have laughed in my sudden
ease of mind, for here at last was something to be sure of, in a way.
And I gripped back as it gripped fast at me, feeling it hairy at the
neck and the crook of the arms--a breathing and lusty body.

"'What have I here?' I asked, but never an answer. At my throat went ten
clawed fingers, and there was Duncan at dismal battle, fighting for life
with what he could not see, in his own home woods, but they so strange
and never a friend to help!

"For a time I had no chance with the knife; but at last 'Steel, my
darling!' said I, and I struck low in the soft spaces. 'Gloop,' said the
knife, and Death was twisting at my feet.

"Did Duncan put hurry on his heels and fly? The hurry was not in me
but the deep heart's wonder. My first dead thing that in life had ever
struck back held me till the morning with a girl's enchantment I went
down on a knee in the grass and felt him, a soft lump, freezing slowly
from the heel to the knee, from the knee to the neck. Some rags of
costume were on him, a kilt of coarse plaiding and a half-shirt of skin,
soaked in sweat at the armpits and wet with blood at the end.

"I waited till the morning to see what I had. 'This,' said I, hunched
on a mound, 'is all as it was before.' The first sound I heard was the
squeal of a beast caught at the throat among the bracken, then a hind
snored among the grass. The morning walked solemn among the trees,
stopping at every step to listen; birds put their claws down and shook
themselves free of sleep and dew; a polecat slinking past me started
at my eye and went back to his hole. Began the fir-trees waving in the
wind, and then the day was open wide and far.

"In the dark I had strained my eyes to see what was at my feet till my
eyeballs creaked in their hollows, yet now I had no desire to turn
about from the cheerful dawn and look behind, but I did it with my heart
thudding.

"Nothing was there to see, lappered blood, nor mark of body on grass!

"My knife, without a stain on the steel of it, was still in my hand.
I wiped it with a tuft of bracken, and I laughed with something of a
bitterness.

"'So!' said I, 'the old story, the old story! It happened me before, and
in a hundred years from now Black Duncan will be at the killing again.'"

CHAPTER XVII--THE STORM

The vessel, straining at the rope that bound her to the shore, lay with
a clumsy shoulder over the bank that shelved abruptly into the great
depths where