on. He dropped
his pipe and fell back against the end of the house with his jaw fallen,
his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. We must have
looked at one another silently for a quarter of a minute, before he made
answer in this extraordinary fashion: "Had he a hair kep on?"

I knew as well as if I had been there that the man who now lay buried at
Sandag had worn a hairy cap, and that he had come shore alive. For the
first and only time I lost toleration for the man who was my benefactor
and the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.

"These were living men," said I, "perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the French,
perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the Spanish
treasure-ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your
daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man, the dead
sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this morning by his grave;
he will not wake before the trump of doom."

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his
eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but
it was plain that he was past the power of speech.

"Come," said I. "You must think for others. You must come up the hill
with me and see this ship."

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient
strides. The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he
scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was
wont, from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to
make better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like
one in bodily pain: "Ay, ay, man, I'm coming." Long before we had
reached the top I had no other thought for him but pity. If the crime
had been monstrous, the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around
us. All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had
vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to
the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was the
interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there
last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and
already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first, in
vain for the schooner.

"There she is," I said at last. But her new position, and the course she
was now lying, puzzled me. "They cannot mean to beat to sea," I cried.