“When one goes up from the Leacann hunting road into the farm-lands he comes in a while on a space among the trees, clean shorn like the shearing of a hook but for white hay that lies there thick and rustling in the spring of the year. ‘Black Duncan,’ said I, ‘be pulling thyself together, gristle and bone, for here’s the fright that stirs about the dark with fingers and claws.’ I was the first man (said my notion) who ever set foot on the braes of Argyll, newly from Erin and Argyll thick with ghosts; daytime or dark the woods were full of things that hate the stranger. Under my feet the rotting dust of the fir-trees felt soft and clogging, like the banks of new-delved graves. My back shivered again to the feel of the space behind me; in my bonnet stirred my hair. I went into the glade with a dry tongue rasping on the roof of my mouth.
“When the Terror came up against me, I could have laughed in my sudden ease of mind, for here at last was something to be sure of, in a way. And I gripped back as it gripped fast at me, feeling it hairy at the neck and the crook of the arms—a breathing and lusty body.
“‘What have I here?’ I asked, but never an answer. At my throat went ten clawed fingers, and there was Duncan at dismal battle, fighting for life with what he could not see, in his own home woods, but they so strange and never a friend to help!
“For a time I had no chance with the knife; but at last ‘Steel, my darling!’ said I, and I struck low in the soft spaces. ‘Gloop,’ said the knife, and Death was twisting at my feet.
“Did Duncan put hurry on his heels and fly? The hurry was not in me but the deep heart’s wonder. My first dead thing that in life had ever struck back held me till the morning with a girl’s enchantment I went down on a knee in the grass and felt him, a soft lump, freezing slowly from the heel to the knee, from the knee to the neck. Some rags of costume were on him, a kilt of coarse plaiding and a half-shirt of skin, soaked in sweat at the armpits and wet with blood at the end.
“I waited till the morning to see what I had. ‘This,’ said I, hunched on a mound, ‘is all as it was before.’ The first sound I heard was the squeal of a beast caught at the throat among the bracken, then a hind snored among the grass. The morning walked solemn among the trees, stopping at every step to listen; birds put their claws down and shook themselves free of sleep and dew; a polecat slinking past me started at my eye and went back to his hole. Began the fir-trees waving in the wind, and then the day was open wide and far.
“In the dark I had strained my eyes to see what was at my feet till my eyeballs creaked in their hollows, yet now I had no desire to turn about from the cheerful dawn and look behind, but I did it with my heart thudding.
“Nothing was there to see, lappered blood, nor mark of body on grass!
“My knife, without a stain on the steel of it, was still in my hand. I wiped it with a tuft of bracken, and I laughed with something of a bitterness.
“‘So!’ said I, ‘the old story, the old story! It happened me before, and in a hundred years from now Black Duncan will be at the killing again.’”