‘Well,’ she said, ‘once upon a time there was a harper in Mull and he was a very famous harper. Yet though he was famous, he was simple in his manners and affectionate. He fell in love with the flower of the island. Her name was Rosie. And he married her. So to celebrate this great event, they set out for the low country to call on their friends—the three of them: himself, Rosie, and the famous harp, which wherever he went always went with him. Now as they came into a desolate part of the country, the sun sinking and the shadows gathering about them, Rosie got a cold fainting turn, and would have fallen to the ground, had he not caught her and held her. He wrapped her in his plaid and chafed her hands and tried to warm her back to life every way he could, but her hands remained cold and her face white and cold, and he didn’t know what more to do. He felt she would die unless he could make up a fire, but though he searched for sticks or anything at all that would burn, not a scrap could he find anywhere. And then his eye fell on his harp. Now as he valued his harp only a little more than his own life, he quickly broke it into pieces and made a grand fire of it, and in the warmth Rosie recovered.

‘In the morning, they set off again. But as they were going down a hillside, they met a hunter riding on a horse, and this hunter greeted Rosie as he would an old and familiar friend. Now the harper, as I have said, had delicate manners, and as Rosie had not thought of introducing him, he walked slowly ahead. But presently, as there were no sounds of Rosie coming, he turned and looked back—and there was Rosie being mounted behind the hunter on his steed, which quickly carried them over the hill and out of sight. So he turned homeward, saying bitterly to himself: “Fool that I was to burn my harp for her.” ’

‘That’s a good story,’ said the Mate. ‘And is the Harper’s Pass really away in there?’

‘Yes, it is. And now you tell a story.’

He thought for a moment and then he said, tilting his head towards me, ‘We must go round with the sun.’

‘If you look’, I said at once, ‘at the chart, you will find on that face of cliff to the east of the entrance to Loch Buy a spot marked “Lord Lovat’s Cave”.’

‘Why, that’s so,’ said the Mate; then he stared at the cliff. ‘And I can see the cave.’

‘No sailor, man or woman, should be astonished at his chatt. . . .’

‘He’s just gaining time to make up the story now,’ said the Crew, interrupting.

‘It was Simon Lord Lovat who hid in that cave after the ’45 . He was called the Fox. Now you would think when you remember all the lands we have passed, the desolate mountains, the glens, the great sea inlets, the endless moors, sky horizon after sky horizon, and still more mountains and corries and passes, with gaunt hiding holes everywhere, not to speak of little croft houses in forgotten places and wooded streams, and hillside forests, and granite rocks, you would think that no Hunter from the outside world would ever catch that Fox in such a land. Yet the Hunter caught him. He hunted him out of that cave, as out of many another cunning or desolate place, and you have only to look at it to see how persistent, how ruthless, he must have been.