“So she said. And you were dead-white, she said: with the sweat pouring down you. An’ you pulled an’ you pulled. Then you looked up at her and said: ‘It’s a heavy net that comes up black, as the sayin’ is.’”
Isla Macleod made no answer to that, but slowly began to haul at the nets. A swift moving light slid hither and thither well away to the north-east. The sea greyed. A new, poignant, salt smell came up from the waves. Sail after sail of the smacks ceased to be a blur in the dark: each lifted a brown shadowy wing against a dusk through which a flood of myriad drops of light steadily oozed.
Now from this boat, now from that, hoarse cries resounded.
The Mairi Ban swung slowly round before the faint dawn-wind, and lifted her bow homeward with a little slapping splash. The Maggie, the Trilleachan, the Eilid, the Jessie, and the Mairi Donn followed one by one.
In silence the two men on the Luath hauled in their nets. The herring made a sheet of shifting silver as they lay in the hold. As the dawn lightened, the quivering silver mass sparkled. The decks were mailed with glittering scales: these, too, gleamed upon the legs, arms, and hands of the two fishermen.
“Well, that’s done!” exclaimed Sheumas at last. “Up with the helm, Isla, and let us make for home.”
The Luath forged ahead rapidly when once the sail had its bellyful of wind. She passed the Tern, then the Jessie Macalpine, caught up the big, lumbering Maggie, and went rippling and rushing along the wake of the Eilid, the lightest of the Inchghunnais boats.
Off shore, the steamer Osprey met the smacks, and took the herring away, cran by cran. Long before her screw made a yeast of foam athwart the black-green inshore water, the Luath was in the little haven and had her nose in the shingle at Craigard point.
In silence Sheumas and Isla walked by the rock-path to the isolated cottage where the Macleans lived. The swallows were flitting hither and thither in front of its low, whitewashed wall, like flying shuttles against a silent loom. The pale gold of a rainy dawn lit the whiteness with a vivid gleam. Suddenly Isla stopped.