I gave him good-day, and he started round suddenly all alert, like a man well used to handling himself.
"Ay," said he, "there will be mackerel there," and he pointed to the sea, all a-louping with the fish, and then he unravelled his knots, and smoothed the strands with hands brown as a bark sail, and hard-looking as an oak.
"You will be following the sea?"
"Just that," said he, "this long while—seven years maybe. I was at the herdin' before that with my father—it is a homely thing to be hearing the crying o' the sheep in the hills. Many's the time I would be thinking on that when the fog would be round us, and naething to be listening for but the creaking o' a block in the rigging. Maist sailor-men have the notion o' a farm," says he, "when they will be at sea. I am thinking it will come to that wi' me too, when my father is old and my mother."
"Where is your place?" said I. "Are you from these parts?" for there was a look about him I kent, and yet could not be naming it.
"Ronald McKinnon is my father," said he.
"And you went to sea years ago," I cried at him, "just before the fair on the green. You are Angus McKinnon, and Ronald, your father, will be the proud man."
"Yea, I was thinking you would be kennin' me soon," said he, laughing; "and my father was telling me you would be walking here on a Sunday. It will be very sedate in our house this day, and McGilp, that was master of the Gull, waling the Bible for stories of sailing craft; and my father reading about Jacob, and yon droll tricks he would be doing with the cattle o' his mother's brother—yon was sailin' near the win'.
"I was seein' beasts like yon, speckled and spotted and runnin' wild" (he would be thinking of Laban's herd), "in an island in the Indies," said Ronald's son after a while.
"A herd?"