ARE BEING STALKED!”
THAT FAR AWAY skirl of bagpipes had come to an end.
With little in their knapsacks but their empty lemonade bottles and all solid rations except chocolate stowed inside them for easy carrying, the three explorers looked out from the top of the old Pict-house and searched the skyline of the ridge before them. The gap in its rocky outline, and glimpses of a cart track winding up to it through the heather, told them where the house was that had been seen from far away when the Sea Bear had been sailing towards the coast the day before.
“I’d like to see what sort of a house it is,” said Dorothea. “I’m sure it ought to be a castle.”
“I bet it’s where that biscuit box comes from,” said Roger.
“We ought to know the worst,” said Titty. “And if we go carefully up to that gap, we ought to be able to see without being seen.”
Watching the skyline, they dropped down from the hill-top and then began to climb again.
“It doesn’t look much used,” said Roger when they came to the cart track.
“We could pretend it isn’t there,” said Titty.
“But why?” said Dorothea. “At dead of night, with the hoofs of their horses muffled to make no noise, the smugglers come this way over the hills. A light blinks out at sea. Boats land and are gone again before the morning and when the sun comes up the smugglers are far away and everything is like it is now.”
“Anyway,” said Roger, “it’s a lot easier walking on it. Come on.”
“We oughtn’t to turn back without knowing what’s there,” said Titty, as much to herself as to the others.
They knew almost at once. As soon as they were in the gap, with heather slopes to right and left, they could see down into the country on the further side of the ridge.
“Native settlement,” said Titty at once.
“I told you it must be a castle,” said Dorothea.
“Don’t let them see you,” said Roger.
They were looking at a group of low thatched buildings, cottages, barns and sheds. Just beyond these was the “conspicuous house” of the chart and, though it was hardly big enough to be a castle, Roger and Titty were not inclined to quarrel with Dorothea about it. It was built into the steep side of the hill and looked down on a bay of the sea. In front of it was a stone terrace, level with the ground at one side but with a ten or twelve foot drop below it to the rocky face of the hill. It was a two-storey house, but was turned into something as good as any castle by a turret with a battlemented top that rose high above its steeply sloping roofs.
“Get down,” said Roger, and dropped to the ground.
But Titty and Dorothea were still standing, looking through the gap at a world very different from the desolate valley they had left. It was different because it was inhabited. Far away on the slopes of the hills that fell away towards the sea there were more of the queer low cottages, like those only a hundred yards or so in front of them, with their rough thatched roofs, the thatching held down by ropes weighted with big stones. Here and there on the dark slopes were little groups of men and women cutting peat.
“Let me have your telescope,” said Dorothea. “There’s a watcher on the tower.”
“Sister Anne,” said Titty. “It’s just the place for a Bluebeard.”
“It’s a girl,” said Roger, lying at their feet, elbows on the ground and telescope to his eye. “Flop, or she’ll see you. She’s looking straight at us.”
They flopped, but not quite quick enough. They heard the sudden, threatening barking of a dog somewhere among the cottages.
“Now you’ve done it,” said Roger, working hurriedly backwards along the ground. “Even if that girl didn’t see us, that beastly dog’ll stir everybody up. They’ll come pouring out to see what it’s barking at and our valley won’t be uninhabited any more. It’ll be a mass of people asking questions, and we’ll have to go back to the ship.”
“It wasn’t a girl,” said Dorothea, as soon as she had wriggled back far enough to be able to lift her head without being seen from the top of the tower. “It was a boy in a kilt. The young chief of his clan looking far and wide from the battlements.”
“Not far and wide,” said Roger. “He was looking straight at us.”
“But what a place for a story,” said Dorothea. “Smugglers or Jacobites … or just villains with a prisoner in the tower. They might easily have a dungeon cut in the solid rock.”
“Natives anyway,” said Titty. “We must get away from here as quick as we can.”
“That dog’s stopped barking,” said Roger.
As quickly as they could they were retreating out of the gap and down the cart track by which they had come. Already they could see down the steep slopes past the hill with the Pict-house to the creek, where the mast of the Sea Bear showed where all the older members of the crew were at work.
“Let’s go back to my Pict-house,” said Roger. “And then, if we see natives pouring out of the gap, we can just slip down the hill, and get away.”
“But we’re going to explore up the valley,” said Titty.
“We’ll never find anything as good as the Pict-house,” said Roger.
“Stop a minute and listen,” said Dorothea.
There were no sounds of pursuit.
“Well, if you won’t come back to my Pict-house,” said Roger, “what about creeping up to the gap again to have another look? I don’t believe that was a boy on the tower. It looked much more like a girl.”
For a moment the others hesitated. Perhaps, if they had not known that they would be sailing next day, they would have waited and then crept up again to have another look at the native settlement beyond the ridge. But they knew that they had to be back at the ship before evening and that they would never see the place again.
“Oh look here,” said Titty. “We can’t just give up exploring. We shan’t have another chance, not here anyway.”
“And there’s Dick,” said Dorothea. “We said we’d pick him up on the way home.”
So, though Roger looked regretfully up at the gap and back at that green mound on the top of the little hill, they presently turned west along the cart track leading towards the head of the valley. To the left, below them, they could see the two lochs, but no sign of Dick.
“He’s made himself as invisible as he could,” said Dorothea. “He always does when he’s looking at birds.”
Far ahead of them blue hills rose like a jagged wall, and above them to the right was the skyline of the Northern Rockies. Not one other human being was in sight.
They
