Macaulay roved the moors and forest while his clerk kept ward in their fortress. Stags fell to his gun, the best linns gave him fish. At the market in Marinish, over the ford on the other island, where the Captain’s clan was unpopular, Macaulay one day appeared at a cattle tryst and sold beasts the buyers did not inquire too closely about, and he replaced them in his fold with others lifted boldly from Kilree’s home farm on his way back from the market. Night and day he was watched for, but night or day either he or Macdonald was awake and waiting; and more than once he was at the other end of the parish on some exploit while Kilree’s men kept an eye on the pass. He became the glory of his own island, and a toast at fairs in all the Islands. “Alasdair Dhu” was the name on every lip; his wife shared his popularity, and people sent her gifts of sheep and fowl from as far as the mainland. And all she would say was, “What a silly thing! An island of men against one man in a dream! If I had just had him here!” IV. The Captain, who had been with his corps in the Lowlands, came home, thought hard, and made a plan. “If my factor is so fond of nature, I must fight him with that same,” he said, and for two weeks before Lammas he had every man in his service building a dam below the pass of Kincreggan. It was so clever a way of getting the better of Alasdair Dhu that the men who admired him most now turned most readily to spoil him. They cut down big firs on either side of the pass, so that the trees fell over and jammed between the cliffs. When the pile was high enough they backed it up with brushwood and turf till it looked like a lofty wall. “I’m thinking that will do now,” said the Captain when it was done. “Let us have the first of the floods of Lammas, and you will see a rat come squealing from his hole.” When the dam was finished it was dry weather, the river at the pass a trickle; but the Captain’s own luck was with him, for the very next day a storm burst on the Islands. He went to the top of Ben Buidhe, and joined the folk there who were looking down on Kincreggan. They saw a spectacle! The river, pit-black in its linns and cream-white in its falls, gulped down the narrow gorge as if all the waters of the world were hasting there; the cliff above the keep was streaming, the path to the house was flooded, the cattle were belly-deep in the fold, and bellowed mournfully. Every minute saw the water perceptibly rise till it lay like a loch deep about Kincreggan House. By the time the gloaming came on the glen the water washed the lintels of the lower storey. “It’s a dour rat, by my troth!” said the Captain. “I thought we would have heard squealing by this time.” He shook the rain from his plaid, and set off for home. Some say he was heedless of Macaulay’s fate; others more plausibly argue that he knew very well Macaulay had friends on the hillside who would rescue him when the need arose.