“Not in notes, Captain Gare: in traveller’s cheques.” Here Captain Gare sighed slightly, and his grip on the stick slackened. “Now could you be interested, Captain Gare, in some such sum as six hundred pounds?”
“Six hundred pounds?” Captain Gare drew a sudden breath. “Really, my dear fellow, are you suggesting that you might pay me six hundred pounds? Whatever for?”
“For certain information.”
“What manner of information, my dear sir?” Captain Gare turned slightly, there in the dark, as if to make sure no one was at hand.
“For instance,” Logan said, “detailed information concerning the past, present, and future of Jackman.”
That bow, drawn at a venture, sent its arrow home. On Gare’s unpleasant face the mottled veins seemed to swell; the man stepped back. “Who the devil are you?” cried Captain Gare, with a quaver in the reedy voice.
“I take it that you know now what I am,” said Logan, still quietly. “Whatever made you think I might accept money?”
“I beg your pardon, sir; really, I …” Captain Gare was stumbling over his words. “That is, you did not seem precisely an American. All a pose, eh? I say, you don’t mean that you’re … that I’m …”
“If you tell me about Jackman,” Logan went on, “we need say no more of all this, so far as you are concerned. We already know a great deal about Dr. Jackman, of course, but conceivably you might add something or other. You’re the fellow who was cashiered, I take it. We know enough about you.”
“I swear it was a miscarriage of justice, Mr. Logan – or whatever your name is, sir. I mean that affair in Madras.” Gare was almost panting. “But Jackman – no, really, I can’t say anything, not for six thousand pounds. My life wouldn’t – but you know that quite as well as I do.”
The swollen face had gone deathly pale. Even had he been able to probe deeper without giving away his game, Logan reflected, this man would have been too frightened to be of any real help. It had been a good random thrust, that mention of Jackman, whoever Jackman might be.
“Very well, Gare,” Logan said. “If you don’t choose to clear yourself, that’s not my concern. Very likely you’d be of no use to us. We’ll have Dowie and Anderson any hour now.” Gare shivered. That shot, too, had gone home. “As for you, Gare, you understand that if you don’t sever all connection with this business, we’ll see that you’re taken into custody? Perhaps the Continent would be a safer place for you at present. And throw away that silly sword-stick: you couldn’t frighten babies with it.” Logan snatched the thing from Gare’s hand and flung it toward the lip of the hill; the steel flashed in the moonlight, and then blade and stick were lost in the gorse. “Be off, now; I’ve tired of you.”
Gare, backing further away, muttered pitifully, “Then you’re … Then I’m not under…?” Logan gestured impatiently toward the town below.
“You can go to the devil, Gare.”
Captain Gare turned with clumsy haste, all his swagger gone, and scuttled heavily down the path toward town; after he had gone a few paces in the dark, Logan thought he heard him break into a run. Yes, it had been a thoroughly satisfying random shot. He did not think he would see Captain Gare again.
Yet whoever thought it worthwhile to offer Logan three hundred pounds to steer clear of Carnglass? Gare had bungled the business badly; he must have been acting without instruction from his principal, Logan thought – whoever that principal might be. Dowie? Or Lagg? Or this fellow Jackman? There were depths in this business, surely, unplumbed by old Duncan MacAskival. Trying to piece the thing together, Logan walked slowly back to the Station Hotel. There the night porter gave him tea and biscuits, and afterwards Logan went up to his rather chilly high-ceilinged room, and stared at the plaster cornice for half an hour before he went to sleep. But he could form no clear picture of what he had begun to call to himself the Carnglass Case.
As he dressed, next morning, Logan saw from his window the steamer “Lochness” at the pier: it would take him to Loch Boisdale, and he hurried into his clothes and gulped down tea at 5:45. This was Wednesday, his third morning in Scotland. Thus far, only frustration: and yet the sort of frustration which roused Logan’s energies. To judge from the impromptu and ineffectual measures that Dowie and Gare had adopted, he was dealing only with an ill-organized and eccentric opposition – though with adversaries sufficiently unscrupulous. And it seemed to be an ill-informed opposition. Either that, or else Dowie and Gare were out of touch with the real intelligence at work, for some reason, supposing that they had principals for whom they were acting. Certainly neither of those two had seemed quite the man to concoct a scheme to keep an American from his prospective purchase of Carnglass. If there were a principal, would he be in the island? Lagg, the factor? The storm of two days ago might have kept the people in Carnglass from communicating with the mainland; but presumably messages now could be sent and received by boat. Whatever messages might be sent, it scarcely was possible that he should receive in Carnglass the sort of rude welcome he had got in Mutto’s Wynd. Even if Carnglass was Ultima Thule, still it was part of Britain, the most law-abiding of nations; and, there would be Lady MacAskival for surety.
At six o’clock the “Lochness” steamed away from the pier toward the Sound of Mull. They crossed the Firth of Lorne; and then, to the south, they skirted the great rocky mass of Mull, while the wild shores of Morven frowned upon them from the north. Several islanders were among the passengers, and for the first time in years Logan heard the Gaelic spoken naturally, that beautiful singing Gaelic of the Hebrides. It went with the cliffs, the sea-rocks, the ruined strongholds of Mull and Morven, the damp air, the whitewashed lonely cottages by the deep and smoothly sinister sea.
As the hours passed, the steamer put into Tobermory, and later touched at the flat islands of Col and Tiree. It crossed the broad rough waters of the Little Minch, with the romantic line of the Outer Isles before them, and the round bulk of Barra drawing closer. After Castlebay, in Barra, the “Lochness” steamed north past Eriskay, and into the splendid dark anchorage of Loch Boisdale, in South Uist, that sprawling low island of peat.
It was nearly midnight now. Going ashore, Logan got himself a room at the homely, cordial inn above the harbor. There was a schoolmaster in Loch Boisdale village, the hotelkeeper said, who might know of a drifter that could put Logan ashore in Carnglass.
Once more alone in a rented room with only conjectures for company, Hugh Logan settled himself in bed and took up that battered pamphlet by the Reverend Samuel Balmullo. Mr. Balmullo’s taste certainly had run to old bones. Here was a tidbit:
“Even in the fierce chronicles of the Western Isles, the chieftains of MacAskival are distinguished by a repute for deeds of blood and passion exceedingly disproportionate to the wealth and power of their sept. In the last century, upon the removal of the plenishing of the Old House to the New House of Fear, there were discovered in a curious pit or oubliette in the crypts the skeletal remains of a human being, still bearing the marks of violence. This pit long had been put to the office of a brinetub, and it is supposed, accordingly, that the bones had lain hid at the bottom for a great while, perhaps some centuries. By any person inured to the sorry superstitions of the people of Carnglass, it might have been anticipated – as, indeed, it befell – that the vulgar peasantry, upon the exhibition of these sad relics of mortality, would allege the bones – some of which were curiously injured or deformed – to be those of a Firgower, or Man-Goat. A legend less incredible, however, relates that the skeleton is that of an illicit lover of a lady of MacAskival, seized by stealth at his abode in North Uist, transported to Carnglass, subjected to indescribable torments, and at length drowned in the brine of the oubliette. What the Duke of Clarence suffered in a butt of Malmsey, some obscure chieftain of the barbarous Hebrides, about the same period of antiquity, may have endured in a darksome pit filled to its brink with pickled herring.”
At the close of this charming paragraph, Logan settled himself to sleep.
In the morning, on his way to seek out the schoolmaster who might help him to a passage