Poor lassie! Little she knew the long, weary travel she had before her ere it could come to that.
But even as she watched she became conscious of a quick stir and movement among the usually so indolent islanders behind her. Hardly she dared to lift her eyes from the approaching boat, which came on with a little square sail rigged on a temporary mast as long as the wind held, and then with flashing dips of rhythmic oars whenever the breeze dropped away.
The voices of the men of Suliscanna crying harshly to each other among the craig-heads and cliff-edges high above her sounded to Kate's ears like a louder brawling of the sea-fowl. The sound had an edge on it, shrill, keen, and bitter as the east wind in mid-January. Yet there was something in it, too, of new. The girl had heard the like of it before, at the kennels of Cumlodan, when the bloodhounds for the Whig-tracking were waiting to be fed, and springing up with their feet on the bars.
"Eh, sirs me! Guid help the poor souls that are in that boat; they will either gang doon bodily to feed the fish, or else be casten up in gobbets the size o' my neive upon the shore!" cried the voice of Mrs. McAlister at Kate's elbow.
"They can never weather it, and if they do they are naught advantaged, after all. For the men of the isle are that worked upon with the fear of my lord, and his threat to clean them off the isle of Suliscanna, like a count off a bairn's slate, if they let the lass escape, that they declare they will slay the poor lads so soon as ever they set foot on the land, if, indeed, they ever win as far."
In her agitated preoccupation the tall woman from Ayrshire had let her hair fall in a bushy mass over her back, as it was her habit to do in the evenings after supper when preparing for bed. She kept working at it nervously while she watched, twisting up its comely masses in order to fix them in their places with bone pins; and, anon, as the boat tacked shorter and shorter to avoid this hidden peril and that, pulling them out and letting it fall again in wavy coils, so overpowering had become her agitation.
Suddenly startled by a peculiar wavering cry from the hill, she took Kate's hand and ran with her along the path which led to the rocks of Lianacraig.
"Ye will never be for thinking," Bess Landsborough said to the girl as they ran, "that this is him that likes ye—the lad ye left in the Tolbooth irons in Holland, gotten free and come after ye?"
But Kate only clasped her friend's hand tighter and answered nothing.
"Poor lass! poor lass!" she said. "Ye believe that your lad would do as muckle for you after a' that has come and gane between ye. But lads are not what they were in my young days! Pray God that ye may be mistaken, for gin this be your lad come seeking ye, I fear he is as good as dead either from the sharp rocks of Suliscanna or from the sharper knives of the wild McAlisters."