“Do not be a fool!” said the young man in the loch, half laughing, half annoyed; and, wading to the bank, he pulled himself up by the exposed root of a birch-tree, and threw himself unconcernedly down among the heather and bogmyrtle. Now it could be seen that he was some inches over six feet and splendidly made; a swift runner, too, it was likely, for all his height and breadth of shoulder. His thick auburn hair, darkened by the water to brown, was plaited for the nonce into a short pigtail like a soldier’s; his deepset blue eyes looked out of a tanned face, but where the sunburn ended his skin was as fair as a girl’s. He had a smiling and determined mouth.
“Now tell me truly why you are lurking here like a grouse on Beinn Tigh,” he repeated.
The half-detected culprit glanced from the naked young man at his feet to the only partially concealed fowling-piece. “You will not be pleased, I am thinking.”
“All the more reason for knowing, then,” responded his chieftain promptly, hugging his bent knees. “I shall stay here until you tell me . . . dhé, how these vegetables prick! No, I do not want your plaid; I want the truth.”
“I am here,” began Lachlan MacMartin with great unwillingness, “because there is something in the loch which may bring you ill-fortune, and——”
“In the loch! What, an each uisge, a water-horse?” He was smiling.
“No, not a water-horse. But my father says——”
“Ah, it is a matter of the two sights? Angus has been ‘seeing’ again! What was the vision?”
But at that moment the speaker himself saw something, though not by the supernatural gift to which he was referring. He stretched out a wet, accusing arm and pointed towards the juniper bush. “What is that gun doing here?” And at the very plain discomposure on its owner’s face a look of amusement came into his own. “You cannot shoot a water-horse, Lachlan—not with a charge of small shot!”
“It is not a water-horse,” repeated his foster-brother. He suddenly crouched down in the heather close to the swimmer. “Listen, Mac ’ic Ailein,” he said in a low, tense voice. “My father is much troubled, for he had a ‘seeing’ last night across the fire, and it concerned you, but whether for good or ill he could not tell; neither would he tell me what it was, save that it had to do with a heron.”