"Then come. Let us set the fellow loose, and after that the less we see of Arkaig the better." So saying he led the way to the hollow place.
The moonlight shone smoothly down between the swaying tree-tops, but it fell upon empty greensward and bristling heather. No man lay there. Not even his ropes remained. It was as though he had been spirited away. Without a word, Cameron drew Rob swiftly back.
"Separate and run," he whispered in an agitated voice, "for we must be surrounded," and bending his body he darted amongst the trees towards the open hill-side. At that Rob overtaken by a sudden fear of the unknown, and a great dread of Ephraim Macaulay, took to his heels, and running in a direction at right angles to that in which Cameron had gone, he doubled on his tracks, and dropped down under a bank of heather.
Fortunate it was he had done so, for swift flying footsteps sounded close above his head, and two men sped past him into the wood. Then, crawling on hands and feet, he made for the head of the loch. But he had travelled a bare five hundred yards before the clear soft note like the sound of a chanter drifted towards him. And the bar that it played was the fantastic, ghostly tune of Muckle John, the same twisted melody that had so shaken the school-master in Miss Macpherson's house.
Nearer it came, and he lay flat upon the ground with a fallen tree before him. Suddenly on to the moonlit shore stepped a figure he could not mistake—the huge shoulders and chest, the massive head of Muckle John himself. And as he played he peered this way and that, as though he were in search of some one.
Rob was about to run forward, then as quickly he sank lower in the shadow. Something held him back.
Presently Muckle John laid aside the instrument, and whistled the haunting catch of tune in the moonlight.
CHAPTER VIII
FLIGHT
Fear of the night, the unknown prowlers in the heather, the escape of the schoolmaster, and above all the danger to his paper, held Rob in a breathless silence.