The Power-House

By JOHN BUCHAN
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.
MY DEAR GENERAL:
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities. I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER

PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.