her,
Torquil, curled miserably upon a skin-covered couch. Paying no attention
to him he crossed the living room and as he did so his sister Jean
entered. In some mysterious way she seemed years older than the
girl-child who had come running after him in the gray mists of that
morning. Dry-eyed, slender, quiet-moving, like the shadow of a girl in
the gloom, she led him back and closed the door. He obeyed her touch
without question, without a trace of his superiority of the morning. In
face of sickness and death, like most of his sex he felt helpless,
impotent. He put his long arm around his sister and suddenly she clung
to him, her slender body shaking.

"He's not--dead--Jean?"

"Not--not yet, Angus. Dr. Wilkes is with him now. He says he won't live
long. He didn't want to tell me, but I made him."

She told him all she knew. Adam Mackay had ridden away by himself that
morning, no one knew whither. In the afternoon he had come home swaying
in his saddle, shot through the body. Then young Turkey has climbed into
the blood-soaked saddle and ridden for the doctor. As to how he had met
with his hurt Adam Mackay had said no word.

The inner door opened to admit a burly, thick-bodied man with reddish
hair sprinkled with gray and grizzled, bushy eyebrows. This was Dr.
Wilkes. He nodded to Angus.

"You're in time. Your father wants you. Go to him, and call me if
anything happens."

"He's going to--going to--"

The boy was unable to complete the sentence. The doctor put his arm
over his shoulder for a moment in a kindly, elder-brotherly touch.

"I'm afraid so, my boy. In fact, I know so. Keep a stiff upper lip, old
man. He'll like that."

Adam Mackay stared at his eldest son hungrily from the pillows. Above
his great black beard his face was gray. He was a great frame of a man,
long, lean and sinewy. The likeness of father and son was marked. He
held out his hand feebly and the boy took it and choked. Then Adam
Mackay spoke in a little whisper so unlike his usual deep voice that the
boy was startled, and because it was near the end with him his words
carried the sharp twist and hiss of the Gaelic which was the tongue of
his youth; for though Adam Mackay had never seen Scotland, he had been
born in a settlement which, fifty years before, was more Gaelic than the
Highlands themselves.

"It cannot be helped, son, and it is little I care for myself. When you
come to face death, many years from now, please the God, you'll