"Wheest, lass! Nae Papist prayers in my hearin'," said Mrs. McAlister in her ear. "Gin that be your lad, he's dead and gane. And that's a hantle better than dying on the gully-knives of the McAlisters." At the sight of the disaster beneath them on the wrinkled face of the water, all the islanders had leaped suddenly erect behind their shelters and craggy hiding-places. Each man stood with his head thrown forward in an attitude of the most intent watchfulness. And once when the stern of the boat cocked up, and a man's arm rose like the fin of a fish beside it for a moment, every son of Alister expelled the long-withholden air from his lungs in a sonorous "Hough!" which indicated that in his opinion all was over. Instantly the islanders of Suliscanna collected here and there, at likely places along the shore, into quick-gathering knots and clusters which dissolved as quickly. They discussed the disaster from every point of view. The minister was specially active, going about from group to group. "We must e'en submit," he was saying; "it is the will of God. And, after all, though both men and boat had been cast ashore, it is little likely that they would have had anything worth lifting on them. They were just poor bodies that by misadventure have been cast away in a fog, and would have no other gear about them save the clothes on their backs." But Alister McAlister was of another mind. "Work like this is enough to make an unbeliever out of a God-fearing man," he affirmed to his intimates, "to see what Providence will permit--a good fishing-boat with a mast and sail in the charge of two landward men that did not even know where to let her go to pieces, so that Christians and men of sense might get some good of her. For the fools let her sink plumb down in the Suck of Suliscanna, instead of driving her straight inshore against the hill of Aoinaig, whence she would have come safe as weed-drift to our very feet." And there were more of Alister's opinion than of the minister's, whose spiritual consolation was discounted, at any rate, by the fact that he was officially compelled to speak well of Providence. But before long there was another sound on the Isle of Suliscanna. Away on the edge of the bay, under the cliffs, a group of men was to be seen grappling some object which repeatedly slipped from their poles between two long shore-skirting reefs. It lay black and limp in the water, and again and again, breaking from their hands, it returned to the push of the tide in the narrow gut with a splash of flaccid weight. "Lord, what's yon they hae gotten?" cried Mistress McAlister, as soon as she had seen the figures of the men collecting about the thing, like carrion-crows gathering about a dead sheep on the hill. "Thank God, my Alister loon is away south'ard on the heuchs of Lianacraig!"