"It was so."

"And grandfather, and his father--did they get ill, too, through the
barrel?"

He shook his head, and she snatched at his arm roughly.

"Wullie, ye're to tell me. I'm telling ye ye're to tell me, Wullie. I
never heard of them. How did they die? I shall ask father if you don't
tell me."

"Your great-grandfather killed his son in a quarrel, when your father
was a bit laddie of four. The next day he was found dead beside his
bar'l in the cellar."

The storm-water went swirling down by their feet, brown and frothing. It
went down and down as though Ben Grief were crying hopelessly for this
wild people he had cradled.

"I see, now, why he's glad I'm not a boy. Wullie--do all the Lashcairns
die--like that?" and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put
it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing
ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water.

"The men folk, yes. They canna rule themselves."

"And the women?" she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet
were all that were left.

"They keep away from the bar'l."