Chapter I. The Man on the Kirkcaple Shore

Prester John

by John Buchan

I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little
I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often
that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and
disturb my waking hours. But I mind yet the cold grue of terror I
got from it, a terror which was surely more than the due of a few
truant lads breaking the Sabbath with their play.

The town of Kirkcaple, of which and its adjacent parish of
Portincross my father was the minister, lies on a hillside above the
little bay of Caple, and looks squarely out on the North Sea. Round
the horns of land which enclose the bay the coast shows on either
side a battlement of stark red cliffs through which a burn or two
makes a pass to the water's edge. The bay itself is ringed with fine
clean sands, where we lads of the burgh school loved to bathe in the
warm weather. But on long holidays the sport was to go farther
afield among the cliffs; for there there were many deep caves and
pools, where podleys might be caught with the line, and hid treasures
sought for at the expense of the skin of the knees and the buttons of
the trousers. Many a long Saturday I have passed in a crinkle of the
cliffs, having lit a fire of driftwood, and made believe that I was a
smuggler or a Jacobite new landed from France. There was a band of
us in Kirkcaple, lads of my own age, including Archie Leslie, the son
of my father's session-clerk, and Tam Dyke, the provost's nephew. We
were sealed to silence by the blood oath, and we bore each the name
of some historic pirate or sailorman. I was Paul Jones, Tam was
Captain Kidd, and Archie, need I say it, was Morgan himself. Our
tryst was a cave where a little water called the Dyve Burn had cut
its way through the cliffs to the sea. There we forgathered in the
summer evenings and of a Saturday afternoon in winter, and told
mighty tales of our prowess and flattered our silly hearts. But the
sober truth is that our deeds were of the humblest, and a dozen of
fish or a handful of apples was all our booty, and our greatest
exploit a fight with the roughs at the Dyve tan-work.

My father's spring Communion fell on the last Sabbath of April,
and on the particular Sabbath of which I speak the weather was mild
and bright for the time of year. I had been surfeited with the
Thursday's and Saturday's services, and the two long diets of worship
on the Sabbath were hard for a lad of twelve to bear with the spring
in his bones and the sun slanting through the gallery window. There
still remained the service on the Sabbath evening - a doleful
prospect, for the Rev. Mr Murdoch of Kilchristie, noted for the
length of his discourses, had exchanged pulpits with my father. So
my mind was ripe for the proposal of Archie Leslie, on our way home
to tea, that by a little skill we might give the kirk the slip. At
our Communion the pews were emptied of their regular occupants and
the congregation seated itself as it pleased. The manse seat was
full of the Kirkcaple relations of Mr Murdoch, who had been invited
there by my mother to hear him, and it was not hard to obtain
permission to sit with Archie and Tam Dyke in the cock-loft in the
gallery. Word was sent to Tam, and so it happened that three
abandoned lads duly passed the plate and took their seats in the
cock-loft. But when the bell had done jowing, and we heard by the
sounds of their feet that the elders had gone in to the kirk, we
slipped down the stairs and out of the side door. We were through
the churchyard in a twinkling, and hot-foot on the road to the Dyve
Burn. It was the fashion of the genteel in Kirkcaple to put their
boys into what were known as Eton suits - long trousers, cut- away
jackets, and chimney-pot hats. I had been one of the earliest
victims, and well I remember how I fled home from the Sabbath school
with the snowballs of the town roughs rattling off my chimney-pot.
Archie had followed, his family being in all things imitators of
mine. We were now clothed in this wearisome garb, so our first care
was to secrete safely our hats in a marked spot under some whin
bushes on the links. Tam was free from the bondage of fashion, and
wore his ordinary best knickerbockers. From inside his jacket he
unfolded his special treasure, which was to light us on our
expedition - an evil-smelling old tin lantern with a shutter.

Tam was of the Free Kirk persuasion, and as his Communion fell
on a different day from ours, he was spared the bondage of church
attendance from which Archie and I had revolted. But notable events
had happened that day in his church. A black man, the Rev. John
Something-or-other, had been preaching. Tam was full of the portent.
'A nagger,' 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 as 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 running in 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
fishermen 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 of wooden
boxes; a pile of driftwood for fires, and a heap of quartz in which
we thought we had found veins of gold - such was the modest
furnishing of our den. To this I must add some broken clay pipes,
with which we made believe to imitate our elders, smoking a foul
mixture of coltsfoot leaves and brown paper. The band was in
session, so following our ritual we sent out a picket. Tam was
deputed to go round the edge of the cliff from which the shore was
visible, and report if the coast was clear.

He returned in three minutes, his eyes round with amazement in
the lantern light. 'There's a fire on the sands,' he repeated, 'and
a man beside it.'

Here was news indeed. Without a word we made for the open,
Archie first, and Tam, who had seized and shuttered his lantern,
coming last. We crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered round,
and there sure enough, on the hard bit of sand which the tide had
left by the burn mouth, was a twinkle of light and a dark figure.

The moon was rising, and besides there was that curious sheen
from the sea which you will often notice in spring. The glow was
maybe a hundred yards distant, a little spark of fire I could have
put in my cap, and, from its crackling and smoke, composed of dry
seaweed and half-green branches from the burnside thickets. A man's
figure stood near it, and as we looked it moved round and round the
fire in circles which first of all widened and then contracted.

The sight was so unexpected, so beyond the beat of our
experience, that we were all a little scared. What could this
strange being want with a fire at half-past eight of an April Sabbath
night on the Dyve Burn sands? We discussed the thing in whispers
behind a boulder, but none of us had any solution. 'Belike he's come
ashore in a boat,' said Archie. 'He's maybe a foreigner.' But I
pointed out that, from the tracks which Archie himself had found, the
man must have come overland down the cliffs. Tam was clear he was a
madman, and was for withdrawing promptly from the whole business.

But some spell kept our feet tied there in that silent world of
sand and moon and sea. I remember looking back and seeing the
solemn, frowning faces of the cliffs, and feeling somehow shut in
with this unknown being in a strange union. What kind of errand had
brought this interloper into our territory? For a wonder I was less
afraid than curious. I wanted to get to the heart of the matter, and
to discover what the man was up to with his fire and his circles.

The same thought must have been in Archie's head, for he dropped
on his belly and began to crawl softly seawards. I followed, and
Tam, with sundry complaints, crept after my heels. Between the
cliffs and the fire lay some sixty yards of debris and boulders above
the level of all but the high spring tides. Beyond lay a string of
seaweedy pools and then the hard sands of the burnfoot. There was
excellent cover among the big stones, and apart from the distance and
the dim light, the man by the fire was too preoccupied in his task to
keep much look-out towards the land. I remember thinking he had
chosen his place well, for save from the sea he could not be seen.
The cliffs are so undercut that unless a watcher on the coast were on
their extreme edge he would not see the burnfoot sands.

Archie, the skilled tracker, was the one who all but betrayed
us. His knee slipped on the seaweed, and he rolled off a boulder,
bringing down with him a clatter of small stones. We lay as still as
mice, in terror lest the man should have heard the noise and have
come to look for the cause. By-and-by when I ventured to raise my
head above a flat-topped stone I saw that he was undisturbed. The
fire still burned, and he was pacing round it. On the edge of the
pools was an outcrop of red sandstone much fissured by the sea. Here
was an excellent vantage- ground, and all three of us curled behind
it, with our eyes just over the edge. The man was not twenty yards
off, and I could see clearly what manner of fellow he was. For one
thing he was huge of size, or so he seemed to me in the half-light.
He wore nothing but a shirt and trousers, and I could hear by the
flap of his feet on the sand that he was barefoot.

Suddenly Tam Dyke gave a gasp of astonishment. 'Gosh, it's the
black minister!' he said.

It was indeed a black man, as we saw when the moon came out of a
cloud. His head was on his breast, and he walked round the fire with
measured, regular steps. At intervals he would stop and raise both
hands to the sky, and bend his body in the direction of the moon.
But he never uttered a word.

'It's magic,' said Archie. 'He's going to raise Satan. We must
bide here and see what happens, for he'll grip us if we try to go
back. The moon's ower high.'

The procession continued as if to some slow music. I had been
in no fear of the adventure back there by our cave; but now that I
saw the thing from close at hand, my courage began to ebb. There was
something desperately uncanny about this great negro, who had shed
his clerical garments, and was now practising some strange magic
alone by the sea. I had no doubt it was the black art, for there was
that in the air and the scene which spelled the unlawful. As we
watched, the circles stopped, and the man threw something on the
fire. A thick smoke rose of which we could feel the aromatic scent,
and when it was gone the flame burned with a silvery blueness like
moonlight. Still no sound came from the minister, but he took
something from his belt, and began to make odd markings in the sand
between the inner circle and the fire. As he turned, the moon
gleamed on the implement, and we saw it was a great knife.

We were now scared in real earnest. Here were we, three boys,
at night in a lonely place a few yards from a savage with a knife.
The adventure was far past my liking, and even the intrepid Archie
was having qualms, if I could judge from his set face. As for Tam,
his teeth were chattering like a threshing-mill.

Suddenly I felt something soft and warm on the rock at my right
hand. I felt again, and, lo! it was the man's clothes. There were
his boots and socks, his minister's coat and his minister's hat.

This made the predicament worse, for if we waited till he
finished his rites we should for certain be found by him. At the
same time, to return over the boulders in the bright moonlight seemed
an equally sure way to discovery. I whispered to Archie, who was for
waiting a little longer. 'Something may turn up,' he said. It was
always his way.

I do not know what would have turned up, for we had no chance of
testing it. The situation had proved too much for the nerves of Tam
Dyke. As the man turned towards us in his bowings and bendings, Tam
suddenly sprang to his feet and shouted at him a piece of schoolboy
rudeness then fashionable in Kirkcaple.

'Wha called ye partan-face, my bonny man?' Then, clutching his
lantern, he ran for dear life, while Archie and I raced at his heels.
As I turned I had a glimpse of a huge figure, knife in hand,
bounding towards us.

Though I only saw it in the turn of a head, the face stamped
itself indelibly upon my mind. It was black, black as ebony, but it
was different from the ordinary negro. There were no thick lips and
flat nostrils; rather, if I could trust my eyes, the nose was
high-bridged, and the lines of the mouth sharp and firm. But it was
distorted into an expression of such a devilish fury and amazement
that my heart became like water.

We had a start, as I have said, of some twenty or thirty yards.
Among the boulders we were not at a great disadvantage, for a boy can
flit quickly over them, while a grown man must pick his way. Archie,
as ever, kept his wits the best of us. 'Make straight for the burn,'
he shouted in a hoarse whisper; we'll beat him on the slope.'

We passed the boulders and slithered over the outcrop of red
rock and the patches of sea-pink till we reached the channel of the
Dyve water, which flows gently among pebbles after leaving the gully.
Here for the first time I looked back and saw nothing. I stopped
involuntarily, and that halt was nearly my undoing. For our pursuer
had reached the burn before us, but lower down, and was coming up its
bank to cut us off.

At most times I am a notable coward, and in these days I was
still more of one, owing to a quick and easily-heated imagination.
But now I think I did a brave thing, though more by instinct than
resolution. Archie was running first, and had already splashed
through the burn; Tam came next, just about to cross, and the black
man was almost at his elbow. Another second and Tam would have been
in his clutches had I not yelled out a warning and made straight up
the bank of the burn. Tam fell into the pool - I could hear his
spluttering cry - but he got across; for I heard Archie call to him,
and the two vanished into the thicket which clothes all the left bank
of the gully. The pursuer, seeing me on his own side of the water,
followed straight on; and before I knew it had become a race between
the two of us.

I was hideously frightened, but not without hope, for the screes
and shelves of this right side of the gully were known to me from
many a day's exploring. I was light on my feet and uncommonly sound
in wind, being by far the best long- distance runner in Kirkcaple.
If I could only keep my lead till I reached a certain corner I knew
of, I could outwit my enemy; for it was possible from that place to
make a detour behind a waterfall and get into a secret path of ours
among the bushes. I flew up the steep screes, not daring to look
round; but at the top, where the rocks begin, I had a glimpse of my
pursuer. The man could run. Heavy in build though he was he was not
six yards behind me, and I could see the white of his eyes and the
red of his gums. I saw something else - a glint of white metal in
his hand. He still had his knife.

Fear sent me up the rocks like a seagull, and I scrambled and
leaped, making for the corner I knew of. Something told me that the
pursuit was slackening, and for a moment I halted to look round. A
second time a halt was nearly the end of me. A great stone flew
through the air, and took the cliff an inch from my head,
half-blinding me with splinters. And now I began to get angry. I
pulled myself into cover, skirted a rock till I came to my corner,
and looked back for the enemy. There he was scrambling by the way I
had come, and making a prodigious clatter among the stones. I picked
up a loose bit of rock and hurled it with all my force in his
direction. It broke before it reached him, but a considerable lump,
to my joy, took him full in the face. Then my terrors revived. I
slipped behind the waterfall and was soon in the thicket, and toiling
towards the top.

I think this last bit was the worst in the race, for my strength
was failing, and I seemed to hear those horrid steps at my heels. My
heart was in my mouth as, careless of my best clothes, I tore through
the hawthorn bushes. Then I struck the path and, to my relief, came
on Archie and Tam, who were running slowly in desperate anxiety about
my fate. We then took hands and soon reached the top of the
gully.

For a second we looked back. The pursuit had ceased, and far
down the burn we could hear the sounds as of some one going back to
the sands.

'Your face is bleeding, Davie. Did he get near enough to hit
you?' Archie asked.

'He hit me with a stone. But I gave him better. He's got a
bleeding nose to remember this night by.'

We did not dare take the road by the links, but made for the
nearest human habitation. This was a farm about half a mile inland,
and when we reached it we lay down by the stack- yard gate and
panted.

'I've lost my lantern,' said Tam. 'The big black brute! See if
I don't tell my father.'

'Ye'll do nothing of the kind,' said Archie fiercely. 'He knows
nothing about us and can't do us any harm. But if the story got out
and he found out who we were, he'd murder the lot of US.'

He made us swear secrecy, which we were willing enough to do,
seeing very clearly the sense in his argument. Then we struck the
highroad and trotted back at our best pace to Kirkcaple, fear of our
families gradually ousting fear of pursuit. In our excitement Archie
and I forgot about our Sabbath hats, reposing quietly below a whin
bush on the links.

We were not destined to escape without detection. As ill luck
would have it, Mr Murdoch had been taken ill with the stomach-ache
after the second psalm, and the congregation had been abruptly
dispersed. My mother had waited for me at the church door, and,
seeing no signs of her son, had searched the gallery. Then the truth
came out, and, had I been only for a mild walk on the links,
retribution would have overtaken my truantry. But to add to this I
arrived home with a scratched face, no hat, and several rents in my
best trousers. I was well cuffed and sent to bed, with the promise
of full-dress chastisement when my father should come home in the
morning.

My father arrived before breakfast next day, and I was duly and
soundly whipped. I set out for school with aching bones to add to
the usual depression of Monday morning. At the corner of the
Nethergate I fell in with Archie, who was staring at a trap carrying
two men which was coming down the street. It was the Free Church
minister - he had married a rich wife and kept a horse - driving the
preacher of yesterday to the railway station. Archie and I were in
behind a doorpost in a twinkling, so that we could see in safety the
last of our enemy. He was dressed in minister's clothes, with a heavy
fur-coat and a brand new yellow-leather Gladstone bag. He was
talking loudly as he passed, and the Free Church minister seemed to
be listening attentively. I heard his deep voice saying something
about the 'work of God in this place.' But what I noticed specially
- and the sight made me forget my aching hinder parts - was that he
had a swollen eye, and two strips of sticking-plaster on his
cheek.