And his queer speech fitted with old Andrew’s fear.  Surely the Buddha was a heathen image and my uncle had set it up.  The stern Scotch conscience would be outraged and see the Decalogue violated in its injunctions.  This would explain the dread with which my uncle’s house was regarded and the reason I could find no man to help me on the way to it.  But it would not explain my uncle’s apprehension.

But my adventure on this afternoon did not end with the big Highlander.  I found out something more.

I returned along the edge of the loch and approached the boathouse from the waterside.

Here the path passed directly along the whole wall of the building.  The path was padded with damp sod, and as it happened I made no sound on it.  It was late afternoon, the shadows were beginning to extend, there was no wind and the whole world was intensely quiet.  Midway of the wall I stopped to listen.

The house was not empty.  There was some one in it.  I could hear him moving about.

It was of no use to try to look in through the wall; every joint and crack of the stones was plastered.  I went on.

Old Andrew was about setting me some supper.  He came over and stood a moment by the window looking at the shadows on the loch.  And I tried to take him unaware with a sudden question: 

“Has my uncle returned from Oban?”

But I had no profit of the venture.

“The master,” he said, “is where he went this morning.”

The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of converging upon some common center.  The thing was in the air.  Old Andrew voiced it when he went out with his candle.

“Ah, sir,” he said, “it was the fool work of an old man to bring you into this affair.  The master will have his way and he must meet what waits for him at the end of it.”

I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that my uncle was about to put into effect, but realized that it was useless.

Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all day in the boathouse.  The journey was to account to me for his disappearance.  I had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel that sat watching in the heather and I wondered whether I had sent a friend or an enemy into Oban on an empty mission, and whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle’s enterprise.

I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch, for the boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep of it.  But, alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are young.  It was far into the night when I awoke.

A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that aroused me.  There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture.

A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse with burdens which they were loading into the boat.  Almost immediately the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the crook of the loch on its way to the ship.  But certain of the human figures remained.  They continued between the boathouse and the beach.