The tower stood at the summit of the first ascent of the island, close beside the cottage of Alister McAlister--of which, indeed, very characteristically and economically, it formed the gable-end. Heather bloomed close up to the door of it, and looked into the dungeon at every narrow peep-hole, so that when Scarlett set his head to one of these he found himself staring into a fairy forest of rose and green, in which the muir-fowl crouched and the grasshoppers chirred. John Scarlett found that during the time he had been conferring with the representative of the Lord of the Small Isles and his wife Bess upon the pebbles of the beach, a bed of fragrant heather tops had been made for him by the clansmen in this arched and airy sleeping-place. Alister went in with him, glanced comprehensively around, and nodded. "Now you will be comfortable and make yourself at home," the action said. And John Scarlett smiled back at his taciturn jailer. For indeed, except the stone seat which ran round the vault, and the new-laid bed of heather tops in the corner, the available accommodations of the Tower of Suliscanna consisted exclusively of an uneven area of hard-beaten earthen floor made visible by the light of half a dozen narrow port-holes, which looked in different directions out upon the moor and through the gable against the dark wall of Bess Landsborough's house. Alister locked the dungeon door by turning the huge key with a spar of driftwood thrust through the head of it like the bar of a capstan. Then he called to him a shaggy gillie and bade him watch the door on the peril of his head. Whereupon the red-headed Gael grinned obediently, pulled himself an armful of heather, and effectually double-locked the door by stretching himself across the entrance with his hand on his dirk and his sword naked by his side. CHAPTER XXIX WAT'S ISLE OF REFUGE But there were two men in the ill-fated boat when she so heedlessly rushed into the strange and dangerous outer defences of my Lord Barra's warded Isle of Suliscanna. What had become of the other? Wat Gordon of Lochinvar was not drowned--it is hardly necessary to say so much. For had his body been lying in some eddy of the swirling waters about the outer reef of the Aoinaig narrows, this narrative of his history could not have been written. And of his life with its chequered good and bad, its fine instincts, clear intents, and halting performances, there would have been left no more than a little swarded mound in the bone-yard of dead and forgotten mariners.