’Then I saw in my dream, that a little off the road, over against the Silver-mine, stood Demas (gentlemanlike) to call to passengers to come and see:  who said to Christian and his fellow, Ho, turn aside hither and I will show you a thing.

At tea I led the talk to my own past life.  I yarned about my experiences as a mining engineer, and said I could never get out of the trick of looking at country with the eye of the prospector.  ’For instance,’ I said, ’if this had been Rhodesia, I would have said there was a good chance of copper in these little kopjes above the town.  They’re not unlike the hills round the Messina mine.’  I told the captain that after the war I was thinking of turning my attention to the West Highlands and looking out for minerals.

‘Ye’ll make nothing of it,’ said the captain.  ’The costs are ower big, even if ye found the minerals, for ye’d have to import a’ your labour.  The West Hielandman is no fond o’ hard work.  Ye ken the psalm o’ the crofter?

O that the peats would cut themselves, The fish chump on the shore, And that I in my bed might lie Henceforth for ever more!’

‘Has it ever been tried?’ I asked.

‘Often.  There’s marble and slate quarries, and there was word o’ coal in Benbecula.  And there’s the iron mines at Ranna.’

‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

’Up forenent Skye.  We call in there, and generally bide a bit.  There’s a heap of cargo for Ranna, and we usually get a good load back.  But as I tell ye, there’s few Hielanders working there.  Mostly Irish and lads frae Fife and Falkirk way.’

I didn’t pursue the subject, for I had found Demas’s silver-mine.  If the Tobermory lay at Ranna for a week, Gresson would have time to do his own private business.  Ranna would not be the spot, for the island was bare to the world in the middle of a much-frequented channel.  But Skye was just across the way, and when I looked in my map at its big, wandering peninsulas I concluded that my guess had been right, and that Skye was the place to make for.

That night I sat on deck with Gresson, and in a wonderful starry silence we watched the lights die out of the houses in the town, and talked of a thousand things.  I noticed—­what I had had a hint of before—­that my companion was no common man.  There were moments when he forgot himself and talked like an educated gentleman:  then he would remember, and relapse into the lingo of Leadville, Colorado.  In my character of the ingenuous inquirer I set him posers about politics and economics, the kind of thing I might have been supposed to pick up from unintelligent browsing among little books.  Generally he answered with some slangy catchword, but occasionally he was interested beyond his discretion, and treated me to a harangue like an equal.  I discovered another thing, that he had a craze for poetry, and a capacious memory for it.  I forgot how we drifted into the