and; but he swallowed the whiskey, and then
he began to look about him a bit.

"Will I put my clothes round him, Sir Keith?" Duncan Cameron said.

"And go home that way to Dare?" Macleod said, with a loud laugh. "Get on
your clothes, Duncan, lad, and get up the sail again; and we will see if
there is a dram left for us in the bottle. John Cameron, confound you!
where are you putting her head to?"

John Cameron, who had again taken the tiller, seemed as one demented. He
was talking to himself rapidly in Gaelic, and his brows were frowning;
and he did not seem to notice that he was putting the head of the boat,
which had now some little way on her by reason of the wind and tide,
though she had no sail up, a good deal too near the southernmost point
of Colonsay.

Roused from this angry reverie, he shifted her course a bit; and then,
when his brother had got his clothes on, he helped to hoist the sail,
and again they flew onward and shoreward, along with the waves that
seemed to be racing them; but all the same he kept grumbling and
growling to himself in Gaelic. Meanwhile Macleod had got a huge
tarpaulin overcoat and wrapped Johnny Wickes in it, and put him in the
bottom of the boat.

"You will soon be warm enough in that, Master Wickes," said he; "the
chances are you will come out boiled red, like a lobster. And I would
strongly advise you, if we can slip into the house and get dry clothes
on, not to say a word of your escapade to Hamish."

"Ay, Sir Keith," said John Cameron, eagerly, in his native tongue, "that
is what I will be saying to myself. If the story is told--and Hamish
will hear that you will nearly drown yourself--what is it he will not do
to that boy? It is for killing him he will be."

"Not as bad as that, John," Macleod said, good-naturedly. "Come, there
is a glass for each of us; and you may give me the tiller now."

"I will take no whiskey, Sir Keith, with thanks to you," said John
Cameron; "I was not in the water."

"There is plenty for all, man!"

"I was not in the water."

"I tell you there is plenty for all of us!"

"There is the more for you, Sir Keith," said he, stubbornly.

And then, as great good luck would have it, it was found, when they got
ashore, that Hamish had gone away as far as Salen on business of some
sort or other; and the story told by the two Camerons was that Johnny
Wickes, whose clothes were sent into the kitchen to be dried, and who
was himself put to bed, had fall