s,
with his cap on the back of his head, stood looking in at me. There was
a scowl between his brows, and by this as well as other certain signs,
I knew that all was not well with him.

"Will ye go on a cruise with me?" says he from the doorway with no
introduction whatever.

"Would it be an unseemly prying into your affairs to ask where to?" I
inquired with a smile.

"North or south," said he, still keeping his place by the door. "It's
immaterial to me, so I escape accompanying my womenfolk to London."

"And if I go with ye," says I, "your wife will like me less than she
does now."

"That would be impossible, so ye needn't worry over it," he returned
dryly. "The only good word ye ever had from her was that if ye'd been a
less handsome man ye might have been a better one."

"And even that could scarce be termed fulsome flattery," I observed.

"Will ye go!" he repeated, his mind set on the one point.

A sudden thought, bred of some news in the paper which I had just
received, came to me upon the instant.

"Let us take the boat from Leith, and go north by the Orkney and
Hebrides Islands, through the Minch to the west coast. There are all
kinds of stories afloat concerning the gipsies and free traders who
live in those deep coves; we might fall in with a pirate ship----"

"Or find a hidden treasure!" he said scoffingly, as he seated himself
on the other side of the table and took some coffee, the frown gone,
and the Sandy I knew with the bright face and laughing eye back again.

"Aye," he went on in his humorous way, "I am convinced 'twill be hidden
treasure we'll find, Jock. We'll go ashore at midnight, and under a
stunted pine will be a sailor's chest. Hidden treasures are always
found in sailors' chests, ye know. And taking a three-foot bar of iron,
which every gentleman in tales carries concealed upon his person, we,
you and I,--none of the others, of course,--will pry this chest
open--to find ducats and doubloons, and piastres, and sous-marquees--and
a map of the Spanish Main and the Dry Tortugas--with crosses in blood.
I'll tell you, ye can have my share of it now," he cried, laughing at
me.

"Ye're over generous," says I, for jesting of this kind was a thing to
which I was accustomed in him.

He dropped the raillery on the moment, however, to take a note-book
from his pocket.

"Whom shall we ask?" he inquired in his natural voice.

Now I had one other friend, almost as dear to me as Sandy, named H