Without saying a word I took a pan and pushed its handle between the lowest cross-piece of my framework and the rock, on the down side of the cave.

‘A rack!’ cried Terry, clapping her hands and hastening to arrange the other pots alongside the first.

‘Is that what you meant?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Partly,’ I replied, laughing at her eagerness.

‘What’s next?’ she wanted to know.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ I told her. Her face clouded again.

‘Don’t tease me, Hugh,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re very bad to me.’

‘Since we haven’t any nails of our own we must steal some,’ I hastened to explain, ‘so we’ll walk as far west as the Ardverikie march and get a few staples from the deer-fence.’

‘Isn’t that very wrong of us?’ she asked. ‘What are we going to do with staples?’

‘Sling our hammock, Terry.’

‘From this frame, Hugh?’ she asked in dubious tones. ‘Oh—I see. But won’t it be in our way?’

I explained that the hammock would be attached permanently on one side, but on the other it would be fixed in such a way that we could disengage it from the frame and swing it upwards flat against the wall when it was out of use.

‘Like a wall-bed in a flat!’ she cried, all enthusiasm. ‘My! it was clever of you to think that out, Hugh. Can we go for the staples at once? I’m dying to see—isn’t it exciting? What fun we’re having, you and me together.’

We fetched four posts which happened to be slack and might come in useful as well as a pocketful of staples from the Ardverikie fence. Terry now insisted that she must be allowed to share in the job, so while I built a rectangular frame four feet wide and six feet long with stout rowan saplings she stripped the hood of our car from its stays and ribs. She cut a piece of the hood to the shape of the hammock-frame but a few inches wider to allow the material to be turned round the side-pieces and end-pieces of the frame when it was ready for sewing. As soon as we had stretched the canvas taut Terry sewed it in place. I drove staples into the four rafters farthest from the fire, and into the middle cross-pieces between these rafters.