But he could not keep quiet. Some nervous unrest seemed to have possessed the man. He got up with a start and went to the window, where the snow was drifting unsteadily past. As he stared out into the storm I heard him mutter to himself, “Three away, God help me, and three wi’ the hole in the throat.”
Then he turned round to me abruptly. I was jotting down notes for an article I contemplated in the Revue Celtique, so my thoughts were far away from the present. The man recalled me by demanding fiercely, “Do ye believe in God?”
I gave him some sort of answer in the affirmative.
“Then do ye believe in the Devil?” he asked.
The reply must have been less satisfactory, for he came forward and flung himself violently into the chair before me.
“What do ye ken about it?” he cried. “You that bides in a southern toun, what can ye ken o’ the God that works in thae hills and the Devil—ay, the manifold devils—that He suffers to bide here? I tell ye, man, that if ye had seen what I have seen ye wad be on your knees at this moment praying to God to pardon your unbelief. There are devils at the back o’ every stane and hidin’ in every cleuch, and it’s by the grace o’ God alone that a man is alive upon the earth.” His voice had risen high and shrill, and then suddenly he cast a frightened glance towards the window and was silent.
I began to think that the man’s wits were unhinged, and the thought did not give me satisfaction. I had no relish for the prospect of being left alone in this moorland dwelling with the cheerful company of a maniac. But his next movements reassured me. He was clearly only dead-tired, for he fell sound asleep in his chair, and by the time his sister brought tea and wakened him, he seemed to have got the better of his excitement.
When the window was shuttered and the lamp lit, I sat myself again to the completion of my notes. The shepherd had got out his Bible, and was solemnly reading with one great finger travelling down the lines. He was smoking, and whenever some text came home to him with power he would make pretence to underline it with the end of the stem. Soon I had finished the work I desired, and, my mind being full of my pet hobby, I fell into an inquisitive mood, and began to question the solemn man opposite on the antiquities of the place.
He stared stupidly at me when I asked him concerning monuments or ancient weapons.
“I kenna,” said he. “There’s a heap o’ queer things in the hills.”
“This place should be a centre for such relics. You know that the name of the hill behind the house, as far as I can make it out, means the ‘Place of the Little Men.’ It is a good Gaelic word, though there is some doubt about its exact interpretation. But clearly the Gaelic peoples did not speak of themselves when they gave the name; they must have referred to some older and stranger population.”
The shepherd looked at me dully, as not understanding.
“It is partly this fact—besides the fishing, of course—which interests me in this countryside,” said I, gaily.
Again he cast the same queer frightened glance towards the window. “If ye’ll tak the advice of an aulder man,” he said, slowly, “ye’ll let well alane and no meddle wi’ uncanny things.”
I laughed pleasantly, for at last I had found out my hardheaded host in a piece of childishness. “Why, I thought that you of all men would be free from superstition.”
“What do ye call supersteetion?” he asked.
“A belief in old wives’ tales,” said I, “a trust in the crude supernatural and the patently impossible.”
He looked at me beneath his shaggy brows. “How do ye ken what is impossible? Mind ye, sir, ye’re no in the toun just now, but in the thick of the wild hills.”
“But, hang it all, man,” I cried, “you don’t mean to say that you believe in that sort of thing? I am prepared for many things up here, but not for the Brownie—though, to be sure, if one could meet him in the flesh, it would be rather pleasant than otherwise, for he was a companionable sort of fellow.”
“When a thing pits the fear o’ death on a man he aye speaks well of it.”
It was true—the Eumenides and the Good Folk over again; and I awoke with interest to the fact that the conversation was getting into strange channels.
The shepherd moved uneasily in his chair. “I am a man that fears God, and has nae time for daft stories; but I havena traivelled the hills for twenty years wi’ my een shut. If I say that I could tell ye stories o’ faces seen in the mist, and queer things that have knocked against me in the snaw, wad ye believe me? I wager ye wadna. Ye wad say I had been drunk, and yet I am a God-fearing temperate man.”
He rose and went to a cupboard, unlocked it, and brought out something in his hand, which he held out to me. I took it with some curiosity, and found that it was a flint arrowhead.
Clearly a flint arrowhead, and yet like none that I had ever seen in any collection. For one thing it was larger, and the barb less clumsily thick. More, the chipping was new, or comparatively so; this thing had not stood the wear of fifteen hundred years among the stones of the hillside. Now there are, I regret to
