Captain Dove, sucking at his black cutty-pipe in the library of Loquhariot, looked very contemptuously at Mr. Jobling. It was self-evident that Mr. Jobling was afraid of Slyne and feeling very sorry for himself.

But Captain Dove was in no such disconsolate mood. Glancing at the despondent lawyer out of his little red-rimmed eyes, he even grinned, still more contemptuously. He was not afraid of Slyne, he told himself, and it made no material difference to him that his recent attempt to brow-beat that grasping scoundrel had failed, even with the London lawyer for ally. For Captain Dove did not intend that either of the other two should eventually get the better of him. He was playing a waiting game, in which he meant to come out winner at any cost.

So far as Captain Dove was concerned there were only two persons really concerned in the question of the Jura succession. One was Sallie, the other himself—her adopted father!

He looked upon Mr. Jobling as a mere mechanical instrument, such as could be replaced at a moment\'s notice if that were needful, now that the legal details of the case had been carried so far toward final success. Slyne was absolutely superfluous there and had outlived his usefulness, in so far, at least, as Captain Dove was concerned. More than that, he was in Captain Dove\'s way. So, to some extent, was Justin Carthew, since it seemed that Sallie felt called upon to make a fool of herself for his benefit; but Captain Dove did not anticipate any great difficulty in dealing with him. And so was Herries, the factor, who had so many inconvenient questions to ask—although he need scarcely be taken into account at present while he was abed and likely to be there for some time to come.

With all of these, in any case, he felt quite capable of coping—except with Jasper Slyne, who had threatened, a few moments before and in the hearing of an attentive witness ... Slyne was undoubtedly dangerous now; and it must be his first care to free himself for all time from the risk of Slyne\'s telling....

"I have it," said Captain Dove, his furrowed forehead suddenly cleared and his face contorted into a smile at sight of which Mr. Jobling was seized with a sickly, sinking sensation. "I have it. We must keep quiet of course, until the Olive Branch turns up, but she shouldn\'t be very long now, and then—

"I\'ll send for Brasse. I warned that fool Slyne to play fair with me—but he won\'t. And so—since it\'s beggar-my-neighbour we\'re at, he won\'t be my neighbour for long."

Mr. Jobling rose, coughing irritably. The reek from Captain Dove\'s foul pipe was too much for him.

"I\'ll go and pack now," he announced. "I\'d never have come here at all if I had thought—"

"You leave things here to me, old cock," Captain Dove encouraged him. "And go and jag your friend Spettigrew along till he gets judgment for us. That\'s the most important part of the game at present. Leave things here to me, and you\'ll find, when the time comes, that Slyne will have to take a back seat."

But the stout solicitor did not seem grateful at all for that crumb of comfort. He merely looked at Captain Dove with equal dislike and disbelief as he left the room.

He left the castle immediately after lunch, to catch the steamer south, a little less depressed, perhaps, after a few further words with Captain Dove, who thought it only politic to inspirit him in his efforts on Sallie\'s behalf. And he had not been gone very long before Captain Dove began to miss him—as a boon-companion, a part which Slyne refused to play any longer. So that the old man soon began to find the time hang very heavy on his hands, and his grudge against Slyne always grew.

Under any circumstances, he could not have been happy for long on land. Nor could he feel altogether safe there, even in the distasteful disguise he had adopted at Slyne\'s advice; and for discrediting which he had been so repeatedly called to account by Slyne. He could scarcely but repent having sacrificed his undisputed autocracy on the Olive Branch in order to figure as a mere puppet in Slyne\'s company, as he had undoubtedly become since he had left his ship. He grew very angry indeed with Slyne when he thought of that, as he often did during those endless days of waiting.

It was all Slyne\'s fault, he assured himself, that he was thus stranded there; that he had not fifty cents left to bless himself with, since one expensive evening in Paris; and that, even if he had had such a sum in his pockets, it might have worn a hole in them before he could spend it, in such a forsaken spot!

Of what use to him, he inquired of himself, going off at another tangent, could a huge, ghost-haunted pile like the Castle of Loquhariot be? Or a great empty barrack like Justicehall?—which reminded him unpleasantly of the Law Courts in London. How could he ever hope to spend such an excess of wealth as was soon to be Sallie\'s, and, therefore, at his disposal? A perfect nausea of money possessed Captain Dove at such moments. He would almost have preferred the prospect of poverty again, if only for the sake of the interest in life the struggle to live might restore to him.

"Enough is as good as a feast!" said he to himself every now and then while he gazed, with gloom in his soul, at the cut-crystal decanters on a salver of solid silver which was never far from his elbow; and, with that wise saw on his lips, he would continue to drown his contradictory sorrows as deeply as possible.

But there was luckily room and to spare in the castle for all its inmates. Slyne and he kept as much as possible out of each other\'s way, although they had resumed a spasmodic outward semblance of amity, a steadfast inward determination to get the better of one another, whether by fair means or foul. He could scarcely seek Sallie\'s company now that she knew his treacherous intentions toward her. The sick man, Herries, was still in bed, in a sufficiently precarious state. So that he lived very much alone with his various grievances, since his walks abroad, as far as the Jura Arms,—where he soon became almost popular among the occasional profligates of the village,—were not so frequent as they would probably have been in better weather.

A bitter east wind, bringing always more snow, had blown almost ceaselessly for the best part of a fortnight before any change came in the wildest weather that had befallen Loquhariot in long years.

The mountain roads for miles in all directions were quite impassable. The mail-cart, with its driver and horses, and also the hastily improvised snow-plough which had attempted their rescue, lay buried deep below the ever deepening drift into which it had plunged on its last outward journey. The single telegraph-line that served the locality had broken down at a dozen points which were quite unapproachable. Stress of weather had prevented the weekly steamer from making its usual call. Loquhariot was absolutely cut off from the outer world.

And then, with a wet westerly wind which soon grew into a gale, the snow on the mountains began to melt and floods made matters still worse, swelling every unconsidered stream into a destructive torrent, cutting wide chasms across the precipitous main-road over the Pass, under-mining its bridges and even washing some of them away bodily. In several of the more outlying districts sheer famine began to grow imminent. The flocks and herds of the countryside were in still worse case than the wild deer which had escaped from their forest sanctuaries before the first of the snow and had been huddling about the village while it endured.

No word had come through from Mr. Jobling in all that time. And Captain Dove was almost beyond the end of his outworn patience before, scowling blackly out of the library window one day when the westerly gale had all but blown itself out, he caught sight of a shabby, sea-going, cargo-tramp, flying the Norwegian flag, which seemed to be seeking an anchorage behind the Small Isles at the mouth of the loch.

It was the Olive Branch. He would have known her in the dark, disguise or no disguise.

"Uh-hum!" he exclaimed, in an ecstasy of relief. "Now I can make things move a little at last. Now we\'ll soon see who\'s who here."

He dashed off a peremptory note to his chief engineer, put that in his pocket, clapped his smoked spectacles on his nose and his soft felt hat on his head, and made for the village, where he hoped to find, in the Jura Arms, a local poacher who would undertake an errand out to the steamer.

He found his man at the inn, and his credit there enabled him to drive a speedy bargain. It also helped him to pass the time contentedly enough till the fishing-boat returned from its wet trip with word for the public that the strange steamer had put into the loch on account of an accident in her engine-room which would delay her there for a little, although she would need no help from the village; and with a hasty private note from the chief engineer for Captain Dove—to the effect that Mr. Brasse refused to come ashore.

"Curse him!" snarled Captain Dove as his messenger retired to the bar again. "I suppose he\'s afraid of the police—though there isn\'t a policeman within thirty miles, and, even if there were, it wouldn\'t matter very much." And he sat down to compose another and still more peremptory note, bidding Brasse obey his lawful commands or take the consequences of disobedience.

He would have put off to the steamer himself but for the obvious reasons against that course. And, to induce his messenger to make the trip again after dark, he had to promise the man twice as much as for the first run, still outstanding.

When he finally emerged from the inn, in no very pleasant temper, he caught sight, first, of the weekly steamer already half way up the loch, inward bound, and then of Sallie at a bend of the road in the distance, on her way back to the castle from the village. There was some one with her. It was Carthew.

Captain Dove became still more incensed, and, his mind a good deal inflamed by his recent potations, set off up the hill in pursuit of them, breathing noisily, not even pausing to scowl at the children who scurried indoors as he passed with the skirts of his long black coat streaming out behind him.

He had heard from Slyne that Herries, the factor, had formally appointed the young American his deputy until he should be able to undertake his own duties again. And, in spite of all Slyne and he could say to Sallie, she had obstinately refused to assist in getting rid of Carthew. He had heard from Slyne that Carthew was making far too many occasions for seeing her, and when he had cautioned Sallie on that score she had shown no disposition at all to take his advice.

"I\'ve warned her often enough," he muttered with steadily rising wrath, "to quit monkeying with that fellow. And she\'ll get right out of hand now, unless I let her see, once and for all, who\'s going to be master here. Where would I come in if he managed to get married to her! He\'s got to go. That\'s all there is to it. I can\'t afford to have him hanging about here any longer."

The couple in front seemed to be in no hurry, however. He had almost overtaken them before he paused at a hazel-clump to cut himself a stout cudgel. By the time he had got that trimmed to his taste, they had almost reached the castle.

"I\'ll wait till she\'s gone in," said Captain Dove to himself. He had noticed that Carthew was carrying what looked like a woodman\'s axe. But that did not daunt him at all in his purpose. He lingered along the edge of an alder-thicket until at length Sallie shook hands in very friendly fashion with the young American and went her own way, while Carthew took to a trail through the woods and made off at a round pace, notwithstanding his limp, axe on shoulder, whistling blithely.

The path he was following wound in and out among plantations of pine and great groves of grey, leafless birches, until, at a distance of half a mile, it found the clear edge of the cliffs overlooking the circular inlet which forms the head of the loch, and finally faded away at the marge of a smooth plateau of bare rock enclosed on three sides by a thick tangle of woodland and rank undergrowth.

Captain Dove stalked him with all precaution, stepping from stone to stone among the wet snow which was rapidly melting, so that he might leave no traceable footprints on the soft, spongy soil or damp, dead leaves. And once, when Carthew halted to light a pipe, the old man, with murder in his mind, dropped into cover behind a moss-grown boulder at one side of the path—because that would have been a most unadvisable spot at which to attack a man armed with an axe. Then, as Carthew moved on, he once more took up the pursuit, through the clumps of bramble and bracken between the dark trunks of the firs about him.

Carthew stepped unconcernedly out of the dusk of the woods into the open space at the end of the path, and stopped there, axe on shoulder, to look about him. But Captain Dove did not immediately spring upon him as he had been minded to do, for he had just observed, at a corner of the convenient plateau, a round hut, stone-built and roofed with heather, which might or might not be inhabited. Captain Dove wormed his way round toward it, within the thicket.