"Rob," he said, "make due south, keeping the sea-line and halt two miles away on the shore. I have business here," and turning back he disappeared in the darkness. Near the wrecked cottage he found the old woman weeping silently. "Sheen, poor woman," he said, "it is not my father's son would ruin you who know my secret." "You are still nameless?" "Still nameless, Sheen, until I meet the man who killed my father." "Who will he be?" "Who, indeed? But I shall know him. I go abroad again when I can. Some day perhaps I shall come across him. They say he had a horror of the 'The Pedlars' Reel'--it was the tune my father died with in his throat, and it is the tune, Sheen, that I play whenever I meet such a man as he may be." The old woman touched his arm. "There is doom coming up the shore," she said, "I can feel it on the wind." "The boat," said Muckle John, "who was coming so fast in the boat?" "I do not know, but there is death in the air." Muckle John caught her arm. "Here," said he, "take this--it is a trifle but it will buy you another cottage, Sheen. Good-bye--it is long till we shall meet again." He stepped past her and crept towards the beach. On the shore the boat was beached, and several men were scrambling up the sand. One, a tall thin man with a heavy cloak about him and a stick in his hand, was supported by two sailors. Muckle John crept closer. Some Mackenzies were running to meet the newcomer full of what had happened. He listened to the tale they told the tall man, who seemed so faint with illness or the sea that he had to sit down to hear them. "Who was this man that Mackenzie sent for us to take?" asked one, the captain of a frigate evidently. "Muckle John!" cried a voice. At that new life seemed to stream into the crouching, broken figure on the sand. "Muckle John!" he cried. _It was the voice of Captain Strange_! All that night Muckle John and Rob sped towards the south, and at the dawn they reached the country of the Macraes, where they parted with Mackenzie, and headed for the shores of Loch Hourn. There on a desolate, rain-lashed moor, with salt upon the wind, and the sea birds crying over their heads, Muckle John called a halt. It was near the end of May, but a bitter day even for Loch Hourn. "Where do we go now?" asked Rob, shivering with cold.