The loch was dappled with sun.  The air was like wine.  The mountains above the moor and the heather were colored like an Oriental carpet.  I was full of the joy of life and swung into an immense stride, when suddenly a voice stopped me.

“My lad,” it said, “which one of the Ten Commandments is it the most dangerous to break?”

Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a big Highlander.  He was knitting a woolen stocking and his needles were clicking like an instrument.  I was taken off my feet, but I tried to meet him on his ground.

“Well,” I answered, “I suppose it would be the one against murder, the sixth.”

“You suppose wrong,” he replied.  “It will be the first.  You will read in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth.  Aye, my lad, He ordered it broken when it pleased Him.  But did you ever read that He set aside the first or that any man escaped who broke it?”

He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure of speech that I cannot reproduce here.

“Did you observe,” he added, “the graven images that your uncle has set up? . . .  Where is the man the noo?”

“He is gone to Oban,” I said.

He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his sporran.

“To Oban!” He stood a moment in some deep reflection.  “There will be ships out of Oban.”  Then he put another question to me: 

“What did auld Andrew say about it?”

“That my uncle was gone to Oban,” I answered, “and had set no time for his return.”

He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the deep heather.

“Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for heathen parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in the boathouse?”

The suggestion startled me.  The thing was not beyond all possibility.

But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination.  I was not going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on the road I had answered a good many questions and I determined to ask one.

“Who are you?” I said.  “And what have you got to do with my uncle’s affairs?”

He cocked his eye at me, looking down as one looks down at a child.

“The first of your questions,” he said, “you will find out if you can, and the second you cannot find out if you will.”  And he was gone, striding past me in the deep heather.

“I have some business with your uncle, of a pressing nature,” he called back.  “I will just take a look through Oban, the night and the morn’s morn.”

I was utterly at sea about the big Highlander.  He might be a friend or an enemy of my uncle.  But clearly he knew all about the man and the mysterious experiment in which he was engaged.  He was keeping the place well within his eye; that was also evident.  From his seat in the heather the whole place was spread out below him.