McALLAN'S LOCKER.

Over the first rise of the hills was a long dreary waste—treeless, awesome, desolate. Whiles, as we ran, a curlew would rise, and its long whirling cry rose in the night, filling the ears and leaving an emptiness afterwards in the silence, for things not canny to be filling. Once we startled a herd of red-deer feeding round the mossy lips of a frozen pool, and away they galloped. One lordly stag wheeled with antlers high, gazed at our flight, and vanished, leaving us in that dreadful stillness, and a cold eerie wind whined and sighed over us. We spoke little, having no breath to spare, for the ground was growing more steep and broken towards the second rise, up which we clambered, sliding and falling, grasping frozen heather till we reached the top. The hill was now a riddle of peat hags and binks, like a bee's skep, a place of treachery and slimy death, although the frost would have most of the sinking pools in its iron hand; but we never stopped the long stride that seemed so slow to me at first. Dan bent and twisted through the peat banks like a hound on the trail. Here was a place where folk had wrought, cutting their fuel for generations; and God knows what memories were lurking here from the old days, what ghosts of love and hatred, what spirits of tears and laughter. Would the race never end? My tongue, dry and swollen, stuck raspily against the roof of my mouth. Round my lips was a hot fire, for I had grasped a handful of snow and melted it in my mouth as I ran. We were past the peat hags, and the ground fell away under our feet; the heather got scantier and sprits more common, until we had descended, maybe, five hundred feet into a wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs. Here was the great grazing for young beasts in the summer, away here in the glen, but now only stillness and desolation. A wide burn rumbled and splashed on its gravelly banks in front of us, and we could hear the deep noise of a waterfall.

"Hold in to the fall," cried McKinnon, and his voice was hoarse as a raven's.

"I ken this like the back o' my hand," said Dan, and led us, with never a break, to an easy crossing.

And now we took the greatest care of our going, for a great hill rose before us steep, as it seemed to me, as the wall of a house, and then all our care was made useless, for the snow began again.

Slowly, blindly we clambered and spelled up the hillside, now numb with cold, now fiery hot, Dan always in the lead, and me groaning at his hurdie.

"Keep a stout heart, Hamish; this is the last o't."

We were now, as it were, on a ladder on the hill face, for there were a succession of great holes like steps, on each of which three men could stand—the giant's steps, the old folks called them.

At the back of the step where we three lay was a grey rock, as though the earth had been worn away, leaving the rock partly bare. As we lay Dan struck it three times with a stone about the size of a putting-ball, and a great low baying sounded, and my blood ran cold, and then the grey rock moved inch by inch, and I heard a great rift of Gaelic, and Dan went crawling like a snake through the hole, and myself and McKinnon at his heels.

"Welcome, hearty welcome; whatever drives ye sae fast. Welcome to
McAllan's Locker."

"It's latish for ceilidhing," said Dan. "I'm hoping me and my friends are not putting ye out in any ways, but just a shakedown o' breckans is all we're asking, and thankful for it."

"Better the bottom o' the locker than the end o' the cable. Sit ye doon and warm yourself."

I was sore done wi' the long running, and lay on the rook floor with my head on my arms, and I felt as a hound feels after a long chase, till the caveman answered Dan. At the first I thought his tongue had been malformed as he stood in the light, for a growling and grumbling came from his throat; and as he growled, from the darkness of the chamber a great brindled dog stalked to his side and stretched his fore-paws, opened a mouth like a red pit, and whined with outstretched curling tongue.

"He would tear down a stag, him," says Dan, nodding at the brute.
Again came the growling rumbling from the stranger.

"Hark tae him, Marr; hark tae him—a stag. Ho, ho, ho! He would tear a man's throat oot at his first leap," and man and dog rumbled and growled in devilish mirth. "Sing tae me, dog—sing," and the man threw his head up, and there came the long greeting howl of a dog baying the moon, and dog and man howled in unison, with swaying bodies and heads thrown upwards.

"God, but the open hill's a bonny place," said McKinnon, and a shiver went over him. In this terrible place we lay the night—a great gloomy forbidding place in the belly of the hill. Shiver on shiver went through me as I looked round me. The walls were rock, bare and dry, converging high up in the gloom; for there was just the peat fire and a cruisie alight. Once, as though disturbed in its sleep, I heard a rock-pigeon "rookatihoo coo-a" away above me in some cranny that must open on the hill face. The smoke curled up in a rude dry-stone chimney for about five or six feet against the rock, and the bulk of it still ascended in a column, although the chimney stopped, but a waving pall hung over the cave, swaying and undulating in long waves and streamers, and the air below was cool and fresh. There were great carvings on the walls—warriors and ships, galleys and horses a-rearing, and on a flat stone projecting from the chimney, and serving as the brace or mantelpiece, were models of ships made from the breast-bones of birds, some quite large and others very small, and needing an infinite deal of patience. There were rough stools and a table, all of which must have been made inside the cave, and, indeed, the bark was dry and brittle on the legs. Great bundles of heather, fashioned like narrow beds, lay along the wall in the firelight, and like a dark unwinking eye the light glimmered on a pool. There were square steps cut in the rock down to the pool, which was shaped like a horn spoon with the handle cut off short, and the water entering it from a crack in the rock, noiselessly as oil, trickled silently away in a little sloping gutter to the back of the cavern. Who first discovered the cavern I never knew, but by the fire lay, twisted and blackened, the hilt and half of a sword, and in a corner a black and rust-pitted breastplate. The back part of the cave narrowed, and through a passage the Nameless Man passed to bring us meat and drink. Have you walked on a bare moor road in the pit mirk wi' a drizzle of soft mist in a silence you could hear? Have you felt the fear coming over you, like a cold hand on your heart, when ye knew that a thing gibbered and mouthed at your side? Well, the thought o' that man, the Nameless Man, brings fear to me in a lighted room.

For he was a dead white man, his hair, lank and white, hung round his shoulders, his beard was slimy and soft as a white hare's, face and hands cold, dead white, and his features were frozen.

No trace of any feeling showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good God's sunlight. As we ate, Dan told him some of our story, and the Nameless Man sat, a handful of his beard in his hand, his elbow on the table, and his eyes growing and fading.

"I'm sair feart I left him deid," said Dan. "If they come for us, dog, when we're lying at the still and the good water turnin' to fine whisky—and the good nice water, trickling and dripping through the rocks for a hundred years—if they creep upon us, dog, what will we be doing, you and me, Marr? Ho—ho—ho! killing them, eh? Leaving their bones wi' the white bones away in there—the old, old bones," and dog and man made a howling of laughter. I knew then that this was the watcher of a smugglers' still; for let the gang o' Preventives do their worst, whisky would still be made in the hills.

It came to me then why the folk would be leaving peats for the wee folks, as they said, when they would be taking down the creels from the hills; for the Nameless Man threw more on the fire from some hidden store, likely nearer his worm, when we had finished eating. The great dog lay at the rock by which we entered, and I saw that the stone was swung on a balance; but if there was a way to open from the outside I never knew till long after. McKinnon and Dan lay talking, but I was silent for the most part, thinking of the sword and the armour, and of the people who fashioned the well, and wondering about the old, old bones away through the dark passage into the heart of the hill. The far, far-away stories were in my mind of Finn and his warriors, of his great dogs and his queens. Did Ossian the bard tune his harp to great deeds, and to lovely women of the land of the Ever Young, in the cave of the past? Into my musings—for sleep had nearly come over me—broke the voice of the Nameless Man.

"I gave her to drink of the foamy milk—warm, and the bubbles of froth in it. 'Drink, my lost lass,' said I, 'for ye loved me well once,' and all the time I would be telling her that death was coming with the white milk. And she took up the fine nice milk and drank, because she had loved me well once, she that loved me yet but feared—the coward, the soft, soft, white coward that would lie on another man's heart after I had keeled her for myself. Ay, she took up the milk and drank, and I took my ways, and they came running to Glen Darruach to tell me she had died.

"Oh, oh! the dark, the dark, and never more the sun shining on the bonny blooms of dark Darruach, never mair the white lambs running, and the gleam on the wing of the moorcock.

"Ay, they would be for the killing of me, and I lay among the rafters, under the thatch of my mother's house, and listened to them miscalling me, the black killer—the bloody man that had the black art and the evil eye; and it came over my heart to catch them by the hair, and pull them up to me as they were speaking, and let my black knife kiss their hearts. It was all red, red before me, up there under the thatch, and them down below, and my sisters shaking when they saw me watching down in the dark. It's droll, droll—because a soft white coward died—they would kill me, me that would kill a man when I drew my dirk—ho, ho, ho!

"I lay hid among the rocks above the Herring Slap, alane day and night, and the blue rockdoos left their nestlings and circled above my lair, till I was feart that folk wid see them, and come peering down and get me. But a herrin' skiff took me away from that place in the dark of the night, and I drifted to the warm South Seas and the darkling women and the white glistening houses; but she came with me, she that had died. I would be seeing her rising before the bows o' the ship, rising from the sea, and waving on me to follow, and the weather was worse and worse at her every coming. An' there was a man o' the Western Isles in the crew, and he had the sight, and would be telling o' the woman rising from the sea, and her hair blowing over the yeast o' the waves, and her eyes staring, staring, and the waving of her hand when I was at the tiller; and so bad the weather got, and the sickness among the crew, that the captain swore he would send the woman's man to her, and he lay aft in his cabin, and drank rum till his boy was feart to venture near him; and then he came on deck—a fine wild man, all in his finery o' lace and golden earrings, and he called his sailors aft to make choice of the woman's man. There was many there that would have been making choice of me, but my hand was quick on the dirk, and no man spoke above a whisper, and then I looked over the bows, and I would be seeing her coming, and the man of the Western Isles cried out in his fear—

"'She's wavin', she's wavin', Chrisht's mercy.' He was pointing to the grey seas, and the froth was on his lips.

"And as he was standing gazing I creeped round behind him like a cat, so quiet, and I had my arms round him before his eyes were winking.

"'Go to your wet love,' I cried, and I flung him over the rail by the poop, and the captain was at the laughing.

"'The curse is lifted, my lads,' he roared. 'Crowd the sail on her. Heigh-ho for the North and the gay adventures!' But after that there were two to be watching in the darkness when I took the tiller—ay, and I crawled from the sea at last, and came to the hills again—in the dark.

"Oh, the dark, the dark, and never mair the sun shining on the heather howes of dark Glen Darruach." As we lay on the heather beds the Nameless Man wandered through the cave, and the booming of his voice rumbled in the heart of the hill, as he wandered through unknown galleries in the dark. The day came at last, and I saw a wee shaft of light filter down some way on the cavern walls, but we could only lie still till the dusk would come again, and we might make our way among the hills, for after our sleeping Dan and Ronny and me had a great confab.

"I canna lie here like a rat in a hole a' my days," said Dan.

"Ye'll never sleep sound till there's many a mile o' blue sea between you and Dol Beag's hunters," said I. "If we could pass the word for a skiff. . . ."

"We're daft, we're clean daft," cried Ronny. "McGilp is lying at the north end, standing off and on. If we can just make Loch Ranza, ye're safe."

"Ay," said Dan. "I'm thinking it's the Low Country now for me, Hamish. Whatever money is due me, ye'll leave wi' McGilp, and he'll find a way for sending it on. I'm sair sweirt tae part frae my bonny horses for yon mauk's sake. . . . And there's the bonny spaewife, Hamish; if anything comes wrong tae that lass I'll be relying on you." And then for a long time he sat brooding at the fire.

In the afternoon a change came over the Nameless Man. He crawled on his knees about the cave, whining and howling like a beast. He glared at the black pool, and pointed.

"She's there in the water." And then with a yell to the dog, "Had her, Marr; tear her sinery; rive her sinery, good Marr." And he hissed the hound on to his vision, and the dog, frenzied at his crying, breenged into the pool, and the man whined with joy, and caressed the soaking coat. Later on in the day, after we had had a meal, he sat at the passage-way and eyed us, and the dog girned and showed his teeth.

"They'll no come creepin' into the dim places where the queer things are hidden, no—spying and spying." And when we paid no heed to his ravings, except that we kept the fire bright and had armed ourselves, he lay down and slept across the passage-way, his head on the hound's flank. At every movement of our bodies the growling rumbled to our ears, and the bristles rose on the dog's back. But when it was nearly dark the sleeper wakened, and we left the dreadful place called McAllan's Locker, and took to the hills again.