It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied. Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.

Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective, which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after landing.

Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.

"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man who took Julian and me there when we were boys."

"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising inflection.

"What! Have you seen something?"

"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot." It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.

The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry—an extremity, he was to understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd best keep handy.

The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever." There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested at last.

He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The only sounds abroad were the shrill keep, keep, of the sea-pie, and a swish of wings out of the cliff.

Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place—scene of many a wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland, among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.

The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when, the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and heather-purple.

Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping along on hands and knees.

The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge, staring into the murk beneath him.

A mere gulf of shadow.

No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order, clear again in his head.

The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent. It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and frost.

After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.

There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.

Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.

What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic, whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.

All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.

In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!

Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable, screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting the farther one of the antennÆ onto this one above his head; but he knew that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that significant companionship and stood quite still.

Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not abandoned—

He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set up among the rocks.

He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution redoubled.

With horror he remembered that old pastime—rolling the rocks down. How they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?

Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing, not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant impact he shrank inwardly.

What was that?

Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.

Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned rabbit!

He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his hair.

He wasn't alone.

How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about, his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to disarm him.

It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other, regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.

Twice Napier had his fingers almost on the trigger, and twice his hand was wrenched away. The last time a thick voice whispered, "Drop it! Don't you know you're a dead man if you make a sound?" The voice of Bloom, Sir William's chauffeur! He had got Napier down again; the full weight of the assailant's body was on Napier's head; his left arm pinned under him. In that strangling darkness Napier told himself the end had come. He was dead already. Why was he resisting? He knew why, when he felt Bloom's teeth on his right forearm. He felt the pistol go from his bruised side. He heard the drop among the scant herbage of the rocks.

It was over. Resistance had been battered out of him. He was quite sure of that. Why didn't Bloom let him alone? Why was the fellow dragging him down?

It suddenly occurred to him that they couldn't be far from Table Rock. Bloom was going to throw him over!

He had loosed his hold on Napier's shoulder. Breathing heavily, he had come round and straddled across his victim's body. He fastened his hands in Napier's torn collar, pulled him up into a sitting posture, and dashed his head against a boulder. Not quite squarely, for Bloom's foot had slipped on the wet moss. He braced himself and took fresh hold. In that second the impotence passed out of Napier's body. His sinews hardened as he locked his maimed arms round the man. Before Bloom could recover from the disadvantage of his stooping posture, Napier, in a spasm of dying energy, had rolled with the chauffeur in his arms toward the edge of Table Rock. More angry than frightened by the suddenness of Napier's recovery, Bloom was striking wild.

"He doesn't know where he is!" Napier said to himself with exultation. In a very convulsion of insane strength he gripped the panting body of the German and flung it out over the edge of Table Rock.

He hung there listening.

But the blood flowed into his ears as well as into his eyes. No sound reached him. He tried to crawl back toward the stream. On the way unconsciousness, like an angel out of heaven, came down and covered him.

In spite of the tribute to McClintock's being able to do what he was told, the old man had no mind to go home at the end of the time stipulated without knowing something of what was keeping Mr. Gavan. And so, some three quarters of an hour after that body had shot out into the void, the fisherman, picking his way cannily down the gorge, slipped on something soft. His questing hands felt blood, new spilt. A match, lit in his sou'wester and instantly smothered, showed him enough. He drew back behind a rock and waited there several minutes, listening. When he got back to Napier, he had the sou'wester half full of water. He sprinkled it over Napier's face. He poured whiskey down his throat. Aye, that was better. Napier was presently able to say that a man who attacked him had been thrown over Table Rock. The question was, could McClintock get Napier back to the boat?

Oh, aye, McClintock could do that same. But Mr. Gavan had best bide there a little longer; and here was the whiskey-flask to keep him company.

Napier sent a whisper of remonstrance after him as the foolhardy old man went down the gorge. Too well Napier knew where McClintock would be going. And he hadn't warned him! Poor old McClintock! Napier lay there a few minutes, and then crawled to the water. He bathed his head and drank some more whiskey. He tried to stand but couldn't manage that, and went on hands and knees. He had no clear idea what he was doing. But McClintock was fumbling his way down there without a notion of the risk he ran.

Presently Napier found he could stand, after a fashion. So he staggered on till the stream turned to the left, and Napier, to the right, was making his way round the Giant's Head down to the ledge beneath.

"McClintock!" he whispered, and steadied himself against the rock wall to listen. McClintock must have gone in! Napier had no consciousness of making any decision. He merely found himself feeling the way along an inward-curving gallery when the pitch blackness in front of him opened on a wedge of light, fierce, intolerable. As suddenly, the light was gone.

If he had been quite clear in his head, Napier declared afterward, he would have prudently retraced his steps.

As it was, a sense of blind compulsion was on him. For in that dazzling instant he'd had a glimpse of McClintock. Poor old McClintock, whom Napier had inveigled into this trap; McClintock, his heavy shoulder, his sou'wester, and a bristle of beard stamped for an instant on that blinding, impossible light. Streaks of it still leaked through the blackness. Napier's outstretched hand came almost at once against something soft, yielding. A double-felted curtain. He grasped it and stared through, to find himself standing at the top of a carpeted incline, looking down into a luxurious room, flooded with high-power, electric light. In the glare McClintock, with a knife in his hand, stood not ten feet from a man in shirt-sleeves seated at a table. The back of the seated figure was turned partly away from the entrance; his head bent; a green shade over his eyes. He was taking down a message. A metal band over his crown, ear-caps set close to his head, held him oblivious to all sound save that which the mysterious forces of nature were ticking into his ears.

Not McClintock's wary approach, but Napier's less cautious movement of the felted curtain, or some cooler air current penetrating the overheated chamber, was responsible for that slight turn of the harnessed head. It was Carl Pforzheim! His cry died on his lips as he tore off the shade. But he couldn't in that lightning instant wrench himself free of the apparatus, for the cord had become wound round his neck. He presented a sickening impression of one struggling in a man-trap, showing, as a wild animal might, a flash of bared teeth as he strained out across the table and seized a revolver. The shot went wild. For he had turned to face the descent of McClintock's knife. Pforzheim fell sidewise against the pink wall of petrol tins, still hung up by his apparat, and dribbling scarlet over the pink.

They spent the night with the dead body.

There were two good beds, but only one was slept in. McClintock mounted guard. In the morning he went out and found the body of Sir William's chauffeur. He buried him with Pforzheim.

The den was stocked with supplies, wine, cigars, food, books, cards. There were very few papers, but they were worth coming for.