“It’s odd,” he thought to himself:  “I’m going to be killed and I don’t care.  If Isla got her, then I’ll see her very soon now, God willing.  But if she wins out—­why it is going to be longer waiting....  And I’ve put my mark on the Boche—­not as often as I wished—­but I’ve marked some of them for what they’ve done to me—­and to the world—­”

A sound caught his ear.  He waited, listening.  Had it been a fighting chance in Isla Water he’d have taken it.  But the man in the boat!—­and to have one’s throat cut—­like a deer!  No!  He’d kill all he could first; he’d die fighting, not fleeing.

He looked at his wrist-watch.  Miss Erith had been gone two hours.  That meant that her slender body lay deep, deep in icy Isla.

Now, listening intently, he heard the bracken stirring and something scraping the gorse below.  They were coming; they were among the rocks!  He straightened up and hurled a great slab of rock down through darkness; heard them scrambling upward still; seized slab after slab and smashed them downward at the flashes as the red flare of their pistols lit up his figure against the sky.

Then, as he hurled the last slab and clutched his short, broad knife, a gasping breath fell on his cheek and a wet and icy little hand thrust a box of clips into his.  And there and then The McKay almost died, for it was as if the “Cold Hand of Isla” had touched him.  And he stared ahead to see his own wraith.

“Quick!” she panted.  “We can hold them, Kay!”

“Yellow-hair!  By God!  You bet we can!” he cried with a terrible burst of laughter; and ripped the clips from the box and snapped them in with lightning speed.

Then his pistols vomited vermilion, clearing the rock of vermin; and when two fresh clips were snapped in, the man stood on the Pulpit’s edge, mad for blood, his fierce young eyes searching the blackness about him.

“You dirty rats!” he cried, “come back!  Are you leaving your dead in the bracken then?”

There were distant sounds on the moor; nothing stirred nearer.

“Are you coming back?” he shouted, “or must I go after you?”

Suddenly in the night their motor roared.  At the same moment, far across the lake, he saw the headlights of other motors glide over Isla Bridge like low-flying stars.

“Yellow-hair!”

There was no sound behind him.  He turned.

The fainting girl lay amid her drenched yellow hair in the ferns, partly covered by the clothing which she had drawn over her with her last conscious effort.

It is a long way across Isla Water.  And twice across is longer.  And “The Cold Hand of Isla” summons the chief of Clan Morhguinn when his time has come to look upon his own wraith face to face.  But The Cold Hand of Isla had touched this girl in vain—­MOLADH MAIRI!!

“Yellow-hair!  Yellow-hair!” he whispered.  The roar of rushing motors from Glenark filled his ears.  He picked up one of her little hands and chafed it.  Then she opened her golden eyes, looked up at him, and a flood of rose dyed her body from brow to ankle.