“‘Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired.”

They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter.

We have twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls: once, as I came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit coamings and running down the companion like a brook to meet me; at that same moment the foresail sheet jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the only occasion on the cruise that ever I set hand to a rope, but I worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of haemorrhage better than the certainty of drowning.

Ex-driver John McLeish of Perth, to whom I am greatly indebted for much information concerning the earlier workings of the Dunlastair Is and the men involved, maintains that there were never two bonnier engines in Britain.