had a good view of him.
Birdlike? The man’s body was anything but birdlike, unless one thought of a stork. Tall, with shoulders thrown back; a heavy, rather clumsy torso, protruding in front; but the legs extremely thin. The man wore a bowler and a good worsted town-suit, dark gray; he was getting into a raincoat as he passed out of Logan’s sight into India Street. He carried a long malacca stick. Even in these brief glimpses, Logan had the impression that this fellow meant to be taken for a country gentleman or a retired officer. Yet somehow the effect did not quite come off. Logan told himself not to be edgy: it wouldn’t do to suspect every hotelguest of dark designs. Perhaps the man had only been glancing at a raw spot on Logan’s cheek, where Jock Anderson’s boot had scraped.
Yet after dinner, and just before he took a cab to the police station, the receptionist with the taffy hair spoke to Logan. “Did the gentleman find you, sir?”
“What gentleman?”
“He didn’t leave his name, sir; he only asked after you – if you were staying in the hotel – and waited a moment by the counter. I thought he would have seen you when you went into dinner. A military gentleman, perhaps.”
Yes, that would have been the man with the bird’s eyes: a military, or pseudo-military, gentleman. Logan made up his mind to remember that gentleman.
Of that gentleman, and of his business in Carnglass, however, Logan said nothing to the Glasgow police, who took his deposition and promised action. Already they had been looking for Jock and his lads, but with no luck. It was odd, the constable named Donald said: to get out of town, or to find some snug hidie-hole, Jock and his gang would have required more money than they took from the gentleman. Yet somehow they had gone to earth, and so had Dowie.
Logan told the sergeant that he was touring Scotland, and would be in Oban a few days, at the Station Hotel. “Never place money with lads like Jim Dowie,” they told him.
An hour later, in bed at Todd’s Hotel, and tired though he was, Logan took up “A Summary History of Carnglass and Daldour.” Balmullo, the old minister, might have been a bigot; yet he had a keen eye and ear. There was a page of description of the New House of Fear, built down by the harbor by Donald MacAskival – one of the extravagances that had ruined him – in 1777.
“It had been the MacAskivals’ design,” Balmullo wrote, “to have demolished in toto the Old House. But the chieftain’s means did not permit of this undertaking. Accordingly, – and to the chagrin of every connoisseur of the arts who sets foot upon the mole of Askival harbour, – the rude Gothic construction has been permitted to loom intact upon its ruder eminence, denuded of its plenishing save for the gigantic carven chimney pieces. There remains also, above the principal entrance to the Old House, a tremendous escutcheon, its bearings in some part defaced, but yet displaying the graceless figure of a Wild Man, armed with a dirk, which Wild Man the vulgar name Askival, the reputed founder of the fortress; and beside the Wild Man a female figure in a state of undress, whom, with still less authority, the folk of the island call Marin or Merin. Below these sculptures, in the letters of a later period, is inscribed the legend, ‘They have said and they will saye. Let them be saying.’
“Of baseless rumor and frantic conjecture, the island of Carnglass has no stint. In contempt, I must record that the natives of this island, blind to the perfections of the New House, continue to allege that Donald MacAskival built afresh not out of an elevated taste, but rather because, in the Old House, he had dwelt in dread of the wraiths of his fathers, said to have waxed wroth with their descendant for his prudent decision to expel from Carnglass the superfluous population. A gaunt and bearded spectre, to which is given the appellation of Old Askival, is reputed to stalk the empty corridors and chambers, in particular the subterranean portions of the oldest tower. An obscure tradition asseverates that a hidden passage leads from these cellars to a recess, and thence to the outer world. Yet the Old House having been builded upon the living rock, as has been observed elsewhere in these pages, this supposition can have no more substance than the Kingdom of the Fairies.”
Here Logan turned out the light. For all his aches and pains, he never had slept sounder in his life.
On his second Scottish morning, Hugh Logan took the train for Oban. The wind had gone down somewhat, and the rain was over, though grim gray clouds still lay to the west. Through Larbert and Stirling, past the Castle high on, its rock, the train puffed up to Callender. Logan sat in a compartment where two old ladies dozed over their knitting. Half the time he looked at the hills and villages, and half the time he read in Balmullo’s “Summary History.” And so the train swept into the West Highlands.
As they approached Loch Awe, someone paused outside the glass door of Logan’s compartment. Looking up, Logan saw the man clear: the man in the bowler, the “military gentleman” with the little black birdeyes. That military gentleman was observing him; but the furtive look moved on to the two somnolent old ladies opposite. For a moment, Logan thought the man was about to pull back the door and enter. Yet the face turned away, and the military gentleman was gone from the corridor. Logan had enjoyed a thorough look at his face: the swollen long nose; the red and purple veins that bulged against the coarse skin; and those tiny, frightened, frightening black eyes, sunk into the skull. About fifty years old, Logan estimated, though seeming older. And a cashiered British officer, some intuition suggested.
Cashiered, yes. Logan made almost a hobby of collecting clippings from newspapers about curious cases of criminal law, strange points of evidence, failures to convict despite strong testimony. It was power of memory, as much as anything else, that had brought Logan success at the bar while he still was young. Now he tried to dredge up from memory that repugnant face of the military gentleman. Cashiered, cashiered. Hadn’t he read of a captain or major cashiered in India, and subsequently tried by a criminal court for some separate, though related, offense – and got off by a very clever barrister? A barrister with somewhat unsavory politics connections? The case had been nasty, remarkably nasty – and the officer’s acts nastier still. Hadn’t some London friend, years ago, sent Logan the penny-press clippings about the case, with a picture or two of the accused? What had the fellow’s name been? Something short? Gale, or Hare? No, even Logan’s trained memory could not recall the details. Yet the face of the military gentleman at the hotel and in the corridor, Logan felt, was curiously like the nasty face he half-recollected from the smudgy newspaper photograph. Had there been espionage hinted at the military hearings? The man had been a bad lot in many ways. But Logan couldn’t feel quite sure he had not fancied the resemblance.
By Ben Cruachan, through the Pass of Brander; across the river at Bridge of Awe; then Connel Ferry. The mountains loomed nobly as the train approached the coast. The military gentleman did not return. A few minutes more, and the train swung into the resort and fishing-port of Oban, on the Firth of Lorn. Now the Western Isles were in plain sight – Kerrera, at least, right opposite Oban. Logan could see its treeless bulk from the window of his hotel. Of the military gentleman, no trace. Logan looked for him in the railway station, but he must have got off hurriedly from a forward coach and have gone into the town. Not that Logan much desired to see the military gentleman again.
Chapter 3
“YOU MIGHT INQUIRE at the North Pier, Mr. Logan,” said the Reverend Andrew Crawford, “but I do not believe any fisherman will undertake to set you ashore in Carnglass. All the boats will be gone from the harbor until sunset: the storm kept them in port for three days, and they won’t wish to waste another day in carrying a passenger to Carnglass.”
The Reverend Andrew Crawford, minister of St. Ninian’s Church, was a knowledgeable man. The people at the Station Hotel had sent Logan to him, not knowing themselves how he might get to Carnglass. Mr. Crawford had set foot in most of the Outer Isles that still were inhabited. Now he and Logan stood at the door of the manse, looking down the hill to Oban town and the piers, with the dim gray Hebrides far beyond the blue sea.
“I’d pay whatever they might ask,” Logan told him.
“It’s not wholly a matter of l.s.d., Mr. Logan. The swell round Carnglass and Daldour always is heavy. I had difficulty in getting ashore