But it was all very well to say “right out!” when there was a stiff breeze blowing right in.  Scarcely had the boat put her nose out beyond the pier, and while as yet there was but little way on her, when a big sea caught her, springing high over her bows and coming rattling down on her with a noise as of pistol-shots.  The chief victim of this deluge was the luckless Johnny Wickes, who tumbled down into the bottom of the boat, vehemently blowing the salt-water out of his mouth, and rubbing his knuckles into his eyes.  Macleod burst out laughing.

“What’s the good of you as a lookout?” he cried.  “Didn’t you see the water coming?”

“Yes, sir,” said Johnny, ruefully laughing, too.  But he would not be beaten.  He scrambled up again to his post, and clung there, despite the fierce wind and the clouds of spray.

“Keep her close up, sir,” said the man who had the sheet of the huge lugsail in both his hands, as he cast a glance out at the darkening sea.

But this great boat, rude and rough and dirty as she appeared, was a splendid specimen of her class; and they know how to build such boats up about that part of the world.  No matter with how staggering a plunge she went down into the yawning green gulf, the white foam hissing away from her sides; before the next wave, high, awful, threatening, had come down on her with a crash as of mountains falling, she had glided buoyantly upward, and the heavy blow only made her bows spring the higher, as though she would shake herself free, like a bird, from the wet.  But it was a wild day to be out.  So heavy and black was the sky in the west that the surface of the sea out to the horizon seemed to be a moving mass of white foam, with only streaks of green and purple in it.  The various islands changed every minute as the wild clouds whirled past.  Already the great cliffs about Dare had grown distant and faint as seen through the spray; and here were the rocks of Colonsay, black as jet as they reappeared through the successive deluges of white foam; and far over there, a still gloomier mass against the gloomy sky told where the huge Atlantic breakers were rolling in their awful thunder into the Staffa caves.

“I would keep her away a bit,” said the sailor next Macleod.  He did not like the look of the heavy breakers that were crashing on to the Colonsay rocks.

Macleod, with his teeth set hard against the wind, was not thinking of the Colonsay rocks more than was necessary to give them a respectful berth.

“Were you ever in a theatre, Duncan?” he said, or rather bawled, to the brown-visaged and black-haired young fellow who had now got the sheet of the lugsail under his foot as well as in the firm grip of his hands.

“Oh yes, Sir Keith,” said he, as he shook the salt-water away from his short beard.  “It was at Greenock.  I will be at the theatre, and more than three times or two times.”

“How would you like to have a parcel of actors and actresses with us now?” he said, with a laugh.