it."

I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that my uncle
was about to put into effect, but realized that it was useless.

Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all day in
the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his disappearance. I
had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel that sat watching in the
heather and I wondered whether I had sent a friend or an enemy into Oban
on an empty mission, and whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's
enterprise.

I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch, for the
boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep of it. But,
alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are young. It was far into
the night when I awoke.

A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that
aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was
filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was
blurred a little like an impalpable picture.

A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the
edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse
with burdens which they were loading into the boat. Almost immediately
the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the
crook of the loch on its way to the ship. But certain of the human
figures remained. They continued between the boathouse and the beach.

And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a ship. The
boat was taking off a cargo.

Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the hold of
the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no
sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like
phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures
came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door
under my window. I took off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room
and down the stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room
was ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.

My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a candle,
and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human creature that I had
ever seen in the world.

He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some
sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform of an
English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though pick