"You bet. I've a date to keep with a suspicious character—on a trawler. Can you beat it? These vermin creep in everywhere. Yes, by Godfrey! They crawl aboard ship in sight of Strathlone Head! Here's hoping it may be a yard-arm jig he'll dance!"
He emptied his glass, refused more. McKay took him to the wicket and let him loose.
"Well, over the top, old scout!" said Sixty-seven cheerily, exchanging a quick handclasp with McKay. And so the fog took him.
A week later they found his dead horse and wrecked dog-cart five miles this side of Glenark Burn, lying in a gully entirely concealed by whinn and broom. It was the noise the flies made that attracted attention. As for the man himself, he floated casually into the Firth one sunny day with five bullets in him and his throat cut very horridly.
But, before that, other things happened on Isla Water—long before anybody missed No. 67. Besides, the horse and dog-cart had been hired for a week; and nobody was anxious except the captain of the trawler, held under mysterious orders to await the coming of a man who never came.
So McKay went back through the fog to his quaint, whitewashed inheritance—this legacy from a Scotch grandfather to a Yankee grandson—and when he came into the dark waist of the house he called up very gently: "Are you awake, Miss Yellow-hair?"
"Yes. Is all well?"
"All's well," he said, mounting the stairs.
"Then—good night to you Kay of Isla!" she said.
"Don't you want to hear—"