"Colin Laing! Is it Colin Laing!" exclaimed Hamish, indignantly. "I will know how to sail this yacht, and I will know the banks, and the tides, and the rocks better than any fifteen thousands of Colin Laings!"
"And what if the Dunara is coming south? If she cannot see us, we can see her."
But whether it was that Colin Laing had, before leaving the yacht, managed to convey to Hamish some notion of the risk he was running, or whether it was that he was merely anxious for his master's safety, it was clear that Hamish was far from satisfied. He opened and shut his big clasp-knife in an awkward silence. Then he said,—
"You will not go to Castle Dare, Sir Keith?"
Macleod started; he had forgotten that Hamish was there.
"No. I have told you where I am going."
"But there is not any good anchorage at that island sir!" he protested. "Have I not been round every bay of it; and you too, Sir Keith? and you know there is not an inch of sand or of mud, but only the small loose stones. And then the shepherd they left there all by himself; it was mad he became at last, and took his own life too."
"Well, do you expect to see his ghost?" Macleod said. "Come, Hamish, you have lost your nerve in the South. Surely you are not afraid of being anywhere in the old yacht so long as she has good sea-room around her?"
"And if you are not wishing to go up the Sound of Iona in the daylight, Sir Keith," Hamish said, still clinging to the point, "we could bear a little to the south, and go round the outside of Iona."
"The Dubh-Artach men would recognize the Umpire at once," Macleod said, abruptly; and then he suggested to Hamish that he should get a little more way on the yacht, so that she might be a trifle steadier when Christina carried the dinner into the English lady's cabin. But indeed there was now little breeze of any kind. Hamish's fears of a dead calm was likely to prove true.