nd figure. He wore a skin cap with a
peak, a red woollen shirt belted about the waist, breeches of
leather, leggings and seaman's boots. The cap was often awry, and a
tuft of red hair tumbled over his bronzed forehead, his shirt was
torn, his breeches were stained, and his leggings tied with rope; but
rough, and even ragged, as his dress was, it sat upon him with a fine
rude grace. With a knife in his sheath, a net or a decoy over his
arm, a pouch for powder slung behind him, a fowling piece across his
shoulder, and a dog at his heels, he would go away into the mountains
as the evening fell. And in the early gleams of sunrise he would
stride down again and into the "Hibernian," scenting up the old
tavern with tobacco smoke, and carrying many dead birds at his belt,
with the blood still dripping from their heads hung down. Folks
called him Red Jason, or sometimes Jason the Red.

He began to visit Government House. Greeba was there, but at first he
seemed not to see her. Simple greetings he exchanged with her, and
that was all the commerce between them. With the Governor, when work
was over, he sat and smoked, telling of his own country and its laws,
and the ways of its people, talking of his hunting and fishing,
calling the mountains Jokulls, and the Tynwald the Loeberg, and
giving names of his own to the glens, the Chasm of Ravens for the
Dhoon, and Broad Shield for Ballaglass. And Adam loved to learn how
close was the bond between his own dear isle and the land of the
great sea kings of old time, but most of all he listened to what
Jason said, that he might thereby know what kind of world it was
wherein his dear lad Michael Sunlocks had to live away from him.

"A fine lad," Adam Fairbrother would say to Greeba; "a lad of
fearless courage, and unflinching contempt of death, with a great
horror of lying and treachery, and an inborn sense of justice. Not
tender and gentle with his strength, as my own dear Sunlocks is, but
of a high and serious nature, and having passions that may not be
trifled with." And hearing this, and the more deliberate warning of
her brothers at Lague, Greeba would remember that she had herself the
best reason to know that the passions of Jason could be terrible.

But nothing she recked of it all, for her heart was as light as her
manners in those days, and if she thought twice of her relations with
Jason she remembered that she was the daughter of the Governor, and
he was only a poor sailor lad