CHAPTER XXVI
THE McGINTY LISTENS TO REASON
“TAP … TAP … TAP … Tap … Tap …”
“It’s a signal,” said Titty.
“Hey!”
It was a very quiet “Hey!” but urgent.
“It’s Roger,” exclaimed Susan.
“Hullo!”
“Do be quiet,” said Nancy, “he’s saying something. Nobody can hear if.…”
“Stop talking,” said Captain Flint. “Give the chap a chance.”
“Barbecued Billygoats!” said Nancy. “I want to hear too.”
“Do listen!” Roger’s whisper, desperate now, came under the door. “I can’t shout. They’ll spot me in another minute.”
“How did you…. ?”
“Listen! Listen! There’s only just time. I was watching from my Pict-house and saw them. The egg-collectors must have seen Dick coming away from the island. They’re in the valley now, coming across. One of them’s got a gun…. Yes, a gun, I tell you. He’s got a gun.”
“We’ve got to get out,” said Dick. “Quick! Quick! We’ve got to stop him. He’ll find the folding boat. He’ll get the eggs. He’ll kill the birds. He said he would.”
“We’re done,” said Dorothea.
“We aren’t,” said Nancy, “but we will be if we aren’t quick. Listen! Roger! Can you open the door?”
“I can’t,” said Roger. “I’ve tried.”
“Do something, Uncle Jim,” said Nancy. “Couldn’t we bust the door if we all tried together?”
“Be quiet for a minute,” said Captain Flint. “Roger! Can you hear?”
“Yes.”
“Are any of those men about?”
“I can hear two of them talking. They don’t know I’m here.”
“It’s no good talking to those savages. Go straight to the house….”
“Where they’re playing the bagpipes?”
“Get there before you get stopped. Go to the front door. Say you have an urgent message and as soon as you see anybody who talks English tell him anything you like so long as you bring him here just as quick as you can.”
“Life and death,” whispered Titty.
“It really is,” said Dorothea. “Even now the foul murderers are stealing towards their helpless victims. And that beast’ll take the eggs and Dick will wish all his life he’d never found them.” Dorothea began with a sentence in her favourite style but ended with the simple dreadful truth.
“Get into the house somehow or other,” said Captain Flint. “If there’s a butler or something and he tries to stop you, nip past him. The noise of the bagpipes will tell you where to go. Do you hear?”
There was no answer. Roger was already on his way.
“There must be somebody in the place with a head on his shoulders, if only we can get a word with him. I say, Dick, I’m most awfully sorry. That swine must have been watching me while I was watching him and when I cleared out he must have come ashore at once. My fault, but what could I do when I saw all you people being hauled off?”
“That man who came after Nancy and me must have got back and seen Dick,” said John.
“We couldn’t have stopped him,” said Nancy.
Dick said nothing. He was holding his spectacles but not wiping them. He was standing there, blind, looking at the ground he could not see and thinking of the Divers betrayed to their worst enemies.
“Gosh, what’s that?” exclaimed Nancy.
There was a wild Gaelic yell from behind their prison, answered by another. There was the sound of running feet.
“They’ve seen Roger,” said Dorothea.
“Roger’s pretty nippy when he wants to be,” said John hopefully.
There was dead silence in the prison. They were all listening but the noise of the footsteps had died away. There was nothing to hear but the far away skirl of the bagpipes.
“He had a pretty good start,” said John.
“He’ll have found the front door by now,” said Dorothea. “He’ll have rung the bell.…”
“Some bells hang awfully high,” said Titty.
“He’ll have jumped for it,” said Dorothea. “The clanging bell wakes the echoes of the castle walls. If they weren’t so thick we’d be hearing it.”
“Do shut up, you two,” said Nancy.
“The boat’s this side of the loch,” said Dick. “They’ll have to cross the stream to get round to it. There may still be time if he’s quick….”
Suddenly in the dim light of their prison, the captives looked at each other, wondering if all had noticed that sudden break in the piping. The piper had been skirling and droning on in a wild, elaborate, endless tune. The tune had been cut off short in an unhappy wail. A minute later it had gone on again from where it had left off. “At least,” Titty said later, “you couldn’t be sure of that, but it went on making the same kind of noise as before.”
“Roger may have startled him,” said Dorothea.
“If only he’s managed to get in,” said Nancy.
“The trouble is, we don’t know what sort of chap he’ll find there,” said Captain Flint.
“We’re going to be too late,” said Dick. Everybody turned towards him and then looked away again at once. It was too dark for them to see much, but they knew how miserable he was as he stood there with bent head, fingering his spectacles.
There was a long silence.
“He’d be back by now if he’d got hold of anybody,” said John at last.
“Here he is,” shouted Nancy.
Steps sounded outside, and Gaelic words and then a few words in English that sank their hopes once more.
“Let GO,” they heard Roger’s voice. “I’m not going to bolt.”
The heavy bolt creaked. The door opened. Roger was shot violently through it. The door slammed behind him and the bolt banged across.
“Thundering galoots we are,” groaned Nancy. “We ought to have been waiting and gone charging out the moment they opened the door.”
Roger picked himself up.
“Are you hurt?” asked Susan.
“No,” said Roger. “At least not much. Only a bit when I got mixed up with that bagpiper.”
“Did you see anybody?” asked Captain Flint.
“There wasn’t time,” said Roger. “I was just getting to the house when a pack of them came after me so I didn’t look for any bell. I just charged through to a sort of terrace place where the man with the bagpipes was prancing. There was an old man and that boy hogging at a table in a room at the other side of the terrace. I darted across behind the piper but he turned round in his prance and I went smack into him and he came down on the top of me, and his bagpipes let out a groan and before I could get up they’d grabbed me. I tried to yell but I couldn’t.” Roger wiped his mouth. “Gaels taste pretty rum,” he said. “Smell too. One of them had a paw over the front of my face.”
“But what about the man at the table?” said Nancy.
“And the young chieftain?” said Dorothea.
“I don’t know,” said Roger. “They lugged me away too quick. And the man with the bagpipes hopped up and went straight on playing. I bet he got hurt all right though. He came down crash and only a bit of him was on me. My knee got scraped and I bet his did too.” Roger patted his knee, brought his hand away and licked it.
“Oh, Roger,” said Susan, “and the iodine’s all in the Sea Bear.”
“I’m all right,” said Roger. “But they’ll have got to the folding boat by now.”
Dick leaned against the wall. Nothing could save the birds. Oh, if only he had never told the egg-collector of his find.
“Come on,” said Nancy. “There’s only one thing we can do.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Captain Flint.
“Yes, there is, and we’ll do it. We can make such a row that they hear us in the house. We aren’t gagged. We’ve got to make the McGinty listen to reason. Start yelling. Go on, Uncle Jim. Let yourself go. Go on. You’re
hailing a ship in a storm. Ahoy! AHOY!”
For a moment Nancy yelled alone. Then the others saw her idea. One after another joined in. “AHOY! AHOY! AHOY!”
“Never mind if you can’t ahoy,” said Nancy, grabbing Dorothea by the shoulder. “Scream. Go on. Scream as if you were being murdered. You will be if you don’t. I’ll murder you myself. Scream! You too, Peggy. AHOY! AHOY! Uncle JIM!”
At last even Captain Flint saw the point and sent out an “Ahoy!” fit to be heard across the Bay of Biscay. He followed it with another and another. Dorothea threw her head back and screamed at the very top of her voice. Peggy did the same. Nancy, John and Titty yelled one “Ahoy!” after another. Roger copied a pig being killed. Susan tried an “Ahoy!” but found that she too could make more noise by plain straightforward yelling. So did Dick. In their prison the crew of the Sea Bear deafened each other and the row they made was such that they heard nothing of people shouting at them from outside. There was thundering on the door. For one second they paused. “Whisht, whisht!” they heard. “We won’t whisht,” said Nancy, and the noise began again. More and more people were shouting at them to be quiet. “Good,” panted Nancy between ahoys. “If they yell too, it’ll help. Keep it up, Uncle Jim. Well done, Dot! Go it, Peggy! Never mind about sore throats. AHOY … OY … OY!”
There is one noise that can make itself heard over any other noise whatsoever, and that is the noise of the bagpipes played by a determined and indignant piper. The prisoners were making all the noise they could and had all but deafened each other, but through that terrific din they heard the skirl and drone of the pipes, nearer and nearer, louder and louder, in the ancient march now known as “The Road to the Isles”.
At first they hardly trusted their own ears. It was not until the skirl of the pipes sounded close outside their prison door that their shouting came suddenly to an end.
“It’s worked,” said Nancy breathlessly.
The heavy bolt that barred the door creaked in its sockets. The door was flung open by the old grey-bearded giant who had captured Dick. Others of the Gaels were standing round. Two or three women and half-a-dozen red-headed children had come out of the cottages, no doubt, on hearing the yelling of the prisoners. But Nancy was right. The yelling had worked. It had brought to the prison door the man they wanted to see. A tall old man, in full Highland dress, with tartan kilt and deerskin sporran, was standing there, and they knew he could be no other than the McGinty himself. Close beside him was the boy they had seen before, Roger’s enemy, Dorothea’s “young chieftain”, Ian McGinty.
THE McGINTY AND HIS PRISONERS
Roger was the first out, but, on seeing the piper, let some of the others get in front of him. “That’s the scoondrel!” exclaimed the piper. “Running like a mad stirk!” But at a sign from the McGinty the piper was silent, scowling heavily and moving a little this way and that to keep his eyes on the one who had tripped him up, broken into the middle of a tune and, but for good luck, might very well have ruined his pipes. The young McGinty too was quick to see Roger and a slow smile crossed his face, and left it grave again.
Dick, usually slow to speak, was for once the first. “Quick, quick!” he said. “We’ll be only just in time. He’s going for the eggs now.…”
“Whisht!” said one of the men.
The McGinty was looking sternly over his nine prisoners. Titty said afterwards that there was a sort of twinkle in his eye, but none of the others believed that she had seen it at the time. “He looked as grim as death,” Dorothea wrote in her diary. His glance moved from one to another of the crew of the Sea Bear as they came blinking out of their prison into the sunshine. It rested at last on Captain Flint.
“Will you explain the reason of this appalling noise?” he asked.
“Had to make it,” said Captain Flint. “No other way. The thing is pretty urgent.”
“We sent Roger to tell you,” put in Nancy, “but they hauled him back.”
“That is the laddie, I tell you,” said the angry piper.
“We had to speak to you somehow,” said Nancy.
“Life and death,” said Titty. “It really is.”
“Oh, quick, quick!” said Dick.
“Whisht!” said the dogmudgeon and grabbed Dick’s arm as Dick, desperate, made a sudden move.
“A noise like that does not make things better for you,” said the McGinty slowly. “For days now you have been disturbing my deer. You have no right on the land at all. Who sent you? Who is the man for whom you have been driving the poor beasts this way and that till by now there’ll not be a hind at peace this side the hills?”
“Sir,” began Captain Flint.
“If it were the children only I might suppose it was just thoughtlessness,” said the McGinty. “But you are a grown man. You come here in two boats….”
“But we didn’t.…”
“That motor boat’s got nothing to do with us.”
“My son and my men have seen what you were at,” said the McGinty. “One day after another. Tell me now, what you have to say for yourself. We have little against strangers in the isles when they behave like honest folk, but the chasing of hinds out of their breeding grounds is beyond right and reason, and we’ll find means to show you we’ll have none of it. This is bad work you have been at, and to use children for it.…”
“Sir,” began Captain Flint again.
“Don’t waste time being polite,” exclaimed Nancy. She shot forward past Captain Flint and faced the McGinty. “PLEASE listen!” she said.
The McGinty looked over her head at Captain Flint and seeing from Captain Flint’s face that he was ready to let Nancy speak for him, looked gravely down at Nancy.
“I am listening,” he said.
“Well, please do,” said Nancy. “There isn’t time to argue. We weren’t driving your deer. We were doing all we could to get out of their way. We weren’t interested in deer. It was birds….”
“Out of season,” said the McGinty. “Surely you’re not telling me you don’t know….”
“Oh, I know about grouse,” said Nancy. “There are lots where we come from. Look here, Dick had better tell you. They were his birds. Birds he found. Divers. Divers nesting on your loch.”
The McGinty was interested but unbelieving. “Yes,” he said. “Black-throated Divers. We have them every year … But if you wanted to see them there was no need to drive the deer to the hills.”
“NOT Black-throated,” said Dick. “Great Northerns. Two of them.”
“They never nest here,” said the McGinty. “They do not nest anywhere in the British Isles.”
“But that’s just it,” said Nancy. “They do. Yours do. The first that have ever been known to. They are nesting on the island in your loch. We’ve seen them. Dick found them first. He wasn’t dead sure, so he made a drawing and then he showed it to a man in that motor yacht … Look here, Dick, you’d better explain.”
“It was a mistake,” said Dick. “I oughtn’t to have shown it to him. When I went to his boat I didn’t know he was an egg-collector. He tried to find out where the nest was, but I didn’t tell him. But he knows now. He’s going there. He wants to shoot the birds and stuff them and take the eggs to put them into his collection. You see it’s the first nest ever known not in Iceland or some other place abroad….”
“Offered the boy five pounds,” put in Captain Flint. “And then offered me a hundred.”
“So you….”
“No, no, NO,” said Nancy.
“We tried to dodge him,” said Dick.
“We did dodge him,” said Nancy. “But he spotted our boat and came after us. When you thought we were chasing your deer, we were trying to make sure that he wouldn’t be looking when Dick went to the island.”
“So you were after the eggs, too?”
“No,” said Dick. “He said only the eggs would prove that the birds had nested, but I thought a photograph would do it.”
“And you got one?” The McGinty was tal
king in a different tone.
“Five,” said Dick.
“Some of us were being decoys to make him think the nest was somewhere else and some of us were being red herrings to keep the coast clear for Dick,” said Nancy, looking rather doubtfully at the Gaels who, whether they talked English or not, all seemed to be listening. “But we all got grabbed by your men … and Dick was collared too, and Uncle Jim deserted his post … He was up at our masthead keeping a watch on the Pterodactyl … Everybody got grabbed except Roger and Roger saw them….”
“Saw whom?”
“The egg-collector and his man going straight for the loch. They’ve got a gun. That’s why we sent Roger to fetch you. And he couldn’t get to you, so I thought of howling till you came. And it worked and here you are but we’re going to be too late….”
“We may be too late already.” Dick was desperate.
“But if the nest’s on the island, your egg-collector can do nothing,” said the McGinty. “There’s no boat on the loch.”
“There’s ours,” said Nancy.
“And he’s seen where it is and he’ll use it to get the eggs.”
The McGinty had turned away. Some time before some of the Gaels had seen a man waving his arms, running down from the top of the ridge beyond the gap. Now he was close to them, and clearly had something to say. Two large sheepdogs, that Roger remembered very well, ran up, licked the young McGinty’s hand and lay down, with their tongues out. The man, a shepherd with a crooked stick, came up to the McGinty and spoke in Gaelic. The McGinty frowned.
“This man tells me there is a boat on the loch now.”
“But we told you there was,” murmured Roger.
“Our folding boat,” said Nancy.
“Does that mean that more of your party are about?”
“No, no, NO,” said Nancy. “That’s the enemy. It’s our boat but the enemy’s got it.”
“We’re too late,” said Dick. “He’s going to take the eggs and shoot the birds. Can’t you do something to stop him?”
Great Northern? Page 28