This is used to take up beads of oil and apply them to the locks, lever, and ejector mechanisms of a gun. Lothian slipped the thing into a side pocket of his coat. In a few minutes, dressed in warm wildfowling clothes of grey wool and carrying his gun, he was tramping out of the long village street with Tumpany. The wind sang like flying arrows, the dark road was hard beneath their feet. They came to Tumpany's cottage and little shop, which were on the outskirts of the village. Then Lothian stopped. "Look here," he said, "you can give me the bag now. There really isn't any need for you to come to the marsh head with me, Tumpany.--Much better get to bed and be fresh for to-morrow." The man was nothing loth. The lit window of his house invited him. "Thank you, sir," he said, sobered now by the keen night wind, "then I'll say good-night." --"Night Tumpany." "G'night, sir." Lothian tramped away into the dark. The sailor stood for a moment with his hand upon the latch of his house door, listening to the receding footsteps. "What's wrong with him?" he asked himself. "He speaks different like. Yesterday morning old Trust seemed positive afraid of him! Never saw such a thing before! And to-night he seems like a stranger somehow. I felt queer, in a manner of speaking, as I walked alongside of him. But what a bloody fool I am!" Tumpany concluded, using the richest adjective he knew, as his master's footsteps died away and were lost. In less than ten minutes Lothian stood upon the edge of the vast marshes. It was a ghostly place and hour. The wind wailed over the desolate miles like a soul sick for the love it had failed to win in life. The wide creeks with their cliff-like sides of black mud were brimming with sullen tidal water, touched here and there by faint moonbeams--lemon colour on lead. Night birds passed high over head with a whistle of wings, heard, but not seen in the gloom. From distant Wordingham to far Blackney beyond which were the cliffs of Sherringham and Cromer, for twelve miles or more, perhaps not a dozen human beings were out upon the marshes. A few bold wildfowlers in their frail punts with the long tapering guns in the bows, might be "setting to birds"; enduring the bitter cold, risking grave danger, and pursuing the wildest and most wary of living things with supreme endurance throughout the night. Once the wind brought two deep booms to Lothian. His trained ear knew and located the sound at once. One of the Wordingham fowlers was out upon the flats three miles away, and had fired his double eight-bore, the largest shoulder gun that even a strong man can use. But the saltings were given over to the night and the things of the night. The plovers called, "'Tis dark and late." "'Tis late and dark."