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Updated: June 20, 2025
In the street I found Tom Kinlay and two other boys waiting for me, and arranging an excursion across the hills to Skaill Bay to hunt for seals. It was an expedition in which I very readily agreed to join, and it was arranged that we should meet early in the afternoon on the moor between Voy and Crua Breck. My home was close beside the school.
Sometimes, indeed, when I was tending my nibbling flock on the hillside, or driving them over to the distant pasture land by the margin of the loch of Harray, where the grass grew sweetest, I would chance to see Thora Kinlay on her way from Crua Breck to Stromness, and occasionally she would come to Lyndardy to see my sister Jessie.
"Weel, ye see, lad, I dinna mind where I gang. One place is as good as another, and this is very well in a shower of rain. I was west at Crua Breck when the rain came on sae heavy; and I hae been here these twa hours tryin' to strike a light, but ye see the tinder's wet "Try you if ye can do it, lad;" and the old man handed me the flint.
"But she went away to Crua Breck when the snow came on so bad." I was dismayed at his answer, for it seemed to prove to me that Thora was really lost in the snow. Paterson offered to continue the search with me, but I advised him to dress and go to Stromness, and make inquiries in the town, while I left him and returned to Lyndardy, always searching for footprints on the snow.
In the afternoon, as the snow had abated, I went out, though without stating my intention, and returned to the top of the cliff, determined upon making the descent to the cave and hearing from Thora her reason for this strange freak of hers, before venturing to inform them at Crua Breck that I had discovered the girl's hiding place.
One had fallen on a projecting part of the cliff, and others, instead of jumping over the edge, had run down a narrow pathway, and, though not injured, stood in danger from the fact that they could neither proceed nor turn back without falling. Near as she was to Crua Breck, however, Jessie would not go thither to seek the help she needed.
A walk of three miles brought us to Crua Breck, a small farmhouse on the hillside of the same name, overlooking the Pentland Firth.
There could no longer be any doubt in my mind that Thora was indeed the daughter of the beautiful woman who was cast ashore at Inganess, and whose body now lay in the old neglected graveyard across the moor the daughter of Thora and Ephraim Quendale. Thora Quendale as I must now call my young girl friend returned that evening to her old home at Crua Breck.
Rising to his feet he did not retaliate, but picked up his jacket, wrapped his store of the treasure into his seal's skin, and wiping the dripping blood from his nose, walked away across the heath in the direction of Crua Breck, muttering a vow of vengeance.
"Has either o' ye been across at Jack Paterson's croft?" I then asked. "No," said the shepherd. "Weel, then, that's the only place she can have been to, that I can think of. So you two had better get back to Crua Breck and wait till daylight. I'll gang to Jack Paterson's, and if they ken nothing of Thora there, we can only wait till the morning."
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