SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan John

“The best we can hope for is to fail without being detected. I think there would be a far-away sporting chance if Macnicol could be tied up. That’s what sticks in my gizzard. I don’t see how it’s possible to get a shot in the Sanctuary without Macnicol spotting it.”

      Wattie Lithgow had returned, and caught the last words. He was grinning broadly.

      “I’m no positeeve but that Macnicol wull be tied up,” he observed. “Benjie’s here, and he’s brocht something wi’ him.”

      He paused for effect.

      “It’s a dog—a wee yelpin’ dog.”

      “Whose dog?”

      “Leddy Claybody’s. It seems that at Haripol her leddyship wears the breeks—that the grey mear is the better horse there—and it seems that she’s fair besottit on that dog. Benjie was sayin’ that if it were lost Macnicol and a’body about the place wad be set lookin’ for’t, and naething wad be thought of at Haripol till it was fund.”

      Archie rose in consternation.

      “D’you mean to say—How on earth did the beast come here?”

      “It cam here wi’ Benjie. It’s fine and comfortable in a box in the stable…I’m no just clear about what happened afore that, but I think Miss Janet Raden and Benjie gae’d ower to Haripol this afternoon and fund the puir wee beast lost in the wuds.”

      Archie did not join in the laughter. His mind held no other emotion than a vast and delighted amazement. The lady who two days before had striven to lift his life to a higher plane, who had been the sole inspiration of his successful speech of yesterday, was now discovered conspiring with Fish Benjie, to steal a pup.

      XI.

       HARIPOL—THE MAIN ATTACK

       Table of Contents

      Some men begin the day with loose sinews and a sluggish mind, and only acquire impetus as the hours proceed; others show a declining scale from the vigour of the dawn to the laxity of evening. It was fortunate for Lamancha that he belonged to the latter school. At daybreak he was obstinate, energetic, and frequently ill-tempered, as sundry colleagues in France and Palestine had learned to their cost; and it needed an obstinate man to leave Crask between the hours of five and six in the morning on an enterprise so wild and in weather so lamentable. For the rain came down in sheets, and a wind from the north-east put ice into it. He stopped for a moment on the summit of the Crask ridge, to contemplate a wall of driving mist where should have been a vista of the Haripol peaks. “This wund will draw beasts intil the Sanctuary without any help from Macnicol,” said Wattie morosely. “It’s ower fierce to last. I wager it will be clear long afore night.”

      “It’s the weather we want,” said Lamancha, cowering from the violence of the blast.

      “For the Sanctuary—maybe. Up till then I’m no sae sure. It’s that thick we micht maybe walk intil a navvy’s airms.”

      The gods of the sky were in a capricious mood. All down the Crask hill-side to the edge of the Doran the wet table-cloth of the fog clung to every ridge and hollow. The stream was in roaring spate, and Lamancha and Wattie, already soaked to the skin, forded it knee-high. They had by this time crossed the moor-road from Crask to Haripol, and marked the nook where in the lee of rocks and birches Archie was to be waiting with the Ford car. Beyond lay the long lift of land to the Haripol peaks. It was rough with boulders and heather, and broken with small gullies, and on its tangled face a man might readily lose himself. Wattie disliked the mist solely because it prevented him from locating the watchers, since his experience of life made him disinclined to leave anything to chance; but he had no trouble in finding his way in it. The consequence was that he took Lamancha over the glacis at the pace of a Gurkha, and in half an hour from the Doran’s edge had him panting among the screes just under the Beallach which led to the Sanctuary. Somewhere behind them were the vain navvy pickets, happily evaded in the fog.

      Then suddenly the weather changed. The wind shifted a point to the east, the mist furled up, the rain ceased, and a world was revealed from which all colour had been washed, a world as bleak and raw as at its first creation. The grey screes sweated grey water, the sodden herbage was bleached like winter, the crags towering above them might have been of coal. A small fine rain still fell, but the visibility was now good enough to show them the ground behind them in the style of a muddy etching.

      The consequence of this revelation was that Wattie shuffled into cover. He studied the hill-side behind him long and patiently with his glass. Then he grunted: “There’s four navvies, as I mak out, but no verra well posted. We cam gey near ane o’ them on the road up. Na, they canna see us here, and besides they’re no lookin’ this airt.” Lamancha tried to find them with his telescope, but could see nothing human in the wide sopping wilderness.

      Wattie grumbled as he led the way up a kind of nullah, usually as dry as Arabia but now spouting a thousand rivulets, right into the throat of the Beallach. “It’s clearin’ just when we wanted it thick. The ways o’ Providence is mysteerious…Na, na, there’s nae road there. That’s a fox’s track, and it’s the deer’s road we maun gang. Stags will no climb rocks, sensible beasts…The wind’s gone, but I wish the mist wad come down again.”

      At the top of the pass was a pad of flat ground, covered thick with the leaves of cloudberries. On the right rose the Pinnacle Ridge of Sgurr Dearg, in its beginning an easy scramble which gave no hint of the awesome towers which later awaited the traveller; on the left Sgurr Mor ran up in a steep face of screes. “Keep doun,” Wattie enjoined, and crawled forward to where two boulders made a kind of window for a view to the north.

      The two looked down into three little corries which, like the fingers of a hand, united in the palm of a larger corrie, which was the upper glen of the Reascuill. It was a sanctuary perfectly fashioned by nature, for the big corrie was cut off from the lower glen by a line of boiler-plates like the wall of a great dam, down which the stream plunged in cascades. The whole place was loud with water—the distant roar of the main river, the ceaseless dripping of the cliffs, the chatter and babble of a myriad hidden rivulets. But the noise seemed only to deepen the secrecy. It was a world in monochrome, every detail clear as a wet pebble, but nowhere brightness or colour. Even the coats of the deer had taken on the dead grey of the slaty crags.

      Never in his life had Lamancha seen so many beasts together. Each corrie was full of them, feeding on the rough pastures or among the boulders, drifting aimlessly across the spouts of screes below the high cliffs, sheltering in the rushy gullies. There were groups of hinds and calves, and knots of stags, and lone beasts on knolls or in mud-baths, and, since all were restless, the numbers in each corrie were constantly changing.

      “Ye gods, what a sight!” Lamancha murmured, his head at Wattie’s elbow. “We won’t fail for lack of beasts.”

      “The trouble is,” said Wattie, “that there’s ower mony.” Then he added obscurely that “it might be the day o’ Pentecost.”

      Lamancha was busy with his glass. Just below him, not three hundred yards off, where the ravine which ran from the Beallach opened out into the nearest corrie, there was a group of deer—three hinds, a little stag, and farther on a second stag of which only the head could be seen.

      “Wattie,” he whispered excitedly, “there’s a beast down there—a shootable beast. It’s just what we’re looking for…close to the Beallach.”

      “Aye, I see it,” was the answer. “And I see something mair. There’s a man ayont the big corrie—d’ye see yon rock shapit like a puddock-stool?… Na, the south side o’ the waterfall…Well, follow on frae there towards Bheinn Fhada—have ye got him?”

      “Is that a man?” asked the surprised Lamancha.

      “Where’s your een, my lord? It’s a man wi’ grey breeks and a brown jaicket—an’ he’s smokin’ a