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A few days after Bailie Duke's preliminary examination of witnesses, the procurator fiscal the official by whom such inquiries are conducted in Scotland on behalf of the Crown arrived from Kirkwall. The case had already been made clear in preparation for him, and he had little else to do than take the evidence formally and arrange it in legal order.
I stopped suddenly, wondering if I should proceed further and interrupt them. And now I understood how it was that Jessie had forgotten the butter, and how she had so calmly agreed to my going back to the farm. I seemed also to understand how it was that Captain Gordon had spoken so much about my sister during our drive to Kirkwall.
It was so long since hoops had been worn. None of the present generation of Kirkwall women could ever have seen a lady in a hoop, and behind the present generation there was no likelihood of any hooped ladies in Kirkwall. Thora had no hoop. Her orders had been positively against it and unless Madame Vedder had slipped inside "the bell" she could not imagine any rival.
It was Saturday night, and no warrant could now be got, but the murderer must be secured. No two men bent on such an errand ever found it more difficult to execute. The little family had sat later than usual. John had always news they were eager to hear of tourists and strangers he had seen in Wick, or of the people the steamer had brought to Kirkwall.
The women came to their doors to watch him, or to speak to him, and their admiration and friendliness was welcome. For many years he had been used to it, but he had not in the least outgrown the thrill of satisfaction it gave him. And often he wondered if his wife noticed the good opinion that the ladies of Kirkwall had for her husband.
Scarcely was the countess consigned to her bed of earth, and even in the hour after the last duties were paid to her, whose closed tomb seemed to have left unto him "his house desolate!" when the heart-desperate Joanna rushed into the weeping husband's presence, fearful of being now restrainingly reclaimed by her father, who had, only a short while before, intimated his intention to relieve his friends of a guardianship they had so partially fulfilled, and to send a vessel for his daughter, to bring her back to Kirkwall, there to be united in marriage to the brave native chieftain, whose singular prowess had preserved the island from a Danish yoke.
Kirkwall, in respect of its shops, surprised us even more than Thurso. There were chemists, grocers, booksellers, whose windows would hardly have been out of place at Brighton; but haunting suggestions of the old, the remote, the wild, were tingling in the air everywhere. The huge tentacles of the kraken might have lifted themselves beyond Kirkwall harbor.
"Ah! now I begin to see your application. Go on, Halcro." I then spoke of finding the charts, and described how the Pilgrim had touched at Kirkwall. "She called at Kirkwall to put me ashore for hospital," interposed Peter Brown. "What!" exclaimed Mr. Duke. "And are you going to say that this Pilgrim was the vessel in which Mr. Quendale sailed for Copenhagen?"
The hundred inhabited isles which lie between Yell and Man, isles which after their conversion contained "three hundred churches and chapels" sent in their contingents, to swell the following of the renowned Earl Sigurd. As his fleet bore southward from Kirkwall it swept the subject coast of Scotland, and gathered from every lough its galleys and its fighting men.
"Will you come with me, then, Halcro?" he asked. "Certainly; I'll be very glad. I know the way well." The two other skippers, with Mr. Watt and the rest, then made arrangements for their boating party, intending to sail round to Scapa, and thence walk across the little peninsula to Kirkwall. When Mr.
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