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Their food, mostly porridge, potatoes, and fish of their own catching, cost little; and they did not spend much money on clothes, especially in summer time, when no Erisaig boy except Rob MacNicol, who was a distinguished person would submit to the encumbrance of shoes and stockings.
The woman's story was the only explanation of this strange disappearance; but the sailors suspected more than they dared to suggest to the bewildered lads. They suspected that old MacNicol had dropped into the water just before the paddles had made their first backward revolution, and that in coming to the surface he had been struck by one of the floats.
Then he returned to the tailor's boat, and worked with his brothers and cousin. He was proud to know that he had a share in a fishing-skiff; but he was not too proud to turn his hand to anything else that might help. These MacNicol boys had grown to be greatly respected in Erisaig.
And I was saying to myself that when Rob MacNicol has a boat of his own, then I will show him how to find the herring, and no one will know but himself. By this time the MacNicols had taken to their oars again; and they had pulled outside the harbour, the old punt still astern. Then Rob had to speak plainly. 'Look here, Sandy, I will not put ye ashore by force.
For this Robert of the Red Hand, more familiarly known as Rob MacNicol, or even as plain Rob, was an active, stout-sinewed, black-eyed lad of seventeen, whose only mark of chieftainship apparently was that, unlike his brothers, he wore shoes and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so battered that nobody now seemed to claim any special ownership of it.
But in the meantime they were all agreed that what Rob counselled was wise; and a share in Coll MacDougall's boat was accordingly purchased, after a great deal of bargaining. A proud lad was Rob MacNicol the afternoon he came along to the wharf to take his place in the boat that was now partly his own.
This Rob MacNicol, for example: it was only for want of a greater career that he had constituted himself a dreaded sea-rover, a stern chieftain, etc. etc. His secret ambition his great and constant and secret ambition went far farther than that.
Well, the MacNicol lads were now in a fair way of earning an independent and honourable living, and this sketch of how they had struggled into that position from being mere wastrels living about the shore like so many curlews may fitly cease here.
This, and not unnaturally, on such a squally coast, Rob MacNicol had constituted an altogether unforgivable offence; and his first impulse was to jump down to the stern of the boat and give the helmsman, caught in flagrante delicto, a sounding whack on the side of the head. But a graver sense of justice prevailed. He summoned a court-martial.
That youth had been heard to remark that the first he caught at this game would pay a sudden visit to the dead dog-fish lying beneath the clear waters of the harbour; and it was very well known among the urchins of Erisaig that the eldest MacNicol had very little scruple about taking the law into his own hand.
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