"Who will he be?"
"Who, indeed? But I shall know him. I go abroad again when I can. Some day perhaps I shall come across him. They say he had a horror of the 'The Pedlars' Reel'—it was the tune my father died with in his throat, and it is the tune, Sheen, that I play whenever I meet such a man as he may be."
The old woman touched his arm.
"There is doom coming up the shore," she said, "I can feel it on the wind."
"The boat," said Muckle John, "who was coming so fast in the boat?"
"I do not know, but there is death in the air."
Muckle John caught her arm.
"Here," said he, "take this—it is a trifle but it will buy you another cottage, Sheen. Good-bye—it is long till we shall meet again."
He stepped past her and crept towards the beach. On the shore the boat was beached, and several men were scrambling up the sand. One, a tall thin man with a heavy cloak about him and a stick in his hand, was supported by two sailors.
Muckle John crept closer. Some Mackenzies were running to meet the newcomer full of what had happened.