s it a true
one?"

"It is true--in a way," said the seaman. "It was a thing that happened
to myself."

Gilian delayed his going--the temptation of a new story was too much for
him.

"Do you take frights?" Black Duncan asked him. "Frights for things that
are not there at all?"

Gilian nodded.

"That is because it is in the blood," said the seaman; "that is the kind
of fright of my story."

And this is the story Black Duncan told in the Gaelic.

CHAPTER XVI--THE DESPERATE BATTLE

"Black darkness came down on the wood of Creag Dubh, and there was I
lost in the middle of it, picking my way among the trees. Fir and oak
are in the wood. In the oak I could walk straight with my chin in the
air, facing anything to come; in the fir the little branches scratched
at my neck and eyes, and I had to crouch low and go carefully.

"I had been at a wedding in the farm-house of Leacann. Song and story
had been rife about the fire; but song and story ever have an end, and
there was I in the hollow of the wood after song and story were by, the
door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was
nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them
as I went. Not a star pricked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in
a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and
the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet,
though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the
fin dust. I swept every one with a shell aside, hunting for my cracked
fellow, and when I found him never was nut so sweet!

"Then came to me the queerest of notions, that some night before in this
same wood I had lost a nut, and the darkness was the dark of a pot in
a cave and a snail under the lid of it. And yet the time or season that
ever I cracked nuts in Creag Dubh was what I could never give name to.

"'Where was it? When was it?' said I to myself, bent double creeping
under the young larch with my plaid drawn up to fend my eyes, and the
black fright crept over me. An owl's whoop would have been cheery, or
the snort of a hind--and Creag Dubh is in daytime stirring with bird
and beast--but here was I stark lonely in the heart of it, never a sound
about, far from the hunting road, and my mind back among the terrors of
a thousand years ere ever the Feinne were sung.

"In this dreamy quirk of the mind I felt I was a hunter and a man of
arms. I was searching