“’Deed, I would not like it at all,” said Duncan, seriously; and he twisted the sheet of the sail twice round his right wrist, so that his relieved left hand could convey a bit of wet tobacco to his mouth.  “The women they would chump apout, and then you do not know what will happen at all.”

“A little bit away yet, sir!” cried out the other sailor, who was looking out to windward, with his head between the gunwale and the sail.  “There is a bad rock off the point.”

“Why, it is half a mile north of our course as we are now going!” Macleod said.

“Oh yes, half a mile!” the man said to himself; “but I do not like half miles, and half miles, and half miles on a day like this!”

And so they went plunging and staggering and bounding onward, with the roar of the water all around them, and the foam at her bows, as it sprung high into the air, showing quite white against the black sky ahead.  The younger lad, Duncan, was clearly of opinion that his master was running too near the shores of Colonsay; but he would say no more, for he knew that Macleod had a better knowledge of the currents and rocks of this wild coast than any man on the mainland of Mull.  John Cameron, forward, kept his head down to the gunwale, his eyes looking far over that howling waste of sea; Duncan, his younger brother, had his gaze fixed mostly on the brown breadth of the sail, hammered at by the gusts of wind; while as for the boy at the bow, that enterprising youth had got a rope’s end, and was endeavoring to strike at the crest of each huge wave as it came ploughing along in its resistless strength.

But at one moment the boat gave a heavier lurch than usual, and the succeeding wave struck her badly.  In the great rush of water that then ran by her side, Macleod’s startled eye seemed to catch a glimpse of something red, something blazing and burning red in the waste of green, and almost the same glance showed him there was no boy at the bow!  Instantly, with just one cry to arrest the attention of the men, he had slipped over the side of the boat just as an otter slips off a rock.  The two men were bewildered but for a second.  One sprang to the halyards, and down came the great lugsail; the other got out one of the great oars, and the mighty blade of it fell into the bulk of the next wave as if he would with one sweep tear her head round.  Like two mad men the men pulled; and the wind was with them, and the tide also, but, nevertheless, when they caught sight, just for a moment, of some object behind them, that was a terrible way away.  Yet there was no time, they thought, or seemed to think, to hoist the sail again, and the small dingy attached to the boat would have been swamped in a second; and so there was nothing for it but the deadly struggle with those immense blades against the heavy resisting mass of the boat.  John Cameron looked round again; then, with an oath, he pulled his oar across the boat.

“Up with the sail, lad!” he shouted; and again he sprang to the halyards.