But there were two men in the ill-fated boat when she so heedlessly rushed into the strange and dangerous outer defences of my Lord Barra's warded Isle of Suliscanna. What had become of the other?

Wat Gordon of Lochinvar was not drowned—it is hardly necessary to say so much. For had his body been lying in some eddy of the swirling waters about the outer reef of the Aoinaig narrows, this narrative of his history could not have been written. And of his life with its chequered good and bad, its fine instincts, clear intents, and halting performances, there would have been left no more than a little swarded mound in the bone-yard of dead and forgotten mariners.

When their boat overset among the whirlpools and treacherous water volcanoes of the Suck of Suliscanna, Wat Gordon had been sculling at the stern. And when the water swallowed him, pulling him down as though he had been jerked through a trap-door by the arm of some invisible giant—or, more exactly, drawn slowly under by the tentacle of the dread Kraken of these Northern seas—he kept a tight grip on the oar with which he had been alternately steering and propelling the boat, as Jack Scarlett cried him his orders from the bows.

Wat Gordon had been born in the old tower of Lochinvar, in the midst of that strange, weird, far-withdrawn moorland loch, set amid its scanty pasture-meadows of sour bent-grass and its leagues of ambient heather. As a boy he had more often gone ashore by diving from his window or paddling out from the little stone terrace than by the more legitimate method of unhooking the boat from its iron lintel and pulling himself across to the main-land. But this was a different kind of swimming, for here in the tumble and tumultuous swirl of angry waters Wat was no more than a plaything tossed about, to be tantalized with the blue sky and the summer sea, and then again to be pulled under and smothered in the seething hiss of the Suck of Suliscanna.

Nevertheless, Wat found space to breathe occasionally, and as he was driven swiftly towards the north along the face of the great Lianacraig precipices and close under them he clutched his oar tighter, holding it under his arm and leaning his chest upon it. So close to the land was he that he voyaged quite unseen by the watchers on the cliffs above, who supposed that he had gone down with the boat. But the current had seized him in its mid-strength, and after first sweeping him close inshore it was now hurrying him northward and westward of the isle, under the vast face of the mural precipice in which the cliffs of Lianacraig culminated. The boat had cleared itself of its mast and sail, and Wat could see that she floated, upturned indeed, but still becking and bowing safely on the humps and swirls of the fierce tidal current which swept both master and vessel along, equally derelict and at its mercy.

The whole northern aspect of the Isle of Suliscanna is stern and forbidding. Here the cliffs of Lianacraig break suddenly down to the sea in one great face of rock many hundreds of feet in height. So precipitous are they that only the cragsmen or the gatherer of seabirds' eggs can scale their crests of serrated rock even from the south, or look down upon the little island of Fiara, the tall southern cliffs of which correspond humbly to the mightier uprising of the precipices of Lianacraig upon the larger isle. But Fiara has for ages been set in the whirl of the backwater which speeds past its greater neighbor on either side, and has taken advantage of its position to thrive upon the waste of its rival. For the tide-race of the Suck, which sets past Suliscanna with such consuming fury, sweeps its prey, snatched in anger from the cliffs and beaches of Suliscanna, and spreads it in mud and sand along the lower northern rocks of Fiara. So that this latter island, instead of frowning out grimly towards the Pole, extends green and pastoral on the other side of the deep strait and behind its frowning southward front of rocks.

At this time Fiara was wholly without inhabitant, and remained as it had come from the shaping hand of the tides and waves. And so mainly it abides to this day. The islanders of Suliscanna had indeed a few sheep and goats upon it, the increase of which they used to harvest when my Lord of Barra's factor came once a year in his boat to take his tithes of the scanty produce of their barren fortress isle.

It was, then, upon the northern shore of this islet of Fiara that Wat, exhausted with the stress and the rough, deadly horseplay of the waves, was cast ashore still grasping his oar. He landed upon a long spit of sand which stretched out at an obtuse angle into the scour of the race, forming a bar which was perpetually being added to by the tide and swept away again when the winds and the waters fought over it their duels to the death in the time of storm.

Thus Wat Gordon found himself destitute and without helper upon this barren isle of Fiara. His companion he had seen sink beneath the waves, and he well knew that it was far out of the power of the soldier Scarlett to reach the shore by swimming. Also he had seen him entangled in the cordage of the sail. So Wat heaved a sigh for the good comrade whom he had brought away from the solvent paymasters and the excellently complaisant landladies of Amersfort, to lay his bones for his sake upon the inhospitable shores of Suliscanna—and, what was worse, without advantage to the quest upon which they had ventured forth with so much recklessness.

Wat knew certainly that his love was upon that island of Suliscanna. For months he had carefully traced her northward. With the aid of Madcap Mehitabel he had been able to identify the spot at which the chief's boat had taken off Captain Smith's passenger, and a long series of trials and failures had at last designated Suliscanna as the only possible prison of his love.

So soon as he was certain of this he had come straight to the spot with the reckless confidence of youth, only to see his hopes shattered upon the natural defences of the isle, before ever he had a chance to encounter the other enemies whom, he doubted not, Barra had set to guard the prison of Kate of the Dark Lashes.

But even in his sad and apparently hopeless plight the knowledge that his love was near by stimulated Wat's desire to make the best of his circumstances.

First of all he set himself the task of exploring the islet, and of discovering if there was any way by which he could reach that other island, past which he had been carried by the current of the race, and on which he hoped to find his love.

From the summit of the south-looking crags of Fiara which he ascended, he could look up at a perpendicular face of vast and gloomy cliffs. Lianacraig fronted him, solid and unbroken on either side as far as he could see. That lower part of it on which the surf fretted and the swell thundered was broken by caves and openings—none of them, save one, of any great size.

But that one made a somewhat notable exception. It was a gateway, wide and high, squarely cut in the black front of the precipice, into which one might have driven two carriages, with all their horses and attendants, abreast, and yet have left room to spare on either side. The swell which pulsed along the narrow strait between Fiara and Suliscanna, regular as the beating of a strong man's heart, was lost within its wide maw, and did not as elsewhere come pouring back again in tessellated foam, white as milk curdled in a churn. The square tunnel to which this was the imposing entrance evidently penetrated far into the rock, and communicated with some larger cavity deep within.

The rest of the isle, which had so unexpectedly become Wat's prison-house, was cut on its northerly aspect into green flats of sparse grass, terminating in sweet sickle-sweeps of yellow sand, over which the cool, green luxury of the sea lapped with a gliding motion. And as Wat looked down upon them from above he saw lights wavering and swaying over the clean-rippled floor, and could fancy that he discerned the fishes wheeling and steering among the bent rays and wandering shadows that flickered and danced like sunshine through thick leaves.

So Wat stood a long time still upon the topmost crest of Fiara, printing its possibilities upon his heart.

Two hundred yards across the smooth, unvexed strait, which slept between its two mighty walls of rock, rose the giant cliffs of Lianacraig, with the ocean-swell passing evenly along their base from end to end—smooth, green steeps of water, dimpled everywhere into knolls and valleys. Seabirds nested up there by thousands. Gillemots sat solemnly in rows like piebald bottles of black and white. Cormorants stood on the lower skerries, shaking their wings for hours together as if they had been performing a religious rite. And here with his gorgeous beak, like a mummer's mask drawn over his ears for sport, waddled the puffin—the bird whose sad fate it is, according to the rhyme, to be forever incapable of amorous dalliance. For have not half a dozen generations been told in rhyme how

But as Wat looked for a moment away from the white-spotted, lime-washed ledges of Suliscanna to the green-fringed, sandy shores of his own island, he saw that in the water to the north which sent him off at a run. Long ere he reached the beach he had recognized the boat from which John Scarlett and he had been capsized, bobbing quietly up and down at the entrance of the bay.

The rebound or "back-spang" of the current from some hidden reef to the northward had turned the boat aside, even as it had done Wat himself with his oar, and there the treasure was almost within his reach. Wat's clothing was still damp from his previous immersion, so that it was no sacrifice to slip it off him and swim out to the boat. Then, laying his hand on the inverted stern, he managed easily enough to push her before him to a shelving beach of sand, where presently, by the aid of a spar of driftwood, he turned her over. To his great joy he found that the little vessel was still fairly water-tight and apparently uninjured, in spite of her rough-and-tumble steeple-chase with the white horses of the Suck of Suliscanna. Wat opened the lockers and saw, as he had expected, that the pistols and powder were useless. But he found, too, Scarlett's sword and his own trusty blade, together with a dagger, all of which he had the satisfaction of polishing there and then with fine sand held in the palm of his hand.

Then he swung his sword naked to his belt, and felt himself another man in an instant.

The lockers also contained a pair of hams of smoked bacon, which had suffered no damage from the water, and which, so far as sustenance went, would at least serve to tide him over a week or two should he be compelled to remain so long upon the isle.

Nevertheless, when Wat sat down to consider his position and plans, he felt that difficulties had indeed closed impenetrably upon him.

Yet he wasted no time in idle despondency. Lochinvar was of other mettle. He believed his love to be on the island close to him—it might be in the power of his enemy himself, certainly in the hands of his emissaries. John Scarlett, his trusty comrade, was equally surely lost to him. Nevertheless, while his own life lasted, he could not cease from seeking his love, nor yet abandon the quest on which he had come.

So, using the dagger for both knife and cooking apparatus, he cut and ate a slice of the smoked bacon. Then he quenched his thirst with a long drink out of a delicious spring which sent a tiny thread of crystal trickling down the rocks towards the northern strand of Fiara.