They had attained a height of some fifty feet and were stopping to rest. Roy had been left below, his master having entrusted him with something to keep watch over. Two email craft were tacking to and fro on the dull, leaden waters, at some distance off, and a grey-backed gull or two floated stationary against the wind, which, increasing in threatening puffs as they rounded a projecting angle of the rock, tended not to render their perilous foothold any the more secure.
The sky was again growing overcast, and the melancholy and hollow moaning of the waves beneath, swishing and swirling round many a submerged reef, produced a most dismal and depressing effect. Olive, with the dour legend running in her mind, now longed to get away from the place. Her companion seemed in no such hurry.
“This is about as far as we shall manage to go,” he remarked, scrutinising the rock overhead. The ledge on which they stood was barely a yard in width. Olive, peering over, noted that at that point the drop was sheer, and looking down upon the pointed reefs with the milky foam seething through and over them—shuddered.
“Take care!” he warned, holding her hand to steady her. “Better come down now, before you begin to feel nervous.” He had felt her hand tremble.
“Perhaps we had. Hark! What is that?” she broke off in an awed whisper.
Even her companion could hardly repress a start of astonishment. Apparently from within the rock itself came the deep-mouthed voice of a dog. Olive turned as white as a sheet. The terrible spectre of The Skegs was her only thought.
To her surprise the other burst out laughing.
“Not the ancestor this time,” he said. “It’s only good old Roy. He’s getting tired of his own company down there, and is remonstrating. Possibly, too, he has an eye on some stray crustacean which invites assault, but that he will not desert his post.”
Olive was immensely relieved. The colour came back into her pale cheeks and she tried to laugh, succeeding a little hysterically, it must be owned. She had been a good deal scared, and, all things considered, there was some excuse for her. This lonely rock, banned by popular superstition, was dread and forbidding enough in itself. Add to this the gloomy sky and the moaning sea; the rather precarious descent yet lying before them; and remember that the spectral hound wae believed in as firmly among the seafaring population as the Deity Himself, and a great deal more feared; that disaster, more or less grave—and sometimes, according to that belief, fatal—had overtaken those upon whose ears the spectral voice had fallen; and it follows that if the girl was momentarily unnerved by a weird and mysterious howl, which, owing to some acoustic peculiarity in its formation, seemed to come from within the haunted rock itself, there was every excuse for her.
“How ridiculous of me to forget all about Roy!” she said. “But anyhow, let us go down now.”