And when he found his way to the Deil's Den, a low stone tower on a hill some six miles from Ardrochan, his favourite occupation was that of robber baron.

It would have been more proper to put the tower to its old use of a lair of a Highland cateran; but, to his shame, Tinker funked the dialect with which such a person must necessarily be cursed.
The Deil's Den had earned its name in earlier centuries from the bloody deeds of its first owners.

No gillie would go within a mile of it, even in bright sunshine.

Tinker's carelessness of its ghosts, a headless woman and a redheaded man with his throat cut, had won him the deepest respect of the village, or rather hamlet, of Ardrochan.

Twice he had constrained himself to wait in the tower till dusk, in the hope that his fearful, but inquiring, spirit would be gratified by the sight of one or other of these psychic curiosities.
It was a two-storied building, and its stone seemed likely to last as long as the hills from which it had been quarried.