sea and the coast.

I jumped the hedge and set out across the moor to the high ground.

There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the heather
where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the loch there was
a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was high and dense and I
followed the trail onto the high ground overlooking the sweep of the
coast.

The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The mountains
above the moor and the heather were colored like an Oriental carpet.
I was full of the joy of life and swung into an immense stride, when
suddenly a voice stopped me.

"My lad," it said, "which one of the Ten Commandments is it the most
dangerous to break?"

Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a big
Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his needles were
clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my feet, but I tried to
meet him on his ground.

"Well," I answered, "I suppose it would be the one against murder, the
sixth."

"You suppose wrong," he replied. "It will be the first. You will read
in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad, He ordered it
broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read that He set aside the
first or that any man escaped who broke it?"

He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure of
speech that I cannot reproduce here.

"Did you observe," he added, "the graven images that your uncle has set
up?... Where is the man the noo?"

"He is gone to Oban," I said.

He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his sporran.

"To Oban!" He stood a moment in some deep reflection. "There will be
ships out of Oban." Then he put another question to me:

"What did auld Andrew say about it?"

"That my uncle was gone to Oban," I answered, "and had set no time for
his return."

He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the deep
heather.

"Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for heathen
parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in the boathouse?"

The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all possibility.

But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination. I was not
going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on the road I
had answered a good many questions and I determined to ask one.

"Who are you?" I said. "And what have you got to do with my uncle's
affairs?"

He cocked his eye at me, look