“Do you know who you’re wreaking this on?” said the lieutenant, in a smothered voice; “not on me, my lass!----” His voice changed, and he cried abruptly, “Come, stir; do we need a whole night for a bare dozen capstan-pushers? Fall in! Gag that whining pickpocket! Form ’em up, coxswain! Ready?” “Ye’d best tak’ th’ dog’s tongue,” Jessie cried, “chance another gentleman boasts he’s killed him. Lend me thy sword while I cut it out!” “By God, your own ought to be cut out, you red witch!--Faugh!--Up, men!” “Ay, forward; I’m walking Portsannet way mysel’; I’ve a dead dog to show folk; me and Nellie’s for Portsannet!--Come, poor lass.” She took the dead retriever up in her arms. The women strove to restrain her, but she answered them in a hard voice; and the hook-nosed lieutenant, grinding his teeth as she railed, was yet unable to keep his eyes from her throat and shoulders. She saw it, and laughed shrilly, and made a display of the bare arms that held the dog for him. He swore a filthy oath under his breath; Fat Maggie and Jerry’s wife and daughter wept; the men’s faces were hard set; and the two terriers leaped and barked about the lieutenant as Jessie clucked them on with her tongue and asked him where his sword was. They set forward down the meadows; a dim ring of orange showed where the moon swam behind the clouds; and as they left the meadows and began the descent to the valley the coxswain stepped back to Jessie, who was heaping taunt on taunt, and said, “Let it alone--ye’re but making it worse for him....” IV.--AT PORTSANNET. The news had spread in Portsannet, and many of the decent fisherfolk had joined the common sort at the head of the street. They murmured, but it was little of their business, after all. Had any of their own kin been seized, they might have resisted; as it was, Portsannet was well rid of a rogue or two; and as for the Pillers, they, too, were in a sort vagrants. True, when a red-haired, slipshod, unkempt wench appeared, holding a dead retriever bitch in her arms, they wondered, and some called her a hussy; but others, looking again, cried that it was a shame. But a dead dog was not a deal to make a trouble about, and what they would be gladdest to see was the stern of the longboat that was fastened down by the jetty. And why did Jessie, with her lover pinioned and about to be reft from her, take his case less passionately than that of the cold and heavy animal? She could not have told you. Maybe her mind could comprehend only the small evil; or, as men in moments of stress will occupy themselves with foolish, trivial things, an instinct bade her hold the unbearable thought away from her. Likely enough it was this last; for, suddenly seeing Willie’s haggard eyes on her, she cried, faintly: “Dinna look at me now, or ’twill be th’ last! Turn thy face away! And ye--some o’ ye--show me where th’ bailiff lives----”