Introduced by J. B. Pick.

When a ship is wrecked on a rocky Highland coast in a wild night of a storm, Charlie MacIan drags a drowning seaman out of the pounding waves. The seaman is clinging to a wooden chest. Brought into a shelter, he is found to be dead—but was his death accidental? And did the chest once contain money?

These questions hang like a threat over the various members of a small community struggling to keep life going on a hard, relentless coast. It is a mystery in which Neil Gunn displays his skills as a writer of depth and subtlety and we emerge from the tale asking questions about the nature and meaning of community itself, and how it can survive in this bewildering and violent century.