the captain disembark and walk up to a house on the hillside.  Then some idlers sauntered down towards her and stood talking and smoking close to her side.  The captain returned and left again.  A man with papers in his hand appeared, and a woman with what looked like a telegram.  The mate went ashore in his best clothes.  Then at last, after midday, Gresson appeared.  He joined the captain at the piermaster’s office, and presently emerged on the other side of the jetty where some small boats were beached.  A man from the Tobermory came in answer to his call, a boat was launched, and began to make its way into the channel.  Gresson sat in the stern, placidly eating his luncheon.

I watched every detail of that crossing with some satisfaction that my forecast was turning out right.  About half-way across, Gresson took the oars, but soon surrendered them to the Tobermory man, and lit a pipe.  He got out a pair of binoculars and raked my hillside.  I tried to see if my neighbour was making any signal, but all was quiet.  Presently the boat was hid from me by the bulge of the hill, and I caught the sound of her scraping on the beach.

Gresson was not a hill-walker like my neighbour.  It took him the best part of an hour to get to the top, and he reached it at a point not two yards from my hiding-place.  I could hear by his labouring breath that he was very blown.  He walked straight over the crest till he was out of sight of Ranna, and flung himself on the ground.  He was now about fifty yards from me, and I made shift to lessen the distance.  There was a grassy trench skirting the north side of the hill, deep and thickly overgrown with heather.  I wound my way along it till I was about twelve yards from him, where I stuck, owing to the trench dying away.  When I peered out of the cover I saw that the other man had joined him and that the idiots were engaged in embracing each other.

I dared not move an inch nearer, and as they talked in a low voice I could hear nothing of what they said.  Nothing except one phrase, which the strange man repeated twice, very emphatically.  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, and I noticed that his voice had not the Highland inflection which I looked for.  Gresson nodded and glanced at his watch, and then the two began to move downhill towards the road I had travelled that morning.

I followed as best I could, using a shallow dry watercourse of which sheep had made a track, and which kept me well below the level of the moor.  It took me down the hill, but some distance from the line the pair were taking, and I had to reconnoitre frequently to watch their movements.  They were still a quarter of a mile or so from the road, when they stopped and stared, and I stared with them.  On that lonely highway travellers were about as rare as roadmenders, and what caught their eye was a farmer’s gig driven by a thick-set elderly man with a woollen comforter round his neck.