“Ay, I believe that will be the best way of it,” Duncan replied. “It’ll be plenty long and plenty wet right enough. But on the Ard Dubh the gentleman might be swept off a ledge and know nothing about it till he was brought up before his Creator.”

“Well, we don’t want that to happen, Duncan, even to get a fair shot at the muckle hart of Ben Glass,” his chief told him.

“I feel pretty much the same way about it as you feel, Ben Nevis,” said Chester Royde. “I know I’ll have to meet my Creator one day, but I don’t want to butt in on Him when He’s busy.”

“The Lord is never too busy to judge a sinner,” Duncan proclaimed sternly.

“Why, I know He holds the biggest one-man job anywhere,” said Royde. “But that’s no reason why I should butt in on Him before I’m expected. I think we’ll give ‘Ah, Do’ a miss to-day. Say, Duncan, if I light up another cigar will that beast over there get a whiff of it?”

“I wouldn’t say but what he mightn’t, Mr Royde. And we’ll have to keep very low for the next two hours before we reach the far end of Drumstickit. You’ll hardly be able to keep your mouth out of the moss so as to enjoy a good smoke as it ought to be enjoyed. And I’m not the one to ask a gentleman to waste the gifts the good Lord has given to him. Now you see yon big crag away over there to the west of where himself is lying?”

“I see a big grey mass of stone about two miles over to the left. You don’t mean that?”

“That’s it, right enough. It’s you that have very good eyes, Mr Royde.”

“And we’re going to crawl on our bellies as far as that mass of stone?” Chester Royde asked incredulously.

“That’s the first thing we have to do. I hope we’ll reach it just before the rain begins to get really heavy.”

There are many tracts among the mountains of the North which cast a weariness and a disgust upon those who have to tramp across them. The view of the encircling bens may be sublime, but the sublime can become tiresome when exactly the same aspect of it is presented during an hour’s plodding over featureless bog furrowed by burns every one of which takes the same dreary course and makes the same monotonous burbling. Such a tract was Achnacallach, the great flat which the stalkers had to cross to reach the westerly shoulder of the ridge known as Drumstickit. To walk across it was a penance; to crawl across it was purgatorial.

“Never mind, Mr Royde, you’ll find it easier as you get used to it,” said Duncan, with kindly encouragement.