t now covered the loch and
the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window, for the world
was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the bed and wrapped the
covers around me. It seemed only a moment later when old Andrew's hand
was on me, and his thin voice crying in the room.

"Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!"

He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I followed
him out of the house into the garden.

It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands behind
him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and bowler hat I
did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of my yesterday's
adventure.

The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though puffed
by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.

The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just beyond the
crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird. One could see
the crew trying every device of sail and tacking, but with all their
desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung there shivering like a
stricken creature.

It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered everything and
then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all the time, the silent,
deadly struggle went on between the trapped ship and the sea running in
among the needles of the loch. I don't think any of us spoke except the
Highlander once in comment to himself.

"It's Ram Chad's tramp.... So that's the craft the man was depending
on!"

Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship was
written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the loch.

Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship
had vanished.

There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current
boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship
nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the
sight.

"The ship!" he cried. "Where is the ship and the master?"

The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.

"My God!" I said. "How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!"

The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and
its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.

"No," he said, "they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think
it was?"

"I don't know," I answered. "The creature in the English uniform said
that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow we