. Jackman and Mr. Royall—who else? They have come near to putting me out of my wits. And now and then they put Dr. Jackman himself out of his wits. He believes, in part at least, though Mr. Royall does not, I think. Dr. Jackman has said he will call old Sir Alastair from under the stone by St. Merin’s Chapel. He has said he has made Sir Alastair walk down this very passage where you and I stand.”
Logan looked involuntarily over his shoulder: but of course there was nothing but mouldy books and hangings and family portraits. In this strange place, minds might scamper after any vagary. “Does your aunt wish to see her dead husband?”
“Not she. She feared him while he lived, and she feared him more once he died; and things lie heavy on her conscience. She will give Dr. Jackman anything he wants, so long as he keeps Sir Alastair this side of her bedroom door.” The girl was almost conversational about it all: surely she was either quite mad, or had a grip upon her nerves stronger than that of any woman Logan had known. What lay at her heart, Logan could not even guess; what could be seen was delectable enough, but Logan put no trust in her. Yet, trollop though she might be, Logan resolved to play his masquerade a little while yet, so far as Jackman was concerned, for her sake and his own.
“Now tell me this, Miss MacAskival,” said Logan, “just how old....” Then he heard something in the passage, toward the tower; and so did the girl; and they turned simultaneously. Logan felt tempted to reach for the little gun under his tweed jacket, but refrained. And, after all, it was only that shifty butler. “Dinner is served. Miss MacAskival,” Tompkins murmured, quite deferentially, and withdrew back toward the tower.
“Later,” Mary MacAskival said, very low, as they followed Tompkins. “Later I’ll tell you everything that can be told. Now you must meet Mr. Royall.” They went up the ancient stairs again, and passed into the study. It was dark now, but the study was cheerful enough. Many candles, in eighteenth-century silver candlesticks, had been lit; a square table was laid with a cloth and good china; there was soup being kept warm by a paraffin lamp on a sideboard. Tompkins had gone down somewhere to the kitchen, assisted by a footman whose grumbling voice Logan could hear below—Anderson, perhaps; and Jackman and Royall were not yet in the room: doubtless the two of them were discussing Hugh Logan thoroughly. Mary MacAskival, leaning gracefully against the piano which occupied a corner, pointed a little finger toward the painted ceiling.
“Do you know what that is?” She meant the painted monster called the Firgower, only dimly visible by the candlelight, away up there in the shadows. “Oh, Dr. Jackman told you? He should: for he is the Firgower, you know. Why do you look at me so queerly? Of course Dr. Jackman is the Firgower; he’d tell you so himself, if he were candid. He has told me so. You saw the hole in his forehead: that’s his third eye. He sees Sir Alastair MacAskival with his third eye, and tells my aunt.” She took a candlestick from the table, and, standing on tiptoe, lifted it as high toward the ceiling as her little body could reach. “Now come here, Hugh Logan, and look close.”
The painted horrid goat-face of the Firgower stared down at Logan; it seemed to smirk and leer and scowl all at once. “Its forehead—look,” the girl went on.
Now Logan could make out that in the middle of that painted forehead, with horns sprouting above it, was a third eye, faintly visible. It was much less distinct than the two normal goat-slit eyes, but it was very like them. “I don’t know whether it was painted so,” Mary MacAskival murmured in Logan’s ear, leaning a pretty hand on his shoulder, “or whether that nasty third eye wore on the nerves of Sir Alastair or someone else, so that perhaps someone put a trifle of white paint over it. It’s no less an eye than Dr. Jackman’s. Do you understand? That’s Dr. Jackman’s portrait, so to speak. I’m ever so glad you do not have a third eye.”
Logan turned his head to look at this queer little lovely creature. Was she lunatic, coquette, or infinitely subtle? They two stood so close together that his nose touched hers. His right arm almost went round her, as she stood there on tiptoe; but just then boots sounded on the stair, and Miss MacAskival drew away. “My poor bare feet!” she said. “I’m forgetting my manners. Whatever would they say at the convent? They never let young ladies dine there barefoot, you know. I leave you to Dr. Jackman and his secretary, but I’ll be back before the soup has gone quite cold.” With a little swirl of her skirt, she sprang, rather than stepped, through the heavy doorway, and was gone.
She must have passed Jackman and Royall on the stair, for they came in immediately. “Mr. Logan,” Jackman said, “Mr. Royall, my secretary.” The death’s-head secretary nodded curtly. Once the man began to speak, Logan perceived with relief that he was an Englishman, like Jackman, though probably from Yorkshire; had he been a Scot, he might have seen through Logan’s masquerade. Logan would talk as little as possible to the Scots among the servants, lest he give himself away.
Royall made some perfunctory observations about the hunt for Donley, the weather, and all that. A cold fish, but a keen one, Logan hazarded. He was well educated, surely; Logan suspected that he might once have been a fairly high-ranking civil servant; somehow there was the mark of Winchester school upon him. Yet now he was secretary to this pseudo-doctor, in an island at the back of beyond. Why? Had Royall been dismissed from some civil post—for unreliability of sorts? The man was sick; the signs of a gnawing illness were plain upon his pallid face; and yet Logan guessed—though perhaps he was becoming fanciful, in this house of shadows—that the real cause of his trouble was some sickness not of the body, but of the spirit. Could one trust Royall? If one were of the same faith, undoubtedly; on the man’s grim features was set fanaticism, not simple criminality.
“Do you have a taste for letters, Mr. Logan?” Royall inquired abruptly, in his hoarse voice. Jackman had said very little, but stood back in the shadows, watching, as if he had agreed to let his secretary do the prying this night. Tompkins came round with a tray of sherry-glasses, and Logan sipped before he replied.
“Why, now, Mr. Royall,” Logan said, “I must admit I am fond of Rabbie Burns. Burns, sir, is the poet of the Scottish nation. No nonsense for Rabbie Burns. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Royall, that at the British Linen Bank, Lawnmarket Branch, we know an honest man’s the noblest work of God. How does Burns express it, sir? ‘The rank is but the guinea’s stamp....’”
Here Mary MacAskival returned, with neat shoes on her feet, and cotton stockings. Jackman and Royall bowed to her slightly, and the four of them sat down to dinner, Tompkins putting the soup before them. Without bothering to taste his soup, Royall pursued the topic.
“I suppose you know, Mr. Logan, that Burns is perhaps the most popular English writer in the Soviet Union today.” Royall’s sunken eyes seemed to expect some significant response to this.
“Indeed, sir?” Logan said, ingenuously. “Why, now, I would have thought there would be difficulties in doing Rabbie Burns into the Russian tongue.”
“The Soviet Russians, Mr. Logan, are masters of translation. Yes, they appreciate Burns. At a conference in the Crimea, not so very long ago, I had the honor to be asked to read Burns aloud, in English, to a group of intellectuals. I found they especially enjoyed the final stanza of ‘For a’ That and a’ That.’ How does it go—
Do I have it quite right, Mr. Logan?” Royall gave him another long stare.
“Aye, as I mind it, it goes so, Mr. Royall. Very sound sentiments—brothers the world o’er.” Logan smiled at him.
Royall hesitated; then, “Would you care to give me a gloss on those lines, Mr. Logan?”
Logan looked puzzled, as indeed he was. “A gloss, sir? Now how do you mean? A commentary?”
“Mr. Royall thought some remarks might occur to your mind, Mr. Logan,” Jackman put in. “Concerning international brotherhood, perhaps.”
“Why, no, Dr. Jackman, I do not believe I could add anything.” Logan turned, simpering, to Mary MacAskival. “Do you think of a proper commentary, Mary, darling?” The girl shook her head slowly; her eyes, their lids half lowered, moved uneasily from Jackman to Royall. “Nevertheless, gentlemen,” Logan went on, still very much the Edinburgh clerk, “we’ve had many a serious discussion of Rabbie Burns in the West End Young Men’s Discussion Club. There’s profound meaning in Rabbie Burns. Profound.”
Royall’s eyes never had ceased to stare at Logan. Now Royall said, “An acquaintance of mine who sometimes visits Edinburgh is an admirer of Burns. Possibly you have met him: a Captain Gare.”
Logan’s training as a lawyer served him well at that moment, for his fatuous smile did not fade, nor did he start. “No, sir,” he told Royall, “I don’t believe I’ve had the honor of making the gentleman’s acquaintance.”
“And then,” said Royall, “I think of a commission agent in Glasgow, a man of the people, who often has Burns on the tip of his tongue. Perhaps you have encountered him. His name is Dowie, Jim Dowie.”
“Dowie? I know a solicitor’s clerk of that name in Dalkeith; but he reads only American thrillers, sir.”
“So, Royall,” Dr. Jackman interjected, “it seems that our Mr. Logan here is not a member, after all, of the little circle you had in mind. You were quite mistaken, I fear; I told you he wouldn’t be. Mr. Logan is a very honest and industrious rising young bank-clerk, I’m sure. But speaking of your national poet Burns, I call to mind a verse you might take to heart—
Apropos, Mr. Logan?”
The butler brought the main course, boiled mutton and potatoes, before Logan had to reply. Logan noticed, as Tompkins served, that Mary MacAskival’s face had gone crimson at Jackman’s quotation, and then white again.
“Tompkins,” Jackman said as the butler served him, “I take it that Carruthers and Rab have returned by this time?”
“No, Dr. Jackman.” Logan saw that Tompkins’ hands trembled slightly. “Neither of them, sir. Not hide nor hair.”
Jackman bit his lip. “Royall, where do you suppose they’ve got to? It has been quite dark for more than an hour.”
“Ah, well, sir,” Royall answered, “so long as the pair of them hang together, no harm can come to them. They’re both armed with good rifles, and they weren’t reared in ladies’ boudoirs. Rab knows rough country well enough, and something of this island. I suppose they may have been hot on Donley’s scent when the sun set, and bedded down in one of the farmhouses or keepers’ cottages. I last saw them toward St. Merin’s Chapel. No doubt they’ll report in the morning.” But Royall seemed to have no appetite for his mutton.
Jackman shrugged. “No doubt, no doubt.” That unpleasant patch on his forehead twitched, almost as if he were trying to lift the lid of the third eye. He turned toward Logan. “As you were about to say...?”
“Why, Dr. Jackman”—but Logan smiled toward Mary MacAskival—“I had thought of another verse from Rabbie Burns, that I like better than yours; and it is this, sir—
“I think that’s very pretty, Hugh,” Mary MacAskival told him. She looked toward Dr. Jackman: “‘Gaist nor bogle....’ A good phrase for the Old House, is it not, Dr. Jackman? But whatever can have become of Rab and Carruthers?”
Jackman looked blacker still. “Leave that to us, if you please, my dear.” He seemed about to add something when Mary MacAskival rose and walked to the piano.
“How very slow Tompkins is in bringing the sweet tonight! May I play until he comes? Hugh, will you sing with me?”
“You know I’ve no voice, Mary, darling,” Logan said, also rising, “but I’ll play to your singing.” He did, indeed, play the piano reasonably well. Miss MacAskival behaved as if she had always known it: wondrously clever, that girl, for fifteen years.
“I’ll set you the tune, Hugh,” she told him, seating herself at the piano, “and then you can take my place here, and I’ll sing you a song from Burns, if you like. Dr. Jackman, can you endure it? Mr. Royall?”
“Of course,” Jackman told her, somewhat absently. He ran his lean hand slowly over his forehead. Royall said nothing: he had stalked to a window, opened it, and was staring uneasily into the night below.
Miss MacAskival played pleasantly—an air Logan knew well, “Charlie He’s My Darling.” Logan took her place at the piano then, and she stood and began to sing. Her young voice was full and tolerably trained, and very sweet.
The night air of Carnglass crept into the ancient room through Royall’s open window. There came the cry of some night bird, winging past the Old House, and the heavy beat of the sea upon the pier of Askival harbor. Mary’s voice swelled up:
Then, above the noise of the ocean, there came an unnatural sound, echoing perhaps from the other side of the Old House. It was a burst of horrid laughter, or so it seemed, ending in a desperate sob; then silence; then the high dreadful cackle again. “The devil!” cried Jackman, and leaped to join Royall at the window. Mary MacAskival shivered, but sang the last verse:
To Logan, the girl’s relative composure was as strange as the dreadful yelling outside, but he played loyally on until “Charlie and his men” died away. Then Mary swept from the piano to the window, and Logan was right behind her. The laughter, if laughter it was, had ceased; and nothing at all was to be seen through the mist. But in a moment, a shot was fired; and then three more shots, in quick succession, seemingly not far outside the Old House. Jackman and Royall ran for the stairs, and Mary and Logan after them.
Through that great chill hodgepodge old house, past Lady MacAskival’s room, through an interior courtyard that had been roofed over, into the enormous Victorian block they ran, stumbling through passages and down flights of stairs, until at last the four of them burst into a big Victorian entrance-hall. About the closed door were clustered Tompkins and Ferd and Anderson and a fourth man whom Logan took to be Niven. They all had rifles at the ready, but no one had ventured to open the door. Jackman dashed among them and flung back the bolts: “See what it is, you fools.” None of the four seemed eager to investigate, but they followed Jackman and Royall a little way into the dark, and Mary MacAskival and Logan tagged after. A massive knob of the great rock on which the Old House stood jutted up close by the door, and Logan urged the girl toward it.
“If anyone fires from out there,” he whispered to her, “we’ll be so many sitting ducks.”
“No one will fire at us,” the girl said; but, obediently, she crouched behind the rock, peering round in the direction the men were looking.
There came one more screech of hysterical laughter, and then a figure came into view, reeling, stumbling, slipping, but still holding a rifle. Only a few yards from the Old House, the man swung round to face the darkness from which he had emerged, brought his gun to his shoulder, and fired three more shots, wildly, toward nothing visible. There was as much chance of his hitting the moon, with the aim he took, as of winging any living thing in Carnglass. Then the man dropped his rifle altogether and came lurching on toward the entrance of the Old House, falling at last in a heap right at Jackman’s feet, giggling, moaning, choking.
“Rab!” cried Jackman. “What the devil, Rab?” It was a very young man, thick-set and heavy-featured, with a great shock of hair. He was covered with little cuts, and his clothes were in rags. To judge by his gasping and gulping, he had run for miles. And he was quite out of his head. He squirmed at Jackman’s feet, and mumbled obscenities, and then burst once more into his screaming and terrified laugh.
“Something has run him like a hare,” Royall said. “The wits are gone out of the man.” The four servants, hard cases though they looked, bunched together like so many rabbits. Stooping, Jackman took Rab by the shoulders and shook him mercilessly.
“Rab!” Jackman hissed. “Rab! Speak, man, or I’ll give you worse than you’ve had already.” But Rab only sobbed for breath. “Pick up his rifle, Mr. Royall,” Jackman said, prodding Rab with his foot. Logan suspected that he gave the order to Royall for fear that none of the servants would obey it. Stooping, Royall slipped into the heather, groped for the gun, found it, and hurried back, glancing over his lean shoulder.
“Anderson and Ferd, lift this lump,” Jackman called out, “and drag him inside.” The whole party retreated through the wide doorway into the Victorian courtyard, and then back into the formal entrance-hall, barring the gates behind them; Anderson was left as sentry inside the great door. “Now you, Niven and Ferd, hold up this thing before me.” They supported the muttering Rab between them. Jackman slapped Rab’s bleeding face with his open palm, terribly hard. The young man ceased to moan; his eyes rolled. “Rab,” said Jackman, slowly and distinctly, “where the devil is Carruthers?”
“O, it took him, it took him!” cried Rab, and lapsed into incoherence.
“I’ll have the heart out of you, Rab, if you don’t speak up. What took Carruthers?” Jackman slapped him again.
Rab’s dull eyes widened. “It took Carruthers! Lagg took him, auld, wet Lagg! Lagg it was!” With that, Rab sank into a kind of fit, and Ferd and Niven pushed him down upon the floor.
Dr. Jackman stood rigid. “No,” he said, perhaps to Royall, perhaps to himself. “No. Not Lagg.” Then he looked round, his face stiff and white, upon the little ring of men, and upon Logan and Mary MacAskival beyond them. “Get this creature to bed,” he said to Niven and Ferd. “Tie him in, if you must. Ignore his ravings. The fellow’s lost his nerve; Donley must have been after him. Royall, post someone atop the tower, and tell him to fire at anything that moves. Miss MacAskival, this is no scene for you. See if your aunt has been disturbed, and then get to your room. Logan, Tompkins will show you up. Stay in your rooms until I have you called for breakfast.” Then Jackman went out into the courtyard again, calling to Anderson.
Tompkins, carrying a petrol lantern, led the girl and Logan through the passages toward the Renaissance block. Outside Lady MacAskival’s room, Mary paused. “I’d best look in here, Hugh,” she said, “so I tell you good-night now.” Tompkins moved discreetly a few feet further down the passage, but Logan only pressed the girl’s hand. She contrived to smile at him. “Do you recollect that last stanza I sang?” she asked:
Take care this night, Hugh.” Then she was gone into the bedroom hung with Spanish leather.
Tompkins led him to a decent smallish chamber on the floor above Lady MacAskival’s room, wished Logan a civil good-night, and slid away. There was no key in the lock upon the door, and no bolt. To shove furniture against the door, Logan felt, might seem unduly suspicious to Dr. Jackman; but he did it, all the same, jamming a chair-back under the doorknob, and reinforcing it by a small chest. He looked out his two windows; they were high and small, and almost impossible for anyone to reach even with very long ladders, for the rock fell sheer away below this portion of the Old House. The bed, if rather damp, was tolerable. He slid his pistol Meg under the pillow, and was dozing off in short order, with only the wind at the panes to break the stillness, and the distant growl of the combers. Logan was too tired to think of Rab, or Lagg, or Jackman, or Royall, or even of the green-eyed girl—to whom, in a fit of sympathy at the dinner-table, he had promised that she need fear neither ghost nor bogle while he was near. It was an unsecured pledge of questionable validity to an insecure girl of questionable antecedents.