‘And what about the telegram we were to have had in the morning anyway?’ I gently probed.

Whereupon, digging his oars in, he grunted his criticism of those who let him down.

Above us were the ruins of Duntulm Castle and I had pointed out to me the three knolls: The Justice Knoll, the Rolling Knoll, and the Hanging Knoll. Here in times past the Macdonald of the Isles had sat in judgment with and on his people. When a man had been condemned on the Knoll of Justice he was taken to the Knoll of Rolling, put inside a nail-studded barrel, and trundled off. If he had the fortune to survive he was deemed innocent, for they had a proper respect for miracles in those days. When true Christian culture came from the south, however, it brought with it the gallows, which was given a hill all to itself, the Hanging Knoll. It did away with miracles. When it was first set up, Macdonald and his intimates were greatly taken with it and wondered just how it would behave. The story goes that they saw an old man and called to him. Such recognition by the mighty fairly set the poor old man hurrying towards them, and when he arrived he was seized and strung up. The contraption worked perfectly. Whereat they were properly astonished and laughed heartily.

I asked Eoin, still muttering threats against the absent, what he would do at the present moment if he were Lord of the Isles, with control over the three knolls. We laughed heartily at the things he said, and obeyed his instructions to cast the empty net on the south side of the island, so that it might catch such fish as chose to come in on the first of the flood. There and then the net was well anchored with three heavy stones and had lead sinkers all along its base line as well, yet it was later dragged by the tidal current right round the inshore point and in front of the sunken wreck of the steam drifter. It was my first practical demonstration of what can happen to ground tackle in the pull of a sea and I was to remember it very soon.

We poked about the wreck, which shows a barnacled gunwale above spring low water and which should be given a comfortable berth by vessels coming to anchor. I was told a war-time story about this wreck, but am not sure enough of the law of libel to repeat it. We tried to disclose the tons of coal which are said to be sunk with her but succeeded only in shoving an oar through the rust-rotten side of a latrine. The hold of the vessel was now a rich marine garden, with its scavenging eel as a fair understudy of the serpent.

Sails away towards Fladdachuain (Fladda of the ocean) attracted our attention, a white sail and a brown sail on the one boat, and we waited her coming on the flat rock that slopes slowly into the sea below Duntulm (the ridges in this rock, said to have been worn by the keels of Macdonald’s galleys, are still quite clear).