"Strikes me," muttered Gibbie, "that we are in a mess about Gloy."
"It's puzzling, but it will all come right," was the chief's reply, spoken in his usual cheery style, which cleared the cloud from Gibbie's brow, and sent him home believing as implicitly as before that Yaspard would find a way of making things come straight. "He always does," the brothers agreed, as they softly stole up to their room, leaving the Viking to paddle himself across the voe.
At breakfast next morning Mrs. Harrison asked in some surprise what they had done with Gloy, for she had expected her nephew would certainly be brought to her house. She was not a little disturbed on hearing of his disappearance, but the factor said, "There's nae harm come to the lad. Ye need not be frightened. It's plain enough some boat has come by, and the men have insisted on his going wi' them. For, mind ye, yon geo is a dangerous place if a high tide happened tae set in."
He would not listen to his boys' arguments against such an explanation. Neither Gloy's declaring himself still "The Prisoner," nor Pirate's honesty as policeman, could shake Harrison's belief in his own theory of the matter. "You'll see I'm right," he ended with; "but I wad like tae ken what way young master is going tae redd it up wi' the lads o' Lunda. My word! he will hae a bourne keschie o' crabs to sort wi' them, if he canno' tell what's come o' their maute." [1]
While Gibbie had been answering questions and their parents had been talking, Lowrie was fidgeting in his chair, trying to gather courage to tell the yet more startling incident which occurred during the midnight trespass on Trullyabister.
At last he managed to say, "Faither, I never could hae thought that Mr. Neeven was a—was a bairn-stealer and a wumman-stealer."
James Harrison stared at his son, as well he might, and one of the older girls cried out, "What in a' the world have ye got in your crazy head, Lowrie?"
Then Lowrie told all he knew about the mother and baby prisoned in the haunted room, and his father listened to the story with a preternatural solemnity of countenance.
Mrs. Harrison, the girls, and small children stared and were dumb, as Lowrie enlarged upon the baby wails which had stirred his soul, and the great glowing eyes that had appeared for one brief moment at the small window. It was all the most remarkable tale that had ever been told at Noostigard, and it was not spoilt by any verbal interruption.
When the story was ended Harrison asked, in a curious low voice that seemed shaken by some strange emotion, "And so ye'll be for letting out Mr. Neeven's prisoners instead o' shutting up your ain? Weel, my boys, tak care that ye dinna find yoursel's in a trap, as mony a wild fellow o' a sea-rover has found himsel' in times past. Mind ye, yon Vikings, that ye hae sae muckle sang about, did not aye come aff wi' the best o' it. Sometimes they had tae tak their turn in the prisons too."