Prester John Read Free Page A

had been preaching. Tam was full of the portent. ‘A nigger,’ he said, ‘a great black chap as big as your father, Archie.’ He seemed to have banged the bookboard with some effect, and had kept Tam, for once in his life, awake. He had preached about the heathen in Africa, and how a black man was a good as a white man in the sight of God, and he had forecast a day when the Negroes would have something to teach the British in the way of civilization. So at any rate ran the account of Tam Dyke, who did not share the preacher’s views. ‘It’s all nonsense, Davie. The Bible says that the children of Ham were to be our servants. If I were the minister I wouldn’t let a nigger into the pulpit. I wouldn’t let him farther than the Sabbath school.’
    Night fell as we came to the broomy spaces of the links, and ere we had breasted the slope of the neck which separates Kirkcaple Bay from the cliffs it was as dark as an April evening with a full moon can be. Tam would have had it darker. He got out his lantern, and after a prodigious waste of matches kindled the candle-end inside, turned the dark shutter, and trotted happily on. We had no need of his lighting till the Dyve Burn was reached and the path began to descend steeply through the rift in the crags.
    It was here we found that some one had gone before us. Archie was great in those days at tracking, his ambition runningin Indian paths. He would walk always with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, whereby he several times found lost coins and once a trinket dropped by the provost’s wife. At the edge of the burn, where the path turns downward, there is a patch of shingle washed up by some spate. Archie was on his knees in a second. ‘Lads,’ he cried, ‘there’s spoor here’; and then after some nosing, ‘it’s a man’s track, going downward, a big man with flat feet. It’s fresh, too, for it crosses the damp bit of gravel, and the water has scarcely filled the holes yet.’
    We did not dare to question Archie’s woodcraft, but it puzzled us who the stranger could be. In summer weather you might find a party of picnickers here, attracted by the fine hard sands at the burn mouth. But at this time of night and season of the year there was no call for any one to be trespassing on our preserves. No fisherman came this way, the lobster-pots being all to the east, and the stark headland of the Red Neb made the road to them by the water’s edge difficult. The tan-work lads used to come now and then for a swim, but you would not find a tan-work lad bathing on a chill April night. Yet there was no question where our precursor had gone. He was making for the shore. Tam unshuttered his lantern, and the steps went clearly down the corkscrew path. ‘Maybe he is after our cave. We’d better go cannily.’
    The glim was dowsed – the words were Archie’s – and in the best contraband manner we stole down the gully. The business had suddenly taken an eerie turn, and I think in our hearts we were all a little afraid. But Tam had a lantern, and it would never do to turn back from an adventure which had all the appearance of being the true sort. Half-way down there is a scrog of wood, dwarf alders and hawthorn, which makes an arch over the path. I, for one, was glad when we got through this with no worse mishap than a stumble from Tam which caused the lantern door to fly open and the candle to go out. We did not stop to relight it, but scrambled down the screes till we came to the long slabs of reddish rock which abutted on the beach. We could not see the track, so we gave up the business of scouts,and dropped quietly over the big boulder and into the crinkle of cliff which we called our cave.
    There was nobody there, so we relit the lantern and examined our properties. Two or three fishing-rods for the burn, much damaged by weather; some sea-lines on a dry shelf of rock; a couple