Johnny Wickes did not understand; but he swallowed the whiskey, and then he began to look about him a bit.

“Will I put my clothes round him, Sir Keith?” Duncan Cameron said.

“And go home that way to Dare?” Macleod said, with a loud laugh.  “Get on your clothes, Duncan, lad, and get up the sail again; and we will see if there is a dram left for us in the bottle.  John Cameron, confound you! where are you putting her head to?”

John Cameron, who had again taken the tiller, seemed as one demented.  He was talking to himself rapidly in Gaelic, and his brows were frowning; and he did not seem to notice that he was putting the head of the boat, which had now some little way on her by reason of the wind and tide, though she had no sail up, a good deal too near the southernmost point of Colonsay.

Roused from this angry reverie, he shifted her course a bit; and then, when his brother had got his clothes on, he helped to hoist the sail, and again they flew onward and shoreward, along with the waves that seemed to be racing them; but all the same he kept grumbling and growling to himself in Gaelic.  Meanwhile Macleod had got a huge tarpaulin overcoat and wrapped Johnny Wickes in it, and put him in the bottom of the boat.

“You will soon be warm enough in that, Master Wickes,” said he; “the chances are you will come out boiled red, like a lobster.  And I would strongly advise you, if we can slip into the house and get dry clothes on, not to say a word of your escapade to Hamish.”

“Ay, Sir Keith,” said John Cameron, eagerly, in his native tongue, “that is what I will be saying to myself.  If the story is told—­and Hamish will hear that you will nearly drown yourself—­what is it he will not do to that boy?  It is for killing him he will be.”

“Not as bad as that, John,” Macleod said, good-naturedly.  “Come, there is a glass for each of us; and you may give me the tiller now.”

“I will take no whiskey, Sir Keith, with thanks to you,” said John Cameron; “I was not in the water.”

“There is plenty for all, man!”

“I was not in the water.”

“I tell you there is plenty for all of us!”

“There is the more for you, Sir Keith,” said he, stubbornly.

And then, as great good luck would have it, it was found, when they got ashore, that Hamish had gone away as far as Salen on business of some sort or other; and the story told by the two Camerons was that Johnny Wickes, whose clothes were sent into the kitchen to be dried, and who was himself put to bed, had fallen into the water down by the quay; and nothing at all was said about Keith Macleod having had to leap into the sea off the coast of Colonsay.  Macleod got into Castle Dare by a back way, and changed his clothes in his own room.  Then he went away upstairs to the small chamber in which Johnny Wickes lay in bed.

“You have had the soup, then?  You look pretty comfortable.”