call my wife.

'These were living men,' said I, 'perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the French,
perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the Spanish
treasure ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your
daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man, the dead
sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this morning by his grave;
he will not wake before the trump of doom.'

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his
eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but it
was plain that he was past the power of speech.

'Come,' said I. 'You must think for others. You must come up the hill
with me, and see this ship.'

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient
strides. The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he
scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was
wont, from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to
make better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like
one in bodily pain: 'Ay, ay, man, I'm coming.' Long before we had
reached the top, I had no other thought for him but pity. If the crime
had been monstrous the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around
us. All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had
vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to
the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was the
interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there
last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and
already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first, in
vain for the schooner.

'There she is,' I said at last. But her new position, and the course she
was now lying, puzzled me. 'They cannot mean to beat to sea,' I cried.

'That's what they mean,' said my uncle, with something like joy; and just
then the schooner went about and stood upon another tack, which put the
question beyond the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a gale on
hand, had thought first of sea-room. With the wind that threatened, in
these reef-sown waters and contending against so violent a stream of
tide, their course was certain death.

'Good God!' said I, 'they are all lost.'

'Ay,' returned my uncle, 'a'--a' lost. They hadnae a chance but to rin
for Kyle Dona. T