“I’m thinking the mackerel will be coming this way to-night. This is the third time I’ve heard the snoring of the pollack … away yonder, beyond Peter Macallum’s boat.”
“Well, Sheumas, I’ll sleep a bit. I had only the outside of a sleep last night.”
With that Isla knocked the ash out of his pipe, and lay over against a pile of rope, and shut his eyes, and did not sleep at all because of the sick dull pain of the homeless man he was—home, home, home, and Silis the name of it.
When, an hour or more later, he grew stiff he moved, and opened his eyes. His mate was sitting at the helm, but the light in his pipe was out, though he held the pipe in his mouth, and his eyes were wide staring open.
“I would not be telling me that story, Isla,” he said.
Isla answered nothing, but shifted back to where he was before, for all his cramped leg. He closed his eyes again.
At the full of the tide, in the deep dark hour before the false dawn, as the first glimmer is called, the glimmer that comes and goes, both men got up, and moved about, stamping their feet. Each lit his pipe, and the smoke hung long in little greyish puffs, so dead-still was it.
On the Brudhearg, John Macalpine’s boat, young Neil Macalpine sang. The two men on the Luath could hear his singing. It was one of the strange songs of Ian Mòr.
O, she will have the deep dark heart, for all her face is fair,