CONTENTS

(Note: Chapter XII notation skipped in the print copy.)

DEDICATION.

JOHN SPLENDID.

CHAPTER I.  FROM THE FOREIGN FIELD.

CHAPTER II.  GILLESBEG GRUAMACH.

CHAPTER III.  THE LADY ON THE STAIR.

CHAPTER IV.  A NIGHT ALARM.

CHAPTER V.  KIRK LAW.

CHAPTER VI.  MY LADY OF MOODS.

CHAPTER VII.  CHILDREN OF THE MIST.

CHAPTER VIII.  THE BALE-FIRES ON THE BENS.

CHAPTER IX.  INVASION.

CHAPTER X.  THE FLIGHT TO THE FOREST.

CHAPTER XI.  ON BENS OF WAR.

CHAPTER XIII.  WHERE TREADS THE DEER.

CHAPTER XIV.  MY LADY AND THE CHILD.

CHAPTER XV.  CONFESSIONS OF A MARQUIS.

CHAPTER XVI.  OUR MARCH FOR LOCHABER.

CHAPTER XVII.  IN THE LAND OF LORN.

CHAPTER XVIII.  BARD OF KEPPOCH.

CHAPTER XIX.  THE MIRACULOUS JOURNEY.

CHAPTER XX.  INVERLOCHY.

CHAPTER XXI.  SEVEN BROKEN MEN.

CHAPTER XXII.  DAME DUBH.

CHAPTER XXIII.  THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.

CHAPTER XXIV.  A NIGHT’S SHELTER.

CHAPTER XXV.  THE ANGRY EAVESDROPPER.

CHAPTER XXVI.  TRAPPED.

CHAPTER XXVII.  A TAVERN IN THE WILDS.

CHAPTER XXVIII.  LOST ON THIS MOOR OF KANNOCH.

CHAPTER XXIX.  THE RETURN.

CHAPTER XXX.  ARGILE’S BEDROOM.

CHAPTER XXXI.  MISTRESS BETTY.

CHAPTER XXXII.  A SCANDAL AND A QUARREL.

CHAPTER XXXIII.    THE BROKEN SWORD.

CHAPTER XXXIV.  LOVE IN THE WOODS.

CHAPTER XXXV.  FAREWELL.

To read this tale, dear Hugh, without any association of its incidents with the old respectable chronicles of the Historians is what I should wish you could always do. That is the happy manner with Romance; that is the enviable aptness of the child. But when (by the favour of God) you grow older and more reflective, seeking perhaps for more in these pages than they meant to give, you may wonder that the streets, the lanes, the tenements herein set forth so much resemble those we know to-day, though less than two hundred years ago the bracken waved upon their promontory. You may wonder, too, that the Silver Mines of Coillebhraid, discovered in the time of your greatgrandfather, should have so strangely been anticipated in the age of Gillesbeg Gruamach. Let not those chronological divergences perturb you; they were in the manuscript (which you will be good enough to assume) of Elrigmore, and I would not alter them. Nor do I diminish by a single hour Elrigmore’s estimate that two days were taken on the Miraculous Journey to Inverlochy, though numerous histories have made it less. In that, as in a few other details, Elrigmore’s account is borne out by one you know to whom The Little Wars of Lorn and Lochaber are yet, as it were, an impulse of yesterday, and the name of Athole is utterly detestable.

I give you this book, dear Hugh, not for History, though a true tale—a sad old tale—is behind it, but for a picture of times and manners, of a country that is dear to us in every rock and valley, of a people we know whose blood is ours. And that you may grow in wisdom as in years, and gain the riches of affection, and escape the giants of life as Connal did the giants of Erin O, in our winter tale, is my fervent prayer.

N. M.

September 1898.

Many a time, in college or in camp, I had planned the style of my home-coming. Master Webster, in the Humanities, droning away like a Boreraig bagpipe, would be sending my mind back to Shira Glen, its braes and corries and singing waters, and Ben Bhuidhe over all, and with my chin on a hand I would ponder on how I should go home again when this weary scholarship was over. I had always a ready fancy and some of the natural vanity of youth, so I could see myself landing off the lugger at the quay of Inneraora town, three inches more of a man than when I left with a firkin of herring and a few bolls of meal for my winter’s provand; thicker too at the chest, and with a jacket of London green cloth with brass buttons. Would the fishermen about the quay-head not lean over the gun’les of their skiffs and say, “There goes young Elrigmore from Colleging, well-knit in troth, and a pretty lad”? I could hear (all in my daydream in yon place of dingy benches) the old women about the well at the town Cross say, “Oh laochain! thou art come back from the Galldach, and Glascow College; what a thousand curious things thou must know, and what wisdom thou must have, but never a change on thine affability to the old and to the poor!” But it was not till I had run away from Glascow College, and shut the boards for good and all, as I thought, on my humane letters and history, and gone with cousin Gavin to the German wars in Mackay’s Corps of true Highlanders, that I added a manlier thought to my thinking of the day when I should come home to my native place. I’ve seen me in the camp at night, dog-wearied after stoury marching on their cursed foreign roads, keeping my eyes open and the sleep at an arm’s-length, that I might think of Shira Glen. Whatever they may say of me or mine, they can never deny but I had the right fond heart for my own countryside, and I have fought men for speaking of its pride and poverty—their ignorance, their folly!—for what did they ken of the Highland spirit? I would be lying in the lap of the night, and my Ferrara sword rolled in my plaid as a pillow for my head, fancying myself—all those long wars over, march, siege, and sack—riding on a good horse down the pass of Aora and through the arches into the old town. Then, it was not the fishermen or the old women I thought of, but the girls, and the winking stars above me were their eyes, glinting merrily and kindly on a stout young gentleman soldier with jack and morion, sword at haunch, spur at heel, and a name for bravado never a home-biding laird in our parish had, burgh or landward. I would sit on my horse so, the chest well out, the back curved, the knees straight, one gauntlet off to let my white hand wave a salute when needed, and none of all the pretty ones would be able to say Elrigmore thought another one the sweetest Oh! I tell you we learnt many arts in the Lowland wars, more than they teach Master of Art in the old biggin’ in the Hie Street of Glascow.

One day, at a place called Nordlingen near the Mid Franken, binding a wound Gavin got in the sword-arm, I said, “What’s your wish at this moment, cousin?”

He looked at me with a melting eye, and the flush hove to his face.

“‘Fore God, Colin,” said he, “I would give my twelve months’ wage to stand below the lintel of my mother’s door and hear her say ‘Darling scamp!’”

“If you had your wish, Gavin, when and how would you go into Inneraora town after those weary years away?”

“Man, I’ve made that up long syne,” said he, and the tear was at his cheek. “Let me go into it cannily at night-fall from the Cromalt end, when the boys and girls were dancing on the green to the pipes at the end of a harvest-day. Them in a reel, with none of the abulziements of war about me, but a plain civil lad like the rest, I would join in the strathspey and kiss two or three of the girls ere ever they jaloused a stranger was among them.”

Poor Gavin, good Gavin! he came home no way at all to his mother and his mountains; but here was I, with some of his wish for my fortune, riding cannily into Inneraora town in the dark.

It is wonderful how travel, even in a marching company of cavaliers of fortune, gives scope to the mind. When I set foot, twelve years before this night I speak of, on the gabert that carried me down to Dunbarton on my way to the Humanities classes, I could have sworn I was leaving a burgh most large and wonderful. The town houses of old Stonefield, Craignish, Craignure, Asknish, and the other cadets of Clan Campbell, had such a strong and genteel look; the windows, all but a very few, had glass in every lozen, every shutter had a hole to let in the morning light, and each door had its little ford of stones running across the gutter that sped down the street, smelling fishily a bit, on its way to the shore. For me, in those days, each close that pierced the tall lands was as wide and high as a mountain eas, the street itself seemed broad and substantial, crowded with people worth kenning for their graces and the many things they knew.

I came home now on this night of nights with Munchen and Augsburg, and the fine cities of all the France, in my mind, and I tell you I could think shame of this mean rickle of stones I had thought a town, were it not for the good hearts and kind I knew were under every roof. The broad street crowded with people, did I say? A little lane rather; and Elrigmore, with schooling and the wisdom of travel, felt he could see into the heart’s core of the cunningest merchant in the place.

But anyway, here I was, riding into town from the Cromalt end on a night in autumn. It was after ten by my Paris watch when I got the length of the Creags, and I knew that there was nothing but a sleeping town before me, for our folks were always early bedders when the fishing season was on. The night hung thick with stars, but there was no moon; a stiff wind from the east prinked at my right ear and cooled my horse’s skin, as he slowed down after a canter of a mile or two on this side of Pennymore. Out on the loch I could see the lights of a few herring-boats lift and fall at the end of their trail of nets.

“Too few of you there for the town to be busy and cheerful,” said I to myself; “no doubt the bulk of the boats are down at Otter, damming the fish in the narrow gut, and keeping them from searching up to our own good townsmen.”

I pressed my brute to a trot, and turned round into the nether part of the town. It was what I expected—the place was dark, black out. The people were sleeping; the salt air of Loch Finne went sighing through the place in a way that made me dowie for old days. We went over the causeway-stones with a clatter that might have wakened the dead, but no one put a head out, and I thought of the notion of a cheery home-coming poor Gavin had—my dear cousin, stroked out and cold under foreign clods at Velshiem, two leagues below the field of Worms of Hessen, on the banks of the Rhine, in Low Germanie.

It is a curious business this riding into a town in the dark waste of night; curious even in a strange town when all are the same for you that sleep behind those shutters and those doors, but doubly curious when you know that behind the dark fronts are folk lying that you know well, that have been thinking, and drinking, and thriving when you were far away. As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front, “Yonder’s my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on the pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?” At another, “There is the garret window of the schoolmaster’s daughter—does she sing so sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?”

In the dead middle of the street I pulled my horse up, just to study the full quietness of the hour. Leaning over, I put a hand on his nostrils and whispered in his ear for a silence, as we do abroad in ambuscade. Town Innera-ora slept sound, sure enough! All to hear was the spilling of the river at the cascade under the bridge and the plopping of the waves against the wall we call the ramparts, that keeps the sea from thrashing on the Tolbooth. And then over all I could hear a most strange moaning sound, such as we boys used to make with a piece of lath nicked at the edges and swung hurriedly round the head by a string. It was made by the wind, I knew, for it came loudest in the gusty bits of the night and from the east, and when there was a lull I could hear it soften away and end for a second or two with a dunt, as if some heavy, soft thing struck against wood.

Whatever it was, the burghers of Inneraora paid no heed, but slept, stark and sound, behind their steeked shutters.

The solemnity of the place that I knew so much better in a natural lively mood annoyed me, and I played there and then a prank more becoming a boy in his first kilt than a gentleman of education and travel and some repute for sobriety. I noticed I was opposite the house of a poor old woman they called Black Kate, whose door was ever the target in my young days for every lad that could brag of a boot-toe, and I saw that the shutter, hanging ajee on one hinge, was thrown open against the harled wall of the house. In my doublet-pocket there were some carabeen bullets, and taking one out, I let bang at the old woman’s little lozens. There was a splinter of glass, and I waited to see if any one should come out to find who had done the damage. My trick was in vain; no one came. Old Kate, as I found next day, was dead since Martinmas, and her house was empty.

Still the moaning sound came from the town-head, and I went slowly riding in its direction. It grew clearer and yet uncannier as I sped on, and mixed with the sough of it I could hear at last the clink of chains.

“What in God’s name have I here?” said I to myself, turning round Islay Campbell’s corner, and yonder was my answer!

The town gibbets were throng indeed! Two corpses swung in the wind, like net bows on a drying-pole, going from side to side, making the woeful sough and clink of chains, and the dunt I had heard when the wind dropped.

I grued more at the sound of the soughing than at the sight of the hanged fellows, for I’ve seen the Fell Sergeant in too many ugly fashions to be much put about at a hanging match. But it was such a poor home-coming! It told me as plain as could be, what I had heard rumours of in the low country, riding round from the port of Leith, that the land was uneasy, and that pit and gallows were bye-ordinar busy at the gates of our castle. When I left for my last session at Glascow College, the countryside was quiet as a village green, never a raider nor a reiver in the land, and so poor the Doomster’s trade (Black George) that he took to the shoeing of horses.

“There must be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed,” I thought, “when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard’s convoy on either hand to prop it up.”

But it was no time for meditation. Through the rags of plaiding on the chains went the wind again so eerily that I bound to be off, and I put my horse to it, bye the town-head and up the two miles to Glen Shira. I was sore and galled sitting on the saddle; my weariness hung at the back of my legs and shoulders like an ague, and there was never a man in this world came home to his native place so eager for taking supper and sleep as young Elrigmore.

What I expected at my father’s door I am not going to set down here. I went from it a fool, with not one grace about me but the love of my good mother, and the punishment I had for my hot and foolish cantrip was many a wae night on foreign fields, vexed to the core for the sore heart I had left at home.

My mind, for all my weariness, was full of many things, and shame above all, as I made for my father’s house. The horse had never seen Glen Shira, but it smelt the comfort of the stable and whinnied cheerfully as I pulled up at the gate. There was but one window to the gable-end of Elrigmore, and it was something of a surprise to me to find a light in it, for our people were not overly rich in these days, and candle or cruisie was wont to be doused at bedtime. More was my surprise when, leading my horse round to the front, feeling my way in the dark by memory, I found the oak door open and my father, dressed, standing in the light of it.

A young sgalag came running to the reins, and handing them to him, I stepped into the light of the door, my bonnet in my hand.

“Step in, sir, caird or gentleman,” said my father—looking more bent at the shoulder than twelve years before.

I went under the door-lintel, and stood a little abashed before him.

“Colin! Colin!” he cried in the Gaelic “Did I not ken it was you?” and he put his two hands on my shoulders.

“It is Colin sure enough, father dear,” I said, slipping readily enough into the mother tongue they did their best to get out of me at Glascow College. “Is he welcome in this door?” and the weariness weighed me down at the hip and bowed my very legs.

He gripped me tight at the elbows, and looked me hungrily in the face.

“If you had a murdered man’s head in your oxter, Colin,” said he, “you were still my son. Colin, Colin! come ben and put off your boots!”

“Mother———” I said, but he broke in on my question.

“Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you never went to with my will, and you’ll find stirring times here at your own parish. It’s the way of the Sennachies’ stories.”

“How is that, sir?”

“They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane.”

I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my heart, and my father was doing what I should have known was my mother’s office if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor—he was laying on the board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red Bordeaux wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for cured herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling sleepily at my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort of thing I never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this petting, which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had the luck to have one.

“You are tired, Colin, my boy?” he said.

“A bit, father, a bit,” I answered; “rough roads you know. I was landed at break of day at Skipness and—Is mother———?”

“Sit in, laochain! Did you meet many folks on the road?”

“No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the field.”

“Ay, ay, lad, so they are,” said my father, pulling back his shoulders a bit—a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good swordsmanship in his younger days.

I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and never the last to sneck the outer door.

“Did you expect any one, father,” I asked, “that you should be waiting up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?”

“There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin,” said he, turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like a wife spaeing fortunes—for sheer want, I could see, of some engagement for his eyes. “I could never get away with the notion that some way like this at night would ye come back to Elngmore.”

“Mother would miss me?”

“She did, Colin, she did; I’m not denying.”

“She’ll be bedded long syne, no doubt, father?”

My father looked at me and gulped at the throat.

“Bedded indeed, poor Colin,” said he, “this very day in the clods of Kilmalieu!”

And that was my melancholy home-coming to my father’s house of Elngmore, in the parish of Glcnaora, in the shire of Argile.

Every land, every glen or town, I make no doubt, has its own peculiar air or atmosphere that one familiar with the same may never puzzle about in his mind, but finds come over him with a waft at odd moments like the scent of bog-myrtle and tansy in an old clothes-press. Our own air in Glen Shira had ever been very genial and encouraging to me. Even when a young lad, coming back from the low country or the scaling of school, the cool fresh breezes of the morning and the riper airs of the late afternoon went to my head like a mild white wine; very heartsome too, rousing the laggard spirit that perhaps made me, before, over-apt to sit and dream of the doing of grand things instead of putting out a hand to do them. In Glascow the one thing that I had to grumble most about next to the dreary hours of schooling was the clammy air of street and close; in Germanie it was worse, a moist weakening windiness full of foreign smells, and I’ve seen me that I could gaily march a handful of leagues to get a sniff of the salt sea. Not that I was one who craved for wrack and bilge at my nose all the time. What I think best is a stance inland from the salt water, where the mountain air, brushing over gall and heather, takes the sting from the sea air, and the two blended give a notion of the fine variousness of life. We had a herdsman once in Elrigmore, who could tell five miles up the glen when the tide was out on Loch Firme. I was never so keen-scented as that, but when I awakened next day in a camceiled room in Elrigmore, and put my head out at the window to look around, I smelt the heather for a second like an escapade in a dream.

Down to Ealan Eagal I went for a plunge in the linn in the old style, and the airs of Shira Glen hung about me like friends and lovers, so well acquaint and jovial.

Shira Glen, Shira Glen! if I was bard I’d have songs to sing to it, and all I know is one sculduddry verse on a widow that dwelt in Maam! There, at the foot of my father’s house, were the winding river, and north and south the brown hills, split asunder by God’s goodness, to give a sample of His bounty. Maam, Elrigmore and Elrigbeg, Kilblaan and Ben Bhuidhe—their steep sides hung with cattle, and below crowded the reeking homes of tacksman and cottar; the bums poured hurriedly to the flat beneath their borders of hazel and ash; to the south, the fresh water we call Dubh Loch, flapping with ducks and fringed with shelisters or water-flags and bulrush, and farther off the Cowal hills; to the north, the wood of Drimlee and the wild pass the red Macgregors sometimes took for a back-road to our cattle-folds in cloud of night and darkness. Down on it all shone the polished and hearty sun, birds chinned on every tree, though it was late in the year; blackcock whirred across the alders, and sturdy heifers bellowed tunefully, knee-deep at the ford.

“Far have I wandered,” thought I to myself, “warring other folk’s wars for the humour of it and small wages, but here’s the one place I’ve seen yet that was worth hacking good steel for in earnest!”

But still my heart was sore for mother, and sore, too, for the tale of changed times in Campbell country my father told me over a breakfast of braddan, fresh caught in a creel from the Gearron river, oaten bannock, and cream.

After breakfast I got me into my kilt for town. There are many costumes going about the world, but, with allowance for every one, I make bold to think our own tartan duds the gallantest of them all. The kilt was my wear when first I went to Glascow College, and many a St Mungo keelie, no better than myself at classes or at English language, made fun of my brown knees, sometimes not to the advantage of his headpiece when it came to argument and neifs on the Fleshers’ Haugh. Pulling on my old breacan this morning in Elrigmore was like donning a fairy garb, and getting back ten years of youth. We have a way of belting on the kilt in real Argile I have seen nowhere else. Ordinarily, our lads take the whole web of tartan cloth, of twenty ells or more, and coil it once round their middle, there belting it, and bring the free end up on the shoulder to pin with a brooch—not a bad fashion for display and long marches and for sleeping out on the hill with, but somewhat discommodious for warm weather. It was our plan sometimes to make what we called a philabeg, or little kilt, maybe eight yards long, gathered in at the haunch and hung in many pleats behind, the plain brat part in front decked off with a leather sporran, tagged with thong points tied in knots, and with no plaid on the shoulder. I’ve never seen a more jaunty and suitable garb for campaigning, better by far for short sharp tulzies with an enemy than the philamore or the big kilt our people sometimes throw off them in a skirmish, and fight (the coarsest of them) in their gartered hose and scrugged bonnets.

With my kilt and the memory of old times about me, I went walking down to Inneraora in the middle of the day. I was prepared for change from the complaints of my father, but never for half the change I found in the burgh town of MacCailein Mor. In my twelve foreign years the place was swamped by incomers, black unwelcome Covenanters from the shires of Air and Lanrick—Brices, Yuilles, Rodgers, and Richies—all brought up here by Gillesbeg Gruamach, Marquis of Argile, to teach his clans the arts of peace and merchandise. Half the folk I met between the arches and the Big Barns were strangers that seemingly never had tartan on their hurdies, but settled down with a firm foot in the place, I could see by the bold look of them as I passed on the plain-stanes of the street A queer town this on the edge of Loch Finne, and far in the Highlands! There were shops with Lowland stuffs in them, and over the doors signboards telling of the most curious trades for a Campbell burgh—horologers, cordiners, baxters, and such like mechanicks that I felt sure poor Donald had small call for. They might be incomers, but they were thirled to Gillesbeg all the same, as I found later on.

It was the court day, and his lordship was sitting in judgment on two Strathlachlan fellows, who had been brawling at the Cross the week before and came to knives, more in a frolic than in hot blood, with some of the town lads. With two or three old friends I went into the Tolbooth to see the play—for play it was, I must confess, in town Inneraora, when justice was due to a man whose name by ill-luck was not Campbell, or whose bonnet-badge was not the myrtle stem.

The Tolbooth hall was, and is to this day, a spacious high-ceiled room, well lighted from the bay-side. It was crowded soon after we got in, with Cowalside fishermen and townpeople all the one way or the other—for or against the poor lads in bilboes, who sat, simple-looking enough, between the town officers, a pair of old bodachs in long scarlet coats and carrying tuaghs, Lochaber axes, or halberds that never smelt blood since they came from the smith.

It was the first time ever I saw Gillesbeg Gruamach sitting on the bench, and I was startled at the look of the man. I’ve seen some sour dogs in my day—few worse than Ruthven’s rittmasters whom we met in Swabia—but I never saw a man who, at the first vizzy, had the dour sour countenance of Archibald, Marquis of Argile and Lord of Lochow. Gruamach, or grim-faced, our good Gaels called him in a bye-name, and well he owned it, for over necklace or gorget I’ve seldom seen a sterner jowl or a more sinister eye. And yet, to be fair and honest, this was but the notion one got at a first glint; in a while I thought little was amiss with his looks as he leaned on the table and cracked in a humoursome laughing way with the paneled jury.

He might have been a plain cottar on Glen Aora side rather than King of the Highlands for all the airs he assumed, and when he saw me, better put-on in costume than my neighbours in court, he seemingly asked my name in a whisper from the clerk beside him, and finding who I was, cried out in St Andrew’s English—

“What! Young Elrigmore back to the Glens! I give you welcome, sir, to Baile Inneraora!”

I but bowed, and in a fashion saluted, saying nothing in answer, for the whole company glowered at me, all except the home-bred ones who had better manners.

The two MacLachlans denied in the Gaelic the charge the sheriff clerk read to them in a long farrago of English with more foreign words to it than ever I learned the sense of in College.

His lordship paid small heed to the witnesses who came forward to swear to the unruliness of the Strathlachlan men, and the jury talked heedlessly with one another in a fashion scandalous to see. The man who had been stabbed—it was but a jag at the shoulder, where the dirk had gone through from front to back with only some lose of blood—was averse from being hard on the panels. He was a jocular fellow with the right heart for a duello, and in his nipped burgh Gaelic he made light of the disturbance and his injury.

“Nothing but a bit play, my jurymen—MacCailein—my lordship—a bit play. If the poor lad didn’t happen to have his dirk out and I to run on it, nobody was a bodle the worse.”

“But the law”—started the clerk to say.

“No case for law at all,” said the man. “It’s an honest brawl among friends, and I could settle the account with them at the next market-day, when my shoulder’s mended.”

“Better if you would settle my account for your last pair of brogues, Alasdair M’Iver,” said a black-avised juryman.

“What’s your trade?” asked the Marquis of the witness.

“I’m at the Coillebhraid silver-mines,” said he. “We had a little too much drink, or these MacLachlan gentlemen and I had never come to variance.”

The Marquis gloomed at the speaker and brought down his fist with a bang on the table before him.

“Damn those silver-mines!” said he; “they breed more trouble in this town of mine than I’m willing to thole. If they put a penny in my purse it might not be so irksome, but they plague me sleeping and waking, and I’m not a plack the richer. If it were not to give my poor cousin, John Splendid, a chance of a living and occupation for his wits, I would drown them out with the water of Cromalt Burn.”

The witness gave a little laugh, and ducking his head oddly like one taking liberties with a master, said, “We’re a drouthy set, my lord, at the mines, and I wouldn’t be saying but what we might drink them dry again of a morning, if we had been into town the night before.”

His lordship cut short his sour smile at the man’s fancy, and bade the officers on with the case.

“You have heard the proof,” he said to the jury when it came to his turn to charge them. “Are they guilty, or not? If the question was put to me I should say the Laird of MacLachlan, arrant Papist! should keep his men at home to Mass on the other side of the loch instead of loosing them on honest, or middling honest, Campbells, for the strict virtue of these Coillebhraid miners is what I am not going to guarantee.”

Of course the fellows were found guilty—one of stabbing, the other of art and part—for MacLachlan was no friend of MacCailein Mor, and as little friend to the merchant burghers of Inneraora, for he had the poor taste to buy his shop provand from the Lamont towns of Low Cowal.

“A more unfriendly man to the Laird of MacLachlan might be for hanging you on the gibbet at the town-head,” said his lordship to the prisoners, spraying ink-sand idly on the clean page of a statute-book as he spoke; “but our three trees upbye are leased just now to other tenants,—Badenoch hawks a trifle worse than yourselves, and more deserving.”

The men looked stupidly about them, knowing not one word of his lordship’s English, and he was always a man who disdained to converse much in Erse. He looked a little cruelly at them and went on.

“Perhaps clipping your lugs might be the bonniest way of showing you what we think of such on-goings in honest Inneraora; or getting the Doomster to bastinado you up and down the street But we’ll try what a fortnight in the Tolbooth may do to amend your visiting manners. Take them away, officers.”

“Abair moran taing—say ‘many thanks’ to his lordship,” whispered one of the red-coat halberdiers in the ear of the bigger of the two prisoners. I could hear the command distinctly where I sat, well back in the court, and so no doubt could Gillesbeg Gruamach, but he was used to such obsequious foolishness and he made no dissent or comment.

“Taing! taing!” said one spokesman of the two MacLachlans in his hurried Cowal Gaelic, and his neighbour, echoing him word for word in the comic fashion they have in these parts; “Taing! taing! I never louted to the horseman that rode over me yet, and I would be ill-advised to start with the Gruamach one!”

The man’s face flushed up as he spoke. It’s a thing I’ve noticed about our own poor Gaelic men: speaking before them in English or Scots, their hollow look and aloofness would give one the notion that they lacked sense and sparkle; take the muddiest-looking among them and challenge him in his own tongue, and you’ll find his face fill with wit and understanding.

I was preparing to leave the court-room, having many people to call on in Inneraora, and had turned with my two friends to the door, when a fellow brushed in past us—a Highlander, I could see, but in trews—and he made to go forward into the body of the court, as if to speak to his lordship, now leaning forward in a cheerful conversation with the Provost of the burgh, a sonsy gentleman in a peruke and figured waistcoat.

“Who is he, this bold fellow?” I asked one of my friends, pausing with a foot on the door-step, a little surprised at the want of reverence to MacCailein in the man’s bearing.

“Iain Aluinn—John Splendid,” said my friend. We were talking in the Gaelic, and he made a jocular remark there is no English for. Then he added, “A poor cousin of the Marquis, a M’Iver Campbell (on the wrong side), with little schooling, but some wit and gentlemanly parts. He has gone through two fortunes in black cattle, fought some fighting here and there, and now he manages the silver-mines so adroitly that Gillesbeg Gruamach is ever on the brink of getting a big fortune, but never done launching out a little one instead to keep the place going. A decent soul the Splendid! throughither a bit, and better at promise than performance, but at the core as good as gold, and a fellow you would never weary of though you tramped with him in a thousand glens. We call him Splendid, not for his looks but for his style.”

The object of my friend’s description was speaking into the ear of MacCailein Mor by this time, and the Marquis’s face showed his tale was interesting, to say the least of it.

We waited no more, but went out into the street I was barely two closes off from the Tolbooth when a messenger came running after me, sent by the Marquis, who asked if I would oblige greatly by waiting till he made up on me. I went back, and met his lordship with his kinsman and mine-manager coming out of the court-room together into the lobby that divided the place from the street.

“Oh, Elrigmore!” said the Marquis, in an offhand jovial and equal way; “I thought you would like to meet my cousin here—M’Iver of the Barbreck; something of a soldier like yourself, who has seen service in Lowland wars.”

“In the Scots Brigade, sir?” I asked M’lver, eyeing him with greater interest than ever. He was my senior by about a dozen years seemingly, a neat, well-built fellow, clean-shaven, a little over the middle height, carrying a rattan in his hand, though he had a small sword tucked under the skirt of his coat.

“With Lumsden’s regiment,” he said. “His lordship here has been telling me you have just come home from the field.”

“But last night. I took the liberty while Inneraora was snoring. You were before my day in foreign service, and yet I thought I knew by repute every Campbell that ever fought for the hard-won dollars of Gustavus even before my day. There were not so many of them from the West Country.”

“I trailed a pike privately,” laughed M’lver, “and for the honour of Clan Diarmaid I took the name Munro. My cousin here cares to have none of his immediate relatives make a living by steel at any rank less than a cornal’s, or a major’s at the very lowest Frankfort, and Landsberg, and the stark field of Leipzig were the last I saw of foreign battles, and the God’s truth is they were my bellyful. I like a bit splore, but give it to me in our old style, with the tartan instead of buff, and the target for breastplate and taslets. I came home sick of wars.”

“Our friend does himself injustice, my dear Elrigmore,” said Argile, smiling; “he came home against his will, I have no doubt, and I know he brought back with him a musketoon bullet in the hip, that couped him by the heels down in Glassary for six months.”

“The result,” M’Iver hurried to exclaim, but putting out his breast with a touch of vanity, “of a private rencontre, an affair of my own with a Reay gentleman, and not to be laid to my credit as part of the war’s scaith at all.”

“You conducted your duello in odd style under Lums-den, surely,” said I, “if you fought with powder and ball instead of steel, which is more of a Highlander’s weapon to my way of thinking. All our affairs in the Reay battalion were with claymore—sometimes with targe, sometimes wanting.”

“This was a particular business of our own,” laughed John Splendid (as I may go on to call M’lver, for it was the name he got oftenest behind and before in Argile). “It was less a trial of valour than a wager about which had the better skill with the musket. If I got the bullet in my groin, I at least showed the Mackay gentleman in question that an Argile man could handle arquebus as well as arme blanche as we said in the France. I felled my man at one hundred and thirty paces, with six to count from a ritt-master’s signal. Blow, present, God sain Mackay’s soul! But I’m not given to braggadocio.”

“Not a bit, cousin,” said the Marquis, looking quizzingly at me.

“I could not make such good play with the gun against a fort gable at so many feet,” said I.

“You could, sir, you could,” said John Splendid in an easy, offhand, flattering way, that gave me at the start of our acquaintance the whole key to his character. “I’ve little doubt you could allow me half-a-dozen paces and come closer on the centre of the target.”

By this time we were walking down the street, the Marquis betwixt the pair of us commoners, and I to the left side. Lowlanders and Highlanders quickly got out of the way before us and gave us the crown of the causeway. The main part of them the Marquis never let his eye light on; he kept his nose cocked in the air in the way I’ve since found peculiar to his family. It was odd to me that had in wanderings got to look on all honest men as equal (except Camp-Master Generals and Pike Colonels), to see some of his lordship’s poor clansmen cringing before him. Here indeed was the leaven of your low-country scum, for in all the broad Highlands wandering before and since I never saw the like! “Blood of my blood, brother of my name!” says our good Gaelic old-word: it made no insolents in camp or castle, yet it kept the poorest clansmen’s head up before the highest chief. But there was, even in Baile Inneraora, sinking in the servile ways of the incomer, something too of honest worship in the deportment of the people. It was sure enough in the manner of an old woman with a face peat-tanned to crinkled leather who ran out of the Vennel or lane, and, bending to the Marquis his lace wrist-bands, kissed them as I’ve seen Papists do the holy duds in Notre Dame and Bruges Kirk.

This display before me, something of a stranger, a little displeased Gillesbeg Gruamach. “Tut, tut!” he cried in Gaelic to the cailltach, “thou art a foolish old woman!”

“God keep thee, MacCailein!” said she; “thy daddy put his hand on my head like a son when he came back from his banishment in Spain, and I keened over thy mother dear when she died. The hair of Peggy Bheg’s head is thy door-mat, and her son’s blood is thy will for a foot-bath.”

“Savage old harridan!” cried the Marquis, jerking away; but I could see he was not now unpleased altogether that a man new from the wide world and its ways should behold how much he was thought of by his people.

He put his hands in a friendly way on the shoulders of us on either hand of him, and brought us up a bit round turn, facing him at a stand-still opposite the door of the English kirk. To this day I mind well the rumour of the sea that came round the corner.

“I have a very particular business with both you gentlemen,” he said. “My friend here, M’Iver, has come hot-foot to tell me of a rumour that a body of Irish banditry under Alasdair MacDonald, the MacColkitto as we call him, has landed somewhere about Kinlochaline or Knoydart This portends damnably, if I, an elder ordained of this kirk, may say so. We have enough to do with the Athole gentry and others nearer home. It means that I must on with plate and falchion again, and out on the weary road for war I have little stomach for, to tell the truth.”

“You’re able for the best of them, MacCailein,” cried John Splendid, in a hot admiration. “For a scholar you have as good judgment on the field and as gallant a seat on the saddle as any man ever I saw in haberschone and morion. With your schooling I could go round the world conquering.”

“Ah! flatterer, flatterer! Ye have all the guile of the tongue our enemies give Clan Campbell credit for, and that I wish I had a little more of. Still and on, it’s no time for fair words. Look! Elrigmore. You’ll have heard of our kittle state in this shire for the past ten years, and not only in this shire but all over the West Highlands. I give you my word I’m no sooner with the belt off me and my chair pulled in to my desk and papers than its some one beating a point of war or a piper blowing the warning under my window. To look at my history for the past few years any one might think I was Dol’ Gorm himself, fight and plot, plot and fight! How can I help it—thrust into this hornets’ nest from the age of sixteen, when my father (beannachd leis!) took me out warring against the islesmen, and I only in the humour for playing at shinty or fishing like the boys on the moor-lochs behind the town. I would sooner be a cottar in Auchnagoul down there, with porridge for my every meal, than constable, chastiser, what not, or whatever I am, of all these vexed Highlands. Give me my book in my closet, or at worst let me do my country’s work in a courtier’s way with brains, and I would ask no more.”

“Except Badenoch and Nether Lochaber—fat land, fine land, MacCailein!” said John Splendid, laughing cunningly.

“You’re an ass, John,” he said; “picking up the countryside’s gossip. I have no love for the Athole and Great Glen folks as ye ken; but I could long syne have got letters of fire and sword that made Badenoch and Nether Lochaber mine if I had the notion. Don’t interrupt me with your nonsense, cousin; I’m telling Elrigmore here, for he’s young and has skill of civilised war, that there may, in very few weeks, be need of every arm in the parish or shire to baulk Colkitto. The MacDonald and other malignants have been robbing high and low from Lochow to Loch Finne this while back; I have hanged them a score a month at the town-head there, but that’s dealing with small affairs, and I’m sore mistaken if we have not cruel times to come.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “what can I do?”

The Marquis bit his moustachio and ran a spur on the ground for a little without answering, as one in a quandary, and then he said, “You’re no vassal of mine, Baron” (as if he were half sorry for it), “but all you Glen Shira folk are well disposed to me and mine, and have good cause, though that Macnachtan fellow’s a Papisher. What I had in my mind was that I might count on you taking a company of our fencible men, as John here is going to do, and going over-bye to Lorn with me to cut off those Irish blackguards of Alasdair MacDonald’s from joining Montrose.”

For some minutes I stood turning the thing over in my mind, being by nature slow to take on any scheme of high emprise without some scrupulous balancing of chances. Half-way up the closes, in the dusk, and in their rooms, well back from the windows, or far up the street, all aloof from his Majesty MacCailein Mor, the good curious people of Inneraora watched us. They could little guess the pregnancy of our affairs. For me, I thought how wearily I had looked for some rest from wars, at home in Glen Shira after my years of foreign service. Now that I was here, and my mother no more, my old father needed me on hill and field, and Argile’s quarrel was not my quarrel until Argile’s enemies were at the foot of Ben Bhuidhe or coming all boden in fier of war up the pass of Shira Glen. I liked adventure, and a captaincy was a captaincy, but——

“Is it boot and saddle at once, my lord?” I asked.

“It must be that or nothing. When a viper’s head is coming out of a hole, crunch it incontinent, or the tail may be more than you can manage.”

“Then, my lord,” said I, “I must cry off. On this jaunt at least. It would be my greatest pleasure to go with you and my friend M’lver, not to mention all the good fellows I’m bound to know in rank in your regiment, but for my duty to my father and one or two other considerations that need not be named. But—if this be any use—I give my word that should MacDonald or any other force come this side the passes at Accurach Hill, or anywhere east Lochow, my time and steel are yours.”

MacCailein Mor looked a bit annoyed, and led us at a fast pace up to the gate of the castle that stood, high towered and embrasured for heavy pieces, stark and steeve above town Inneraora. A most curious, dour, and moody man, with a mind roving from key to key. Every now and then he would stop and think a little without a word, then on, and run his fingers through his hair or fumble nervously at his leathern buttons, paying small heed to the Splendid and I, who convoyed him, so we got into a crack about the foreign field of war.

“Quite right, Elrigmore, quite right!” at last cried the Marquis, pulling up short, and looked me plump in the eyes. “Bide at hame while bide ye may. I would never go on this affair myself if by God’s grace I was not Marquis of Argile and son of a house with many bitter foes. But, hark ye! a black day looms for these our home-lands if ever Montrose and those Irish dogs get through our passes. For twenty thousand pounds Saxon I would not have the bars off the two roads of Accurach! And I thank you, Elrigmore, that at the worst I can count on your service at home. We may need good men here on Loch Finneside as well as farther afield, overrun as we are by the blackguardism of the North and the Papist clans around us. Come in, friends, and have your meridian. I have a flagon of French brown brandy you never tasted the equal of in any town you sacked in all Low Germanie.”

John Splendid looked at me from the corner of an eye as we came out again and daundered slowly down the town.

“A queer one yon!” said he, as it were feeling his way with a rapier-point at my mind about his Marquis.

“Do you tell me?” I muttered, giving him parry of low quarte like a good swordsman, and he came to the recover with a laugh.

“Foil, Elrigmore!” he cried. “But we’re soldiers and lads of the world, and you need hardly be so canny. You see MacCailein’s points as well as I do. His one weakness is the old one—books, books,—the curse of the Highlands and every man of spirit, say I. He has the stuff in him by nature, for none can deny Clan Diarmaid courage and knightliness; but for four generations court, closet, and college have been taking the heart out of our chiefs. Had our lordship in-bye been sent a fostering in the old style, brought up to the chase and the sword and manly comportment, he would not have that wan cheek this day, and that swithering about what he must be at next!”

“You forget that I have had the same ill-training,” I said (in no bad humour, for I followed his mind). “I had a touch of Glascow College myself.”

“Yes, yes,” he answered quickly; “you had that, but by all accounts it did you no harm. You learned little of what they teach there.”

This annoyed me, I confess, and John Splendid was gleg enough to see it

“I mean,” he added, “you caught no fever for paper and ink, though you may have learned many a quirk I was the better of myself. I could never even write my name; and I’ve kept compt of wages at the mines with a pickle chuckie-stones.”

“That’s a pity,” says I, drily.

“Oh, never a bit,” says he, gaily, or at any rate with a way as if to carry it off vauntingly. “I can do many things as well as most, and a few others colleges never learned me. I know many winter tales, from ‘Minochag and Morag’ to ‘The Shifty Lad’; I can make passable poetry by word of mouth; I can speak the English and the French, and I have seen enough of courtiers to know that half their canons are to please and witch the eye of women in a way that I could undertake to do by my looks alone and some good-humour. Show me a beast on hill or in glen I have not the history of; and if dancing, singing, the sword, the gun, the pipes—ah, not the pipes,—it’s my one envy in the world to play the bagpipes with some show of art and delicacy, and I cannot. Queer is that, indeed, and I so keen on them! I would tramp right gaily a night and a day on end to hear a scholar fingering ‘The Glen is Mine.’”

There was a witless vanity about my friend that sat on him almost like a virtue. He made parade of his crafts less, I could see, because he thought much of them, than because he wanted to keep himself on an equality with me. In the same way, as I hinted before, he never, in all the time of our wanderings after, did a thing well before me but he bode to keep up my self-respect by maintaining that I could do better, or at least as good.

“Books, I say,” he went on, as we clinked heels on the causeway-stones, and between my little bit cracks with old friends in the by-going,— “books, I say, have spoiled Mac-Cailein’s stomach. Ken ye what he told me once? That a man might readily show more valour in a conclusion come to in the privacy of his bed-closet than in a victory won on the field. That’s what they teach by way of manly doctrine down there in the new English church, under the pastorage of Maister Alexander Gordon, chaplain to his lordship and minister to his lordship’s people! It must be the old Cavalier in me, but somehow (in your lug) I have no broo of those Covenanting cattle from the low country—though Gordon’s a good soul, there’s no denying.”

“Are you Catholic?” I said, in a surprise.

“What are you yourself?” he asked, and then he flushed, for he saw a little smile in my face at the transparency of his endeavour to be always on the pleasing side.

“To tell the truth,” he said, “I’m depending on salvation by reason of a fairly good heart, and an eagerness to wrong no man, gentle or semple. I love my fellows, one and all, not offhand as the Catechism enjoins, but heartily, and I never saw the fellow, carl or king, who, if ordinary honest and cheerful, I could not lie heads and thraws with at a camp-fire. In matters of strict ritual, now,—ha—urn!”

“Out with it, man!” I cried, laughing.

“I’m like Parson Kilmalieu upbye. You’ve heard of him—easy-going soul, and God sain him! When it came to the bit, he turned the holy-water font of Kilcatrine blue-stone upside-down, scooped a hole in the bottom, and used the new hollow for Protestant baptism. ‘There’s such a throng about heaven’s gate,’ said he, ‘that it’s only a mercy to open two;’ and he was a good and humour-some Protestant-Papist till the day he went under the flagstones of his chapel upbye.”

Now here was not a philosophy to my mind. I fought in the German wars less for the kreutzers than for a belief (never much studied out, but fervent) that Protestantism was the one good faith, and that her ladyship of Babylon, that’s ever on the ran-don, cannot have her downfall one day too soon. You dare not be playing corners-change-corners with religion as you can with the sword of what the ill-bred have called a mercenary (when you come to ponder on’t, the swords of patriot or paid man are both for selfish ends unsheathed); and if I set down here word for word what John Splendid said, it must not be thought to be in homologation on my part of such latitudinarianism.

I let him run on in this key till we came to the change-house of a widow—one Fraser—and as she curtsied at the door, and asked if the braw gentlemen would favour her poor parlour, we went in and tossed a quaich or two of aqua, to which end she set before us a little brown bottle and two most cunningly contrived and carven cups made of the Coillebhraid silver.

The houses in Inneraora were, and are, built all very much alike, on a plan I thought somewhat cosy and genteel, ere ever I went abroad and learned better. I do not even now deny the cosiness of them, but of the genteelity it were well to say little. They were tall lands or tenements, three storeys high, with through-going closes, or what the English might nominate passages, running from front to back, and leading at their midst to stairs, whereby the occupants got to their domiciles in the flats above. Curved stairs they were, of the same blue-stone the castle is built of, and on their landings at each storey they branched right and left to give access to the single apartments or rooms and kitchens of the residenters. Throng tenements they are these, even yet, giving, as I write, clever children to the world. His Grace nowadays might be granting the poor people a little more room to grow in, some soil for their kail, and a better prospect from their windows than the whitewashed wall of the opposite land; but in the matter of air there was and is no complaint The sea in stormy days came bellowing to the very doors, salt and stinging, tremendous blue and cold. Staying in town of a night, I used to lie awake in my relative’s, listening to the spit of the waves on the window-panes and the grumble of the tide, that rocked the land I lay in till I could well fancy it was a ship. Through the closes the wind ever stalked like something fierce and blooded, rattling the iron snecks with an angry finger, breathing beastily at the hinge, and running back a bit once in a while to leap all the harder against groaning lintel and post.

The change-house of the widow was on the ground-flat, a but and ben, the ceilings arched with stone—a strange device in masonry you’ll seldom find elsewhere, Highland or Lowland. But she had a garret-room up two stairs where properly she abode, the close flat being reserved for trade of vending uisgebeatha and ale. I describe all this old place so fully because it bears on a little affair that happened therein on that day John Splendid and I went in to clink glasses.

The widow had seen that neither of us was very keen on her aqua, which, as it happened, was raw new stuff brewed over at Karnes, Lochow, and she asked would we prefer some of her brandy.

“After his lordship’s it might be something of a down-come,” said John Splendid, half to me and half to the woman.

She caught his meaning, though he spoke in the English; and in our own tongue, laughing toothlessly, she said—

“The same stilling, Barbreck, the same stilling I make no doubt MacCailein gets his brown brandy by my brother’s cart from French Foreland; it’s a rough road, and sometimes a bottle or two spills on the way. I’ve a flagon up in a cupboard in my little garret, and I’ll go fetch it.”

She was over-old a woman to climb three steep stairs for the sake of two young men’s drought, and I (having always some regard for the frail) took the key from her hand and went, as was common enough with her younger customers, seeking my own liquor up the stair.

In those windy flights in the fishing season there is often the close smell of herring-scale, of bow tar and the bark-tan of the fishing nets; but this stair I climbed for the wherewithal was unusually sweet-odoured and clean, because on the first floor was the house of Provost Brown—a Campbell and a Gael, but burdened by accident with a Lowland-sounding cognomen. He had the whole flat to himself—half-a-dozen snug apartments with windows facing the street or the sea as he wanted. I was just at the head of the first flight when out of a door came a girl, and I clean forgot all about the widow’s flask of French brandy.

Little more than twelve years syne the Provost’s daughter had been a child at the grammar-school, whose one annoyance in life was that the dominie called her Betsy instead of Betty, her real own name: here she was, in the flat of her father’s house in Inneraora town, a full-grown woman, who gave me check in my stride and set my face flaming. I took in her whole appearance at one glance—a way we have in foreign armies. Between my toe on the last step of the stair and the landing I read the picture: a well-bred woman, from her carriage, the neatness of her apparel, the composure of her pause to let me bye in the narrow passage to the next stair; not very tall (I have ever had a preference for such as come no higher than neck and oxter); very dark brown hair, eyes sparkling, a face rather pale than ruddy, soft skinned, full of a keen nervousness.

In this matter of a woman’s eyes—if I may quit the thread of my history—I am a trifle fastidious, and I make bold to say that the finest eyes in the world are those of the Highland girls of Argile—burgh or landward—the best bred and gentlest of them, I mean: There is in them a full and melting friendliness, a mixture to my sometimes notion of poetry and of calm—a memory, as I’ve thought before, of the deep misty glens and their sights and secrets. I have seen more of the warm heart and merriment in a simple Loch Finne girl’s eyes than in all the faces of all the grand dames ever I looked on, Lowland or foreign.

What pleased me first and foremost about this girl Betty, daughter of Provost Brown, were her eyes, then, that showed, even in yon dusky passage, a humoursome interest in young Elrigmore in a kilt coming up-stairs swinging on a finger the key of Lucky Fraser’s garret. She hung back doubtfully, though she knew me (I could see) for her old school-fellow and sometime boy-lover, but I saw something of a welcome in the blush at her face, and I gave her no time to chill to me.

“Betty lass, ‘tis you,” said I, putting out a hand and shaking her soft fingers. “What think you of my ceremony in calling at the earliest chance to pay my devoirs to the Provost of this burgh and his daughter?”

I put the key behind my back to give colour a little to my words; but my lady saw it and jumped at my real errand on the stair, with that quickness ever accompanying eyes of the kind I have mentioned.

“Ceremony here, devoir there!” said she, smiling, “there was surely no need for a key to our door, Elrigmore—-”

“Colin, Mistress Brown, plain Colin, if you please.”

“Colin, if you will, though it seems daftlike to be so free with a soldier of twelve years’ fortune. You were for the widow’s garret Does some one wait on you below?”

“John Splendid.”

“My mother’s in-bye. She will be pleased to see you back again if you and your friend call. After you’ve paid the lawing,” she added, smiling like a rogue.

“That will we,” said I; but I hung on the stair-head, and she leaned on the inner sill of the stair window.

We got into a discourse upon old days, that brought a glow to my heart the brandy I forgot had never brought to my head. We talked of school, and the gay days in wood and field, of our childish wanderings on the shore, making sand-keps and stone houses, herding the crabs of God—so little that bairns dare not be killing them, of venturings to sea many ells out in the fishermen’s coracles, of journeys into the brave deep woods that lie far and wide round Inneraora, seeking the branch for the Beltane fire; of nutting in the hazels of the glens, and feasts upon the berry on the brae. Later, the harvest-home and the dance in green or barn when I was at almost my man’s height, with the pluck to put a bare lip to its apprenticeship on a woman’s cheek; the songs at ceilidh fires, the telling of sgeulachdan and fairy tales up on the mountain sheiling——

“Let me see,” said I; “when I went abroad, were not you and one of the Glenaora Campbells chief?”

I said it as if the recollection had but sprung to me, while the truth is I had thought on it often in camp and field, with a regret that the girl should throw herself off on so poor a partner.

She laughed merrily with her whole soul in the business, and her face without art or pretence—a fashion most wholesome to behold.

“He married some one nearer him in years long syne,” said she. “You forget I was but a bairn when we romped in the hay-dash.” And we buckled to the crack again, I more keen on it than ever. She was a most marvellous fine girl, and I thought her (well I mind me now) like the blue harebell that nods upon our heather hills.

We might, for all I dreamt of the widow’s brandy, have been conversing on the stair-head yet, and my story had a different conclusion, had not a step sounded on the stair, and up banged John Splendid, his sword-scabbard clinking against the wall of the stair with the haste of him.

“Set a cavalier at the side of an anker of brandy,” he cried, “an——”

Then he saw he was in company. He took off his bonnet with a sweep I’ll warrant he never learned anywhere out of France, and plunged into the thick of our discourse with a query.

“At your service, Mistress Brown,” said he. “Half my errand to town to-day was to find if young MacLach-lan, your relative, is to be at the market here to-morrow. If so——”

“He is,” said Betty.

“Will he be intending to put up here all night, then?”

“He comes to supper at least,” said she, “and his biding overnight is yet to be settled.”

John Splendid toyed with the switch in his hand in seeming abstraction, and yet as who was pondering on how to put an unwelcome message in plausible language.

“Do you know,” said he at last to the girl, in a low voice, for fear his words should reach the ears of her mother in-bye, “I would as well see MacLachlan out of town the morn’s night. There’s a waft of cold airs about this place not particularly wholesome for any of his clan or name. So much I would hardly care to say to himself; but he might take it from you, madam, that the other side of the loch is the safest place for sound sleep for some time to come.”

“Is it the MacNicolls you’re thinking of?” asked the girl.

“That same, my dear.”

“You ken,” he went on, turning fuller round to me, to tell a story he guessed a new-comer was unlikely to know the ins and outs of—“you ken that one of the MacLachlans, a cousin-german of old Lachie the chief, came over in a boat to Braleckan a few weeks syne on an old feud, and put a bullet into a Mac Nicoll, a peaceable lad who was at work in a field. Gay times, gay times, aren’t they? From behind a dyke wall too—a far from gentlemanly escapade even in a MacLa—— Pardon, mistress; I forgot your relationship, but this was surely a very low dog of his kind. Now from that day to this the murtherer is to find; there are some to say old Lachie could put his hand on him at an hour’s notice if he had the notion. But his lordship, Justiciar-General, upbye, has sent his provost-marshal with letters of arrest to the place in vain. Now here’s my story. The MacNicolls of Elrig have joined cause with their cousins and namesakes of Braleckan; there’s a wheen of both to be in the town at the market to-morrow, and if young Mac-Lachlan bides in this house of yours overnight, Mistress Betty Brown, you’ll maybe have broken delf and worse ere the day daw.”

Mistress Brown took it very coolly; and as for me, I was thinking of a tiny brown mole-spot she used to have low on the white of her neck when I put daisy-links on her on the summers we played on the green, and wondering if it was still to the fore and hid below her collar. In by the window came the saucy breeze and kissed her on a curl that danced above her ear.

“I hope there will be no lawlessness here,” said she: “whether he goes or bides, surely the burghers of Inner-aora will not quietly see their Provost’s domicile invaded by brawlers.”

“Exactly so,” said John Splendid, drily. “Nothing may come of it, but you might mention the affair to MacLachlan if you have the chance. For me to tell him would be to put him in the humour for staying—dour fool that he is—out of pure bravado and defiance. To tell the truth, I would bide myself in such a case. ‘Thole feud’ is my motto. My granddad writ it on his sword-blade in clear round print letters I’ve often marvelled at the skill of. If it’s your will, Elrigmore, we may be doing without the brandy, and give the house-dame a call now.”

We went in and paid our duties to the goodwife—a silver-haired dame with a look of Betty in every smile.

Writing all this old ancient history down, I find it hard to riddle out in my mind the things that have really direct and pregnant bearing on the matter in hand. I am tempted to say a word or two anent my Lord Marquis’s visit to my father, and his vain trial to get me enlisted into his corps for Lorn. Something seems due, also, to be said about the kindness I found from all the old folks of Inneraora, ever proud to see a lad of their own of some repute come back among them; and of my father’s grieving about his wae widowerhood: but these things must stand by while I narrate how there arose a wild night in town Inneraora, with the Highlandmen from the glens into it with dirk and sword and steel Doune pistols, the flambeaux flaring against the tall lands, and the Lowland burghers of the place standing up for peace and tranquil sleep.

The market-day came on the morning after the day John Splendid and I foregathered with my Lord Archibald. It was a smaller market than usual, by reason of the troublous times; but a few black and red cattle came from the landward part of the parish and Knapdale side, while Lochow and Bredalbane sent hoof nor horn. There was never a blacker sign of the time’s unrest But men came from many parts of the shire, with their chieftains or lairds, and there they went clamping about this Lowland-looking town like foreigners. I counted ten tartans in as many minutes between the cross and the kirk, most of them friendly with MacCailein Mor, but a few, like that of MacLachlan of that ilk, at variance, and the wearers with ugly whingers or claymores at their belts. Than those MacLachlans one never saw a more barbarous-looking set. There were a dozen of them in the tail or retinue of old Lachie’s son—a henchman, piper, piper’s valet, gille-mor, gille wet-sole, or running footman, and such others as the more vain of our Highland gentry at the time ever insisted on travelling about with, all stout junky men of middle size, bearded to the brows, wearing flat blue bonnets with a pervenke plant for badge on the sides of them, on their feet deerskin brogues with the hair out, the rest of their costume all belted tartan, and with arms clattering about them. With that proud pretence which is common in our people when in strange unfamiliar occasions—and I would be the last to dispraise it—they went about by no means braggardly but with the aspect of men who had better streets and more shops to show at home; surprised at nothing in their alert moments, but now and again forgetting their dignity and looking into little shop-windows with the wonder of bairns and great gabbling together, till MacLachlan fluted on his whistle, and they came, like good hounds, to heel.

All day the town hummed with Gaelic and the round bellowing of cattle. It was clear warm weather, never a breath of wind to stir the gilding trees behind the burgh. At ebb-tide the sea-beach whitened and smoked in the sun, and the hot air quivered over the stones and the crisping wrack. In such a season the bustling town in the heart of the stem Highlands seemed a fever spot. Children came boldly up to us for fairings or gifts, and they strayed—the scamps!—behind the droves and thumped manfully on the buttocks of the cattle. A constant stream of men passed in and out at the change-house closes and about the Fisherland tenements, where seafarers and drovers together sang the maddest love-ditties in the voices of roaring bulls; beating the while with their feet on the floor in our foolish Gaelic fashion, or, as one could see through open windows, rugging and riving at the corners of a plaid spread between them,—a trick, I daresay, picked up from women, who at the waulking or washing of woollen cloth new spun, pull out the fabric to tunes suited to such occasions.

I spent most of the day with John Splendid and one Tearlach Fraser, on old comrade, and as luck, good or ill, would have it, the small hours of morning were on me before I thought of going home. By dusk the bulk of the strangers left the town by the highroads, among them the MacNicolls, who had only by the cunning of several friends (Splendid as busy as any) been kept from coming to blows with the MacLachlan tail. Earlier in the day, by a galley or wherry, the MacLachlans also had left, but not the young laird, who put up for the night at the house of Provost Brown.

The three of us I have mentioned sat at last playing cartes in the ferry-house, where a good glass could be had and more tidiness than most of the hostelries in the place could boast of. By the stroke of midnight we were the only customers left in the house, and when, an hour after, I made the move to set out for Glen Shira, John Splendid yoked on me as if my sobriety were a crime.

“Wait, man, wait, and I’ll give you a convoy up the way,” he would say, never thinking of the road he had himself to go down to Coillebhraid.

And aye it grew late and the night more still. There would be a foot going by at first at short intervals, sometimes a staggering one and a voice growling to itself in Gaelic; and anon the wayfarers were no more, the world outside in a black and solemn silence. The man who kept the ferry-house was often enough in the custom of staying up all night to meet belated boats from Kilcatrine; we were gentrice and good customers, so he composed himself in a lug chair and dovered in a little room opening off ours, while we sat fingering the book. Our voices as we called the cartes seemed now and then to me like a discourtesy to the peace and order of the night.

“I must go,” said I a second time.

“Another one game,” cried John Splendid. He had been winning every bout, but with a reluctance that shone honestly on his face, and I knew it was to give Tearlach and me a chance to better our reputation that he would have us hang on.

“You have hard luck indeed,” he would say. Or, “You played that trick as few could do it” Or, “Am not I in the key to-night? there’s less craft than luck here.” And he played even slovenly once or twice, flushing, we could read, lest we should see the stratagem. At these times, by the curious way of chance, he won more surely than ever.

“I must be going,” I said again. And this time I put the cartes bye, firmly determined that my usual easy and pliant mood in fair company would be my own enemy no more.

“Another chappin of ale,” said he. “Tearlach, get Elrigmore to bide another bit. Tuts, the night’s but young, the chap of two and a fine clear clean air with a wind behind you for Shira Glen.”

“Wheest!” said Tearlach of a sudden, and he put up a hand.

There was a skliffing of feet on the road outside—many feet and wary, with men’s voices in a whisper caught at the teeth—a sound at that hour full of menace. Only a moment and then all was by.

“There’s something strange here!” said John Splendid, “let’s out and see.” He put round his rapier more on the groin, and gave a jerk at the narrow belt creasing his fair-day crimson vest For me I had only the dirk to speak of, for the sgian dubh at my leg was a silver toy, and Tearlach, being a burgh man, had no arm at all. He lay hold on an oaken shinty stick that hung on the wall, property of the ferry-house landlord’s son.

Out we went in the direction of the footsteps, round Gillemor’s corner and the jail, past the Fencibles’ arm-room and into the main street of the town, that held no light in door or window. There would have been moon, but a black wrack of clouds filled the heavens. From the kirk corner we could hear a hushed tumult down at the Provost’s close-mouth.

“Pikes and pistols!” cried Splendid. “Is it not as I said? yonder’s your MacNicolls for you.”

In a flash I thought of Mistress Betty with her hair down, roused by the marauding crew, and I ran hurriedly down the street shouting the burgh’s slogan, “Slochd!”

“Damn the man’s hurry!” said John Splendid, trotting at my heels, and with Tearlach too he gave lungs to the shout.

“Slochd!” I cried, and “Slochd!” they cried, and the whole town clanged like a bell. Windows opened here and there, and out popped heads, and then—

“Murder and thieves!” we cried stoutly again.

“Is’t the Athole dogs?” asked some one in bad English from a window, but we did not bide to tell him.

“Slochd! slochd! club and steel!” more nimble burghers cried, jumping out at closes in our rear, and following with neither hose nor brogue, but the kilt thrown at one toss on the haunch and some weapon in hand. And the whole wide street was stark awake.

The MacNicolls must have numbered fully threescore. They had only made a pretence (we learned again) of leaving the town, and had hung on the riverside till they fancied their attempt at seizing Maclachlan was secure from the interference of the townfolk. They were packed in a mass in the close and on the stair, and the foremost were solemnly battering at the night door at the top of the first flight of stairs, crying, “Fuil airson fuil!—blood for blood, out with young Lachie!”

We fell to on the rearmost with a will, first of all with the bare fist, for half of this midnight army were my own neighbours in Glen Shira, peaceable men in ordinary affairs, kirk-goers, law-abiders, though maybe a little common in the quality, and between them and the mustering burghers there was no feud. For a while we fought it dourly in the darkness with the fingers at the throat or the fist in the face, or wrestled warmly on the plain-stones, or laid out, such as had staves, with good vigour on the bonneted heads. Into the close we could not—soon I saw it—push our way, for the enemy filled it—a dense mass of tartan—stinking with peat and oozing with the day’s debauchery.

“We’ll have him out, if it’s in bits,” they said, and aye upon the stair-head banged the door.

“No remedy in this way for the folks besieged,” thought I, and stepping aside I began to wonder how best to aid our friends by strategy rather than force of arms. All at once I had mind that at the back of the land facing the shore an outhouse with a thatched roof ran at a high pitch well up against the kitchen window, and I stepped through a close farther up and set, at this outhouse, to the climbing, leaving my friends fighting out in the darkness in a town tumultuous. To get up over the eaves of the outhouse was no easy task, and I would have failed without a doubt had not the stratagem of John Splendid come to his aid a little later than my own and sent him after me. He helped me first on the roof, and I had him soon beside me. The window lay unguarded (all the inmates of the house being at the front), and we stepped in and found ourselves soon in a household vastly calm considering the rabble dunting on its doors.

“A pot of scalding water and a servant wench at that back-window we came in by would be a good sneck against all that think of coming after us,” said John Splendid, stepping into the passage where we had met Mistress Betty the day before—now with the stair-head door stoutly barred and barricaded up with heavy chests and napery-aumries.

“God! I’m glad to see you, sir!” cried the Provost, “and you, Elrigmore!” He came forward in a trepidation which was shared by few of the people about him.

Young MacLachlan stood up against the wall facing the barricaded door, a lad little over twenty, with a steel-grey quarrelsome eye, and there was more bravado than music in a pipe-tune he was humming in a low key to himself. A little beyond, at the door of the best room, half in and half out, stood the goodwife Brown and her daughter. A long-legged lad, of about thirteen, with a brog or awl was teasing out the end of a flambeau in preparation to light it for some purpose not to be guessed at, and a servant lass, pock-marked, with one eye on the pot and the other up the lum, as we say of a glee or cast, made a storm of lamentation, crying in Gaelic—

“My grief! my grief! what’s to come of poor Peggy?” (Peggy being herself.) “Nothing for it but the wood and cave and the ravishing of the Ben Bhuidhe wolves.”

Mistress Betty laughed at her notion, a sign of humour and courage in her (considering the plight) that fairly took me.

“I daresay, Peggy, they’ll let us be,” she said, coming forward to shake Splendid and me by the hand. “To keep me in braws and you in ashets to break would be more than the poor creatures would face, I’m thinking. You are late in the town, Elrigmore.”

“Colin,” I corrected her, and she bit the inside of her nether lip in a style that means temper.

“It’s no time for dalliance, I think. I thought you had been up the glen long syne, but we are glad to have your service in this trouble, Master—Colin” (with a little laugh and a flush at the cheek), “also Barbreck. Do you think they mean seriously ill by MacLachlan?”

“Ill enough, I have little doubt,” briskly replied Splendid. “A corps of MacNicolls, arrant knaves from all airts, worse than the Macaulays or the Gregarach themselves, do not come banging at the burgh door of Inner-aora at this uncanny hour for a child’s play. Sir” (he went on, to MacLachlan), “I mind you said last market-day at Kilmichael, with no truth to back it, that you could run, shoot, or sing any Campbell ever put on hose; let a Campbell show you the way out of a bees’-bike. Take the back-window for it, and out the way we came in. I’ll warrant there’s not a wise enough (let alone a sober enough) man among all the idiots battering there who’ll think of watching for your retreat.”

MacLachlan, a most extraordinarily vain and pompous little fellow, put his bonnet suddenly on his head, scragged it down vauntingly on one side over the right eye, and stared at John Splendid with a good deal of choler or hurt vanity.

“Sir,” said he, “this was our affair till you put a finger into it. You might know me well enough to understand that none of our breed ever took a back-door if a front offered.”

“Whilk it does not in this case,” said John Splendid, seemingly in a mood to humour the man. “But I’ll allow there’s the right spirit in the objection—to begin with in a young lad. When I was your age I had the same good Highland notion that the hardest way to face the foe was the handsomest ‘Pallas Armata’ * (is’t that you call the book of arms, Elrigmore?) tells different; but ‘Pallas Armata’ (or whatever it is) is for old men with cold blood.”

     * It could hardly be ‘Pallas Armata.’ The narrator
     anticipates Sir James Turner’s ingenious treatise by several
     years.—N. M.

Of a sudden MacLachlan made dart at the chests and pulled them back from the door with a most surprising vigour of arm before any one could prevent him. The Provost vainly tried to make him desist; John Splendid said in English, “Wha will to Cupar maun to Cupar,” and in a jiffy the last of the barricade was down, but the door was still on two wooden bars slipping into stout staples. Betty in a low whisper asked me to save the poor fellow from his own hot temper.

At the minute I grudged him the lady’s consideration—too warm, I thought, even in a far-out relative, but a look at her face showed she was only in the alarm of a woman at the thought of any one’s danger.

I caught MacLachlan by the sleeve of his shirt—he had on but that and a kilt and vest—and jerked him back from his fool’s employment; but I was a shave late. He ran back both wooden bars before I let him.

With a roar and a display of teeth and steel the MacNicolls came into the lobby from the crowded stair, and we were driven to the far parlour end. In the forefront of them was Nicol Beg MacNicoll, the nearest kinsman of the murdered Braleckan lad. He had a targe on his left arm—a round buckler of darach or oakwood covered with dun cow-hide, hair out, and studded in a pleasing pattern with iron bosses—a prong several inches long in the middle of it Like every other scamp in the pack, he had dirk out. Beg or little he was in the countryside’s bye-name, but in truth he was a fellow of six feet, as hairy as a brock and in the same straight bristly fashion. He put out his arms at full reach to keep back his clansmen, who were stretching necks at poor MacLachlan like weasels, him with his nostrils swelling and his teeth biting his bad temper.

“Wait a bit, lads,” said Nicol Beg; “perhaps we may get our friend here to come peaceably with us. I’m sorry” (he went on, addressing the Provost) “to put an honest house to rabble at any time, and the Provost of Inneraora specially, for I’m sure there’s kin’s blood by my mother’s side between us; but there was no other way to get MacLachlan once his tail was gone.”

“You’ll rue this, MacNicoll,” fumed the Provost—as red as a bubblyjock at the face—mopping with a napkin at his neck in a sweat of annoyance; “you’ll rue it, rue it, rue it!” and he went into a coil of lawyer’s threats against the invaders, talking of brander-irons and gallows, hame-sucken and housebreaking.

We were a daft-like lot in that long lobby in a wan candle-light. Over me came that wonderment that falls on one upon stormy occasions (I mind it at the sally of Lecheim), when the whirl of life seems to come to a sudden stop, all’s but wooden dummies and a scene empty of atmosphere, and between your hand on the basket-hilt and the drawing of the sword is a lifetime. We could hear at the close-mouth and far up and down the street the shouting of the burghers, and knew that at the stair-foot they were trying to pull out the bottom-most of the marauders like tods from a hole. For a second or two nobody said a word to Nicol MacNicoll’s remark, for he put the issue so cool (like an invitation to saunter along the road) that all at once it seemed a matter between him and MacLachlan alone. I stood between the housebreakers and the women-folk beside me—John Splendid looking wonderfully ugly for a man fairly clean fashioned at the face by nature. We left the issue to MacLachlan, and I must say he came up to the demands of the moment with gentlemanliness, minding he was in another’s house than his own.

“What is it ye want?” he asked MacNicoll, burring out his Gaelic r’s with punctilio.

“We want you in room of a murderer your father owes us,” said MacNicoll.

“You would slaughter me, then?” said MacLachlan, amazingly undisturbed, but bringing again to the front, by a motion of the haunch accidental to look at, the sword he leaned on.

“Fuil airson fuil!” cried the rabble on the stairs, and it seemed ghastly like an answer to the young laird’s question; but Nicol Beg demanded peace, and assured MacLachlan he was only sought for a hostage.

“We but want your red-handed friend Dark Neil,” said he; “your father kens his lair, and the hour he puts him in our hands for justice, you’ll have freedom.”

“Do you warrant me free of scaith?” asked the young laird.

“I’ll warrant not a hair of your head’s touched,” answered Nicol Beg—no very sound warranty, I thought, from a man who, as he gave it, had to put his weight back on the eager crew that pushed at his shoulders, ready to spring like weasels at the throat of the gentleman in the red tartan.

He was young, MacLachlan, as I said; for him this was a delicate situation, and we about him were in no less a quandary than himself. If he defied the Glen Shira men, he brought bloodshed on a peaceable house, and ran the same risk of bodily harm that lay in the alternative of his going with them that wanted him.

Round he turned and looked for guidance—broken just a little at the pride, you could see by the lower lip. The Provost was the first to meet him eye for eye.

“I have no opinion, Lachie,” said the old man, snuffing rappee with the butt of an egg-spoon and spilling the brown dust in sheer nervousness over the night-shirt bulging above the band of his breeks. “I’m wae to see your father’s son in such a corner, and all my comfort is that every tenant in Elrig and Braleckan pays at the Tolbooth or gallows of Inneraora town for this night’s frolic.”

“A great consolation to think of!” said John Splendid.

The goodwife, a nervous body at her best, sobbed away with her pock-marked hussy in the parlour, but Betty was to the fore in a passion of vexation. To her the lad made next his appeal.

“Should I go?” he asked, and I thought he said it more like one who almost craved to stay. I never saw a woman in such a coil. She looked at the dark Mac-Nicolls, and syne she looked at the fair-haired young fellow, and her eyes were swimming, her bosom heaving under her screen of Campbell tartan, her fingers twisting at the pleated hair that fell in sheeny cables to her waist.

“If I were a man I would stay, and yet—if you stay—— Oh, poor Lachlan! I’m no judge,” she cried; “my cousin, my dear cousin!” and over brimmed her tears.

All this took less time to happen than it tikes to tell with pen and ink, and though there may seem in reading it to be too much palaver on this stair-head, it was but a minute or two, after the bar was off the door, that John Splendid took me by the coat-lapel and back a bit to whisper in my ear—

“If he goes quietly or goes gaffed like a grilse, it’s all one on the street. Out-bye the place is hotching with the town-people. Do you think the MacNicolls could take a prisoner bye the Cross?”

“It’ll be cracked crowns on the causeway,” said I.

“Cracked crowns any way you take it,” said he, “and better on the causeway than on Madame Brown’s parlour floor. It’s a gentleman’s policy, I would think, to have the squabble in the open air, and save the women the likely sight of bloody gashes.”

“What do you think, Elrigmore?” Betty cried to me the next moment, and I said it were better the gentleman should go. The reason seemed to flash on her there and then, and she backed my counsel; but the lad was not the shrewdest I’ve seen, even for a Cowal man, and he seemed vexed that she should seek to get rid of him, glancing at me with a scornful eye as if I were to blame.

“Just so,” he said, a little bitterly; “the advice is well meant,” and on went his jacket that had hung on a peg behind him, and his bonnet played scrug on his forehead. A wiry young scamp, spirited too! He was putting his sword into its scabbard, but MacNicoll stopped him, and he went without it.

Now it was not the first time “Slochd a Chubair!” was cried as slogan in Baile Inneraora in the memory of the youngest lad out that early morning with a cudgel. The burgh settled to its Lowlandishness with something of a grudge. For long the landward clans looked upon the incomers to it as foreign and unfriendly. More than once in fierce or drunken escapades they came into the place in their mogans at night, quiet as ghosts, mischievous as the winds, and set fire to wooden booths, or shot in wantonness at any mischancy unkilted citizen late returning from the change-house. The tartan was at those times the only passport to their good favour; to them the black cloth knee-breeches were red rags to a bull, and ill luck to the lad who wore the same anywhere outside the Crooked Dyke that marks the town and policies of his lordship! If he fared no worse, he came home with his coat-skirts scantily filling an office unusual. Many a time “Slochd!” rang through the night on the Athole winter when I dosed far off on the fields of Low Germanie, or sweated in sallies from leaguered towns. And experience made the burghers mighty tactical on such occasions. Old Leslie or ‘Pallas Armata’ itself conferred no better notion of strategic sally than the simple one they used when the MacNicolls came down the stair with their prisoner; for they had dispersed themselves in little companies up the closes on either side the street, and past the close the invaders bound to go.

They might have known, the MacNicolls, that mischief was forward in that black silence, but they were, like all Glen men, unacquaint with the quirks of urban war. For them the fight in earnest was only fair that was fought on the heather and the brae; and that was always my shame of my countrymen, that a half company of hagbutiers, with wall cover to depend on, could worst the most chivalrous clan that ever carried triumph at a rush.

For the middle of the street the invaders made at once, half ready for attack from before or behind, but ill prepared to meet it from all airts as attack came. They were not ten yards on their way when Splendid and I, emerging behind them, found them pricked in the rear by one company, brought up short by another in front at Stonefield’s land, and harassed on the flanks by the lads from the closes. They were caught in a ring.

Lowland and Highland, they roared lustily as they came to blows, and the street boiled like a pot of herring: in the heart of the commotion young MacLachlan tossed hither and yond—a stick in a linn. A half-score more of MacNicolls might have made all the difference in the end of the story, for they struck desperately, better men by far as weight and agility went than the burgh half-breds, but (to their credit) so unwilling to shed blood, that they used the flat of the claymore instead of the edge and fired their pistols in the air.

The long-legged lad flung up a window and lit the street with the flare of the flambeau he had been teasing out so earnestly, and dunt, dunt went the oaken rungs on the bonnets of Glen Shira, till Glen Shira smelt defeat and fell slowly back.

In all this horoyally I took but an onlooker’s part MacLachlan’s quarrel was not mine, the burgh was none of my blood, and the Glen Shira men were my father’s friends and neighbours. Splendid, too, candidly kept out of the turmoil when he saw that young MacLachlan was safely free of his warders, and that what had been a cause militant was now only a Highland diversion.

“Let them play away at it,” he said; “I’m not keen to have wounds in a burgher’s brawl in my own town when there’s promise of braver sport over the hills among other tartans.”

Up the town drifted the little battle, no dead left as luck had it, but many a gout of blood. The white gables clanged back the cries, in claps like summer thunder, the crows in the beech-trees complained in a rasping roupy chorus, and the house-doors banged at the back of men, who, weary or wounded, sought home to bed. And Splendid and I were on the point of parting, secure that the young laird of MacLachlan was at liberty, when that gentleman himself came scouring along, hard pressed by a couple of MacNicolls ready with brands out to cut him down. He was without steel or stick, stumbling on the causeway-stones in a stupor of weariness, his mouth gasping and his coat torn wellnigh off the back of him. He was never in his twenty years of life nearer death than then, and he knew it; but when he found John Splendid and me before him he stopped and turned to face the pair that followed him—a fool’s vanity to show fright had not put the heels to his hurry! We ran out beside him, and the MacNicolls refused the rencontre, left their quarry, and fled again to the town-head, where their friends were in a dusk the long-legged lad’s flambeau failed to mitigate.

“I’ll never deny after this that you can outrun me!” said John Splendid, putting up his small sword.

“I would have given them their kail through the reek in a double dose if I had only a simple knife,” said the lad angrily, looking up the street, where the fighting was now over. Then he whipped into Brown’s close and up the stair, leaving us at the gable of Craignure’s house.

John Splendid, ganting sleepily, pointed at the fellow’s disappearing skirts. “Do you see yon?” said he, and he broke into a line of a Gaelic air that told his meaning.

“Lovers?” I asked.

“What do you think yourself?” said he.

“She is mighty put about at his hazard,” I confessed, reflecting on her tears.

“Cousins, ye ken, cousins!” said Splendid, and he put a finger in my side, laughing meaningly.

I got home when the day stirred among the mists over Strone.

Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic on Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster in name of law. To read some books I’ve read, one would think our Gaels in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not, I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italian fops; we are—the poorest of us—coarse a little at the hide, too quick, perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carry the most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword. That’s the blood; it’s the common understanding among ourselves. But we were never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, as the Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty to do to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the bad clans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country. When I was a lad some of the old-fashioned tenants in Glenaora once or twice went over to Glen Nant and Rannoch and borrowed a few beasts; but the Earl (as he was then) gave them warning for it that any vassal of his found guilty of such practice again should hang at the town-head as readily as he would hang a Cowal man for theftuously awaytaking a board of kipper salmon. My father (peace with him!) never could see the logic of it “It’s no theft,” he would urge, “but war on the parish scale: it needs coolness of the head, some valour, and great genius to take fifty or maybe a hundred head of bestial hot-hoof over hill and moor. I would never blame a man for lifting a mart of black cattle any more than for killing a deer: are not both the natural animals of these mountains, prey lawful to the first lad who can tether or paunch them?”

“Not in the fold, father!” I mind of remonstrating once.

“In the fold too,” he said. “Who respects Bredal-bane’s fenced deer? Not the most Christian elders in Glenurchy: they say grace over venison that crossed a high dyke in the dead of night tail first, or game birds that tumbled out of their dream on the bough into the reek of a brimstone fire. A man might as well claim the fish of the sea and the switch of the wood, and refuse the rest of the world a herring or a block of wood, as put black cattle in a fank and complain because he had to keep watch on them!”

It was odd law, but I must admit my father made the practice run with the precept, for more than once he refused to take back cattle lifted by the Macgregors from us, because they had got over his march-stone.

But so far from permitting this latitude in the parish of Inneraora, Kirk and State frowned it down, and sins far less heinous. The session was bitterly keen on Sabbath-breakers, and to start on a Saturday night a kiln-drying of oats that would claim a peat or two on Sabbath, was accounted immorality of the most gross kind.

Much of this strict form, it is to be owned, was imported by the Lowland burghers, and set up by the Lowland session of the English kirk, of which his lordship was an elder, and the Highlanders took to it badly for many a day. They were aye, for a time, driving their cattle through the town on the Lord’s day or stravaiging about the roads and woods, or drinking and listening to pipers piping in the change-houses at time of sermon, fond, as all our people are by nature, of the hearty open air, and the smell of woods, and lusty sounds like the swing of the seas and pipers playing old tunes. Out would come elders and deacons to scour the streets and change-houses for them, driving them, as if with scourges, into worship. Gaelic sermon (or Irish sermon, as the Scots called it) was but every second Sabbath, and on the blank days the landward Highlanders found in town bound to go to English sermon whether they knew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays to defend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven to chapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushed with a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by the blessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respect for Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there were no more devout churchgoers and respecters of the law ecclesiastic than the umquhile pagan small-clans of Loch Firme and the Glens.

It is true that Nicol Beg threatened the church-officer with his dirk when he came to cite him before the session a few days after the splore in Inneraora, but he stood his trial like a good Christian all the same, he and half a score of his clan, as many as the church court could get the names of. I was a witness against them, much against my will, with John Splendid, the Provost, and other townsfolk.

Some other defaulters were dealt with before the Mac-Nicolls, a few throughither women and lads from the back-lanes of the burghs, on the old tale, a shoreside man for houghing a quey, and a girl Mac Vicar, who had been for a season on a visit to some Catholic relatives in the Isles, and was charged with malignancy and profanity.

Poor lass! I was wae for her. She stood bravely beside her father, whose face was as begrutten as hers was serene, and those who put her through her catechism found to my mind but a good heart and tolerance where they sought treachery and rank heresy. They convicted her notwithstanding.

“You have stood your trials badly, Jean MacVicar,” said Master Gordon. “A backslider and malignant proven! You may fancy your open profession of piety, your honesty and charity, make dykes to the narrow way. A fond delusion, woman! There are, sorrow on it! many lax people of your kind in Scotland this day, hangers-on at the petticoat tails of the whore of Babylon, sitting like you, as honest worshippers at the tables of the Lord, eating Christian elements that but for His mercy choked them at the thrapple. You are a wicked woman!”

“She’s a good daughter,” broke in the father through his tears; but his Gaelic never stopped the minister.

“An ignorant besom.”

“She’s leech-wife to half Kenmore,” protested the old man.

“And this court censures you, ordains you to make public confession at both English and Gaelic kirks before the congregations, thereafter to be excommunicate and banished furth and from this parish of Inneraora and Glenaora.”

The girl never winced.

Her father cried again. “She can’t leave me,” said he, and he looked to the Marquis, who all the time sat on the hard deal forms, like a plain man. “Your lordship kens she is motherless and my only kin; that’s she true and honest.”

The Marquis said yea nor nay, but had a minute’s talk with the clergyman, as I thought at the time, to make him modify his ruling. But Master Gordon enforced the finding of the session.

“Go she must,” said he; “we cannot have our young people poisoned at the mind.”

“Then she’ll bide with me,” said the father, angrily.

“You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in your house,” said Gordon; “but taking to consideration that excommunication precludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never to keep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mind to do so with her, to follow her wherever she goes.”

And that sorry small family went out at the door, in tears.

Some curious trials followed, and the making of quaint bylaws; for now that his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was bound for new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he left behind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification was made discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes in the smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from public flyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne’er-do-weels from other parishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attending kirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermon as occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not be distinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, it was ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of taking the plaids from them.

With these enactments too came evidence of the Kirk’s paternity. It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars, instructed the administering of the funds in the poor’s-box, fixed a levy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives who would be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to an elderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burial clothes ready, but had not the wherewithal for linen.

“We are,” said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere the MacNicolls came forward, “the fathers and guardians of this parish people high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly. I have no complaint about its civil rule—his lordship here might well be trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell me old Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) used to come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown. Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I’ll say it to his face in another world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsome landward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous times of God’s grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with a dirk at his hip sitting before the Lord’s table last Lammas!”

“Please God,” said the Marquis, “the world shall come to its sight some day. My people are of an unruly race, I ken, good at the heart, hospitable, valorous, even with some Latin chivalry; but, my sorrow! they are sorely unamenable to policies of order and peace.”

“Deil the hair vexed am I,” said John Splendid in my ear; “I have a wonderful love for nature that’s raw and human, and this session-made morality is but a gloss. They’ll be taking the tartan off us next maybe! Some day the old dog at the heart of the Highlands will bark for all his sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sitting here making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scots speech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe.”

Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid’s confidence,—in truth, few but knew my hero’s mind on these matters; and I have little doubt it was for John’s edification he went on to sermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.

“Your lordship will have the civil chastisement of these MacNicolls after this session is bye with them. We can but deal with their spiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls as members or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-table against them for a period, and bring them to the stool of repentance. Some here may think a night of squabbling and broken heads in a Highland burgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or the court of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better than the valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at its proper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seen it on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone, and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the stricken fields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In the heart of man is hell smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames of sharpened steel; it’s a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the ear to stir the ember, saying, ‘Hiss, catch him, dog!’ I’m for keeping hell (even in a wild High-landman’s heart) for its own business of punishing the wicked.”

“Amen to yon!” cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, and Master Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plain for the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with the MacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the brave gentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown’s stair.

They had little to deny, and our evidence was but a word ere the session passed sentence of suspension from the kirk tables, as Gordon had said, and a sheriffs officer came to hale them to the Tolbooth for their trial on behalf of the civil law.

With their appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described of this kirk-session’s cognisance of those rough fellows’ ill behaviour is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and its wide dominion,—to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we were not beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword came on us and the persecution of the torch. The MacNicoll’s Night in the Hie Street of MacCailein Mot’s town was an adventure uncommon enough to be spoken of for years after, and otherwise (except for the little feuds between the Glens-men and the burghers without tartan), our country-side was as safe as the heart of France—safer even. You might leave your purse on the open road anywhere within the Crooked Dyke with uncounted gold in it and be no penny the poorer at the week’s end; there was never lock or bar on any door in any of the two glens—locks, indeed, were a contrivance the Lowlanders brought for the first time to the town; and the gardens lay open to all who had appetite for kail or berry. There was no man who sat down to dinner (aye in the landward part I speak of; it differed in the town) without first going to the door to look along the high road to see if wayfarers were there to share the meal with him and his family. “There he goes,” was the saying about any one who passed the door at any time without coming in to take a spoon—“there he goes; I’ll warrant he’s a miser at home to be so much of a churl abroad” The very gipsy claimed the cleanest bed in a Glenman’s house whenever he came that way, and his gossip paid handsomely for his shelter.

It was a fine fat land this of ours, mile upon mile thick with herds, rolling in the grassy season like the seas, growing such lush crops as the remoter Highlands never dreamt of. Not a foot of good soil but had its ploughing, or at least gave food to some useful animal, and yet so rocky the hills between us and lower Lochow, so tremendous steep and inaccessible the peaks and corries north of Ben Bhuidhe, that they were relegated to the chase. There had the stag his lodging and the huntsman a home almost perpetual. It was cosy, indeed, to see at evening the peat-smoke from well-governed and comfortable hearths lingering on the quiet air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braes or singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.

In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup brimmingly, and my father, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said he had never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent the branches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, the blaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchards of the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the winter grudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees that beard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searing and falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, and friendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in a golden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tall friends, held up their tasselled heads in unquenching green. Birds swarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantly with deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; you came down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it into the linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.

All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to be but an old fellow’s boasting and a childish vanity about my own calf-country. ‘Tis the picture I would paint—a land laughing and content, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by name and by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer’s wage, but what need had one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at his very door?

On the 27th of July in this same year 1644 we saw his lordship and his clan march from Inneraora to the dreary north. By all accounts (brought in to the Marquis by foot-runners from the frontier of Lorn), the Irishry of Colkitto numbered no more than 1200, badly armed with old matchlocks and hampered by two or three dozen camp-women bearing the bairns of this dirty regiment at their breasts. Add to this as many Highlanders under Montrose and his cousin Para Dubh of Inchbrackie, and there was but a force of 3500 men for the good government of Argile to face. But what were they? If the Irish were poorly set up in weapons the Gaels were worse. On the spring before, Gillesbeg had harried Athole, and was cunning enough to leave its armouries as bare as the fields he burned, so now its clans had but home-made claymores, bows, and arrows, Lochaber tuaghs and cudgels, with no heavy pieces. The cavalry of this unholy gang was but three garrons, string and bone. Worse than their ill-arming, as any soldier of experience will allow, were the jealousies between the two bodies of the scratched-up army. Did ever one see a Gael that nestled to an Irishman? Here’s one who will swear it impossible, though it is said the blood is the same in both races, and we nowadays read the same Gaelic Bible. Colkitto MacDonald was Gael by birth and young breeding, but Erinach by career, and repugnant to the most malignant of the west clans before they got to learn, as they did later, his quality as a leader. He bore down on Athole, he and his towsy rabble, hoping to get the clans there to join him greedily for the sake of the old feud against MacCailein Mor, but the Stewarts would have nothing to say to him, and blows were not far off when Montrose and his cousin Black Pate came on the scene with his king’s licence.

To meet this array now playing havoc on the edge of Campbell country, rumour said two armies were moving from the north and east: if Argile knew of them he kept his own counsel on the point, but he gave colour to the tale by moving from Inneraora with no more than 2000 foot and a troop of horse. These regimentals had mustered three days previously, camping on the usual camping-ground at the Maltland, where I spent the last day and night with them. They were, for the main part, the Campbells of the shire: of them alone the chief could muster 5000 half-merkland men at a first levy, all capable swordsmen, well drilled and disciplined soldadoes, who had, in addition to the usual schooling in arms of every Gael, been taught many of the niceties of new-fashioned war, countermarch, wheeling, and pike-drill. To hear the orders, “Pouldron to pouldron; keep your files; and middlemen come forth!” was like an echo from my old days in Germanie. These manoeuvres they were instructed in by hired veterans of the Munro and Mackay battalions who fought with Adolphus. Four or five companies of Lowland soldiers from Dunbarton and Stirling eked out the strength; much was expected from the latter, for they were, unlike our clansmen, never off the parade-ground, and were in receipt of pay for their militant service; but as events proved, they were MacCailein’s poor reed.

I spent, as I have said, a day and a night in the camp between Aora river and the deep wood of Tarradubh. The plain hummed with our little army, where now are but the nettle and the ivied tower, and the yellow bee booming through the solitude; morning and night the shrill of the piob-mhor rang cheerily to the ear of Dun-chuach; the sharp call of the chieftains and sergeants, the tramp of the brogued feet in their simple evolutions, the clatter of arms, the contention and the laughing, the song, the reprimand, the challenge, the jest,—all these were pleasant to me.

One morning I got up from a bed of gall or bog-myrtle I shared with John Splendid after a late game of chess, and fared out on a little eminence looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke to a rain of twittering prayer among the bushes ere ever a man stirred more than from side to side to change his dream. It was the most melancholy hour I ever experienced, and I have seen fields in the wan morning before many a throng and bloody day. I felt “fey,” as we say at home—a premonition that here was no conquering force, a sorrow for the glens raped of their manhood, and hearths to be desolate. By-and-by the camp moved into life, Dun-barton’s drums beat the reveille, the pipers arose, doffed their bonnets to the sun, and played a rouse; my gloom passed like a mist from the mountains.

They went north by the Aora passes into the country of Bredalbane, and my story need not follow them beyond.

Inneraora burghers went back to their commercial affairs, and I went to Glen Shira to spend calm days on the river and the hill. My father seemed to age perceptibly, reflecting on his companion gone, and he clung to me like the crotal to the stone. Then it was (I think) that some of the sobriety of life first came to me, a more often cogitation and balancing of affairs. I began to see some of the tanglement of nature, and appreciate the solemn mystery of our travel across this vexed and care-warped world. Before, I was full of the wine of youth, giving doubt of nothing a lodgment in my mind, acting ever on the impulse, sucking the lemon, seeds and all, and finding it unco sappy and piquant to the palate. To be face to face day after day with this old man’s grief, burdened with his most apparent double love, conscious that I was his singular bond to the world he would otherwise be keen to be leaving, set me to chasten my dalliance with fate. Still and on, our affection and its working on my prentice mind is nothing to dwell on publicly. I’ve seen bearded men kiss each other in the France, a most scandalous exhibition surely, one at any rate that I never gazed on without some natural Highland shame, and I would as soon kiss my father at high noon on the open street as dwell with paper and ink upon my feeling to him.

We settled down to a few quiet weeks after the troops had gone. Rumours came of skirmishes at Tippermuir and elsewhere. I am aware that the fabulous Wishart makes out that our lads were defeated by Montrose at every turning, claiming even Dundee, Crief, Strathbogie, Methven Wood, Philiphaugh, Inverness, and Dunbeath. Let any one coldly calculate the old rogue’s narrative, and it will honestly appear that the winner was more often Argile, though his lordship never followed up his advantage with slaughter and massacre as did his foes at Aberdeen. All these doings we heard of but vaguely, for few came back except an odd lad wounded and cut off in the wilds of Athole from the main body.

Constant sentinels watched the land from the fort of Dunchuach, that dominates every pass into our country, and outer guards took day and night about on the remoter alleys of Aora and Shira Glens. South, east, and west, we had friendly frontiers; only to the north were menace and danger, and from the north came our scaith—the savage north and jealous.

These considerations seemed, on the surface, little to affect Inneraora and its adjacent parts. We slept soundly at night, knowing the warders were alert; the women with absent husbands tempered their anxiety with the philosophy that comes to a race ever bound to defend its own doors.

The common folks had ceilidhs at night—gossip parties in each other’s houses, and in our own hall the herds and shepherds often convocat to change stories, the tales of the Fingalians, Ossian and the Firme. The burgh was a great place for suppers too, and never ceilidh nor supper went I to but the daughter of Provost Brown was there before me. She took a dislike to me, I guessed at last, perhaps thinking I appeared too often; and I was never fully convinced of this till I met her once with some companions walking in the garden of the castle, that always stood open for the world.

I was passing up the Dame’s Pad, as it was called, a little turfed road, overhung by walnut trees brought by the old Earl from England. I had on a Lowland costume with a velvet coat and buckled shoes, and one or two vanities a young fellow would naturally be set up about, and the consciousness of my trim clothing put me in a very complacent mood as I stopped and spoke with the damsels.

They were pretty girls all, and I remember particularly that Betty had a spray of bog-myrtle and heather fastened at a brooch at her neck.

She was the only one who received me coldly, seemed indeed impatient to be off, leaving the conversation to her friends while she toyed with a few late flowers on the bushes beside her.

“You should never put heather and gall together,” I said to her, rallyingly.

“Indeed!” she said, flushing. “Here’s one who wears what she chooses, regardless of custom or freit.”

“But you know,” I said, “the badge of the Campbell goes badly with that of so bitter a foe as the MacDonald. You might as well add the oak-stalk of Montrose, and make the emblem tell the story of those troubles.”

It was meant in good-humour, but for some reason it seemed to sting her to the quick. I could see it in the flash of her eyes and the renewed flush at her temples.

There was a little mischievous girl in the company, who giggled and said, “Betty’s in a bad key to-day; her sweetheart has vexed her surely.”

It was a trivial remark, but I went off with it in my mind.

A strange interest in the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me. Meeting her on my daily walks to town by the back way through the new avenue, I found her seemingly anxious to avoid me, and difficult to warm to any interest but in the most remote and abstract affairs. Herself she would never speak of, her plans, cares, ambitions, preferences, or aversions; she seemed dour set on aloofness. And though she appeared to listen to my modestly phrased exploits with attention and respect, and some trepidation at the dangerous portions, she had notably more interest in my talk of others. Ours was the only big house in the glen she never came calling to, though her father was an attentive visitor and supped his curds-and-cream of a Saturday with friendly gusto, apologising for her finding something to amuse and detain her at Roderick’s over the way, or the widow’s at Gearran Bridge.

I would go out on these occasions and walk in the open air with a heart uneasy.

And now it was I came to conclude, after all, that much as a man may learn of many women studied indifferently, there is something magical about his personal regard for one, that sets up a barrier of mystery between them. So long as I in former years went on the gay assumption that every girl’s character was on the surface, and I made no effort to probe deeper, I was the confidant, the friend, of many a fine woman. They all smiled at my douce sobriety, but in the end they preferred it to the gaudy recklessness of more handsome men.

But here was the conclusion of my complacent belief in my knowledge of the sex. The oftener I met her the worse my friendship progressed. She became a problem behind a pretty mask, and I would sit down, as it were, dumb before it and guess at the real woman within. Her step on the road as we would come to an unexpected meeting, her handling of a flower I might give her in a courtesy, her most indifferent word as we met or parted, became a precious clue I must ponder on for hours. And the more I weighed these things, the more confused thereafter I became in her presence. “If I were in love with the girl,” I had to say to myself at last, “I could not be more engrossed on her mind.”

The hill itself, with days of eager hunting after the red-deer, brought not enough distraction, and to stand by the mountain tarns and fish the dark trout was to hold a lonely carnival with discontent.

It happened sometimes that on the street of Inneraora I would meet Betty convoying her cousin young Mac-Lachlan to his wherry (he now took care to leave for home betimes), or with his sister going about the shops. It would be but a bow in the bye-going, she passing on with equanimity and I with a maddening sense of awkwardness, that was not much bettered by the tattle of the plainstanes, where merchant lads and others made audible comment on the cousinly ardour of young Lachie.

On Sundays, perhaps worst of all, I found my mind’s torment. Our kirk to-day is a building of substantiality and even grace; then it was a somewhat squalid place of worship, in whose rafters the pigeon trespassed and the swallow built her home. We sat in torturous high-backed benches so narrow that our knees rasped the boards before us, and sleep in Master Gordon’s most dreary discourse was impossible. Each good family in the neighbourhood had its own pew, and Elrigmore’s, as it is to this day, lay well in the rear among the shadows of the loft, while the Provost’s was a little to the left and at right angles, so that its occupants and ours were in a manner face to face.

Gordon would be into many deeps of doctrine no doubt while I was in the deeper depths of speculation upon my lady’s mind. I think I found no great edification from the worship of those days—shame to tell it!—for the psalms we chanted had inevitably some relevance to an earthly affection, and my eyes were for ever roaming from the book or from the preacher’s sombre face.

They might rove far and long, but the end of each journey round that dull interior was ever in the Provost’s pew, and, as if by some hint of the spirit, though Betty might be gazing steadfastly where she ought, I knew that she knew I was looking on her. It needed but my glance to bring a flush to her averted face. Was it the flush of annoyance or of the conscious heart? I asked myself, and remembering her coldness elsewhere, I was fain to think my interest was considered an impertinence. And there I would be in a cold perspiration of sorry apprehension.

The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, “pay their daughters’ tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon.” Then it was that they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters to help themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest and best It would be a skurry of bare knees down pass and brae, a ring of the robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill or in the hollows among the ripe grass, a brisk change of shot and blow if alarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane’s lantern.

This Michaelmas my father put up a buaile-mhart, a square fold of wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual autumn’s recreation. But a buaile-mhart when shifted from time to time in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night about a fire within one of the spaces of the fold and telling tales and singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars—of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to a caschrom, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of esteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such a diversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign of superstition. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it did no more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on the imagination. As for the superstition of the tales of ceilidh and buaile-mhart I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among us scarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on our topmost hills.

A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper’s Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, may hear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.

“A trick of the senses,” said he.

“But I can bring you scores who have heard it!” said I.

“So they said of every miracle since time began,” said he; “it but proves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature.”

I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the very tunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself could cherish so strange a delusion.

Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to the humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they may have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in a magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed untenanted and empty through the jealous night.

It happened on a night of nights—as the saying goes—that thus we were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to reivers—for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?—when a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.

We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.

The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.

“Co tha’n sud’s an uchd air a bhuaile?” (“Who is there leaning on the fold?”) asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.

He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly eerie in their silence on the wall.

“Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m’inthaidh aig an fhear as gile broilleach agaibh” (“My arrow’s for the whitest breast, if ye make no answer “), said my man, and there was no answer.

The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white breast fell—shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.

They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.

And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each other in their hurry from her foul lips.

“Dogs! dogs!—heaven’s worst ill on ye, dogs!” she cried, a waeful spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.

Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was then—with the sweat on her brow—she gave the hint I speak of, the hint of the war’s end and the end of MacCailein Mor.

“Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!” said she; “I see the heather above the myrtle on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein’s head on a post.”

That was all.

It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has been told sometime or other by every fireside of the shire—not before the prophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bonded word. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of the woman’s saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace the same.

Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there was one occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledged word, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday worship and gave me so much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, came up often on a Saturday and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheery over a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Betty honoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our men and women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop of grass they were airing for the winter byres—a custom brought to the glen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.

I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on some poor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundry calls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in a mellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as she stood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me, and said, “I’ve brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she’ll give you a day’s darg for a kiss.”

I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.

Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.

“Look at the hussy!” said her father again, laughing with heaving shoulders. “‘Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?’ said I; ‘Where but to Elrigmore,’ said she; ‘I have not seen Colin for an age!’ Yet I’ll warrant you thought the cunning jade shy of a gentleman soldier! Ah, those kirtles, those kirtles! I’ll give you a word of wisdom, sir, you never learned in Glascow Hie Street nor in the army.”

I looked helplessly after the girl, who had fled, incontinent, to the women at work in the field.

“Well, sir,” I said, “I shall be pleased to hear it. If it has any pertinence to the harvesting of a second crop it would be welcome.”

My father sighed. He never entered very heartily into diversion nowadays—small wonder!—so the Provost laughed on with his counsel.

“You know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,” he cried; “I said kirtles, didn’t I! And you needn’t be so coy about the matter; surely to God you never learned modesty at your trade of sacking towns. Many a wench——”

“About this counsel,” I put in; “I have no trick or tale of wenchcraft beyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talking of a lady who is your daughter.”

Even in his glass he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion at once.

“Of course, of course, Colin,” he said hurriedly, coughing in a confusion. “Never mind an old fool’s havering.” Then said he again, “There’s a boy at many an old man’s heart. I saw you standing there and my daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of a song that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looks but yesterday, and yet here’s an old done man! Folks have been born and married (some of them) and died since syne, and I’ve been going through life with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flash three minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Saturday sipping the good aqua of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and a wrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courtship you put me in mind of.”

“Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your glass,” said my father. He was not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.

The two of them sat dumb a space, heedless of the bottle or me, and at last, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost back to the topic of his counsel.

“You had a word of advice,” I said, very softly. There was a small tinge of pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference to his daughter.

“Man! I forget now,” he said, rousing himself. “What were we on?”

“Harvesting,” said father.

“No, sir; kirtles,” said I.

“Kirtles—so it was,” said the Provost. “My wife at Betty’s age, when I first sought her company, was my daughter’s very model, in face and figure.”

“She was a handsome woman, Provost,” said my father. “I can well believe it,” said I. “She is that to-day,” cried the Provost, pursing his lips and lifting up his chin in a challenge. “And I learned one thing at the courting of her which is the gist of my word of wisdom to you, Colin. Keep it in mind till you need it. It’s this: There’s one thing a woman will put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notion of, and that’s the absence of conceit about himself or her.” In the field by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedly eating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the age when toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures of life, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among the mown and gathered grass. And oh! mo chridhe, but that was long ago! Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, test its cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lying under a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost; the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundaries upon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those old careless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, among the stubble of grass and youth.

As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the Provost’s daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit beside me, and she made no demur.

“You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them,” she said; “I miss some of the men who were here last year.”

They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.

“Oh! those wars!” she cried sadly. “I wish they were ended. Here are the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be fighting?”

“Ask your Highland heart,” said I. “We are children of strife.”

“In my heart,” she replied, “there’s but love for all. I toss sleepless, at night, thinking of the people we know—the good, kind, gallant; merry lads we know—waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to discover the meaning of.”

“The Almighty’s order—we have been at it from the birth of time.”

“So old a world might have learned,” she said, “to break that order when they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?”

“I wish he might be,” said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein’s head on a post “Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?”

“Yes,” she said; “an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein’s home-coming?”

“Very little indeed,” I answered, recalling our bond; “but she cursed his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old soldier of Sweden.”

“God ward all evil!” cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. “You’ll be glad to see your friend M’Iver back, I make no doubt.”

“Oh! he’s an old hand at war, madam; he’ll come safe out of this by his luck and skill, if he left the army behind him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said she, smiling.

“What!” I cried in raillery; “would you be grateful for so poor a balance left of a noble army?”

And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the dinner-table.

In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter, the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time, was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful prospect—too briefly ours—that the country would settle anon to peace.

Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.

The very deer came down from the glens—cabarfeidh stags, hinds, and prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking the shore and the travellers’ illusion—the content that’s always to come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the constant hours.

Twas in these bitter nights, shivering under blanket and plaid, I thought ruefully of foreign parts, of the frequented towns I had seen elsewhere, the cleanly paven streets, swept of snow, the sea-coal fires, and the lanterns swinging over the crowded causeways, signs of friendly interest and companionship. Here were we, poor peasants, in a waste of frost and hills, cut off from the merry folks sitting by fire and flame at ease! Even our gossiping, our ceilidh in each other’s houses, was stopped; except in the castle itself no more the song and story, the pipe and trump.

In the morning when one ventured abroad he found the deer-slot dimpling all the snow on the street, and down at the shore, unafeared of man, would be solitary hinds, widows and rovers from their clans, sniffing eagerly over to the Cowal hills. Poor beasts! poor beasts! I’ve seen them in their madness take to the ice for it when it was little thicker than a groat, thinking to reach the oak-woods of Ardchyline. For a time the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that at a whistle almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters quarrelled over their eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle. A roebuck in his winter jacket of mouse-brown fur died one night at my relative’s door, and a sea-eagle gorged himself so upon the carcass that at morning he could not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.

The passes to the town were head-high with drifted snow, our warders at the heads of Aora and Shira could not themselves make out the road, and the notion of added surety this gave us against Antrim’s Irishmen was the only compensation for the ferocity of nature.

In three days the salt loch, in that still and ardent air, froze like a fishpond, whereupon the oddest spectacle ever my country-side saw was his that cared to rise at morning to see it. Stags and hinds in tremendous herds, black cattle, too, from the hills, trotted boldly over the ice to the other side of the loch, that in the clarity of the air seemed but a mile off. Behind them went skulking foxes, pole-cats, badgers, cowering hares, and bead-eyed weasels. They seemed to have a premonition that Famine was stalking behind them, and they fled our luckless woods and fields like rats from a sinking ship.

To Master Gordon I said one morning as we watched a company of dun heifers mid-way on the loch, “This is an ill omen or I’m sore mistaken.”

He was not a man given to superstitions, but he could not gainsay me. “There’s neither hip nor haw left in our woods,” he said; “birds I’ve never known absent here in the most eager winters are gone, and wild-eyed strangers, their like never seen here before, tamely pick crumbs at my very door. Signs! signs! It beats me sometimes to know how the brute scents the circumstance to come, but—whats the Word?—‘Not a sparrow shall fall.’”

We fed well on the wild meat driven to our fireside, and to it there never seemed any end, for new flocks took up the tale of the old ones, and a constant procession of fur and feather moved across our white prospect. Even the wolf—from Benderloch no doubt—came baying at night at the empty gibbets at the town-head, that spoke of the law’s suspense.

Only in Castle Inneraora was there anything to be called gaiety. MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle. It would be on the 10th or the 15th of the month that I first sampled it I went up with a party from the town and neighbourhood, with their wives and daughters, finding an atmosphere wondrous different from that of the cooped and anxious tenements down below. Big logs roared behind the fire-dogs, long candles and plenty lit the hall, and pipe and harp went merrily. Her ladyship had much of the French manner—a dainty dame with long thin face and bottle shoulders, attired always in Saxon fashion, and indulgent in what I then thought a wholesome levity, that made up for the Gruamach husband. And she thought him, honestly, the handsomest and noblest in the world, though she rallied him for his overmuch sobriety of deportment. To me she was very gracious, for she had liked my mother, and I think she planned to put me in the way of the Provost’s daughter as often as she could.

When his lordship was in his study, our daffing was in Gaelic, for her ladyship, though a Morton, and only learning the language, loved to have it spoken about her. Her pleasure was to play the harp—a clarsach of great beauty, with Iona carving on it—to the singing of her daughter Jean, who knew all the songs of the mountains and sang them like the bird. The town girls, too, sang, Betty a little shyly, but as daintily as her neighbours, and we danced a reel or two to the playing of Paruig Dall, the blind piper. Venison and wine were on the board, and whiter bread than the town baxters afforded. It all comes back on me now—that lofty hall, the skins of seal and otter and of stag upon the floor, the flaring candles and the glint of glass and silver, the banners swinging upon the walls over devices of pike, gun, and claymore—the same to be used so soon!

The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town. Between it and the river was the small garden consecrate to her ladyship’s flowers, a patch of level soil, cut in dice by paths whose tiny pebbles and broken shells crunched beneath the foot at any other season than now when the snow covered all.

John Splendid, who was of our party, in a lull of the entertainment was looking out at the prospect from a window at the gable end of the hall, for the moon sailed high above Strone, and the outside world was beautiful in a cold and eerie fashion. Of a sudden he faced round and beckoned to me with a hardly noticeable toss of the head.

I went over and stood beside him. He was bending a little to get the top of Dunchuach in the field of his vision, and there was a puzzled look on his face.

“Do you see any light up yonder?” he asked, and I followed his query with a keen scrutiny of the summit, where the fort should be lying in darkness and peace.

There was a twinkle of light that would have shown fuller if the moonlight were less.

“I see a spark,” I said, wondering a little at his interest in so small an affair.

“That’s a pity,” said he, in a rueful key. “I was hoping it might be a private vision of my own, and yet I might have known my dream last night of a white rat meant something. If that’s flame there’s more to follow. There should be no lowe on this side of the fort after nightfall, unless the warders on the other side have news from the hills behind Dunchuach. In this matter of fire at night Dunchuach echoes Ben Bhuidhe or Ben Bhrec, and these two in their turn carry on the light of our friends farther ben in Bredalbane and Cruachan. It’s not a state secret to tell you we were half feared some of our Antrim gentry might give us a call; but the Worst Curse on the pigs who come guesting in such weather!”

He was glowering almost feverishly at the hill-top, and I turned round to see that the busy room had no share in our apprehension. The only eyes I found looking in our direction were those of Betty, who finding herself observed, came over, blushing a little, and looked out into the night.

“You were hiding the moonlight from me,” she said with a smile, a remark which struck me as curious, for she could not, from where she sat, see out at the window.

“I never saw one who needed it less,” said Splendid, and still he looked intently at the mount. “You carry your own with you.”

Having no need to bend, she saw the top of Dun-chuach whenever she got close to the window, and by this time the light on it looked like a planet, wan in the moonlight, but unusually large and angry.

“I never saw star so bright,” said the girl, in a natural enough error.

“A challenge to your eyes, madam,” retorted Splendid again, in a raillery wonderful considering his anxiety, and he whispered in my ear—“or to us to war.”

As he spoke, the report of a big gun boomed through the frosty air from Dunchuach to the plain, and the beacon flashed up, tall, flaunting, and unmistakable.

John Splendid turned into the hall and raised his voice a little, to say with no evidence of disturbance—

“There’s something amiss up the glens, your ladyship.”

The harp her ladyship strummed idly on at the moment had stopped on a ludicrous and unfinished note, the hum of conversation ended abruptly. Up to the window the company crowded, and they could see the balefire blazing hotly against the cool light of the moon and the widely sprinkled stars. Behind them in a little came Argile, one arm only thrust hurriedly in a velvet jacket, his hair in a disorder, the pallor of study on his cheek. He very gently pressed to the front, and looked out with a lowering brow at the signal.

“Ay, ay!” he said in the English, after a pause that kept the room more intent on his face than on the balefire. “My old luck bides with me. I thought the weather guaranteed me a season’s rest, but here’s the claymore again! Alasdair, Craignish, Sir Donald, I wish you gentlemen would set the summons about with as little delay as need be. We have no time for any display of militant science, but as these beacons carry their tale fast we may easily be at the head of Glen Aora before the enemy is down Glenurchy.”

Sir Donald, who was the eldest of the officers his lordship addressed, promised a muster of five hundred men in three hours’ time. “I can have a crois-tara,” he said, “at the very head of Glen Shira in an hour.”

“You may save yourself the trouble,” said John Splendid; “Glen Shira’s awake by this time, for the watchers have been in the hut on Ben Bhuidhe since ever we came back from Lorn, and they are in league with other watchers at the Gearron town, who will have the alarm miles up the Glen by now if I make no mistake about the breed.”

By this time a servant came in to say Sithean Sluaidhe hill on Cowal was ablaze, and likewise the hill of Ardno above the Ardkinglas lands.

“The alarm will be over Argile in two hours,” said his lordship. “We’re grand at the beginnings of things,” and as he spoke he was pouring, with a steady hand, a glass of wine for a woman in the tremors. “I wish to God we were better at the endings,” he added, bitterly. “If these Athole and Antrim caterans have the secret of our passes, we may be rats in a trap before the morn’s morning.”

The hall emptied quickly, a commotion of folks departing rose in the courtyard, and candle and torch moved about. Horses put over the bridge at a gallop, striking sparks from the cobble-stones, swords jingled on stirrups. In the town, a piper’s tune hurriedly lifted, and numerous lights danced to the windows of the burghers. John Splendid, the Marquis, and I were the only ones left in the hall, and the Marquis turned to me with a smile—

“You see your pledge calls for redemption sooner than you expected, Elrigmore. The enemy’s not far from Ben Bhuidhe now, and your sword is mine by the contract.”

“Your lordship can count on me to the last ditch,” I cried; and indeed I might well be ready, for was not the menace of war as muckle against my own hearth as against his?

“Our plan,” he went on, “as agreed upon at a council after my return from the north, was to hold all above Inneraora in simple defence while lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds can’t get through our passes.”

“I’m not cock-sure of that, MacCailein,” said Splendid. “We’re here in the bottom of an ashet; there’s more than one deserter from your tartan on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It’s an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the passes.”

“So we can, sir, so we can!” said the Marquis, nervously picking at his buttons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and shaped.

“Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot. This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of numbers. The science of war—what little I learned of it in the Low Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters—convinces me that if a big enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might sweep us into the loch like rattons.”

I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the town lights increasing in number as the minutes passed. His own piper in the close behind the buttery had tuned up and into the gathering—

“Bha mi air banais ‘am bail’ Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air an t-saoghal!”

I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M’Iver, I could see by the twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.

“Curse them!” cried MacCailein; “Curse them!” he cried in the Gaelic, and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; “I’m wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. God’s name! and I’ll crush them like ants on the ant-heap.”

From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn toddled in, wearing a night-shirt, a curly gold-haired boy with his cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father’s knees. On my word I’ve seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald, Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling of his own till they are grown up, and I could see the tear at the cheek he laid against the youth’s ruddy hair.

“Wild men coming!” said the child, not much put about after all.

“They shan’t touch my little Illeasbuig,” whispered his lordship, kissing him on the mouth. Then he lifted his head and looked hard at John Splendid. “I think,” he said, “if I went post-haste to Edinburgh, I could be of some service in advising the nature and route of the harassing on the rear of Montrose. Or do you think—do you think——?”

He ended in a hesitancy, flushing a little at the brow, his lips weakening at the corner.

John Splendid, at my side, gave me with his knee the least nudge on the leg next him.

“Did your lordship think of going to Edinburgh at once?” he asked, with an odd tone in his voice, and keeping his eyes very fixedly on a window.

“If it was judicious, the sooner the better,” said the Marquis, nuzzling his face in the soft warmth of the child’s neck.

Splendid looked helpless for a bit, and then took up the policy that I learned later to expect from him in every similar case. He seemed to read (in truth it was easy enough!) what was in his master’s mind, and he said, almost with gaiety—

“The best thing you could do, my lord. Beyond your personal encouragement (and a Chiefs aye a consoling influence on the field, I’ll never deny), there’s little you could do here that cannot, with your pardon, be fairly well done by Sir Donald and myself, and Elrigmore here, who have made what you might call a trade of tulzie and brulzie.”

MacCailein Mor looked uneasy for all this open assurance. He set the child down with an awkward kiss, to be taken away by a servant lass who had come after him.

“Would it not look a little odd!” he said, eyeing us keenly.

“Your lordship might be sending a trusty message to Edinburgh,” I said; and John Splendid with a “Pshaw!” walked to the window, saying what he had to say with his back to the candle-light.

“There’s not a man out there but would botch the whole business if you sent him,” he said; “it must be his lordship or nobody. And what’s to hinder her ladyship and the children going too? Snugger they’d be by far in Stirling Lodge than here, I’ll warrant. If I were not an old runt of a bachelor, it would be my first thought to give my women and bairns safety.”

MacCailein flew at the notion. “Just so, just so,” he cried, and of a sudden he skipped out of the room.

John Splendid turned, pushed the door to after the nobleman, and in a soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I heard (and I’ve known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his Marquis everything but a man.

“Then why in the name of God do you urge him on to a course that a fool could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for being a coward before,” said I.

“Coward!” cried Splendid. “It’s no cowardice but selfishness—the disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward? Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his head at Drimtyne, but jested with a ‘Close on’t: a nail-breadth more, and Colin was heir to an earlhood!’”

“I’m sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely his place is here now.”

“It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I’m a fool in one thing, as you’ll discover anon, because ifs easier and pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince him the way he would avoid is the only right one.”

“It’s not an altogether nice quirk of the character,” I said, drily. It gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many notable parts.

He spunked up like tinder.

“Do you call me a liar?” he said, with a face as white as a clout, his nostrils stretching in his rage.

“Liar!” said I, “not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fashion) is the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another: your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I’ve noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to put him in the right.”

“You do me less than half justice,” said Splendid, the blood coming back to his face, and him smiling again; “I allow I’m no preacher. If a man must to hell, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know it’s not his character. But I’ve been in a temper with my cousin before now, and I ken the stuff he’s made of: he gets as cold as steel the hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a black confusion——”

“But you——”

“Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He’ll know himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all it’s not much of a weakness—the wish to save a wife and children from danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little.”

I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and deserted countryside waiting them.

Eight hours after the beacon kindled on Dunchuach, the enemy was feeling at the heart of Argile.

It came out years after, that one Angus Macalain, a Glencoe man, a branded robber off a respectable Water-of-Duglas family, had guided the main body of the invaders through the mountains of the Urchy and into our territory. They came on in three bands, Alasdair Mac-Donald and the Captain of Clanranald (as they called John MacDonald, the beast—a scurvy knave!), separating at Accurach at the forking of the two glens, and entering both, Montrose himself coming on the rear as a support As if to favour the people of the Glens, a thaw came that day with rain and mist that cloaked them largely from view as they ran for the hills to shelter in the sheiling bothies. The ice, as I rode up the water-side, home to Glen Shira to gather some men and dispose my father safely, was breaking on the surface of the loch and roaring up on the shore in the incoming tide. It came piling in layers in the bays—a most wonderful spectacle! I could not hear my horse’s hooves for the cracking and crushing and cannonade of it as it flowed in on a south wind to the front of the Gearran, giving the long curve of the land an appearance new and terrible, filled as it was far over high-water mark with monstrous blocks, answering with groans and cries to every push of the tide.

I found the glen wrapped in mist, the Gearran hamlet empty of people, Maam, Kilblaan, Stuchgoy, and Ben Bhuidhe presenting every aspect of desolation. A weeping rain was making sodden all about my father’s house when I galloped to the door, to find him and the sgalag the only ones left.

The old man was bitter on the business.

“Little I thought,” said he, “to see the day when Glen Shira would turn tail on an enemy.”

“Where are they?” I asked, speaking of our absent followers; but indeed I might have saved the question, for I knew before he told me they were up in the conies between the mounts, and in the caves of Glen Finne.

He was sitting at a fire that was down to its grey ash, a mournful figure my heart was vexed to see. Now and then he would look about him, at the memorials of my mother, her chair and her Irish Bible (the first in the parish), and a posy of withered flowers that lay on a bowl on a shelf where she had placed them, new cut and fresh, the day she took to her deathbed. Her wheel, too, stood in the corner, with the thread snapped short in the heck—a hint, I many times thought, at the sundered interests of life.

“I suppose we must be going with the rest,” I ventured; “there’s small sense in biding here to be butchered.”

He fell in a rain of tears, fearing nor death nor hardship, I knew, but wae at the abandonment of his home. I had difficulty in getting him to consent to come with me, but at last I gave the prospect of safety in the town and the company of friends there so attractive a hue that he consented So we hid a few things under a bruach or overhanging brae beside the burn behind the house, and having shut all the doors—a comical precaution against an army, it struck me at the time—we rode down to Inneraora, to the town house of our relative Craignure.

It was a most piteous community, crowded in every lane and pend with men, women, and children dreadful of the worst All day the people had been trooping in from the landward parts, flying before the rumour of the Athole advance down Cladich. For a time there was the hope that the invaders would but follow the old Athole custom and plunder as they went, sparing unarmed men and women, but this hope we surrendered when a lad came from Camus with a tale of two old men, who were weavers there, and a woman, nailed into their huts and burned to death.

Had Inneraora been a walled town, impregnable, say, as a simple Swabian village with a few sconces and redoubts, and a few pieces of cannon, we old soldiers would have counselled the holding of it against all comers; but it was innocently open to the world, its back windows looking into the fields, its through-going wynds and closes leading frankly to the highway.

A high and sounding wind had risen from the south, the sea got in a tumult, the ice-blocks ran like sheep before it to the Gearran bay and the loch-head. I thought afterwards it must be God’s providence that opened up for us so suddenly a way of flight from this lamentable trap, by the open water now free from shore to shore in front of the town. Generalling the community as if he was a marshal of brigade, John Splendid showed me the first of his manly quality in his preparation for the removal of the women and children. He bade the men run out the fishing smacks, the wherries and skiffs, at the Cadger’s Quay, and moving about that frantic people, he disposed them in their several places on the crafts that were to carry them over the three-mile ferry to Cowal. A man born to enterprise and guidance, certes! I never saw his equal. He had the happy word for all, the magic hint of hope, a sober merriment when needed, sometimes a little raillery and laughing, sometimes (with the old) a farewell in the ear. Even the better gentry, Sir Donald and the rest, took a second place in the management, beholding in this poor gentleman the human heart that at a pinch is better than authority in a gold-braided coat.

By noon we had every bairn and woman (but for one woman I’ll mention) on their way from the shore, poor dears! tossing on the turbulent sea, the women weeping bitterly for the husbands and sons they left, for of men there went with them but the oldsters, able to guide a boat, but poorly equipped for battling with Irish banditty. And my father was among them, in the kind hands of his sgaiag and kinswomen, but in a vague indifference of grief.

A curious accident, that in the grace of God made the greatest difference on my after-life, left among them that found no place in the boats the daughter of Provost Brown. She had made every preparation to go with her father and mother, and had her foot on the beam of the boat, when an old woman set up a cry for an oe that had been forgot in the confusion, and was now, likely, crying in the solitude of the back lands. It was the love-bairn of a dead mother, brought up in the kindly Highland fashion, free of every gimel and kail-pot. Away skirted Betty up the causeway of the Cadger’s Quay, and in among the lanes for the little one, and (I learned again) she found it playing well content among puddled snow, chattering to itself in the loneliness of yon war-menaced town. And she had but snatched it up to seek safety with her in the boats when the full tide of Colkitto’s robbers came pelting in under the Arches. They cut her off from all access to the boats by that way, so she turned and made for the other end of the town, hoping to hail in her father’s skiff when he had put far enough off shore to see round the point and into the second bay.

We had but time to shout her apparent project to her father, when we found ourselves fighting hand-to-hand against the Irish gentry in trews. This was no market-day brawl, but a stark assault-at-arms. All in the sound of a high wind, broken now and then with a rain blattering even-down, and soaking through tartan and clo-dubh we at it for dear life. Of us Clan Campbell people, gentrice and commoners, and so many of the Lowland mechanics of the place as were left behind, there would be something less than two hundred, for the men who had come up the loch-side to the summon of the beacons returned the way they came when they found MacCailein gone, and hurried to the saving of wife and bairn. We were all well armed with fusil and sword, and in that we had some advantage of the caterans bearing down on us; for they had, for the main part, but rusty matchlocks, pikes, billhooks—even bows and arrows, antique enough contrivance for a time of civilised war! But they had hunger and hate for their backers, good guidance in their own savage fashion from MacDonald, and we were fighting on a half heart, a body never trained together, and stupid to the word of command.

From the first, John took the head of our poor defence. He was duine-uasail enough, and he had, notoriously, the skill that earned him the honour, even over myself (in some degree), and certainly over Sir Donald.

The town-head fronted the upper bay, and between it and the grinding ice on the shore lay a broad tract of what might be called esplanade, presenting ample space for our encounter.

“Gentlemen,” cried John, picking off a man with the first shot from a silver-butted dag he pulled out of his waist-belt at the onset, “and with your leave, Sir Donald (trusting you to put pluck in these Low Country shopkeepers), it’s Inneraora or Ifrinn for us this time. Give them cold steel, and never an inch of arm-room for their bills!”

Forgotten were the boats, behind lay all our loves and fortunes—was ever Highland heart but swelled on such a time? Sturdy black and hairy scamps the Irish—never German boor so inelegant—but venomous in their courage! Score upon score of them ran in on us through the Arches. Our lads had but one shot from the muskets, then into them with the dirk and sword.

“Montrose! Montrose!” cried the enemy, even when the blood glucked at the thrapple, and they twisted to the pain of the knife.

“A papist dog!” cried Splendid, hard at it on my right, for once a zealous Protestant, and he was whisking around him his broadsword like a hazel wand, facing half-a-dozen Lochaber-axes. “Cruachan, Cruachan!” he sang. And we cried the old slogan but once, for time pressed and wind was dear.

Sitting cosy in taverns with friends long after, listening to men singing in the cheery way of taverns the ditty that the Leckan bard made upon this little spulzie, I could weep and laugh in turns at minding of yon winter’s day. In the hot stress of it I felt but the ardour that’s in all who wear tartan—less a hatred of the men I thrust and slashed at with Sir Claymore than a zest in the busy traffic, and something of a pride (God help me!) in the pretty way my blade dirled on the ham-pans of the rascals. There was one trick of the sword I had learned off an old sergeant of pikes in Macka’s Scots, in a leisure afternoon in camp, that I knew was alien to every man who used the targe in home battles, and it served me like a Mull wife’s charm. They might be sturdy, the dogs, valorous too, for there’s no denying the truth, and they were gleg, gleg with the target in fending, but, man, I found them mighty simple to the feint and lunge of Alasdair Mor!

Listening, as I say, to a song in a tavern, I’m sad for the stout fellows of our tartan who fell that day, and still I could laugh gaily at the amaze of the ragged corps who found gentlemen before them. They pricked at us, for all their natural ferocity, with something like apology for marring our fine clothes; and when the end came, and we were driven back, they left the gentlemen of our band to retreat by the pends to the beech-wood, and gave their attention to the main body of our common townsmen.

We had edged, Splendid and Sir Donald and I, into a bit of green behind the church, and we held a council of war on our next move.

Three weary men, the rain smirring on our sweating, faces, there we were! I noticed that a trickle of blood was running down my wrist, and I felt at the same time a beat at the shoulder that gave the explanation, and had mind that a fellow in the Athole corps had fired a pistolet point-blank at me, missing me, as I had thought, by the thickness of my doublet-sleeve.

“You’ve got a cut,” said Sir Donald. “You have a face like the clay.”

“A bit of the skin off,” said I, unwilling to vex good company.

“We must take to Eas-a-chosain for it,” said Splendid, his eyes flashing wild upon the scene, the gristle of his red neck throbbing.

Smoke was among the haze of the rain; from the thatch of the town-head houses the wind brought on us the smell of burning heather and brake and fir-joist.

“Here’s the lamentable end of town Inneraora!” said John, in a doleful key.

And we ran, the three of us, up the Fisherland burn side to the wood of Creag Dubh.

We made good speed up the burn-side, through the fields, and into the finest forest that was (or is to this day, perhaps) in all the wide Highlands. I speak of Creag Dubh, great land of majestic trees, home of the red-deer, rich with glades carpeted with the juiciest grass, and endowed with a cave or two where we knew we were safe of a sanctuary if it came to the worst, and the Athole men ran at our heels. It welcomed us from the rumour of battle with a most salving peace. Under the high fir and oak we walked in a still and scented air, aisles lay about and deep recesses, the wind sang in the tops and in the vistas of the trees, so that it minded one of Catholic kirks frequented otherwhere. We sped up by the quarries and through Eas-a-chosain (that little glen so full of fondest memorials for all that have loved and wandered), and found our first resting-place in a cunning little hold on an eminence looking down on the road that ran from the town to Coillebhraid mines. Below us the hillside dipped three or four hundred feet in a sharp slant bushed over with young darach wood; behind us hung a tremendous rock that few standing upon would think had a hollow heart Here was our refuge, and the dry and stoury alleys of the fir-wood we had traversed gave no clue of our track to them that might hunt us.

We made a fire whose smoke curled out at the back of the cave into a linn at the bottom of a fall the Cromalt burn has here, and had there been any to see the reek they would have thought it but the finer spray of the thawed water rising among the melting ice-lances. We made, too, couches of fir-branches—the springiest and most wholesome of beds in lieu of heather or gall, and laid down our weariness as a soldier would relinquish his knapsack, after John Splendid had bandaged my wounded shoulder.

In the cave of Eas-a-chosain we lay for more days than I kept count of, I immovable, fevered with my wound, Sir Donald my nurse, and John Splendid my provider. They kept keen scrutiny on the road below, where sometimes they could see the invaders passing in bands in their search for scattered townships or crofts.

On the second night John ventured into the edge of the town to see how fared Inneraora and to seek provand. He found the place like a fiery cross,—burned to char at the ends, and only the mid of it—the solid Tolbooth and the gentle houses—left to hint its ancient pregnancy. A corps of Irish had it in charge while their comrades scoured the rest of the country, and in the dusk John had an easy task to find brandy in the cellars of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellar for anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls here and there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open to the night, smelling of stale hearth-fires, and harried.

To get fresh meat was a matter even easier, though our guns we dare not be using, for there were blue hares to snare, and they who have not taken fingers to a roasted haunch of badger harried out of his hiding with a club have fine feeding yet to try. The good Gaelic soldier will eat, sweetly, crowdy made in his brogue—how much better off were we with the stout and well-fired oaten cakes that this Highland gentleman made on the flagstone in front of our cave-fire!

Never had a wounded warrior a more rapid healing than I. “Ruigidh an ro-ghiullach air an ro-ghalar”—good nursing will overcome the worst disease, as our antique proverb says, and I had the best of nursing and but a baggage-master’s wound after all. By the second week I was hale and hearty. We were not uncomfortable in our forest sanctuary; we were well warmed by the perfumed roots of the candle-fir; John Splendid’s foraging was richer than we had on many a campaign, and a pack of cartes lent some solace to the heaviest of our hours. To our imprisonment we brought even a touch of scholarship. Sir Donald was a student of Edinburgh College—a Master of Arts—learned in the moral philosophies, and he and I discoursed most gravely of many things that had small harmony with our situation in that savage foe-haunted countryside.

To these, our learned discourses, John Splendid would listen with an impatient tolerance, finding in the most shrewd saying of the old scholars we dealt with but a paraphrase of some Gaelic proverb or the roundabout expression of his own views on life and mankind.

“Tuts! tuts!” he would cry, “I think the dissensions of you two are but one more proof of the folly of book-learning. Your minds are not your own, but the patches of other people’s bookish duds. A keen eye, a custom of puzzling everything to its cause, a trick of balancing the different motives of the human heart, get John M’Iver as close on the bone when it comes to the bit. Every one of the scholars you are talking of had but my own chance (maybe less, for who sees more than a Cavalier of fortune?) of witnessing the real true facts of life. Did they live to-day poor and hardy, biting short at an oaten bannock to make it go the farther, to-morrow gorging on fat venison and red rich wine? Did they parley with cunning lawyers, cajole the boor, act the valorous on a misgiving heart, guess at the thought of man or woman oftener than we do? Did ever you find two of them agree on the finer points of their science? Never the bit!”

We forgave him his heresies for the sake of their wit, that I but poorly chronicle, and he sang us wonderful Gaelic songs that had all of that same wisdom he bragged of—no worse, I’ll allow, than the wisdom of print; not all love-songs, laments, or such naughty ballads as you will hear to-day, but the poetry of the more cunning bards. Our cavern, in its inner recesses, filled with the low rich chiming of his voice; his face, and hands, and whole body took part in the music. In those hours his character borrowed just that touch of sincerity it was in want of at ordinary times, for he was one of those who need trial and trouble to bring out their better parts.

We might have been happy, we might have been content, living thus in our cave the old hunter’s life; walking out at early mornings in the adjacent parts of the wood for the wherewithal to breakfast; rounding in the day with longer journeys in the moonlight, when the shadows were crowded with the sounds of night bird and beast;—we might have been happy, I say, but for thinking of our country’s tribulation. Where were our friends and neighbours? Who were yet among the living? How fared our kin abroad in Cowal or fled farther south to the Rock of Dunbarton? These restless thoughts came oftener to me than to my companions, and many an hour I spent in woeful pondering in the alleys of the wood.

At last it seemed the Irish who held the town were in a sure way to discover our hiding if we remained any longer there. Their provender was running low, though they had driven hundreds of head of cattle before them down the Glens; the weather hardened to frost again, and they were pushing deeper into the wood to seek for bestial. It was full of animals we dare not shoot, but which they found easy to the bullet; red-deer with horns—even at three years old—stunted to knobs by a constant life in the shade and sequestration of the trees they threaded their lives through, or dun-bellied fallow-deer unable to face the blasts of the exposed hills, light-coloured yeld hinds and hornless “heaviers” (or winterers) the size of oxen. A flock or two of wild goat, even, lingered on the upper slopes towards Ben Bhrec, and they were down now browsing in the ditches beside the Marriage Tree.

We could see little companies of the enemy come closer and closer on our retreat each day—attracted up the side of the hill from the road by birds and beast that found cover under the young oaks.

“We’ll have to be moving before long,” said Sir Donald, ruefully looking at them one day—so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingers round the dirk-hilts.

He had said the true word.

It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lift a hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in grass and bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyes were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry further.

For once John Splendid’s cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way. “I could have stabbed him where he stood,” he said afterwards, “for I was in the shadow at his elbow;” but he forgot that the fire whose embers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite as well as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered only struck him when the man, after but one glance in, went bounding down the hill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.

It was “Bundle and Go” on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of the hill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in the direction of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fall upon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we came upon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in the heart of the forest of Creag Dubh,—or rather more on the upper edge of it,—their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of the mountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-trees lay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, with the wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charred arms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or about these once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them, had been spared by the robbers.

But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our way along the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sure to have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was bound to be round it.

It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and raw in the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves and moss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick nor massive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, so that we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation. We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our first check came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But there was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, plopping and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry—a laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder than a child’s toy.

On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump of beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whin and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us, and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of Dunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which, with its moat and guns, and its secret underground passage to the seashore, was safe against surprises or attacks through all this disastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle was beyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered us wonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream of domestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.

“Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be,” said John, digging herb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger, for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.

I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we must pass on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandary as ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald—good old soul!—he was now, as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendid helped him to.

We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the whole of us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by the spreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the bruach we were invisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of our retreat and disclose the three of us.

The hours passed, with us ensconced there—every hour the length of a day to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred, for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We had talked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of such unnatural discourse, and began to sleep in snatches for sheer lack of anything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfall at least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to our hiding.

I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil, and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense, our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness that swelled the noises of nature round about us—the wind, the river, the distant call of the crows—to a most clamorous and appalling degree.

We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on the stunted grass above us, and so certain seemed discovery that we had our little black knives lying naked along our wrists.

The suspense parched me at the throat till I thought the rasping of my tongue on the roof of my palate seemed like the scraping of a heath-brush in a wooden churn. Unseen we were, we knew, but it was patent that the man above us would be round in front of us at any moment, and there we were to his plain eyesight! He was within three yards of a steel death, even had he been Fin MacCoul; but the bank he was standing on—or lying on, as we learned again—crumbled at the edge and threw him among us in a different fashion from that we had looked for.

My fingers were on his throat before I saw that we had for our visitor none other than young MacLachlan.

He had his sgian dubh almost at my stomach before our mutual recognition saved the situation.

“You’re a great stranger,” said John Splendid, with a fine pretence at more coolness than he felt, “and yet I thought Cowal side would be more to your fancy than real Argile in this vexatious time.”

“I wish to God I was on Cowal side now!” said the lad, ruefully. “At this minute I wouldn’t give a finger-length of the Loch Eck road for the whole of this rich strath.”

“I don’t suppose you were forced over here,” I commented.

“As well here in one way as another,” he said “I suppose you are unaware that Montrose and MacDonald have overrun the whole country. They have sacked and burned the greater part of Cowal; they have gone down as far as Knapdale. I could have been in safety with my own people (and the bulk of your Inneraora people too) by going to Bute or Dunbarton, but I could hardly do that with my kinsfolk still hereabouts in difficulties.”

“Where, where?” I cried; “and who do you mean?”

He coughed, in a sort of confusion, I could see, and said he spoke of the Provost and his family.

“But the Provost’s gone, man!” said I, “and his family too.”

“My cousin Betty is not gone among them,” said he; “she’s either in the castle yonder—and I hope to God she is—or a prisoner to the MacDonalds, or——”

“The Worst Curse on their tribe!” cried John Splendid, in a fervour.

Betty, it seemed, from a narrative that gave me a stound of anguish, had never managed to join her father in the boats going over to Cowal the day the MacDonalds attacked the town. Terror had seemingly sent her, carrying the child, away behind the town; for though her father and others had put ashore again at the south bay, they could not see her, and she was still unfound when the triumph of the invader made flight needful again.

“Her father would have bided too,” said MacLachlan, “but that he had reason to believe she found the safety of the castle. Lying off the quay when the light was on, some of the people in the other boats saw a woman with a burden run up the riverside to the back of the castle garden, and there was still time to get over the draw-brig then.”

MacLachlan himself had come round by the head of the loch, and by going through the Barrabhreac wood and over the shoulder of Duntorval, had taken Inneraora on the rear flank. He had lived several days in a bothy above the Beannan on High Balantyre, and, like ourselves, depended on his foraging upon the night and the luck of the woods.

We lay among the whins and bramble undisturbed till the dusk came on. The rain had stopped, a few stars sedately decked the sky. Bursts of laughing, the cries of comrades, bits of song, came on the air from the town where the Irish caroused. At last between us and Dun-chuach there seemed to be nothing to prevent us venturing on if the bridge was clear.

“If not,” said Sir Donald, “here’s a doomed old man, for I know no swimming.”

“There’s Edinburgh for you, and a gentleman’s education!” said John Splendid, with a dry laugh; and he added, “But I daresay I could do the swimming for the both of us, Sir Donald I have carried my accoutrements dry over a German river ere now, and I think I could convey you safe over yon bit burn even if it were not so shallow above the bridge as I expect it is after these long frosts.”

“I would sooner force the bridge if ten men held it,” said MacLachlan. “I have a Highland hatred of the running stream, and small notion to sleep a night in wet tartan.”

John looked at the young fellow with a struggle for tolerance. “Well, well,” he said; “we have all a touch of the fop in our youth.”

“True enough, you’re not so young as you were once,” put in MacLachlan, with a sly laugh.

“I’m twenty at the heart,” cried John,—“at the heart, man,—and do my looks make me more than twice that age? I can sing you, or run you, or dance you. What I thought was that at your age I was dandified too about my clothing. I’ll give you the benefit of believing that it’s not the small discomfort of a journey in wet tartan you vex yourself over. Have we not—we old campaigners of Lumsden’s—soaked our plaids in the running rivers of Low Germanie, and rolled them round us at night to make our hides the warmer, our sleep the snugger? Oh, the old days! Oh, the stout days! God’s name, but I ken one man who wearies of these tame and comfortable times!”

“Whether or not,” said Sir Donald, anxious to be on, “I wish the top of Dunchuach was under our brogues.”

“Allons, mes amis, then,” said John, and out we set.

Out we went, and we sped swiftly down to the bridge, feeling a sense of safety in the dark and the sound of the water that mourned in a hollow way under the wooden cabars. There was no sentinel, and we crossed dry and safely. On the other side, the fields, broken here and there by dry-stone dykes, a ditch or two, and one long thicket of shrubs, rose in a gentle ascent to the lime-kiln. We knew every foot of the way as ‘twere in our own pockets, and had small difficulty in pushing on in the dark. The night, beyond the kiln and its foreign trees, was loud with the call of white-horned owls, sounding so human sometimes that it sent the heart vaulting and brought us to pause in a flurried cluster on the path that we followed closely as it twisted up the hill.

However, we were in luck’s way for once. Never a creature challenged our progress until we landed at the north wall of the fort, and crouching in the rotten brake, cried, “Gate, oh!” to the occupants.

A stir got up within; a torch flared on the wall, and a voice asked our tartan and business.

“Is that you, Para Mor?” cried John Splendid. “It’s a time for short ceremony. Here are three or four of your closest friends terribly keen to see the inside of a wall.”

“Barbreck, is’t?” cried Para Mor, holding the flambeau over his head that he might look down on us.

“Who’s that with the red tartan?” he asked, speaking of MacLachlan, whose garments shone garish in the light beside our dull Campbell country war-cloth.

“Condemn your parley, Para Mor,” cried Sir Donald; “it’s young MacLachlan,—open your doors!”

And the gate in a little swung on its hinges to pass us in.

This mount of Dunchuach, on which we now found ourselves ensconced, rises in a cone shape to a height of about eight hundred feet, its bottom being but a matter of a quarter-mile from the castle door. It is wooded to the very nose, almost, except for the precipitous sgornach or scaur, that, seen from a distance, looks like a red wound on the face of it The fort, a square tower of extraordinarily stout masonry, with an eminent roof, had a sconce with escarpment round it, placed on the very edge of the summit. Immediately behind Dunchuach is Duntorvil, its twin peak, that, at less distance than a shout will carry, lifts a hundred feet higher on the north. The two hills make, indeed, but one, in a manner of talking, except for this hundred feet of a hollow worn by a burn lost midway in long sour grasses. It had always been a surprise to me that Argile’s grandfather, when he set the fort on the hill, chose the lower of the two eminences, contrary to all good guidance of war. But if he had not full domination on Dunchuach, he had, at any rate, a fine prospect I think, in all my time, I have never witnessed a more pleasing scene than ever presents itself in clear weather from the brow of this peak. Loch Finne—less, as the whim of the fancy might have it, a loch than a noble river—runs south in a placid band; the Cowal hills rise high on the left, bare but of heather and gall; in front is the heart of Argile, green with the forest of Creag Dubh, where the stag bays in the gloaming. For miles behind the town and castle lies a plain, flat and rich, growing the most lush crops. The town itself, that one could almost throw a stone down on, looks like a child’s toy. And away to the north and west are the abundant hills, rising higher and higher, sprinkled here and there with spots of moor loch.

The fort this night was held by a hundred men of the body called the Marquis his Halberdiers, a corps of antique heroes whose weapon for ordinary was a long axe, a pretty instrument on a parade of state, but small use, even at close quarters, with an enemy. They had skill of artillery, however, and few of them but had a Highlander’s training in the use of the broadsword. Besides two culverins mounted on the less precipitous side of the hill—which was the way we came—they had smaller firearms in galore on the sconce, and many kegs of powder disposed in a recess or magazine at the base of the tower. To the east of the tower itself, and within the wall of the fort (where now is but an old haw-tree), was a governor’s house perched on the sheer lip of the hill, so that, looking out at its window, one could spit farther than a musket-ball would carry on the level.

We were no sooner in than MacLachlan was scenting round and into this little house. He came out crestfallen, and went over to the group of halberdiers, who were noisily telling their story to myself and Splendid.

“Are no people here but men?” he asked Para Mor, who was sergeant of the company, and to all appearance in charge of the place.

He caught me looking at him in some wonder, and felt bound, seemingly, to explain himself.

“I had half the hope,” said he, “that my cousin had come here; but she’ll be in the castle after all, as her father thought.”

John Splendid gave me the pucker of an eye and a line of irony about the edge of his lips, that set my blood boiling. I was a foolish and ungoverned creature in those days of no-grace. I cried in my English, “One would think you had a goodman’s interest in this bit girl.”

MacLachlan leered at me with a most devilish light in his black eyes, and said, “Well, well, I might have even more. Marriage, they say, makes the sweetest woman wersh. But I hope you’ll not grudge me, my dear Elrigmore, some anxiety about my own relatives.”

The fellow was right enough (that was the worst of it), for a cousin’s a cousin in the friendly North; but I found myself for the second time since I came home grudging him the kinship to the Provost of Inneraora’s daughter.

That little tirravee passed, and we were soon heartily employed on a supper that had to do duty for two meals. We took it at a rough table in the tower, lighted by a flambeau that sent sparks flying like pigeons into the sombre height of the building which tapered high overhead as a lime-kiln upside down. From this retreat we could see the proof of knavery in the villages below. Far down on Knapdale, and back in the recesses of Lochow, were burning homes, to judge from the blotched sky.

Dunchuach had never yet been attacked, but that was an experience expected at any hour, and its holders were ready for it They had disposed their guns round the wall in such a way as to command the whole gut between the hills, and consequently the path up from the glens. The town side of the fort wall, and the east side, being on the sheer face (almost) of the rock, called for no artillery.

It was on the morning of the second day there that our defence was put to the test by a regiment of combined Irish and Athole men. The day was misty, with the frost in a hesitancy, a raw gowsty air sweeping over the hills. Para Mor, standing on the little north bastion or ravelin, as his post of sergeant always demanded, had been crooning a ditty and carving a scroll with his hunting-knife on a crook he would maybe use when he got back to the tack where his home was in ashes and his cattle were far to seek, when he heard a crackle of bushes at the edge of the wood that almost reached the hill-top, but falls short for lack of shelter from the sinister wind. In a second a couple of scouts in dirty red and green tartans, with fealdags or pleatless kilts on them instead of the better class philabeg, crept cannily out into the open, unsuspicious that their position could be seen from the fort.

Para Mor stopped his song, projected his firelock over the wall as he ducked his body behind it—all but an eye and shoulder—and, with a hairy cheek against the stock, took aim at the foremost The crack of the musket sounded odd and moist in the mist, failing away in a dismal slam that carried but a short distance, yet it was enough to rouse Dunchuach.

We took the wall as we stood,—myself, I remember me, in my kilt, with no jacket, and my shirt-sleeves rolled up to the shoulder; for I had been putting the stone, a pleasant Highland pastime, with John Splendid, who was similarly disaccoutred.

“All the better for business,” said he, though the raw wind, as we lined the wall, cut like sharp steel.

Para Mor’s unfortunate gentleman was the only living person to see when we looked into the gut, and he was too little that way to say much about. Para had fired for the head, but struck lower, so that the scout writhed to his end with a red-hot coal among his last morning’s viands.

Long after, it would come back to me, the oddity of that spectacle in the hollow—a man in a red fealdag, with his hide-covered buckler grotesquely flailing the grass, he, in the Gaelic custom, making a great moan about his end, and a pair of bickering rooks cawing away heartily as if it was no more than a sheep in the throes of braxy.

After a little the moan of the MacDonald stopped, the crows slanted down to the loch-side, stillness came over the place. We talked in whispers, sped about the walls on the tiptoes of our brogues, and peered wonderingly down to the edge of the wood. Long we waited and wearily, and by-and-by who came out high on the shoulder of Duntorvil but a band of the enemy, marching in good order for the summit of that paramount peak?

“I hope to God they have no large pieces with them yonder,” said John; “for they’ll have a coign there to give us trouble if once they get mother of muskets in train.”

But, fortunately for us, no artillery ever came to Duntorvil.

Fully two hundred of the enemy massed on the hill, commanded by a squat officer in breeks and wearing a peruke Anglicè, that went oddly with his tartan plaid. He was the master of Clanranald, we learned anon, a cunning person, whose aim was to avail himself of the impetuousness of the kilts he had in his corps. Gaels on the attack, as he knew, are omnipotent as God’s thunderbolts: give them a running start at a foe, with no waiting, and they might carry the gates of hell against the Worst One and all his clan; on a standing defence where coolness and discipline are wanted they have less splendid virtues. Clanranald was well aware that to take his regiment all into the hollow where his scout was stiffening was not only to expose them to the fire of the fort without giving them any chance of quick reply, but to begin the siege off anything but the bounding shoe-sole the Highlander has the natural genius for. What he devised was to try musketry at long range (and to shorten my tale, that failed), then charge from his summit, over the rushy gut, and up the side of Dunchuach, disconcerting our aim and bringing his men in on their courageous heat.

We ran back our pieces through the gorge of the bastions, wheeled them in on the terre-plein back from the wall, and cocked them higher on their trunnions to get them in train for the opposite peak.

“Boom!” went the first gun, and a bit of brown earth spat up to the left of the enemy, low by a dozen paces.

A silly patter of poor musketry made answer, but their bullets might as well have been aimed at snipe for all the difference it made to us: they came short or spattered against our wall. We could hear the shouts of the foe, and saw their confusion as our third gun sent its message into the very heart of them.

Then they charged Dunchuach.

Our artillery lost its value, and we met them with fusil and caliver.

They came on in a sort of echelon of four companies, close ordered, and not as a more skilly commander would make them, and the leading company took the right. The rushy grass met them with a swish as they bounded over it like roebucks, so fast that our few score of muskets made no impression on them until they were climbing up the steep brae that led to our walls.

Over a man in a minority, waiting, no matter how well ensconced, the onslaught of numbers carried on the wings of hate, there comes a strange feeling—I’ll never deny it—a sort of qualm at the pit of the stomach, a notion to cry parley or turn a tail disgraceful. I felt it but for a second, and then I took to my old practice of making a personal foe of one particular man in front of me. This time I chose a lieutenant or sergeant of the MacDonalds (by his tartan), a tall lean rascal, clean shaved, in trews and a tight-fitting cota gearr or short coat, with an otter-skin cap on his head, the otter-tail still attached and dangling behind like a Lowlander’s queue. He was striding along zealfully, brandishing his sword, and disdaining even to take off his back the bull-hide targe, though all his neighbours kept theirs in front of them on the left arm.

“You have wrecked honest homes!” I argued with him in my mind. “You put the torch to the widow’s thatch, you have driven the cattle from Elrigmore, and what of a girl with dark eyes like the sloe? Fancy man, man of my fancy! Oh! here’s the end of your journey!”

Our assailants, after their usual custom, dropped their pieces, such as had them, when they had fired the first shot, and risked all on the push of the target and the slash of the broad brand, confident even that our six or seven feet of escarpment would never stay their onset any time to speak of. An abattis or a fosse would have made this step futile; but as things were, it was not altogether impossible that they might surmount our low wall. Our advantage was that the terre-plein on which we stood was three or four feet higher than they were at the outer side of the wall, apart from the fact that they were poised precariously on a steep brae. We leaned calmly over the wall and spat at them with pistols now and then as they ran up the hill, with Clanranald and some captains crying them on at the flank or middle. In the plain they left a piper who had naturally not enough wind to keep his instrument going and face the hill at the same time. He strode up and down in the deadliest part of the valley where a well-sent musket ball would never lose him, and played a tune they call “The Galley of the Waves,” a Stewart rant with a hint of the zest of the sea in it Nobody thought of firing at him, though his work was an encouragement to our foes, and anon the hill-tops rang with a duel of pibrochs between him and a lad of our garrison, who got round on the top of the wall near the governor’s house and strutted high shouldered up and down, blasting at the good braggart air of “Baile Inneraora.”

Those snorting, wailing, warring pipes mingled oddly with the shout of the fighting men, who had ways of battle new to me in practice though they were in a sense my own countrymen. Gaelic slogans and maledictions they shouted, and when one of them fell in the mob, his immediate comrades never failed to stop short in their charge and coolly rob him of a silver button from his coat, or a weapon if it seemed worth while.

In a little they were soon clamouring against our wall. We laughed and prodded them off with the long-handed axes to get free play with the fusils, and one after another of them fell off, wounded or dead.

“This is the greatest folly ever I saw,” said Sir Donald, wiping his brow with a bloody hand.

“I wish I was sure there was no trick in it,” said John. He was looking around him and taking a tug at his belt, that braced him by a couple of holes. Then he spat, for luck, on a ball he dropped into his fusil, said a Glassary charm on it as he rammed home the charge and brought the butt to his cheek, aiming at a white-faced Irisher with a leathern waistcoat, who fell backward into a dub of mud and stirred no more.

“Four!” said John; “I could scarcely do better with my own French fusil Main Og.”

The enemy drew off at a command of their captain, and into the edge of the wood that came up on the left near our summit. We lost our interest in them for a time, watching a man running up the little valley from the right, above Kilmalieu. He came on waving his arms wildly and pointing ahead; but though he was plain to our view, he was out of sight of the enemy on the left.

A long black coat hampered his movements, and he looked gawky enough, stumbling through the rushes.

“If I didn’t think the inside of Castle Inneraora was too snug to quit for a deadly hillside,” said John, “I could believe yon was our friend the English minister.”

“The English minister sure enough!” said half-a-dozen beside us.

“Here’s ill-luck for us then!” cried John, with irony. “He’ll preach us to death: the fellow’s deadlier than the Clanranald ban ditty.”

Some one ran to the post beside the governor’s house, and let the gentleman in when he reached it. He was panting like a winded hound, the sweat standing in beads on his shaven jowl, and for a minute or two he could say nothing, only pointing at the back of our fort in the direction of the town.

“A parish visit, is it, sir?” asked John, still in his irony.

The minister sat him down on a log of wood and clutched his side, still pointing eagerly to the south of our fort No one could understand him, but at last he found a choked and roupy voice.

“A band behind there,” he said; “your—front—attack is—but—a—feint”

As he spoke, half-a-dozen men in a north-country tartan got on the top of our low rear wall that we thought impregnable on the lip of the hill, and came on us with a most ferocious uproar. “Badenoch!” they cried in a fashion to rend the hills, and the signal (for such it was more than slogan) brought on our other side the Clanranald gentry.

What followed in that hearthstone fight so hot and brisk took so short a space of time, and happened in so confused and terrible a moment, that all but my personal feeling escapes me. My every sense stirred with something horrible—the numb sound of a musket-butt on a head, the squeal of men wounded at the vitals, and the deeper roar of hate; a smell of blood as I felt it when a boy holding the candle at night to our shepherds slaughtering sheep in the barn at home; before the eyes a red blur cleared at intervals when I rubbed the stinging sweat from my face.

Half a hundred of those back-gait assailants were over our low wall with their axe-hooks and ladders before we could charge and prime, engaging us hand to hand in the cobbled square of our fort, at the tower foot. The harassment on this new side gave the first band of the enemy the chance to surmount our front wall, and they were not slow to take it.

Luckily our halberdiers stood firm in a mass that faced both ways, and as luckily, we had in Master John M’Iver a general of strategy and experience.

“Stand fast, Campbell Halberdiers!” he cried. “It’s bloody death, whether we take it like cravens or Gaelic gentlemen!” He laid about him with a good purpose, and whether they tried us in front or rear, the scamps found the levelled pikes and the ready swords. Some dropped beside, but more dropped before us, for the tod in a hole will face twenty times what he will flee from in the open wood, but never a man of all our striving company fought sturdier than our minister, with a weapon snatched from an Athole man he had levelled at a first blow from an oaken rung.

“The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” he would cry; “for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered together against us.” A slim elder man he was, ordinarily with a wan sharp face; now it was flushed and hoved in anger, and he hissed his texts through his teeth as he faced the dogs. Some of youth’s schooling was there, a Lowland youth’s training with the broadsword, for he handled it like no novice, and even M’Iver gave him “Bravo, suas e!”

That we held our ground was no great virtue—we could scarcely do less; but we did more, for soon we had our enemy driven back on the walls. They fought with a frenzy that made them ill to beat, but when a couple of scores of our lads lined the upper wall again and kept back the leak from that airt by the command of John Splendid, it left us the chance of sweeping our unwelcome tenants back again on the lower wall. They stayed stubbornly, but we had weight against them and the advantage of the little brae, and by-and-by we pinned them, like foumarts, against the stones. Most of them put back against the wall, and fought, even with the pike at their vitals, slashing empty air with sword or dirk; some got on the wall again and threw themselves over the other side, risking the chance of an uglier death on the rocks below.

In less than an hour after the shot of Para Mor (himself a stricken corpse now) rang over Dunchuach, our piper, with a gash on his face, was playing some vaunting air on the walls again, and the fort was free of the enemy, of whom the bulk had fallen back into the wood, and seemingly set out for Inneraora.

Then we gathered and stroked our dead—twenty-and-three; we put our wounded in the governor’s house, and gave them the rough leech-craft of the fighting field; the dead of the assailants we threw over the rock, and among them was a clean-shaven man in trews and a tight-fitting cota gearr, who left two halves of an otter-skin cap behind him.

“I wish to God!” cried John Splendid, “that I had a drink of Altanaluinn at this minute, or the well of Beal-loch-an-uarain.”

It was my own first thought, or something very like it, when the fighting was over, for a most cruel thirst crisped my palate, and, as ill luck had it, there was not a cup of water in the fort.

“I could be doing with a drop myself,” said the English minister. “I’ll take a stoup and go down to the well yonder and fetch it.”

He spoke of the spout in the gut, a clean little well of hill-water that, winter or summer, kept full to the lip and accessible.

We had gathered into the tower itself (all but a few sentinels), glad for a time to escape the sight of yon shambles of friend and foe that the battle had left us. The air had softened of a sudden from its piercing cold to a mildness balmy by comparison; the sky had leadened over with a menacing vapour, and over the water—in the great glen between Ben Ime and Ardno—a mist hurried to us like driving smoke. A few flakes of snow fell, lingering in the air as feathers from a nest in spring.

“Here’s a friend of Argile back again,” said an old halberdier, staunching a savage cut on his knee, and mumbling his words because he was chewing as he spoke an herb that’s the poultice for every wound.

“Frost and snow might have been Argile’s friend when that proverb was made,” said John Splendid, “but here are changed times; our last snow did not keep Colkitto on the safe side of Cladich. Still, if this be snow in earnest,” he added with a cheerier tone, “it may rid us of these vermin, who’ll find provand iller to get every extra day they bide. Where are you going, Master Gordon?”

“To the well,” said the minister, simply, stopping at the port, with a wooden stoup in his hand. “Some of our friends must be burning for a mouthful, poor dears; the wounded flesh is drouthy.”

John turned himself round on a keg he sat on, and gave a French shrug he had picked up among foreign cavaliers.

“Put it down, sir,” he said; “there’s a wheen less precious lives in this hold than a curate’s, and for the turn you did us in coming up to alarm us of the rear attack, if for nothing else, I would be sorry to see you come to any skaith. Do you not know that between us and the well there might be death half-a-dozen times? The wood, I’ll warrant, is hotching still with those disappointed warriors of Clanranald, who would have no more reverence for your life than for your Geneva bands.”

“There’s no surer cure for the disease of death in a hind than for the same murrain in a minister of the Gospel—or a landed gentleman,” said Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as we heard them at the kirk-session.

John showed some confusion in his face, and the minister had his feet on the steps before he could answer him.

“Stop, stop!” he cried. “Might I have the honour of serving the Kirk for once? I’ll get the water from the well, minister, if you’ll go in again and see how these poor devils of ours are thriving. I was but joking when I hinted at the risk; our Athole gentry are, like enough, far off by this time.”

“I liked you better when you were selfish and told the truth, than now that you’re valiant (in a small degree) and excuse it with a lie,” quo’ the minister, and off he set.

He was beyond the wall, and stepping down the brae before we could be out at the door to look after him.

“Damn his nipped tongue!” fumed John. “But man! there’s a lovable quirk in his character too. I’ll give twenty pounds (Scots) to his kirk-plate at the first chance if he wins out of this fool’s escapade of his without injury.”

There was no doubt the minister’s task had many hazards in it, for he carried stave nor steel as he jogged on with the stoup, over the frank open brae-side, down to the well. Looking at him going down into the left of the gut as unafeared as he had come up on the right of it, I put myself in his place, and felt the skin of my back pimp-ling at the instinct of lurking enemies.

But Gordon got safely to the well, through the snow, now falling in a heavy shower, dipped out a stoupful, and turned about to come home. A few yards off his path back, to the right and closer to the wood, lay the only man of all the bodies lying in the valley who seemed to have any life left in him. This fellow lay on his side, and was waving his hands feverishly when the minister went up to him, and—as we saw in a dim way through the snow—gave him a drink of the water from the lip of the stoup.

“Sassenach fool!” said young MacLachlan, parched with thirst, gathering in with a scooped hand the snow as it fell on the wall, and gluttonously sucking it.

“There are many kinds of folly, man,” said I; “and I would think twice before I would grudge a cleric’s right to give a mouthful of water to a dying man, even if he was a Mac Donald on his way to the Pit.”

“Tuts, tuts! Elrigmore,” cried John, “let the young cock crow; he means no more than that it’s hard to be hungry and see your brother feed a foeman. Indeed I could be wishing myself that his reverence was the Good Samaritan on a more fitting occasion.”

We were bandying words now, and not so closely watching our friend in the hollow, and it was Sir Donald, standing to a side a little, who called our attention anew, with a cry of alarm.

“Look, lads, look!” he cried, “God help Gordon!”

We looked through the snow—a grey veil—and saw two or three men fall on the minister.

John Splendid but stopped a second to say, “It may be a feint to draw us off the fort; bide where ye are,” and then he leaped over the wall, armed with a claymore picked from the haunch of a halberdier beside him. I was over at his heels, and the pair of us scoured down the brae.

There was some hazard in the enterprise; I’m ashamed to this day to tell I thought that, at every foot of the way as we ran on. Never before nor since have I felt a wood so sinister, so ghastly, so inspired by dreadful airs, and when it was full on our flank, I kept my head half turned to give an eye to where I was going and an eye to what might come out on my rear. People tell you fear takes wings at a stern climax, that a hot passion fills the brain with blood and the danger blurs to the eye. It’s a theory that works but poorly on a forlorn-hope, with a certainty that the enemy are outnumbering you on the rear. With man and ghost, I have always felt the same: give me my back to the wall, and I could pluck up valour enough for the occasion, but there’s a spot between the shoulders that would be coward flesh in Hector himself. That, I’m thinking, is what keeps some armies from turning tail to heavy odds.

Perhaps the terror behind (John swore anon he never thought on’t till he learned I had, and then he said he felt it worse than I) gave our approach all the more impetuousness, for we were down in the gut before the MacDonald loiterers (as they proved) were aware of our coming. We must have looked unco numerous and stalwart in the driving snow, for the scamps dashed off into the wood as might children caught in a mischief. We let them go, and bent over our friend, lying with a very gashly look by the body of the MacDonald, a man well up in years, now in the last throes, a bullet-wound in his neck and the blood frothing at his mouth.

“Art hurt, sir?” asked John, bending on a knee, but the minister gave no answer.

We turned him round and found no wound but a bruise on the head, that showed he had been attacked with a cudgel by some camp-followers of the enemy, who had neither swords, nor reverence for a priest who was giving a brotherly sup to one of their own tartan. In that driving snow we rubbed him into life again, cruelly pallid, but with no broken bit about him.

“Where’s my stoup?” were his first words; “my poor lads upbye must be wearying for water.” He looked pleased to see the same beside him where he had set it down, with its water untouched, and then he cast a wae glance on the dead man beside him.

“Poor wretch, poor wretch!” said he.

We took the stoup and our minister up to the summit, and had got him but safely set there when he let out what gave me the route again from Dunchuach, and led to divers circumstances that had otherwise never come into this story if story there was, which I doubt there had never been. Often I’ve thought me since how pregnant was that Christian act of Gordon in giving water to a foe. Had I gone, or had John gone, for the stoup of water, none of us, in all likelihood, had stirred a foot to relieve yon enemy’s drouth; but he found a godly man, though an austere one too on occasion, and paid for the cup of water with a hint in broken English that was worth all the gold in the world to me. Gordon told us the man’s dying confidence whenever he had come to himself a little more in the warmth of the fort fire.

“There’s a woman and child,” said he, “in the wood of Strongara.”

When the English minister, in his odd lalland Scots, had told us this tale of the dying MacDonald, I found for the first time my feeling to the daughter of the Provost of Inneraora, Before this the thought of her was but a pleasant engagement for the mind at leisure moments; now it flashed on my heart with a stound that yon black eyes were to me the dearest jewels in the world, that lacking her presence these glens and mountains were very cold and empty. I think I gave a gasp that let John Splendid into my secret there and then; but at least I left him no doubt about what I would be at.

“What’s the nearer way to Strongara?” I asked; “alongside the river, or through Tombreck?”

He but peered at me oddly a second under his brows—a trifle wistfully, though I might naturally think his mood would be quizzical, then he sobered in a moment That’s what I loved about the man; a fool would have laughed at the bravado of my notion, a man of thinner sentiment would have marred the moment by pointing out difficulties.

“So that’s the airt the wind’s in!” he said, and then he added, “I think I could show you, not the shortest, but the safest road.”

“I need no guidance,” I cried in a hurry, “only——”

“Only a friend who knows every wood in the country-side, and has your interest at heart, Colin,” he said, softly, putting a hand on my elbow and gripping it in a homely way. It was the first time he gave me my Christian name since I made his acquaintance.

His company was not to be denied.

We made up some bear-meal bannocks, and a collop of boiled venison in a knapsack that I carried on my back, borrowed plaids from some of the common soldiery, and set out for Strongara at the mouth of the night, with the snow still driving over the land.

MacLachlan was for with us, but John turned on him with a great deal of determination, and dared him to give extra risk to our enterprise by adding another man to the chance of the enemy seeing us.

The lad met the objection ungraciously, and John took to his flattery.

“The fact is, MacLachlan,” said he, taking him aside with a hand on his lapel, and a show of great confidence—“the fact is, we can’t be leaving this place in charge of a lot of old bodachs—Sir Donald the least able of them all,—and if there’s another attack the guidance of the defence will depend on you. You may relish that or you may not; perhaps after all you would be safer with us——”

MacLachlan put up his chest an inch or two, unconscious that he did it, and whistled a stave of music to give evidence of his indifférence. Then he knitted his brows to cogitate, as it were, and—

“Very well!” said he. “If you come on my coz, you’ll bring her back here, or to the castle, I suppose?”

“I had no thought of running away with the lass, I’ll take my oath,” cried John, sticking his tongue in the cheek nearest me.

“I wish I could fathom yon fellow’s mind,” I said to my comrade, as we stepped out through the snow and into the wooded brae-side, keeping a wary eye about for spies of the enemy, whose footprints we came on here and there, but so faint in the fresh snowfall that it was certain they were now in the valley.

“Do you find it difficult?” asked John. “I thought a man of schooling, with Latin at his tongue’s-end, would see to the deepest heart of MacLachlan.”

“He’s crafty.”

“So’s the polecat till the fox meets him. Tuts, man, you have a singular jealousy of the creature.”

“Since the first day I saw him.”

John laughed.

“That was in the Provost’s,” quo’ he, and he hummed a song I caught the meaning of but slightly.

“Wrong, wrong!” said I, striding under the trees as we slanted to the right for Tombreck. “His manner is provoking.”

“I’ve seen him polish it pretty well for the ladies.”

“His temper’s always on the boil.”

“Spirit, man; spirit! I like a fellow of warmth now and then.”

“He took it most ungraciously when we put him out of the Provost’s house on the night of the squabble in the town.”

“It was an awkward position he was in. I’d have been a bit black-browed about it myself,” said John. “Man! it’s easy to pick holes in the character of an unfriend, and you and MacLachlan are not friendly, for one thing that’s not his fault any more than yours.”

“You’re talking of the girl,” I said, sharply, and not much caring to show him how hot my face burned at having to mention her.

“That same,” said he; “I’ll warrant that if it wasn’t for the girl (the old tale! the old tale!), you had thought the young sprig not a bad gentleman after all.”

“Oh, damn his soul!” I blurted out “What is he that he should pester his betters with his attentions?”

“A cousin, I think, a simple cousin-german they tell me,” said John, drily; “and in a matter of betters, now—eh?”

My friend coughed on the edge of his plaid, and I could swear he was laughing at me. I said nothing for a while, and with my skin burning, led the way at a hunter’s pace. But John was not done with the subject.

“I’m a bit beyond the age of it myself,” he said; “but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t have eyes in my head. I know how much put about you are to have this young fellow gallivanting round the lady.”

“Jealous, you mean,” I cried.

“I didn’t think of putting it that way.”

“No; it’s too straightforward a way for you,—ever the roundabout way for you. I wish to God you would sometimes let your Campbell tongue come out of the kink, and say what you mean.”

With a most astonishing steady voice for a man as livid as the snow on the hair of his brogues, and with his hand on the hilt of his dirk, John cried—

“Stop a bit.”

I faced him in a most unrighteous humour, ready to quarrel with my shadow.

“For a man I’m doing a favour to, Elrigmore,” he said, “you seem to have a poor notion of politeness. I’m willing to make some allowance for a lover’s tirravee about a woman who never made tryst with him; but I’ll allow no man to call down the credit of my clan and name.”

A pair of gowks, were we not, in that darkening wood, quarrelling on an issue as flimsy as a spider’s web, but who will say it was not human nature? I daresay we might have come to hotter words and bloody blows there and then, but for one of the trifles that ever come in the way to change—not fate, for that’s changeless, but the semblance of it.

“My mother herself was a Campbell of an older family than yours,” I started to say, to show I had some knowledge of the breed, and at the same time a notion of fairness to the clan.

This was fresh heather on the fire.

“Older!” he cried; “she was a MacVicar as far as ever I heard; it was the name she took to kirk with her when she married your father.”

“So,” said I; “but——”

“And though I allow her grandfather Dpl-a-mhonadh [Donald-of-the-Hills] was a Campbell, it was in a roundabout way; he was but the son of one of the Craignish gentry.”

“You yourself——”

“Sir!” said he in a new tone, as cold as steel and as sharp, misjudging my intention.

“You yourself are no more than a M’Iver.”

“And what of that?” he cried, cooling down a bit “The M’ivers of Asknish are in the direct line from Duncan, Lord of Lochow. We had Pennymore, Stron-shira, and Glenaora as cadets of Clan Campbell when your Craignish cross-breeds were under the salt.”

“Only by the third cousin,” said I; “my father has told me over and over again that Duncan’s son had no heir.”

And so we went into all this perplexity of Highland pedigree like old wives at a waulking, forgetting utterly that what we began to quarrel about was the more serious charge of lying. M’lver was most frantic about the business, and I think I was cool, for I was never a person that cared a bodle about my history bye the second generation. They might be lairds or they might be lackeys for all the differ it made to me. Not that there were any lackeys among them. My grandfather was the grandson of Tormaid Mor, who held the whole east side of Lochow from Ford to Sonachan, and we have at home the four-posted bed that Tormaid slept on when the heads of the house of Argile were lying on white-hay or chaff.

At last John broke into a laugh.

“Aren’t you the amadan to be biting the tongue between your teeth?” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, constrained to laugh too.

“You talk about the crook in our Campbell tongue in one breath,” said he, “and in the next you would make yourself a Campbell more sib to the chief than I am myself. Don’t you think we might put off our little affairs of family history till we find a lady and a child in Stron-gara?”

“No more of it, then,” said I. “Our difference began on my fool’s notion that because I had something of what you would call a liking for this girl, no one else should let an eye light on her.”

By now we were in a wide glade in the Tombreck wood. On our left we could see lying among the grey snow the house of Tombreck, with no light nor lowe (as the saying goes); and though we knew better than to expect there might be living people in it, we sped down to see the place.

“There’s one chance in a million she might have ventured here,” I said.

A most melancholy dwelling! Dwelling indeed no more but for the hoodie-crow, and for the fawn of the hill that years after I saw treading over the grass-grown lintel of its door. To-night the place was full of empty airs and ghosts of sounds inexplicable, wailing among the cabars that jutted black and scarred mid-way from wall to wall The byre was in a huddle of damp thatch, and strewn (as God’s my judge) by the bones of the cattle the enemy had refused to drive before them in the sauciness of their glut A desolate garden slept about the place, with bush and tree—once tended by a family of girls, left orphan and desolate for evermore.

We went about on tiptoes as it might be in a house of the dead, and peeped in at the windows at where had been chambers lit by the cheerful cruisie or dancing with peat-fire flame—only the dark was there, horrible with the odours of char, or the black joist against the dun sky. And then we went to the front door (for Tombreck was a gentle-house), and found it still on the hinges, but hanging half back to give view to the gloomy interior. It was a spectacle to chill the heart, a house burned in hatred, the hearth of many songs and the chambers of love, merrymaking, death, and the children’s feet, robbed of every interest but its ghosts and the memories of them they came to.

“It were useless to look here; she is not here,” I said in a whisper to my comrade.

He stood with his bonnet in his hand, dumb for a space, then speaking with a choked utterance.

“Our homes, our homes, Colin!” he cried. “Have I not had the happy nights in those same walls, those harmless hospitable halls, those dead halls?”

And he looked broadcast over the country-side.

“The curse of Conan and the black stones on the hands that wrought this work!” he said. “Poison to their wells; may the brutes die far afield!”

The man was in a tumult of grief and passion, the tears, I knew by his voice, welling to his eyes. And indeed I was not happy myself, had not been happy indeed, by this black home, even if the girl I loved was waiting me at the turn of the road.

“Let us be going,” I said at last.

“She might be here; she might be in the little plantation!” he said (and still in the melancholy and quiet of the place we talked in whispers).

“Could you not give a call, a signal?” he asked; and I had mind of the call I had once taught her, the doleful pipe of the curlew.

I gave it with hesitancy to the listening night. It came back an echo from the hills, but brought no other answer.

A wild bird roosting somewhere in the ruined house flapped out by the door and over us. I am not a believer in the ghostly—at least to the extent of some of our people; yet I was alarmed, till my reason came to me and the badinage of the professors at college, who had twitted me on my fears of the mischancy. But M’Iver clutched me by the shoulder in a frenzy of terror. I could hear his teeth chittering as if he had come out of the sea.

“Name of God!” he cried, “what was yon?”

“But a night-hag,” said I.

He was ashamed of his weakness; but the night, as he said, had too many holes in it for his fancy.

And so we went on again across the hill-face in the sombre gloaming. It was odd that the last time I had walked on this hillside had been for a glimpse of that same girl we sought to-night. Years ago, when I was a lad, she had on a summer been sewing with a kinswoman in Car-lunnan, the mill croft beside a linn of the river, where the salmon plout in a most wonderful profusion, and I had gone at morning to the hill to watch her pass up and down in the garden of the mill, or feed the pigeons at the round doo-cot, content (or wellnigh content) to see her and fancy the wind in her tresses, the song at her lip. In these mornings the animals of the hill and the wood and I were friendly; they guessed somehow, perhaps, no harm was in my heart: the young roes came up unafraid, almost to my presence, and the birds fluttered like comrades about me, and the little animals that flourish in the wild dallied boldly in my path. It was a soft and tranquil atmosphere, it was a world (I think now) very happy and unperplexed. And at evening, after a hurried meal, I was off over the hills to this brae anew, to watch her who gave me an unrest of the spirit, unappeasable but precious. I think, though the mornings were sweet, ‘twas the eve that was sweeter still. All the valley would be lying soundless and sedate, the hills of Salachary and the forest of Creag Dubh purpling in the setting sun, a rich gold tipping Dunchuach like a thimble. Then the eastern woods filled with dark caverns of shade, wherein the tall trunks of the statelier firs stood grey as ghosts. What was it, in that precious time, gave me, in the very heart of my happiness, a foretaste of the melancholy of coming years? My heart would swell, the tune upon my lip would cease, my eyes would blur foolishly, looking on that prospect most magic and fine. Rarely, in that happy age, did I venture to come down and meet the girl, but—so contrary is the nature of man!—the day was happier when I worshipped afar, though I went home fuming at my own lack of spirit.

To-day, my grief! how different the tale! That bygone time loomed upon me like a wave borne down on a mariner on a frail raft, the passion of the past ground me inwardly in a numb pain.

We stumbled through the snow, and my comrade—good heart!—said never a word to mar my meditation. On our right the hill of Meall Ruadh rose up like a storm-cloud ere the blackest of the night fell; we walked on the edges of the plantations, surmising our way by the aid of the grey snow around us.

It was not till we were in the very heart of Strongara wood that I came to my reason and thought what folly was this to seek the wanderer in such a place in dead of night. To walk that ancient wood, on the coarse and broken ground, among fallen timber, bog, bush, water-pass, and hillock, would have tried a sturdy forester by broad day; it was, to us weary travellers, after a day of sturt, a madness to seek through it at night for a woman and child whose particular concealment we had no means of guessing.

M’lver, natheless, let me flounder through that perplexity for a time, fearful, I suppose, to hurt my feelings by showing me how little I knew of it, and finally he hinted at three cairns he was acquaint with, each elevated somewhat over the general run of the country, and if not the harbourage a refugee would make for, at least the most suitable coign to overlook the Strongara wood.

“Lead me anywhere, for God’s sake!” said I; “I’m as helpless as a mowdie on the sea-beach.”

He knew the wood as ‘twere his own garden, for he had hunted it many times with his cousiri, and so he led me briskly, by a kind of natural path, to the first cairn. Neither there nor at the second did I get answer to my whistle.

“We’ll go up on the third,” said John, “and bide there till morning; scouring a wood in this fashion is like hunting otters in the deep sea.”

We reached the third cairn when the hour was long past midnight I piped again in vain, and having ate part of our coilop, we set us down to wait the dawn. The air, for mid-winter, was almost congenial; the snow fell no longer; the north part of the sky was wondrous clear and even jubilant with star.

I woke with a shiver at the hour before dawn, that strange hour when the bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur, when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning. M’Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier’s drill on his lips, but without opening his eyes.

We were on the edge of a glade of the wood, at the watershed of a small burn that tinkled among its ice along the ridge from Tombreck, dividing close beside us, half of it going to Shira Glen and half to Aora. The tall trees stood over us like sentinels, coated with snow in every bough; a cool crisp air fanned me, with a hint in it, somehow, of a smouldering wood-fire. And I heard close at hand the call of an owl, as like the whimper of a child as ever howlet’s vesper mocked. Then to my other side, my plaid closer about me, and to my dreaming anew.

It was the same whimper waked me a second time, too prolonged to be an owl’s complaint, and I sat upright to listen. It was now the break of day. A faint grey light brooded among the tree-tops.

“John! John!” I said in my companion’s ear, shaking his shoulder.

He stood to his feet in a blink, wide awake, fumbling at his sword-belt as a man at hurried wakings on foreign shores.

“What is it?” he asked, in a whisper.

I had no need to answer him, for anew the child’s cry rose in the wood—sharp, petulant, hungry. It came from a thick clump of undergrowth to the left of our night’s lodging, not sixty yards away, and in the half-light of the morning had something of the eerie about it.

John Splendid crossed himself ere he had mind of his present creed, and “God sain us!” he whispered; “have we here banshee or warlock!”

“I’ll warrant we have no more than what we seek,” said I, with a joyous heart, putting my tartan about me more orderly, and running a hand through my hair.

“I’ve heard of unco uncanny things assume a wean’s cry in a wood,” said he, very dubious in his aspect.

I laughed at him, and “Come away, ‘ille,” I said; “here’s the Provost’s daughter.” And I was hurrying in the direction of the cry.

M’Iver put a hand on my shoulder.

“Canny, man, canny; would ye enter a lady’s chamber (even the glade of the wood) without tirling at the pin?”

We stopped, and I softly sounded my curlew-call—once, twice, thrice.

The echo of the third time had not ceased on the hill when out stepped Betty. She looked miraculous tall and thin in the haze of the dawn, with the aspiring firs behind her, pallid at the face, wearied in her carriage, and torn at her kirtle by whin or thorn. The child clung at her coats, a ruddy brat, with astonishment stilling its whimper.

For a little the girl half misdoubted us, for the wood behind us and the still sombre west left us in a shadow, and there was a tremor in her voice as she challenged in English—

“Is that you, Elrigmore?”

I went forward at a bound, in a stupid rapture that made her shrink in alarm; but M’Iver lingered in the rear, with more discretion than my relations to the girl gave occasion for.

“Friends! oh, am not I glad to see yoa?” she said simply, her wan face lighting up. Then she sat down on a hillock and wept in her hands. I gave her awkward comfort, my wits for once failing me, my mind in a confusion, my hands, to my own sense, seeming large, coarse, and in the way. Yet to have a finger on her shoulder was a thrill to the heart, to venture a hand on her hair was a passionate indulgence.

The bairn joined in her tears till M’Iver took it in his arms. He had a way with little ones that had much of magic in it, and soon this one was nestling to his breast with its sobs sinking, an arm round his neck.

More at the pair of them than at me did Betty look with interest when her tears were concluded.

“Amn’t I like myself this morning?” asked John, jocularly, dandling the bairn in his arms.

Betty turned away without a reply, and when the child was put down and ran to her, she scarcely glanced on it, but took it by the hand and made to go before us, through the underwood she had come from.

“Here’s my home, gentlemen,” she said, “like the castle of Colin Dubh, with the highest ceiling in the world and the stars for candles.”

We might have passed it a score of times in broad daylight and never guessed its secret. It was the beildy side of the hill. Two fir-trees had fallen at some time in the common fashion of wind-blown pines, with their roots clean out of the earth, and raised up, so that coming together at two edges they made two sides of a triangle. To add to its efficiency as a hiding-place, some young firs grew at the open third side of the triangle.

In this confined little space (secure enough from any hurried search) there was still a greasach as we call it, the ember of a fire that the girl had kindled with a spark from a flint the night before, to warm the child, and she had kept it at the lowest extremity short of letting it die out altogether, lest it should reveal her whereabouts to any searchers in the wood.

We told her our story and she told us hers. She had fled on the morning of the attack, in the direction of the castle, but found her way cut off by a wing of the enemy, a number of whom chased her as she ran with the child up the river-side to the Cairnbaan, where she eluded her pursuers among his lordship’s shrubberies, and discovered a road to the wood. For a week she found shelter and food in a cow-herd’s abandoned bothy among the alders of Tarra-dubh; then hunger sent her travelling again, and she reached Leacainn Mhor, where she shared the cotter’s house with a widow woman who went out to the burn with a kail-pot and returned no more, for the tardy bullet found her. The murderers were ransacking the house when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament, told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely to escape further search.

“And so I am here with my charge,” said the girl, affecting a gaiety it were hard for her to feel “I could be almost happy and content, if I were assured my father and mother were safe, and the rest of my kinsfolk.”

“There’s but one of them in all the countryside,” I said. “Young MacLachlan, and he’s on Dunchuach.”

To my critical scanning her cheek gave no flag.

“Oh, my cousin!” she said. “I am pleased that he is safe, though I would sooner hear he was in Cowal than in Campbell country.”

“He’s honoured in your interest, madam,” I could not refrain from saying, my attempt at raillery I fear a rather forlorn one.

She flushed at this, but said never a word, only biting her nether lip and fondling the child.

I think we put together a cautious little fire and cooked some oats from my dorlach, though the ecstasy of the meeting with the girl left me no great recollection of all that happened. But in a quiet part of the afternoon we sat snugly in our triangle of fir roots and discoursed of trifles that had no reasonable relation to our precarious state. Betty had almost an easy heart, the child slept on my comrade’s plaid, and I was content to be in her company and hear the little turns and accents of her voice, and watch the light come and go in her face, and the smile hover, a little wae, on her lips at some pleasant tale of Mover’s.

“How came you round about these parts?” she asked—for our brief account of our doings held no explanation of our presence in the wood of Strongara.

“Ask himself here,” said John, cocking a thumb over his shoulder at me; “I have the poorest of scents on the track of a woman.”

Betty turned to me with less interest in the question than she had shown when she addressed it first to my friend.

I told her what the Glencoe man had told the parson, and she sighed. “Poor man!” said she, “(blessing with him!) it was he that sent me here to Strongara, and gave me tinder and flint.”

“We could better have spared any of his friends, then,” said I. “But you would expect some of us to come in search of you?”

“I did,” she said in a hesitancy, and crimsoning in a way that tingled me to the heart with the thought that she meant no other than myself. She gave a caressing touch to the head of the sleeping child, and turned to M’Iver, who lay on his side with his head propped on an elbow, looking out on the hill-face.

“Do you know the bairn?” she asked.

“No,” he said, with a careless look where it lay as peaceful as in a cradle rocked by a mother’s foot.

“It’s the oe of Peggie Mhor,” she said.

“So,” said he; “poor dear!” and he turned and looked out again at the snow.

We were, in spite of our dead Glencoe man’s assurance, in as wicked a piece of country as well might be. No snow had fallen since we left Tombreck, and from that dolorous ruin almost to our present retreat was the patent track of our march.

“I’m here, and I’m making a fair show at an easy mind,” said M’I ver; “but I’ve been in cheerier circumstances ere now.”

“So have I, for that part of it,” said Betty with spirit, half humorously, half in an obvious punctilio.

“Mistress,” said he, sitting up gravely, “I beg your pardon. Do you wonder if I’m not in a mood for saying dainty things? Our state’s precarious (it’s needless to delude ourselves otherwise), and our friend Sandy and his bloody gang may be at a javelin’s throw from us as we sit here. I wish—”

He saw the girl’s face betray her natural alarm, and amended his words almost too quickly for the sake of the illusion.

“Tuts, tuts!” he cried. “I forgot the wood was searched before, and here I’m putting a dismal black face on a drab business. We might be a thousand times worse. I might be a clay-cold corp with my last week’s wage unspent in my sporran, as it happens to be, and here I’m to the fore with four or five MacDonalds to my credit If I’ve lost my mercantile office as mine-manager (curse your trades and callings!) my sword is left me; you have equal fortune, Elrigmore; and you, Mistress Brown, have them you love spared to you.”

Again the girl blushed most fiercely. “Thank God! Thank God!” she cried in a stifled ecstasy, “and O! but I’m grateful.” And anew she fondled the little bye-blow as it lay with its sunny hair on the soldier’s plaid.

John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression, and asked her if she was fond of bairns.

“Need you ask that of a woman?” she said. “But for the company of this one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me crazy if I had not this little one’s hand in mine, and his breath in my hair as we lay together.”

“To me,” said John, “they’re like flowers, and that’s the long and the short of it.”

“You’re like most men, I suppose,” said Betty, archly; “fond of them in the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This one now—you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight in. But the nursing of bairns—even their own—is not a soldier’s business.”

“No, perhaps not,” said M’Iver, surveying her gravely; “and yet I’ve seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy’s country. He was struck—as he told me after—by the look of it sitting in a scene of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before him on the saddle for a many leagues’ march till he found a peaceful wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to all appearance, as these parts could boast He might even—for all I know to the contrary—have fairly bought her attention for it by a season’s paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who mocked the sentiment of the deed.”

“I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a cause so noble,” said the girl, softly.

“Neither greatly brave nor middling good,” said John, laughing, “at least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn.”

“I think I know the man,” said I, innocently, “and his name would be John.”

“And John or George,” said the girl, “I could love him for his story.”

M’Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child’s hair and toyed with it between his fingers.

“My dear, my dear!” said he; “it’s a foolish thing to judge a man’s character by a trifle like yon: he’s a poor creature who has not his fine impulse now and then; and the man I speak of, as like as not, was dirling a wanton flagon (or maybe waur) ere nightfall, or slaying with cruelty and zest the bairn’s uncles in the next walled town he came to. At another mood he would perhaps balance this lock of hair against a company of burghers but fighting for their own fire-end.”

“The hair is not unlike your own,” said Betty, comparing with quick eyes the curl he held and the curls that escaped from under the edge of his flat blue bonnet.

“May every hair of his be a candle to light him safely through a mirk and dangerous world,” said he, and he began to whittle assiduously at a stick, with a little black oxter-knife he lugged from his coat.

“Amen!” said the girl, bravely; “but he were better with the guidance of a good father, and that there seems small likelihood of his enjoying—poor thing!”

A constraint fell on us; it may have been there before, but only now I felt it myself. I changed the conversation, thinking that perhaps the child’s case was too delicate a subject, but unhappily made the plundering of our glens my dolorous text, and gloom fell like a mort-cloth on our little company. If my friend was easily uplifted, made buoyantly cheerful by the least accident of life, he was as prone to a hellish melancholy when fate lay low. For the rest of the afternoon he was ever staving with a gloomy brow about the neighbourhood, keeping an eye, as he said, to the possible chance of the enemy.

Left thus for long spaces in the company of Betty and the child, that daffed and croodled about her, and even became warmly friendly with me for the sake of my Paris watch and my glittering waistcoat buttons, I made many gallant attempts to get on my old easy footing. That was the wonder of it: when my interest in her was at the lukewarm, I could face her repartee with as good as she gave; now that I loved her (to say the word and be done with it), my words must be picked and chosen and my tongue must stammer in a contemptible awkwardness. Nor was she, apparently, quite at her ease, for when our talk came at any point too close on her own person, she was at great pains adroitly to change it to other directions.

I never, in all my life, saw a child so muckle made use of. It seemed, by the most wonderful of chances, to be ever needing soothing or scolding or kissing or running after in the snow, when I had a word to say upon the human affections, or a compliment to pay upon some grace of its most assiduous nurse.

“I’m afraid,” said Betty at last, “you learned some courtiers’ flatteries and coquetries in your travels. You should have taken the lesson like your friend and fellow-cavalier M’Iver, and got the trick of keeping a calm heart.”

“M’Iver!” I cried. “He’s an old hand at the business.”

She put her lips to the child’s neck and kissed it tumultuously.

“Not—not at the trade of lovier?” she asked after a while, carelessly keeping up the crack.

“Oh no!” I said, laughing. “He’s a most religious man.”

“I would hardly say so much,” she answered, coldly; “for there have been tales—some idle, some otherwise—about him, but I think his friend should be last to hint at any scandal.”

Good heavens! here was a surprise for one who had no more notion of traducing his friend than of miscalling the Shorter Catechism. The charge stuck in my gizzard. I fumed and sweat, speechless at the injustice of it, while the girl held herself more aloof than ever, busy preparing for our evening meal.

But I had no time to put myself right in her estimate of me before M’Iver came back from his airing with an alarming story.

“It’s time we were taking our feet from here,” he cried, running up to us. “I’ve been up on Meall Ruadh there, and I see the whole countryside’s in a confusion. Pipers are blowing away down the glen and guns are firing; if it’s not a muster of the enemy preparatory to their quitting the country, it’s a call to a more particular search in the hills and woods. Anyway we must be bundling.”

He hurriedly stamped out the fire, that smoked a faint blue reek which might have advertised our whereabouts, and Betty clutched the child to her arms, her face again taking the hue of hunt and fear she wore when we first set eyes on her in the morning.

“Where is safety?” she asked, hopelessly. “Is there a sheep-fank or a sheiling-bothy in Argile that is not at the mercy of those blood-hounds?”

“If it wasn’t for the snow on the ground,” said M’Iver, “I could find a score of safe enough hidings between here and the Beannan.” “Heavens!” he added, “when I think on it, the Beannan itself is the place for us; it’s the one safe spot we can reach by going through the woods without leaving any trace, if we keep under the trees and in the bed of the burn.”

We took the bairn in turns, M’Iver and I, and the four of us set out for the opposite side of Glenaora for the eas or gully called the Beannan, that lay out of any route likely to be followed by the enemy, whether their object was a retreat or a hunting. But we were never to reach this place of refuge, as it happened; for M’Iver, leading down the burn by a yard or two, had put his foot on the path running through the pass beside the three bridges, when he pulled back, blanching more in chagrin than apprehension.

“Here they are,” he said “We’re too late; there’s a band of them on the march up this way.”

At our back was the burned ruin of a house that had belonged to a shepherd who was the first to flee to the town when the invaders came. Its byre was almost intact, and we ran to it up the burn as fast as we could, and concealed ourselves in the dark interior. Birds came chirping under the eaves of thatch and by the vent-holes, and made so much bickering to find us in their sanctuary that we feared the bye-passers, who were within a whisper of our hiding, would be surely attracted Band after band of the enemy passed, laden in the most extraordinary degree with the spoil of war. They had only a rough sort of discipline in their retirement: the captains or chieftains marched together, leaving the companies to straggle as they might, for was not the country deserted by every living body but themselves? In van of them they drove several hundreds of black and red cattle, and with the aid of some rough ponies, that pulled such sledges (called carns) as are used for the hauling home of peat on hilly land, they were conveying huge quantities of household plenishing and the merchandise of the burgh town.

Now we had more opportunity of seeing those coarse savage forces than on any occasion since they came to Argile, for the whole of them had mustered at Inneraora after scouring the shire, and were on their march out of the country to the north, fatter men and better put-on than when they came. Among them were numerous tartans, either as kilt, trews, or plaid; the bonnet was universal, except that some of the officers wore steel helms, with a feather tip in them, and a clan badge of heather or whin or moss, and the dry oak-stalk whimsy of Montrose. They had come bare-footed and bare-buttocked (many of the privates of them) to Campbell country; now, as I say, they were very snod, the scurviest of the knaves set up with his hosen and brogues. Sturdy and black, or lank and white-haired like the old sea-rovers, were they, with few among them that ever felt the razor edge, so that the hair coated them to the very eyeholes, and they looked like wolves. The pipers, of whom there were three, were blasting lustily at Clanranald’s march when they came up the lower part of the Glen, according to M’Iver, who had heard them from Meall Ruadh; but now the music was stopped, and all were intent upon driving the cattle or watching their stolen gear’, for doubtless among such thieves there was not as much honour as would prevent one from picking his neighbour’s sporran.

We lay buried to the head in bracken that filled one side of the byre, and keeked through the plenteous holes in the dry-stone wall at the passing army. Long gaps were between the several clans, and the Irish came last It seemed—they moved so slowly on account of the cattle—that the end of the cavalcade was never to come; but at length came the baggage and the staff of Montrose himself. Then I got my first look of the man whose name stinks in the boar’s snout to this day. A fellow about thirty-three years of age, of mid height, hair of a very dark red, hanging in a thick fell on the shoulders of the tartan jacket (for he wore no armour), with a keen scrutinising eye, and his beard trimmed in the foreign vein. He sat his horse with considerable ease and grace, and was surrounded by half-a-dozen of the chiefs who had come under his banner. The most notable-looking of these was Alasdair MacDonald, the Major-General, an uncouth dog, but a better general, as I learned later, than ever God or practice made James Grahame of Montrose; with John of Moidart, the Captain of Clanranald, Donald Glas MacRanald of Keppoch, the laird of Glencoe, Stewart of Appin, and one of the Knoydart house, all of whilk we distinguished by their tartans and badges.

In the mien of these savage chiefs there was great elation that Montrose had little share in, to all appearance. He rode moodily, and when fair opposite our place of concealment he stopped his horse as if to quit the sell, but more likely to get, for a little, out of the immediate company of his lawless troops. None of those home-returning Gaels paid heed to his pause, for they were more Alasdair Macdonald’s men than his; Mac-Donald brought them to the lair of the boar, MacDonald glutted their Highland thirst for Campbell blood, Mac-Donald had compelled this raid in spite of the protests of the nobleman who held the King’s Commission and seal.

For some minutes his lordship stood alone on the pathway. The house where we lay was but one, and the meanest, among a numerous cluster of such drear memorials of a black business, and it was easy to believe this generalissimo had some gloomy thoughts as he gazed on the work he had lent consent to. He looked at the ruins and he looked up the pass at his barbarians, and shrugged his shoulders with a contempt there was no mistaking.

“I could bring him down like a capercailzie,” said M’Iver, coolly, running his eye along his pistol and cocking it through his keek-hole.

“For God’s sake don’t shoot!” I said, and he laughed quietly.

“Is there anything in my general deportment, Colin, that makes ye think me an assassin or an idiot? I never wantonly shot an unsuspecting enemy, and I’m little likely to shoot Montrose and have a woman and bairn suffer the worst for a stupid moment of glory.”

As ill luck would have it, the bairn, that had been playing peacefully in the dusk, at this critical minute let up a cry Montrose plainly heard.

“We’re lost, we’re lost,” said Betty, trembling till the crisp dry bracken rustled about her, and she was for instant flight.

“If we’re lost, there’s a marquis will go travelling with us,” said M’Iver, covering his lordship’s heart with his pistol.

Had Montrose given the slightest sign that he intended to call back his men to tread out this last flicker of life in Aora Glen he would never have died on the gibbet at the Grassmarket of Dunedin, Years after, when Grahame met his doom (with much more courtliness and dignity than I could have given him credit for), M’Iver would speak of his narrow escape at the end of the raiding.

“I had his life in the crook of my finger,” he would say; “had I acted on my first thought, Clan Campbell would never have lost Inverlochy; but bha e air an dàn,—what will be will be,—and Grahame’s fate was not in the crook of my finger, though so I might think it Aren’t we the fools to fancy sometimes our human wills decide the course of fate, and the conclusions of circumstances? From the beginning of time, my Lord Marquis of Montrose was meant for the scaffold.”

Montrose, when he heard the child’s cry, only looked to either hand to see that none of his friends heard it, and finding there was no one near him, took off his Highland bonnet, lightly, to the house where he jaloused there was a woman with the wean, and passed slowly on his way.

“It’s so honest an act,” said John, pulling in his pistol, “that I would be a knave to advantage myself of the occasion.”

A generous act enough. I daresay there were few in the following of James Grahame would have borne such a humane part at the end of a bloody business, and I never heard our people cry down the name of Montrose (bitter foe to me and mine) but I minded to his credit that he had a compassionate ear for a child’s cry in the ruined hut of Aora Glen.

Montrose gave no hint to his staff of what he had heard, for when he joined them, he nor they turned round to look behind. Before us now, free and open, lay the way to Inneraora. We got down before the dusk fell, and were the first of its returning inhabitants to behold what a scandal of charred houses and robbed chests the Athole and Antrim caterans had left us.

In the grey light the place lay tenantless and melancholy, the snow of the silent street and lane trodden to a slush, the evening star peeping between the black roof-timbers, the windows lozenless, the doors burned out or hanging off their hinges. Before the better houses were piles of goods and gear turned out on the causeway. They had been turned about by pike-handles and trodden upon with contemptuous heels, and the pick of the plenishing was gone. Though upon the rear of the kirk there were two great mounds, that showed us where friend and foe had been burled, that solemn memorial was not so poignant to the heart at the poor relics of the homes gutted and sacked. The Provost’s tenement, of all the lesser houses in the burgh, was the only one that stood in its outer entirety, its arched ceils proof against the malevolent fire. Yet its windows gaped black and empty. The tide was in close on the breast-wall behind, and the sound of it came up and moaned in the close like the sough of a sea-shell held against the ear.

We stood in the close, the three of us (the bairn clinging in wonder to the girl’s gown), with never a word for a space, and that sough of the sea was almost a coronach.

In a few hours, as it were, the news that the enemy had left the country was put about the shire, and people returned to pick up the loose ends of the threads of family and affairs. Next day my lord the Marquis came round Lochlong and Glencroe in a huge chariot with four wheels, the first we had ever seen in these parts, a manner of travel incumbent upon him because of a raxed shoulder he had met with at Dunbarton. He came back to a poor reception: the vestiges of his country’s most bitter extremity were on every hand, and, what was bound to be embarrassing to any nobleman of spirit, there was that in the looks and comportment of his clansmen that must have given MacCailein some unpleasant thought.

Behind his lordship came eleven hundred Lowland levies that had been with Baillie in England, and to command them came his cousin, Sir Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreac, luckily new over from Ireland, and in the spirit for campaigning. A fiery cross was sent round the clan, that in better times should easily have mustered five thousand of the prettiest lads ever trod heather, but it brought only a remnant of a thousand, and the very best that would have been welcome under the galley flag were too far afield for the summons to reach them in time. But every well-affected branch of Clan Campbell sent its gentlemen to officer our brigade.

A parley of war held in the castle determined on immediate pursuit of Montrose to Lochaber, keeping within easy distance, but without attacking till he was checked in front by troops that had gone up to flank him by way of Stirling. I was at the council, but had little to do with its decision, though the word of M’Iver and myself (as was due to cavaliers of experience) was invited with respect.

We were to march in two days; and as I had neither house nor ha’ to shelter me, seeing the old place up the glen was even more of a ruin than in Donald Gorm’s troubles, when the very roof-tree was thrown in Dhuloch, I shared quarters with M’Iver in the castle, where every available corner was occupied by his lordship’s guests.

When these other guests were bedded, and the house in all our wing of it was still, my comrade and I sat down to a tasse of brandy in our chamber, almost blythe, as you would say, at the prospect of coming to blows with our country’s spoilers. We were in the midst of a most genial crack when came a faint rap at the door, and in steps the goodman, as solemn as a thunder-cloud, in spite of the wan smile he fixed upon his countenance. He bore his arm out of his sleeve in a sling, and his hair was un-trim, and for once a most fastidious nobleman was anything but perjink.

“I cry pardon, gentlemen!” he said in Gaelic, “for breaking in on my guests’ privacy; but I’m in no humour for sleeping, and I thought you might have a spare glass for a friend.”

“It’s your welcome, Argile,” said I, putting a wand chair to the front for him. He sat himself down in it with a sigh of utter weariness, and nervously poking the logs on the fire with a purring-iron, looked sadly about the chamber.

It was his wife’s tiring-room, or closet, or something of that nature, fitted up hastily for our accommodation, and there were signs of a woman’s dainty hand and occupation about it The floor was carpeted, the wall was hung with arras; a varnish ‘scrutoire, some sweet-wood boxes, two little statues of marble, two raised silver candlesticks with snuffers conform, broidery-work unfinished, and my lord’s picture, in a little gilded frame hanging over a dressing-table, were among its womanly plenishing.

“Well, coz,” said his lordship, breaking an awkward silence, “we have an enormous and dastardly deed here to avenge.”

“We have that!” said M’Iver. “It’s a consolation that we are in the mood and in the position to set about paying the debt. Before the glad news came of your return, I was half afraid that our quarry would be too far gone ere we set loose the dogs on him. Luckily he can be little farther than Glenurchy now. Elrigmore and I had the honour to see the visitors make their departure. They carried so much stolen gear, and drove so big a prize of cattle, that I would not give them more than a twenty miles’ march to the day.”

“Will they hang together, do you think?” asked his lordship, fingering a crystal bottle for essence that lay on the ‘scrutoire.

“I misdoubt it,” said M’Iver. “You know the stuff, MacCailein? He may have his Irish still; but I’ll wager the MacDonalds, the Stewarts, and all the rest of that reiving crowd are off to their holds, like the banditty they are, with their booty. A company of pikes on the rear of him, as like as not, would settle his business.”

The Marquis, besides his dishevelment, was looking very lean and pale. I am wrong if I had not before me a man who had not slept a sound night’s sleep in his naked bed since the point of war beat under his castle window.

“Your arm, my lord “—I said in a pause of his conversation with Mlver, “is it a fashious injury? You look off your ordinary.”

“I do,” he said. “I daresay I do, and I wish to God it was only this raxed arm that was the worst of my ailment.”

His face burned up red in the candle-light, his nostrils swelled, and he rose in his chair. A small table was between us. He put his uninjured hand on it to steady himself, and leaned over to me to make his words more weighty for my ear.

“Do you know,” he added, “I’m Archibald, Marquis of Argile, and under the cope and canopy of heaven this January night there’s not a creature of God’s making more down in the heart and degraded than I? If the humblest servant in my house pointed a scornful finger at me and cried ‘Coward,’ I would bow my head. Ay, ay! it’s good of you, sir, to shake a dissenting head; but I’m a chief discredited. I know it, man. I see it in the faces about me. I saw it at Rosneath, when my very gardener fumbled, and refused to touch his bonnet when I left. I saw it to-night at my own table, when the company talked of what they should do, and what my men should do, and said never a word of what was to be expected of MacCailein Mor.”

“I think, my lord,” I cried “that you’re exaggerating a very small affair.”

“Small affair!” he said (and he wetted his lips with his tongue before the words came). “Small affair! Hell’s flame! is there anything smaller than the self-esteem of a man who by some infernal quirk of his nature turns his back on his most manifest duty—leaves the blood of his blood and the skin of his skin to perish for want of his guidance and encouragement, and wakens at morning to find it no black nightmare but the horrible fact? Answer me that, Elrigmore!”

“Tut, tut,” said M’Iver, pouring his cousin a glass; “you’re in the vapours, and need a good night’s sleep. There’s no one in Argile dare question your spirit, whatever they may think of your policy.”

Argile relapsed into his chair, and looked with a pitiful eye at his kinsman.

“My good Iain,” he said, “do you ken the old Lochow wife’s story of the two daws? ‘Thou didst well,’ said the one, ‘though thy wings are cut; thou didst well to do as I told thee.’ I’m not blaming you; you are a brave man of your own hands, and a middling honest man too, as honesty goes among mercenaries; but your tongue’s plausible, plausible, and you are the devil’s counsellor to any other man who slackens his will by so much as a finger-length.”

M’Iver took on a set stern jaw, and looked his chief very dourly in the face.

“My Lord of Argile,” he said, “you’re my cousin-ger-man, and you’re in a despondent key, and small blame to you with your lands smoking about you from Cruachan to Kilmartin; but if you were King Tearlach himself, I would take no insult from you. Do you charge me with any of your misfortunes?”

“I charge you with nothing, John,” said Argile, wearily. “I’m only saying that at a time of stress, when there’s a conflict in a man’s mind between ease and exertion, you’re not the best of consciences. Are we two going to quarrel about a phrase while our clansmen’s blood is crying from the sod? Sit down, sir; sit down, if it please you,” he said more sternly, the scowl that gave him the gruamach reputation coming on his face; “sit down, if it please you, and instead of ruffling up like the bubbly-jock over words, tell me, if you can, how to save a reputation from the gutter. If it was not that I know I have your love, do you think I should be laying my heart bare here and now? You have known me some time now, M’Iver—did you ever find me without some reserve in my most intimate speech? Did you ever hear me say two words that I had not a third in the background to bring forward if the policy of the moment called for it?”

M’Iver laughed slyly, and hesitated to make any answer.

“It’s a simple question,” said the Marquis; “am I to think it needs too straightforward an answer for John Splendid to give it?”

“I’m as frank as my neighbours,” said M’Iver.

“Well, sir, do not check the current of my candour by any picking and choosing of words. I ask if you have ever found me with the babbling and unbridled tongue of a fool in my mouth, giving my bottom-most thought to the wind and the street?”

“You were no Gael if you did, my lord. That’s the sin of the shallow wit. I aye kept a bit thought of my own in the corner of my vest.”

MacCailein sighed, and the stem of the beaker he was fingering broke in his nervous fingers. He threw the fragments with an impatient cry into the fireplace.

“It’s the only weakness of our religion (God pardon the sin of hinting at any want in that same!) that we have no chance of laying the heart bare to mortal man. Many a time I could wish for the salving influence of the confessional, even without the absolution to follow.”

“I think,” said John Splendid, “it would be a strange day when MacCailein Mor, Marquis of Argile, would ask or need shriving from anything or any one. There was never a priest or vicar in the shire you couldn’t twist the head off!”

The Marquis turned to me with a vexed toss of his shoulder. “It’s a hopeless task to look for a pagan’s backbone,” said he. “Come, I’ll confess. I dare not hint at my truant thought to Auchinbreac or before any of these fiery officers of mine, who fear perhaps more than they love me. At the black tale of my weakness they would make no allowance for my courage as the same was shown before.”

“Your courage, sir,” said I, “has been proved; it is the inheritance of your race. But I dare not strain my conscience, my lord, much as I love and honour your house, to say I could comprehend or concur in the extraordinary retirement you made from these parts when our need for your presence was the sorest.”

“I thank you for that, Elrigmore,” said his lordship, cordially. “You say no more now than you showed by your face (and perhaps said too) on the night the beacon flamed on Dunchuach. To show that I value your frankness—that my kinsman here seems to fancy a flaw ol character—I’ll be explicit on the cause of my curious behaviour in this crisis. When I was a boy I was brought up loyally to our savage Highland tradition, that feuds were to carry on, and enemies to confound, and that no logic under heaven should keep the claymore in its sheath while an old grudge was to wipe out in blood or a wrong to right.”

“A most sensible and laudable doctrine!” cried M’Iver. “With that and no more of a principle in life—except paying your way among friends—a good man of his hands could make a very snug and reputable progress through the world.”

“Some men might,” said Argile, calmly; “I do not know whether to envy or pity their kind. But they are not my kind. I think I bore myself not ungracefully in the Cabinet, in the field too, so long as I took my father’s logic without question. But I have read, I have pondered——”

“Just so,” whispered M’Iver, not a bit abashed that a sneer was in his interjection and his master could behold it.

“—And I have my doubts about the righteousness of much of our warfare, either before my day or now. I have brought the matter to my closet I have prayed——”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed M’Iver, but at once he asked pardon.

“—I am a man come—or wellnigh come—to the conclusion that his life was never designed by the Creator to be spent in the turmoil of faction and field. There is, I allow, a kind of man whom strife sets off, a middling good man in his way, perhaps, with a call to the sword whose justice he has never questioned. I have studied the philosophies; I have reflected on life—this unfathomable problem—and ‘fore God I begin to doubt my very right to wear a breastplate against the poignard of fate. Dubiety plays on me like a flute.”

To all this I listened soberly, at the time comprehending that this was a gentleman suffering from the disease of being unable to make up his mind. I would have let him go on in that key while he pleasured it, for it’s a vein there’s no remedy for at the time being; but M’Iver was not of such tolerant stuff as I. He sat with an amazed face till his passion simmered over into a torrent of words.

“MacCailein!” said he, “I’ll never call you coward, but I’ll call you mad, book mad, closet mad! Was this strong fabric your house of Argile (John M’Iver the humblest of its members) built up on doubt and whim and shillyshally hither and yond? Was’t that made notable the name of your ancestor Cailein Mor na Sringe, now in the clods of Kilchrenan, or Cailein Iongataich who cooled his iron hide in Linne-na-luraich; or your father himself (peace with him!), who did so gallantly at Glenlivet?”

“——And taught me a little of the trade of slaughter at the Western Isles thirty years ago come Candlemas,” said the Marquis. “How a man ages! Then—then I had a heart like the bird of spring.”

“He could have taught you worse! I’m your cousin, and I’ll say it to your beard, sir! Your glens and howes are ruined, your cattle are houghed and herried, your clan’s name is a bye-word this wae day in all Albainn, and you sit there like a chemist weighing the wind on your stomach.”

“You see no farther than your nose, John,” said the Marquis, petulantly, the candle-light turning his eyes blood-red.

“Thank God for that same!” said Mlver, “if it gives me the wit to keep an enemy from striking the same. If the nose was Argile’s, it might be twisted off his face while he debated upon his right to guard it.”

“You’re in some ways a lucky man,” said the Marquis, still in the most sad and tolerant humour. “Did you never have a second’s doubt about the right of your side in battle?”

“Here’s to the doubt, sir!” said M’Iver. “I’m like yourself and every other man in a quandary of that kind, that thinking on it rarely brought me a better answer to the guess than I got from my instinct to start with.”

Argile put his fingers through his hair, clearing the temples, and shutting wearied eyes on a perplexing world.

“I have a good deal of sympathy with John’s philosophy,” I said, modestly. “I hold with my father that the sword is as much God’s scheme as the cassock. What are we in this expedition about to start but the instruments of Heaven’s vengeance on murtherers and unbelievers?”

“I could scarcely put it more to the point myself,” cried M’Iver. “A soldier’s singular and essential duty is to do the task set him with such art and accomplishment as he can—in approach, siege, trench, or stronghold.”

“Ay, ay! here we are into our dialectics again,” said his lordship, laughing, with no particular surrender in his merriment. “You gentlemen make no allowance for the likelihood that James Grahame, too, may be swearing himself Heaven’s chosen weapon. ‘Who gave Jacob to the spoil and Israel to the robbers—did not I, the Lord?’ Oh, it’s a confusing world!”

“Even so, MacCailein; I’m a plain man,” said M’Iver, “though of a good family, brought up roughly among men, with more regard to my strength and skill of arm than to book-learning; but I think I can say that here and in this crisis I am a man more fit, express, and appropriate than yourself. In the common passions of life, in hate, in love, it is the simple and confident act that quicker achieves its purpose than the cunning ingenuity. A man in a swither is a man half absent, as poor a fighter as he is indifferent a lover; the enemy and the girl will escape him ere he has throttled the doubt at his heart There’s one test to my mind for all the enterprises of man—are they well contrived and carried to a good conclusion? There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon’s wing that the gled of the wood may have food to live on.”

“Upon my word, M’Iver,” said Argile, “you beat me at my own trade of debate, and—have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?”

“I kent a man of that name in a corps we forgathered with at Mentz—a ‘provient schriever,’ as they called him. A rogue, with a hand in the sporran of every soldier he helped pay wage to.”

“This was a different person; but no matter. Let us back to the beginning of our argument—why did you favour my leaving for Dunbarton when Montrose came down the Glen?”

The blood swept to M’Iver’s face, and his eye quailed.

“I favoured no such impolitic act,” said he, slowly. “I saw you were bent on going, and I but backed you up, to leave you some rags of illusion to cover your naked sin.”

“I thought no less,” said Argile, sadly, “and yet, do you know, Iain, you did me a bad turn yonder. You made mention of my family’s safety, and it was the last straw that broke the back of my resolution. One word of honest duty from you at that time had kept me in Inner-aora though Abijah’s array and Jeroboam’s horse and foot were coming down the glens.”

For a little M’Iver gave no answer, but sat in a chair of torture.

“I am sorry for it,” he said at last, in a voice that was scarce his own; “I’m in an agony for it now; and your horse was not round Strone before I could have bit out the tongue that flattered your folly.”

MacCailein smiled with a solemn pity that sat oddly on the sinister face that was a mask to a complex and pliable soul.

“I have no doubt,” said he, “and that’s why I said you were a devil’s counsellor. Man, cousin! have we not played together as boys on the shore, and looked at each other on many a night across a candid bowl? I know you like the open book; you and your kind are the weak, strong men of our Highland race. The soft tongue and the dour heart; the good man at most things but at your word!”

The essence of all human melancholy is in the sentiment of farewells. There are people roving about the world, to-day here, to-morrow afar, who cheat fate and avoid the most poignant wrench of this common experience by letting no root of their affection strike into a home or a heart Self-contained, aloof, unloved, and unloving, they make their campaign through life in movable tents that they strike as gaily as they pitch, and, beholding them thus evade the one touch of sorrow that is most inevitable and bitter to every sensitive soul, I have sometimes felt an envy of their fortune. To me the world was almost mirthful if its good-byes came less frequent. Cold and heat, the contumely of the slanderer, the insult of the tyrant, the agues and fevers of the flesh, the upheavals of personal fortune, were events a robust man might face with calm valiancy if he could be spared the cheering influence of the homely scene or the unchanged presence of his familiars and friends. I have sat in companies and put on an affected mirth, and laughed and sung with the most buoyant of all around, and yet ever and anon I chilled at the intruding notion of life’s brevity.

Thus my leaving town Inneraora—its frozen hearths, its smokeless vents, its desecrated doorways, and the few of my friends who were back to it—was a stupendous grief. My father and my kinspeople were safe—we had heard of them by the returners from Lennox; but a girl with dark tresses gave me a closer passion for my native burgh than ever I felt for the same before. If love of his lady had been Argile’s reason for retreat (thought I), there was no great mystery in his act.

What enhanced my trouble was that Clan MacLachlan—as Catholics always safe to a degree from the meddling of the invaders—had re-established themselves some weeks before in their own territory down the loch, and that young Lachlan, as his father’s proxy, was already manifesting a guardian’s interest in his cousin. The fact came to my knowledge in a way rather odd, but characteristic of John Splendid’s anxiety to save his friends the faintest breeze of ill-tidings.

We were up early betimes in the morning of our departure for Lorn, though our march was fixed for the afternoon, as we had to await the arrival of some officers from Ceanntyre; and John and I, preparing our accoutrements, began to talk of the business that lay heaviest at my heart—the leaving of the girl we had found in Strongara wood.

“The oddest thing that ever happened to me,” he said, after a while, “is that in the matter of this child she mothers so finely she should be under the delusion that I have the closest of all interests in its paternity. Did you catch her meaning when she spoke of its antecedents as we sat, the four of us, behind the fir-roots?”

“No, I can’t say that I did,” said I, wonderingly.

“You’re not very gleg at some things, Elrigmore,” he said, smiling. “Your Latin gave you no clue, did it, to the fact that she thought John M’Iver a vagabond of the deepest dye?”

“If she thought that,” I cried, “she baffles me; for a hint I let drop in a mere careless badinage of your gallanting reputation made her perilously near angry.”

John with pursed lips stroked his chin, musing on my words. I was afraid for a little he resented my indiscretion, but resentment was apparently not in his mind, for his speech found no fault with me.

“Man, Colin,” he said, “you could scarcely have played a more cunning card if you had had myself to advise you. But no matter about that.”

“If she thinks so badly of you, then,” I said, “why not clear yourself from her suspicions, that I am willing to swear (less because of your general character than because of your conduct since she and you and the child met) are without foundation?”

“I could scarcely meet her womanly innuendo with a coarse and abrupt denial,” said he. “There are some shreds of common decency left in me yet.”

“And you prefer to let her think the worst?”

He looked at me with a heightened colour, and he laughed shortly.

“You’ll be no loser by that, perhaps,” he said; and before I could answer he added, “Pardon a foolish speech, Colin; I learned the trick of fanfaron among foreign gentry who claimed a conquête d’amour for every woman who dropped an eye to their bold scrutiny. Do not give me any share of your jealousy for Lachlan MacLachlan of that ilk—I’m not deserving the honour. And that reminds me——”

He checked himself abruptly.

“Come, come,” said I, “finish your story; what about MacLachlan and the lady?”

“The lady’s out of the tale this time,” he said, shortly. “I met him stravaiging the vacant street last night; that was all.”

“Then I can guess his mission without another word from you,” I cried, after a little dumfounderment. “He would be on the track of his cousin.”

“Not at all,” said John, with a bland front; “he told me he was looking for a boatman to ferry him over the loch.”

This story was so plainly fabricated to ease my apprehension that down I went, incontinent, and sought the right tale in the burgh.

Indeed it was not difficult to learn the true particulars, for the place rang all the worse for its comparative emptiness with the scandal of M’Iver’s encounter with Mac-Lachlan, whom, it appeared, he had found laying a gallant’s siege to the upper window of Askaig’s house, whose almost unharmed condition had made it a convenient temporary shelter for such as had returned to the town. In the chamber behind the window that Mac-Lachlan threw his peebles at, were his cousin and the child, as M’Iver speedily learned, and he trounced him from the neighbourhood with indignities.

“What set you on the man?” I asked John when I came back after learning this.

“What do you think?” said he.

“You could have done no more if you had an eye on the girl yourself,” I said, “and that, you assure me, is out of the question.”

“The reason was very simple,” he answered. “I have a sort of elder man’s mischievous pleasure in spoiling a young buck’s ploy, and—and—there might be an extra interest in my entertainment in remembering that you had some jealous regard for the lady.”

All I had that was precious to take with me when we left Inneraora to follow the track of Montrose was the friendly wave of Mistress Betty’s hand as we marched out below the Arches on our way to the North.

Argile and Auchinbreac rode at our head—his lordship on a black horse called Lepanto, a spirited beast that had been trained to active exercises and field-practice; Auchinbreac on a smaller animal, but of great spirit and beauty. M’Iver and I walked, as did all the officers. We had for every one of our corps twelve shot apiece, and in the rear a sufficiency of centners of powder, with ball and match. But we depended more on the prick of pike and the slash of sword than on our culverins. Our Lowland levies looked fairly well disciplined and smart, but there was apparent among them no great gusto about our expedition, and we had more hope of our vengeance at the hands of our uncouth but eager clansmen who panted to be at the necks of their spoilers and old enemies.

M’Iver confided to me more than once his own doubts about the mettle of the companies from Dumbarton.

“I could do well with them on a foreign strand,” he said, “fighting for the bawbees against half-hearted soldiery like themselves, but I have my doubts about their valour or their stomach for this broil with a kind of enemy who’s like to surprise them terribly when the time comes. This affair’s decision must depend, I’m afraid, for the most part on our own lads, and I wish there were more of them.”

We went up the Glen at a good pace, an east wind behind us, and the road made a little easier for us since the snow had been trodden by the folks we were after. To-day you will find Aora Glen smiling—happy with crop and herd on either hand and houses at every turn of the road, with children playing below the mountain-ash that stands before each door. You cannot go a step but human life’s in sight Our march was in a desolate valley—the winds with the cold odour (one might almost think) of ruin and death.

Beyond Lecknamban, where the time by the shadow on Tom-an-Uarader was three hours of the afternoon, a crazy old cailleach, spared by some miracle from starvation and doom, ran out before us wringing her hands, and crying a sort of coronach for a family of sons of whom not one had been spared to her. A gaunt, dark woman, with a frenzied eye, her cheeks collapsed, her neck and temples like crinkled parchment, her clothes dropping off her in strips, and her bare feet bleeding in the snow.

Argile scoffed at the superstition, as he called it, and the Lowland levies looked on it as a jocular game, when we took a few drops of her blood from her forehead for luck—a piece of chirurgy that was perhaps favourable to her fever, and one that, knowing the ancient custom, and respecting it, she made no fraca about.

She followed us in the snow to the ruins of Camus, pouring out her curses upon Athole and the men who had made her home desolate and her widowhood worse than the grave, and calling on us a thousand blessings.

Lochow—a white, vast meadow, still bound in frost—we found was able to bear our army and save us the toilsome bend round Stronmealchan. We put out on its surface fearlessly. The horses pranced between the isles; our cannon trundled on over the deeps; our feet made a muffled thunder, and that was the only sound in all the void. For Cruachan had looked down on the devastation of the enemy. And at the falling of the night we camped at the foot of Glen Noe.

It was a night of exceeding clearness, with a moon almost at the full, sailing between us and the south. A certain jollity was shed by it upon our tired brigade, though all but the leaders (who slept in a tent) were resting in the snow on the banks of the river, with not even a saugh-tree to give the illusion of a shelter. There was but one fire in the bivouac, for there was no fuel at hand, and we had to depend upon a small stock of peats that came with us in the stores-sledge.

Deer came to the hill and belled mournfully, while we ate a frugal meal of oat-bannock and wort. The Low-landers—raw lads—became boisterous; our Gaels, stern with remembrance and eagerness for the coming business, thawed to their geniality, and soon the laugh and song went round our camp. Argile himself for a time joined in our diversion. He came out of his tent and lay in his plaid among his more immediate followers, and gave his quota to the story or the guess. In the deportment of his lordship now there was none of the vexatious hesitancy that helped him to a part so poor as he played in his frowning tower at home among the soothing and softening effects of his family’s domestic affairs. He was true Diarmaid the bold, with a calm eye and steadfast, a worthy general for us his children, who sat round in the light of the cheerful fire. So sat his forebears and ours on the close of many a weary march, on the eve of many a perilous enterprise. That cold pride that cocked his head so high on the causeway-stones of Inneraora relinquished to a mien generous, even affectionate, and he brought out, as only affection may, the best that was of accomplishment and grace in his officers around.

“Craignure,” he would say, “I remember your story of the young King of Easaidh Ruadh; might we have it anew?” Or, “Donald, is the Glassary song of the Target in your mind? It haunts me like a charm.”

And the stories came free, and in the owercome of the songs the dark of Glen Noe joined most lustily.

Songs will be failing from the memory in the ranging of the years, the passions that rose to them of old burned low in the ash, so that many of the sweetest ditties I heard on that night in Glen Noe have long syne left me for ever—all but one that yet I hum to the children at my knee. It was one of John Splendid’s; the words and air were his as well as the performance of them, and though the English is a poor language wherein to render any fine Gaelic sentiment, I cannot forbear to give something of its semblance here. He called it in the Gaelic “The Sergeant of Pikes,” and a few of its verses as I mind them might be Scotticed so—

     When I sat in the service o’ foreign commanders,
        Selling a sword for a beggar man’s fee,
     Learning the trade o’ the warrior who wanders,
        To mak’ ilka stranger a sworn enemie;
     There was ae thought that nerved roe, and brawly it served me.
        With pith to the claymore wherever I won,—
     ‘Twas the auld sodger’s story, that, gallows or glory,
        The Hielan’s, the Hielan’s were crying me on!

     I tossed upon swinging seas, splashed to my kilted knees,
        Ocean or ditch, it was ever the same;
     In leaguer or sally, tattoo or revally,
        The message on every pibroch that came,
      Was “Cruachan, Cruachan, O son remember us,
        Think o’ your fathers and never be slack!”
      Blade and buckler together, though far off the heather,
        The Hielan’s, the Hielan’s were all at my back!

     The ram to the gate-way, the torch to the tower,
        We rifled the kist, and the cattle we maimed;
     Our dirks stabbed at guess through the leaves o’ the bower,
        And crimes we committed that needna be named:
     Moonlight or dawning grey, Lammas or Lady-day,
        Donald maun dabble his plaid in the gore;
     He maun hough and maun harry, or should he miscarry,
        The Hielan’s, the Hielan’s will own him no more!

     And still, O strange Providence! mirk is your mystery,
        Whatever the country that chartered our steel
     Because o’ the valiant repute o’ our history,
        The love o’ our ain land we maistly did feel;
     Many a misty glen, many a sheiling pen,
        Rose to our vision when slogans rang high;
     And this was the solace bright came to our starkest fight,
        A’ for the Hielan’s, the Hielan’s we die!

     A Sergeant o’ Pikes, I have pushed and have parried O
        (My heart still at tether in bonny Glenshee);
     Weary the marches made, sad the towns harried O,
        But in fancy the heather was aye at my knee:
     The hill-berry mellowing, stag o’ ten bellowing,
        The song o’ the fold and the tale by the hearth,
     Bairns at the crying and auld folks a-dying,
        The Hielan’s sent wi’ me to fight round the earth!

     O the Hielan’s, the Hielan’s, praise God for His favour,
        That ane sae unworthy should heir sic estate,
     That gi’ed me the zest o the sword, and the savour
        That lies in the loving as well as the hate.
     Auld age may subdue me, a grim death be due me,
        For even a Sergeant o’ Pikes maun depart,
     But I’ll never complain o’t, whatever the pain o’t,
        The Hielan’s, the Hielan’s were aye at my heart!

We closed in our night’s diversion with the exercise of prayer, wherein two clerics led our devotion, one Master Mungo Law, a Lowlander, and the other his lordship’s chaplain—Master Alexander Gordon, who had come on this expedition with some fire of war in his face, and never so much as a stiletto at his waist.

They prayed a trifle long and drearily the pair of them, and both in the English that most of our clansmen but indifferently understood. They prayed as prayed David, that the counsel of Ahithophel might be turned to foolishness; and “Lo,” they said, “be strong and courageous; fear not, neither be afraid of the King of Ashur, neither for all the multitude that is with him; for there be more with us than with him,” and John Splendid turned to me at this with a dry laugh.

“Colin, my dear,” said he, “thus the hawk upon the mountain-side, and the death of the winged eagle to work up a valour for! ‘There be more with us than with him.’ I never heard it so bluntly put before. But perhaps Heaven will forgive us the sin of our caution, seeing that half our superior number are but Lowland levies.”

And all night long deer belled to deer on the braes of Glen Noe.

We might well be at our prayers. Appin paid dearly for its merriment in the land of Cailein Mor, and the MacDonalds were mulct most generously for our every hoof and horn. For when we crossed Loch Etive there came behind us from the ruined glens of Lower Lorn hordes of shepherds, hunters, small men of small families, who left their famished dens and holes, hunger sharping them at the nose, the dead bracken of concealment in their hair, to join in the vengeance on the cause of their distress. Without chieftains or authority, they came in savage bands, affronting the sea with their shouts as they swam or ferried; they made up with the wildest of our troops, and ho, ro! for the plaids far and wide on the errands of Hell. In that clear, cold, white weather—the weather of the badger’s dream, as our proverb calls it—we brought these glens unfriendly, death in the black draught and the red wine of fire. A madness of hate seized on us; we glutted our appetites to the very gorge. I must give Argile the credit of giving no licence to our on-goings. He rode after us with his Lowlanders, protesting, threatening, cajoling in vain. Many a remonstrance, too, made Gordon, many an opening fire he stamped out in cot and bam. But the black smoke of the granary belching against the white hills, or the kyloe, houghed and maimed, roaring in its agony, or the fugitive brought bloody on his knees among the rocks—God’s mercy!

Do you know why those unco spectacles were sometimes almost sweet to me, though I was more often a looker-on than a sharer in their horror? It was because I never saw a barn blaze in Appin or Glencoe but I minded on our own black barns in Shira Glen; nor a beast slashed at the sinew with a wanton knife, but I thought of Moira, the dappled one that was the pride of my mother’s byre, made into hasty collops for a Stewart meal. Through this remoter Lorn I went, less conscious of cruelty than when I plied fire and sword with legitimate men of war, for ever in my mind was the picture of real Argile, scorched to the vitals with the invading flame, and a burgh town I cherished reft of its people, and a girl with a child at her neck flying and sobbing among the hills.

Montrose and MacColkitto were far before us, marching up the Great Glen. They had with them the pick of the clans, so we lived, as it were, at free quarters, and made up for weeks of short fare by a time of high feeding.

Over Etive and through the Benderloch, and through Appin and even up to Glencoe, by some strange spasm of physique—for she was frail and famished—the barefooted old cailleach of Carnus came after us, a bird of battle, croaking in a horrible merriment over our operations. The Dark Dame we called her. She would dance round the butchery of the fold, chanting her venomous Gaelic exultation in uncouth rhymes that she strung together as easily as most old people of her kind can do such things in times of passion or trance. She must have lived like a vulture, for no share would she have in our pots, though sometimes she added a relish to them by fetching dainties from houses by the way, whose larders in our masculine ignorance we had overlooked.

“I would give thee the choicest of the world,” she would say. “What is too good for my heroes, O heroes of the myrtle-badge?”

“Sit down and pick,” John Splendid bade her once, putting a roysterer’s playful arm round her waist, and drawing her to the fire where a dinner stewed.

Up she threw her claws, and her teeth were at his neck with a weasel’s instinct But she drew back at a gleam of reason.

“Oh, darling, darling,” she cried, patting him with her foul hands, “did I not fancy for the moment thou wert of the spoilers of my home and honour—thou, the fleet foot, the avenger, the gentleman with an account to pay—on thee this mother’s blessing, for thee this widow’s prayers!”

M’Iver was more put about at her friendliness than at her ferocity, as he shook his plaiding to order and fell back from her worship.

“I’ve seldom seen a more wicked cat,” said he; “go home, grandam, and leave us to our business. If they find you in Lochaber they will gralloch you like a Yule hind.”

She leered, witch-like, at him, clutched suddenly at his sword-hilt, and kissed it with a frenzy of words, then sped off, singing madly as she flew.

We left the Dark Dame on Levenside as we ferried over to Lochaber, and the last we saw of her, she stood knee-deep in the water, calling, calling, calling, through the grey dun morning, a curse on Clan Donald and a blessing on Argile.

His lordship sat at the helm of a barge, his face pallid and drawn with cold, and he sighed heavily as the beldame’s cries came after us.

“There’s little of God’s grace in such an omen,” said he, in English, looking at the dim figure on the shore, and addressing Gordon.

“It could happen nowhere else,” said the cleric, “but in such a ferocious land. I confess it, my lord—I confess it with the bitter shame of surrender, that I behold generations of superstition and savagery still to beat down ere your people are so amenable to the Gospel as the folks of the Lowland shires. To them such a shrieking harridan would be an object of pity and stern measure; they would call her mad as an etter-cap, and keep her in bounds: here she is made something of a prophetess———”

“How?” asked Argile, shortly, and he was looking wistfully at the hills we were leaving—the hills that lay between him and his books.

“There’s not a Highlander in your corps but has bowed his head to her blessing; there’s not one but looks upon her curse of the MacDonalds as so much of a gain in this enterprise.”

“Oh,” said his lordship, “you are a little extravagant We have our foolish ways, Gordon, but we are not altogether heathen; and do you think that after all there might not be something in the portents of a witch like yon in her exaltation?”

“No more than’s in the howling of the wind in the chimney,” said Gordon, quickly.

“Perhaps not,” said Argile, after a little, “perhaps not; but even the piping of the vent has something of prophecy in it, though the wind bloweth where it listeth. I have only a scholar’s interest in these things, I give you my word, and——”

He laughed with a little restraint before he went on.

“Do you know, John,” he called out to M’Iver—“do you know what our cailleach friend says of our jaunt? She put a head in at my tent last night, and ‘Listen, MacCailein,’ said she, ‘and keep on high roads,’ said she, ‘and Inverlochy’s a perilous place,’ said she, ‘and I’d be wae to see the heather above the gall.’”

John Splendid’s back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame. He never turned: he made no answer for a moment, and when he spoke it was with a laughing allusion in English to the folly of portents.

This was so odd an attitude for a man usually superstitious to take up, that I engaged him on the point whenever we landed.

“You seem to have no great respect for the Dark Dame’s wizardy,” said I.

He took me aside from some of the clansmen who could overhear.

“Never let these lads think that you either lightly Dame Dubh or make overmuch of her talk about the heather and gall, for they prize her blessing, strangely enough, and they might lay too great stress on its failure. You catch me?”

I nodded to keep him going, and turned the thing over in my mind.

“What do you think of the prophecy yourself?” he asked; “is it not familiar?”

In a flash it came to my mind that I had half-hinted to him at what the Macaulay woman had said in the fold of Elrigmore.

“I think,” said I, “the less the brooding on these things the better.”

If we had our own misgivings about the end of this jaunt, our companions had none. They plunged with hearts almost jocular into the woods on Lochaber’s edge, in a bright sunshine that glinted on the boss of the target and on the hilt of the knife or sword, and we came by the middle of the day to the plain on which lay the castle of Inverlochy—a staunch quadrangular edifice with round towers at the angles, and surrounded by a moat that smelled anything but freshly. And there we lay for a base, and thence we sent out round Keppoch and Locheil some dashing companies that carried on the work we began in Athole.

Auchinbreac’s notion, for he was more than my lord the guide of this enterprise, was to rest a day or two in the castle and then follow on the heels of Montrose, who, going up Loch Ness-side, as we knew he was, would find himself checked in front by Seaforth, and so hemmed between two fires.

It was about three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon when Argile sent for M’Iver and myself to suggest a reconnoitring excursion up the Great Glen by the side of the lochs, to see how far the enemy might have reached before us.

“I’m sorry to lose your company, gentlemen,” said he, “even for a day; but this is a delicate embassy, and I can fancy no one better able to carry it through successfully than the two gentlemen who have done more delicate and dangerous work in the ranks of the honourable Scots Brigade.”

“I can say for myself,” said John, “that there’s not a man in Keppoch could guess my nativity or my politics if I had on another tartan than that of the Diarmaid.”

“Ah! you have the tongue, no doubt of it,” said Argile, smiling; “and if a change of colour would make your task less hazardous, why not effect it? I’m sure we could accommodate you with some neutral fabric for kilt and plaid.”

“For the humour of the thing,” said John, “I would like to try it; but I have no notion of getting hanged for a spy. James Grahame of Montrose has enough knowledge of the polite arts of war to know the difference between a spy in his camp in a false uniform and a scout taking all the risks of the road by wearing his own colours. In the one case he would hang us offhand, in the other there’s a hair’s-breadth of chance that he might keep us as hostages.”

“But in any tartan, cousin, you’re not going to let yourself be caught,” said Argile. “We have too much need for you here. Indeed, if I thought you were not certain to get through all right, I would send cheaper men in your place.”

John laughed.

“There’s no more cure,” said he, “for death in a common herd than for the same murrain in an ensign of foot.”

“A scholar’s sentiment!” cried Argile. “Are you taking to the philosophies?”

“It’s the sentiment, or something like it, of your chaplain, Master Gordon,” said John; “he reproved me with it on Dunchuach. But to do myself justice, I was never one who would run another into any danger I was unwilling to face myself.”

The Marquis said no more, so we set about preparing for the journey.

“Well, Elrigmore, here we are running the loupegarthe with MacDonalds on the one side of us and Camerons on the other,” said my comrade, as we set out at the mouth of the evening, after parting from a number of the clan who went up to the right at Spean to do some harrying in Glen Roy.

No gavilliger or provost-marshal ever gave a more hazardous gauntlet to run, thought I, and I said as much; but my musings brought only a good-humoured banter from my friend.

All night we walked on a deserted rocky roadway under moon and star. By the side of Loch Lochy there was not a light to be seen; even the solitary dwellings we crept bye in the early part of our journey were without smoke at the chimney or glimmer at the chink. And on that loch-side, towards the head of it, there were many groups of mean little hovels, black with smoke and rain, with ragged sloven thatch, the midden at the very door and the cattle routing within, but no light, no sign of human occupation.

It was the dawning of the day, a fine day as it proved and propitious to its close, that we ventured to enter one such hut or bothy at the foot of another loch that lay before us. Auchinbreac’s last order to us had been to turn wherever we had indication of the enemy’s whereabouts, and to turn in any case by morning. Before we could go back, however, we must have some sleep and food, so we went into this hut to rest us. It stood alone in a hollow by a burn at the foot of a very high hill, and was tenanted by a buxom, well-featured woman with a herd of duddy children. There was no man about the place; we had the delicacy not to ask the reason, and she had the caution not to offer any. As we rapped at her door we put our arms well out of sight below our neutral plaids, but I daresay our trade was plain enough to the woman when she came out and gave us the Gael’s welcome somewhat grudgingly, with an eye on our apparel to look for the tartan.

“Housewife,” said John M’Iver, blandly, “we’re a bit off our way here by no fault of our own, and we have been on the hillside all night, and——”

“Come in,” she said, shortly, still scrutinising us very closely, till I felt myself flushing wildly. She gave us the only two stools in her dwelling, and broke the peats that smouldered on the middle of her floor. The chamber—a mean and contracted interior—was lit mainly from the door and the smoke-vent, that gave a narrow glimpse of heaven through the black cabar and thatch. Round about the woman gathered her children, clinging at her gown, and their eyes stared large and round in the gloom at the two of us who came so appallingly into their nest.

We sat for a little with our plaids about us, revelling in the solace of the hearty fire that sent wafts of odorous reek round the dwelling; and to our dry rations the woman added whey, that we drank from birch cogies.

“I am sorry I have no milk just now,” she said. “I had a cow till the day before yesterday; now she’s a cow no more, but pith in Colkitto’s heroes.”

“They lifted her?” asked John.

“I would not say they lifted her,” said the woman, readily, “for who would be more welcome to my all than the gentlemen of Keppoch and Seumais Grahame of Montrose?” And again she looked narrowly at our close-drawn plaids.

I stood up, pulled out my plaid-pin, and let the folds off my shoulder, and stood revealed to her in a Diarmaid tartan.

“You see we make no pretence at being other than what we are,” I said, softly; “are we welcome to your whey and to your fire-end?”

She showed no sign of astonishment or alarm, and she answered with great deliberation, choosing her Gaelic, and uttering it with an air to impress us.

“I dare grudge no one at my door,” said she, “the warmth of a peat and what refreshment my poor dwelling can give; but I’ve seen more welcome guests than the spoilers of Appin and Glencoe. I knew you for Campbells when you knocked.”

“Well, mistress,” said M’Iver, briskly, “you might know us for Campbells, and might think the worse of us for that same fact (which we cannot help), but it is to be hoped you will know us for gentlemen too. If you rue the letting of us in, we can just go out again. But we are weary and cold and sleepy, for we have been on foot since yesterday, and an hour among bracken or white hay would be welcome.”

“And when you were sleeping,” said the woman; “what if I went out and fetched in some men of a clan who would be glad to mar your slumber?”

John studied her face for a moment It was a sonsy and simple face, and her eyes were not unkindly.

“Well,” he said, “you might have some excuse for a deed so unhospitable, and a deed so different from the spirit of the Highlands as I know them. Your clan would be little the better for the deaths of two gentlemen whose fighting has been in other lands than this, and a wife with a child at her breast would miss me, and a girl with her wedding-gown at the making would miss my friend here. These are wild times, good wife, wild and cruel times, and a widow more or less is scarcely worth troubling over. I think we’ll just risk you calling in your men, for, God knows, I’m wearied enough to sleep on the verge of the Pit itself.”

The woman manifestly surrendered her last scruple at his deliverance. She prepared to lay out a rough bedding of the bleached bog-grass our people gather in the dry days of spring.

“You may rest you a while, then,” said she. “I have a husband with Keppoch, and he might be needing a bed among strangers himself.”

“We are much in your reverence, housewife,” said John, nudging me so that I felt ashamed of his double-dealing. “That’s a bonny bairn,” he continued, lifting one of the children in his arms; “the rogue has your own good looks in every lineament.”

“Aye, aye,” said the woman, drily, spreading her blankets; “I would need no sight of tartan to guess your clan, master. Your flattery goes wrong this time, for by ill-luck you have the only bairn that does not belong to me of all the brood.”

“Now that I look closer,” he laughed, “I see a difference; but I’ll take back no jot of my compliment to yourself.”

“I was caught yonder,” said he to me a little later in a whisper in English, as we lay down in our corner. “A man of my ordinary acuteness should have seen that the brat was the only unspoiled member of all the flock.”

We slept, it might be a couple of hours, and wakened together at the sound of a man’s voice speaking with the woman outside the door. Up we sat, and John damned the woman for her treachery.

“Wait a bit,” I said. “I would charge her with no treachery till I had good proofs for it I’m mistaken if your lie about your wife and weans has not left her a more honest spirit towards us.”

The man outside was talking in a shrill, high voice, and the woman in a softer voice was making excuses for not asking him to go in. One of her little ones was ill of a fever, she said, and sleeping, and her house, too, was in confusion, and could she hand him out something to eat?

“A poor place Badenoch nowadays!” said the man, petulantly. “I’ve seen the day a bard would be free of the best and an honour to have by any one’s fire. But out with the bannocks and I’ll be going. I must be at Kilcumin with as much speed as my legs will lend me.”

He got his bannocks and he went, and we lay back a while on our bedding and pretended to have heard none of the incident It was a pleasant feature of the good woman’s character that she said never a word of her tactics in our interest.

“So you did not bring in your gentlemen?” said John, as we were preparing to go. “I was half afraid some one might find his way unbidden, and then it was all bye with two poor soldiers of fortune.”

“John MacDonald the bard, John Lorn, as we call him, went bye a while ago,” she answered simply, “on his way to the clan at Kilcumin.”

“I have never seen the bard yet that did not demand his bardic right to kail-pot and spoon at every passing door.”

“This one was in a hurry,” said the woman, reddening a little in confusion.

“Just so,” said M’Iver, fumbling in his hand some coin he had taken from his sporran; “have you heard of the gold touch for fever? A child has been brought from the edge of the grave by the virtue of a dollar rubbed on its brow. I think I heard you say some neighbour’s child was ill? I’m no physician, but if my coin could—what?”

The woman flushed deeper than ever, an angered pride this time in her heat.

“There’s no child ill that I know of,” said she; “if there was, we have gold of our own.”

She bustled about the house and put past her blankets, and out with a spinning-wheel and into a whirr of it, with a hummed song of the country at her lips—all in a mild temper, or to keep her confusion from showing itself undignified.

“Come away,” I said to my comrade in English; “you’ll make her bitterly angry if you persist in your purpose.”

He paid no heed to me, but addressed the woman again with a most ingenious story, apparently contrived, with his usual wit, as he went on with it.

“Your pardon, goodwife,” said he, “but I see you are too sharp for my small deceit I daresay I might have guessed there was no child ill; but for reasons of my own I’m anxious to leave a little money with you till I come back this road again. We trusted you with our lives for a couple of hours there, and surely, thinks I, we can trust you with a couple of yellow pieces.”

The woman stopped her wheel and resumed her good-humour. “I thought,” said she,—“I thought you meant payment for——”

“You’re a bit hard on my manners, goodwife,” said John. “Of course I have been a soldier, and might have done the trick of paying forage with a sergeant’s blunt-ness, but I think I know a Gaelic woman’s spirit better.”

“But are you likely to be passing here again at any time?” cried the woman, doubt again darkening her face, and by this time she had the money in her hand. “I thought you were going back by the Glen?”

“That was our notion,” said my comrade, marvellously ready, “but to tell the truth we are curious to see this Keppoch bard, whose songs we know very well in real Argile, and we take a bit of the road to Kilcumin after him.”

The weakness of this tale was not apparent to the woman, who I daresay had no practice of such trickery as my friend was the master of, and she put the money carefully in a napkin and in a recess beneath one of the roof-joists. Our thanks she took carelessly, no doubt, because we were Campbells.

I was starting on the way to Inverlochy when M’Iver protested we must certainly go a bit of the way to Kilcumin.

“I’m far from sure,” said he, “that that very particular bit of MacDonald woman is quite confident of the truth of my story. At any rate, she’s no woman if she’s not turning it over in her mind by now, and she’ll be out to look the road we take before very long or I’m mistaken.”

We turned up the Kilcumin road, which soon led us out of sight of the hut, and, as my friend said, a glance behind us showed us the woman in our rear, looking after us.

“Well, there’s no turning so long as she’s there,” said I. “I wish your generosity had shown itself in a manner more convenient for us. There’s another example of the error of your polite and truthless tongue! When you knew the woman was not wanting the money, you should have put it in your sporran again, and——”

“Man, Elrigmore,” he cried, “you have surely studied me poorly if you would think me the man to insult the woman—and show my own stupidity at the same time—by exposing my strategy when a bit fancy tale and a short daunder on a pleasant morning would save the feelings of both the lady and myself.”

“You go through life on a zigzag,” I protested, “aiming for some goal that another would cut straight across for, making deviations of an hour to save you a second’s unpleasantness. I wish I could show you the diplomacy of straightforwardness: the honest word, though hard to say sometimes, is a man’s duty as much as the honest deed of hand.”

“Am I not as honest of my word as any in a matter of honour? I but gloze sometimes for the sake of the affection I have for all God’s creatures.”

I was losing patience of his attitude and speaking perhaps with bitterness, for here were his foolish ideas of punctilio bringing us a mile or two off our road and into a part of the country where we were more certain of being observed by enemies than in the way behind us.

“You jink from ambuscade to ambuscade of phrase like a fox,” I cried.

“Call it like a good soldier, and I’ll never quarrel with your compliment,” he said, good-humouredly. “I had the second excuse for the woman in my mind before the first one missed fire.”

“Worse and worse!”

“Not a bit of it: it is but applying a rule of fortification to a peaceful palaver. Have bastion and ravelin as sure as may be, but safer still the sally-port of retreat.”

I stood on the road and looked at him, smiling very smug and self-complacent before me, and though I loved the man I felt bound to prick a hole in his conceit.

But at that moment a dead branch snapped in a little plantation that lay by the way, and we turned quickly to see come to us a tall lean man in MacDonald clothing.

He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime, with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in his dress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin. I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visage than was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two of a clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on a forenoon in Badenoch.

“You’re taking your walk?” he said, with a bantering tone, after a moment’s pause.

“You couldn’t have guessed better,” said John. “We are taking all we’re likely to get in so barren a country.”

The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a group surveying each other. “My name,” said he, in his odd north Gaelic, and throwing out his narrow chest, “is John MacDonad I’m Keppoch’s bard, and I’ve no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I’m namely in the world for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the ditty of the lover? Here’s the songster to break hearts. Since the start of time there have been ‘prentices at my trade: I have challenged North and East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back their master.”

M’Iver put a toe on one of mine, and said he, “Amn’t I the unlucky man, for I never heard of you?”

“Tut, tut,” cried the bard in a fret, “perhaps you think so much in Argile of your hedge-chanters that you give the lark of the air no ear.”

“We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan,” said John, “that the business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make an honest living at prose.”

“Honest living,” said the bard, “would be the last thing I would expect Clan Campbell to brag of.”

He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shuffling his feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth, that I’ve noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit.

“Come, come,” he went on, “will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my ‘Harp of the Trees’? If there’s a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I’ve yet to learn it.”

“If I heard it,” said John, “I’ve forgotten it.”

“Name of God!” cried the bard in amaze, “you couldn’t; it goes so”—and he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been singing some years before.

We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his budget—some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh—but to each and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.

“No doubt,” said he, “they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a living but string rhymes?”

The bard was in a sweat of vexation. “I’ve wandered far,” said he, “and you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field and the wood between his duans?”

“I think,” said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness was in his utterance)—“I think his songs would be all the better for some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a desolate home? Love,—sir, you are young, young———”

“Thanks be with you,” said the bard; “your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer.”

I’m afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.

“John Lorn, John Lom!” I cried, “I heard a soldier sing your songs in the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore.”

He turned with a grateful eye from M’Iver to me, and I felt that I had one friend now in Badenoch.

“Do you tell me?” he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. “Which one did they sing—‘The Harp of the Trees’ or ‘Macrannul Og’s Lament’? I am sure it would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew—the gentle hearts—my ‘Farewell to the Fisher.’ I made it with yon tremor of joy, and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill.”

M’Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our friends as secretly as the fox.

“Were you on the ocean?” he asked the bard, whose rapture was not abated.

“Never,” said he, “but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe of Morar.”

“Mere dubs,” said M’Iver, pleasantly—“mere dubs or ditches. Now I, Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without a headland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,—I’ll not say yea or nay to that,—but I never gave a lochan credit for washing the bulged sides of the world.”

“You hadn’t fancy for it, my good fellow,” said the bard, angry again. “I forgot to say that I saw Loch Finne too, and the Galley of Lorn taking MacCailein off from his castle. I’m making a song on that now.”

“Touched!” thinks I, for it was a rapier-point at my comrade’s very marrow. He reddened at once, pulled down his brows, and scanned the bard of Keppoch, who showed his knowledge of his advantage.

“If I were you,” said John in a little, “I would not put the finish on that ditty till I learned the end of the transaction. Perhaps MacCailein (and God bless my chief!) is closer on Lochiel and Lochaber to-day than you give him credit for.”

“Say nothing about that,” said I warningly in English to my friend, never knowing (what I learned on a later occasion) that John Lorn had the language as well as myself.

“When MacCailein comes here,” said the bard, “he’ll get a Badenoch welcome.”

“And that is the thief’s welcome, the shirt off his very back,” cried M’Iver.

“Off his back very likely,” said the bard; “it’s the back we see oftenest of the bonny gentleman.”

M’Iver grew livid to the very lip, and sprang to his feet, dutching with great menace the black knife he had been whittling with. Not a bit abashed, the bard pulled out his dirk, and there was like to be a pretty to-do when I put between them.

The issue of the quarrel that thus I retarded was postponed altogether by a circumstance that changed the whole course of our adventure in this wild country,—severed us at a sharp wrench from the Campbell regiments, and gave us the chance—very unwelcome it was—of beholding the manner of war followed by Alasdair MacDonald’s savage tribes. It happened in a flash, without warning. No blow had been struck by the two gentlemen at variance, when we were all three thrown to the ground, and the bound prisoners of a squad of Macgregors who had got out of the thicket and round us unobserved in the heat of the argument.

They treated us all alike—the bard as curt as the Campbells, in spite of his tartan,—and without exchanging any words with us marched us before them on a journey of several hours to Kilcumin.

Long or ever we reached Kilcumin we were manifestly in the neighbourhood of Montrose’s force. His pickets held the road; the hillsides moved with his scouts. On a plain called Leiter-nan-lub the battalion lay camped, a mere fragment of the force that brought ruin to Argile: Athol men under the Tutor of Struan, Stewarts of Appin, Maclans of Glencoe, a few of the more sedate men of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Maclean, as well as a handful of the Gregaraich who had captured us. It was the nightfall when we were turned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a few ells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of a fir-root fire.

“Whom have we here?” said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse of us.

“Two Campbells and a man who says he’s bard of Keppoch,” he was told.

“A spy in an honest tartan, no doubt,” said Sir Alas-dair; “but well put it to the test with Keppoch himself: tell him to come over and throw an eye on the fellow.”

Keppoch was sent for, and came across from a fire at another part of the field, a hiccough at his throat and a blear look in his eye as one that has been overly brisk with the bottle, but still and on the gentleman and in a very good humour.

“Here’s my bard sure enough!” he cried. “John, John, what do you seek in Kilcumin, and in Campbell company too?”

“The company is none of my seeking,” said John Lorn, very short and blunt “And we’re like to have a good deal more of the same clan’s company than we want before long, for Argile and his clan to three times your number are at Inverlochy. I have tramped a weary day to tell you the tale, and I get but a spy’s reception.”

The tale went round the camp in the time a man would whistle an air. Up came Montrose on the instant, and he was the first to give us a civil look. But for him we had no doubt got a short quittance from MacColkitto, who was for the tow gravatte on the spot Instead we were put on parole when his lordship learned we had been Cavaliers of fortune. The moon rose with every sign of storm, the mountains lay about white to their foundations, and ardent winds belched from the glens, but by mountain and glen Mac Donald determined to get round on the flank of Argile.

The month of January, as our old Gaelic notion has it, borrows three days from July for a bribe of three young lambs. Those three days we call Faoilteaeh, and often they are very genial and cheerful days, with a sun that in warmth is a sample of the mellow season at hand. But this year, as my history has shown, we had no sign of a good Faoilteach, and on the morning of the last day of January, when Alasdair MacDonald’s army set over the hills, it was wild, tempestuous weather. A wind rose in the dawning and increased in vehemence as the day aged, and with it came a storm of snow—the small bitter sifting snow that, encountered on the hill, stings like the ant and drifts in monstrous and impassable wreaths. Round about us yawned the glens, to me nameless, mysterious, choked to the throat with snow-mist that flapped and shook like grey rags. The fields were bleak and empty; the few houses that lay in the melancholy plain were on no particularly friendly terms with this convocation of Erse-men and wild kerns: they shut their doors steadfastly on our doings, and gave us not even the compliment of looking on at our strange manoeuvres. There was but one exception, in a staunch and massive dwelling,—a manifest baron keep or stout domicile of that nature, just on the border of the Meld in which the camp was pitched: it was apparently in the charge of two old spinster sisters whose men-folk were afield somewhere else, for they had shuttered the windows, barricaded the gates, and ever and anon would they show blanched faces as the tumult of our preparation disturbed them, and they came to the door and cunningly pulled it open a little and looked out on this warlike array. If a soldier made a step in their direction they fled inside with terror, and their cries rang in the interior.

Those two spinsters—very white, very thin clad for a morn so rigorous, and with a trepidation writ on every feature—were all that saw us off on our march to the south-east They came out and stood hand in hand on the door-stoop, and I have little doubt the honest bodies thanked the God of Israel that the spoilers were departed furth their neighbourhood.

The country we now plunged into, as may be guessed, was a terra incognita to me. Beyond that it was Bade-noch and an unhealthy clime for all that wear the Campbell tartan, I could guess no more. It was after these little wars were over I discovered the names of the localities—the glens, mounts, passes, streams, and drove-roads—over which we passed in a march that Gustavus never faced the like of.

With good judgment enough our captors put a small advance-guard ahead, a score of Airlie’s troopers, swanky blaspheming persons, whose horses pranced very gaily up Glen Tarf, guided by John Lom. M’Iver and I walked together with the main body, quite free and unfettered, sometimes talking with affability to our captors. The Irish were in good humour; they cracked jokes with us in their peculiar Gaelic that at first is ill for a decent Gael of Albion to follow, if uttered rapidly, but soon becomes as familiar as the less foreign language of the Athole men, whose tongue we Argiles find some strange conceits in. If the Irish were affable, the men of our own side of the ocean were most singularly morose—small wonder, perhaps, for we have little reason to love each other. Sour dogs! they gloomed at us under their bonnets and swore in their beards. I have no doubt but for their gentry there had been dirks in us before we reached Corryarick.

It was with the repartee of the Irish and the scowls of the Gaels we went up the rough valley of the Tarf, where the wind moaned most drearily and drove the thin fine snow like a smoke of burning heather. But when we got to the pass of Corryarick our trials began, and then such spirit did M’Iver put in the struggle with the task before us, such snatches of song, sharp saying and old story,—such commradary as it might be named,—that we were on good terms with all. For your man of family the Gael has ever some regard. M’Iver (not to speak of myself) was so manifestly the duine-uasail that the coarsest of the company fell into a polite tone, helped to their manners to some degree no doubt by the example of Montrose and Airlie, who at the earliest moments of our progress walked beside us and discoursed on letters and hunting, and soldiering in the foreign wars.

The pass of Corryarick met us with a girning face and white fangs. On Tarf-side there was a rough bridle-path that the wind swept the snow from, and our progress was fairly easy. Here the drifts lay waist high, the horses plunged to the belly-bands, the footmen pushed through in a sweat. It was like some Hyperborean hell, and we the doomed wretches sentenced to our eternity of toil. We had to climb up the shoulder of the hill, now among tremendous rocks, now through water unfrozen, now upon wind-swept ice, but the snow—the snow—the heartless snow was our constant companion. It stood in walls before, it lay in ramparts round us, it wearied the eye to a most numbing pain. Unlucky were they who wore trews, for the same clung damply to knee and haunch and froze, while the stinging sleet might flay the naked limb till the blood rose among the felt of the kilted, but the suppleness of the joints was unmarred.

It was long beyond noon when we reached the head of the pass, and saw before us the dip of the valley of the Spey. We were lost in a wilderness of mountain-peaks; the bens started about us on every hand like the horrors of a nightmare, every ben with its death-sheet, menacing us, poor insects, crawling in our pain across the landscape.

I thought we had earned a halt and a bite of meat by this forenoon of labour; and Montrose himself, who had walked the pass on foot like his fellows, seemed anxious to rest, but Sir Alasdair pushed us on like a fate relentless.

“On, on,” he cried, waving his long arms to the prospect before; “here’s but the start of our journey; far is the way before; strike fast, strike hot! Would ye eat a meal with appetite while the Diarmaids wait in the way?”

M’iver, who was plodding beside MacDonald when he said these words, gave a laugh. “Take your time, Sir Sandy,” said he; “you’ll need a bowl or two of brose ere you come to grips with MacCailein.”

“Well never come to grips with MacCailein,” said MacDonald, taking the badinage in good part, “so long as he has a back-gate to go out at or a barge to sail off in.”

“I could correct you on that point in a little affair of arms as between gentlemen—if the time and place were more suitable,” said M’Iver, warmly.

“Let your chief defend himself, friend,” said MacDonald. “Man, I’ll wager we never see the colour of his face when it comes to close quarters.”

“I wouldn’t wonder,” I ventured. “He is in no great trim for fighting, for his arm is——”

Sir Alasdair gave a gesture of contempt and cried, “Faugh! we’ve heard of the raxed arm: he took care when he was making his tale that he never made it a raxed leg.”

Montrose edged up at this, with a red face and a somewhat annoyed expression. He put his gloved hand lightly on MacDonald’s shoulder and chided him for debate with a prisoner of war.

“Let our friends be, Alasdair,” he said, quietly. “They are, in a way, our guests: they would perhaps be more welcome if their tartan was a different hue, but in any case we must not be insulting them. Doubtless they have their own ideas of his lordship of Argile——”

“I never ask to serve a nobler or a more generous chief,” said M’Iver, firmly.

“I would expect no other sentiment from a gentleman of Argile’s clan. He has ever done honestly enough by his own people. But have we not had enough of this? We are wasting our wind that should be more precious, considering the toils before us.”

We found the descent of Corryarick even more ill than its climbing. The wind from the east had driven the snow into the mouth of it like a wedge. The horses, stepping ahead, more than once slipped into drifts that rose to their necks. Then they became wild with terror, dashed with frantic hooves into deeper trouble, or ran back, quivering in every sinew and snorting with affright till the troopers behove to dismount and lead them. When we in the van reached the foot of the come we looked back on a spectacle that fills me with new wonder to this day when I think of it,—a stream of black specks in the distance dropping, as it were, down the sheer face of white; nearer, the broken bands of different clansmen winding noiselessly and painfully among the drifts, their kilts pinned between their thighs, their plaids crossed on their chests—all their weapons a weariness to them.

In the afternoon the snow ceased to fall, but the dusk came on early notwithstanding, for the sky was blotted over with driving clouds.

At the head of Glen Roy the MacDonalds, who had lost their bauchles of brogues in the pass, started to a trot, and as the necessity was we had to take up the pace too. Long lank hounds, they took the road like deer, their limbs purple with the cold, their faces pinched to the aspect of the wolf, their targets and muskets clattering about them. “There are Campbells to slay, and suppers to eat,” the Major-General had said. It would have given his most spiritless followers the pith to run till morning across a strand of rock and pebble. They knew no tiring, they seemingly felt no pain in their torn and bleeding feet, but put mile after mile below them.

But the Campbells were not in Glen Roy. They had been there and skirmished for a day among their old foes and had gone back to Lochyside, little thinking the fires they left in the Cameron barns at morning would light the enemy on ere night The roofs still smouldered, and a granary here and there on the sides of the valley sent up its flames,—at once a spur to the spirit of the MacDonalds and a light to their vengeance.

We halted for the night in Glen Spean, with Ben Chlin-aig looming high to the south, and the river gulping in ice beside our camp. Around was plenty of wood: we built fires and ate as poor a meal as the Highlands ever granted in a bad year, though it was the first break in our fast for the day. Gentle and simple, all fared alike—a whang of barley bannock, a stirabout of oat-and-water, without salt, a quaich of spirits from some kegs the troopers carried, that ran done before the half of the corps had been served. Sentinels were posted, and we slept till the morning pipe with sweet weariness in our bones.

Our second day was a repetition of the first. We left without even a breakfast whenever the pipers set up the Cameron rant, “Sons of the dogs, O come and get flesh!” The Campbells had spoiled the bridge with a charge of powder, so we had to ford the river among the ice-lumps, MacDonald showing the way with his kilt-tail about his waist A hunter from a hamlet at the glen foot gladly left the smoking ruin of his home and guided us on a drove-road into the wilds of Lochaber, among mountains more stupendous than those we had left behind. These relentless peaks were clad with blinding snow. The same choking drifts that met us in Corryarick filled the passes between Stob Choire and Easan Mor and Stob Ban, that cherish the snow in their crannies in the depths of midsummer. Hunger was eating at our hearts when we got to Glen Nevis, but the glen was empty of people, and the second night fell ere we broke fast.

I have hungered many times on weary marches, but yon was the most cruel hunger of my life. And though the pain of the starving could be dulled a little by draughts of water from the wayside springs, what there was no remede for was the weakness that turned the flesh in every part of me to a nerveless pulp. I went down Nevis Glen a man in a delirium. My head swam with vapours, so that the hillside seemed to dance round and before me. If I had fallen in the snow I should assuredly have lain there and died, and the thought of how simple and sweet it would be to stretch out my heavy limbs and sleep the sleep for ever, more than once robbed me of my will. Some of the Stewarts and Camerons, late recruits to the army, and as yet not inured to its toils, fell on the wayside halfway down the glen. Mac Donald was for leaving them—“We have no need for weaklings,” he said, cruelly, fuming at the delay; but their lairds gave him a sharp answer, and said they would bide bye them till they had recovered. Thus a third of our force fell behind us in the march, and I would have been behind too, but for M’Iver’s encouragement. His songs were long done; his stories chilled on his lip. The hunger had him at the heart, but he had a lion’s will and a lion’s vigour.

“For the love of God!” he said to me, “do not let them think we are so much of the Covenanter that we cannot keep up! For a Scots Cavalier you are giving in over early.”

“Campaigning with Mackay was never like this,” I pleaded, wearily; “give me the open road and an enemy before me, and I would tramp gaily to the world’s end. Here’s but a choked ravine the very deer abhor in such weather, and before us but a battle we must not share in.”

He said never a word for a few moments, but trudged on. My low-heeled shoon were less fitted for the excursion than his close-thonged brogues that clung to the feet like a dry glove, and I walked lamely. Ever and anon he would look askance at me, and I was annoyed that he should think me a poorer mountaineer than those unwearied knaves who hurried us. I must have shown my feeling in my face, for in a little he let-on to fall lame too, and made the most grievous complaint of ache and weariness. His pretence deceived me but for a little. He was only at his old quirk of keeping me in good repaie with myself, but he played the part with skill, letting us both fall behind the general company a little, so that the Mac Donalds might not witness the indignity of it.

Glen Nevis, as I saw it that night in the light of the moon, is what comes to me now in my dreams. I smell the odour of the sweat-drenched, uncleanly deeding of those savage clans about us; I see the hills lift on either hand with splintered peaks that prick among the stars—gorge and ravine and the wide ascending passes filled ever with the sound of the river, and the coarse, narrow drove-road leads into despair. That night the moon rode at the full about a vacant sky. There was not even a vapour on the hills; the wind had failed in the afternoon.

At the foot of the hill Cam Dearg (or the Red Mount), that is one of three gallant mountains that keep company for Nevis Ben the biggest of all, the path we followed made a twist to the left into a gully from which a blast of the morning’s wind had cleaned out the snow as by a giant’s spade.

So much the worse for us, for now the path lay strewn with boulders that the dragoons took long to thread through, and the bare feet of the private soldiers bled redly anew. Some lean high fir-trees threw this part into a shadow, and so it happened that as I felt my way wearily on, I fell over a stone. The fall lost me the last of my senses: I but heard some of the Stewarts curse me for an encumbrance as they stumbled over me and passed on, heedless of my fate, and saw, as in a dwam, one of them who had abraded his knees by his stumble over my body, turn round with a drawn knife that glinted in a shred of moonlight.

I came to, with M’Iver bent over me, and none of our captors at hand.

“I had rather this than a thousand rix-dollars,” said he, as I sat up and leaned on my arm.

“Have they left us?” I asked, with no particular interest in the answer. It could work little difference whatever it might be. “I thought I saw one of them turn on me with a knife.”

“You did,” said M’Iver. “He broke his part of the parole, and is lying on the other side of you, I think with a hole in his breast. An ugly and a treacherous scamp! It’s lucky for us that Montrose or MacColkitto never saw the transaction between this clay and John M’Iver, or their clemency had hardly been so great ‘You can bide and see to your friend,’ was James Grahame’s last words, and that’s the reason I’m here.”

M’Iver lifted me to my feet, and we stood a little to think what we should do. My own mind had no idea save the one that we were bound to keep in touch with the company whose prisoners we were, but M’Iver hinted at an alternative scarce so honest—namely, a desertion and a detour to the left that would maybe lead us to the Campbell army before active hostilities began.

“You would surely not break parole?” said I, surprised, for he was usually as honourable in such matters as any Highlander I ever met.

“Bah!” he cried, pretending contempt at hesitation, though I could perceive by his voice he was somewhat ashamed of the policy he proposed. “Who quitted the contract first? Was it not that Stewart gentleman on your other side who broke it in a most dastardly way by aiming at your life?”

“I’m thankful for the life you saved, John,” said I, “little worth though it seems at this time, but Montrose is not to be held responsible for the sudden impulse of a private. We made our pact as between gentleman and gentleman—let us be going.”

“Oh, very well!” said he, shortly. “Let us be going. After all, we are in a trap anyway we look at all; for half the Stewarts and Gainerons are behind in the wood there, and our flank retreat among these hills might be a tempting of Providence. But are you thinking of this Athole corp and what his kin will be doing to his slayers?”

“I’ll risk it,” I said, shortly. “We may be out of their hands one way or the other before they miss him.”

On a sudden there rose away before us towards the mouth of the glen the sound of a bagpipe. It came on the tranquil air with no break in its uproar, and after a preparatory tuning it broke into an air called “Cogadh no Sith”—an ancient braggart pibroch made by one Macruimen of the Isle of Skye,—a tune that was commonly used by the Campbells as a night-retreat or tattoo.

My heart filled with the strain. It gave me not only the simple illusion that I saw again the regimentals of my native country—many a friend and comrade among them in the shelter of the Castle of Inverlochy—but it roused in me a spirit very antique, very religious and moving too, as the music of his own land must in every honest Gael.

“Cruachan for ever!” I said lightly to M’Iver, though my heart was full.

He was as much touched by that homely lilt as myself. “The old days, the old styles!” said he. “God! how that pibroch stings me to the core!” And as the tune came more clearly in the second part, or Crunluadh as we call it, and the player maybe came round a bend of the road, my comrade stopped in his pace and added with what in another I might have thought a sob—“I’ve trudged the world; I have learned many bravadoes, so that my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one, and the piob mhor conquers me. What is it, Colin, that’s in us, rich and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?”

“Tis the Gaelic,” I said, cheered myself by the air. “Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but’s in the Gaelic tongue.”

“Maybe,” said he, “maybe: I’ve heard the scholars like yourself say the sheepskin and the drones were Roman—that or Spanish, it’s all one to me. I heard them at Boitzenburg when we gave the butt of the gun to Tilly’s soldadoes, they played us into Holstein, and when the ditch of Stralsund was choked with the tartan of Mackay, and our lads were falling like corn before the hook, a Reay piper stood valiantly in front and played a salute. Then and now it’s the pipes, my darling!”

“I would as lief have them in a gayer strain. My fondest memories are of reels I’ve danced to their playing,” I said, and by now we were walking down the glen.

“And of one reel you danced,” said he, quizzingly, “not more than two months gone in a town that was called Inneraora?”

“Two months!” I cried,—“two months! I could have sworn offhand we have been wandering in Lorn and Badenoch for as many years!”

Such spirit did my native pipes, played by a clansman, put in me that my weariness much abated, and we made great progress down the glen, so that before the tune had ceased we were on the back of Montrose’s men as they crept on quietly in the night.

The piper stopped suddenly enough when some shots rang out,—an exchange of compliments between our pickets ahead and some wandering scouts of Argile.

And yonder below us, Loch Linnhe and Locheil glanced in the moonlight, and the strong towers of Inverlochy sat like a scowl on the fringe of the wave!

When we came up with the main body of MacDonald’s army, the country, as I say, was shining in the light of the moon, with only a camp-fire down in the field beside the castle to show in all the white world a sign of human life. We had got the Campbells in the rear, but they never knew it A few of their scouts came out across the fields and challenged our pickets; there was an exchange of musketry, but, as we found again, we were thought to be some of the Lochaber hunters unworthy of serious engagement.

For the second time in so many days we tasted food, a handful of meal to the quaich of water—no more and no less; and James Grahame, Marquis of Montrose, supped his brose like the rest of us, with the knife from his belt doing the office of a horn-spoon.

Some hours after us came up the Camerons, who had fallen behind, but fresher and more eager for fighting than our own company, for they had fallen on a herd of roe on the slope of Sgur an Iolair, and had supped savagely on the warm raw flesh.

“You might have brought us a gigot off your take,” Sir Alasdair said to the leader of them, Dol Ruadh. He was a short-tempered man of no great manners, and he only grunted his response.

“They may well call you Camerons of the soft mouth,” said Alasdair, angrily, “that would treat your comrades so.”

“You left us to carry our own men,” said the chief, shortly; “we left you to find your own deer.”

We were perhaps the only ones who slept at the mouth of Glen Nevis that woeful night, and we slept because, as my comrade said, “What cannot be mended may be well slept on; it’s an ease to the heart.” And the counsel was so wise and our weariness so acute, that we lay on the bare ground till we were roused to the call of a trumpet.

It was St Bridget’s Day, and Sunday morning. A myriad bens around gave mists, as smoke from a censer, to the day. The Athole pipers high-breastedly strutted with a vain port up and down their lines and played incessantly. Alasdair laid out the clans with amazing skill, as M’Iver and I were bound to confess to ourselves,—the horse (with Montrose himself on his charger) in the centre, the men of Clanranald, Keppoch, Locheil, Glengarry, and Maclean, and the Stewarts of Appin behind. MacDonald and O’Kyan led the Irish on the wings.

In the plain we could see Argile’s forces in a somewhat similar order, with the tartan as it should be in the midst of the bataille and the Lowland levies on the flanks. Over the centre waved the black galley of Lorne on a gold standard.

I expressed some doubt about the steadfastness of the Lowlanders, and M’Iver was in sad agreement with me.

“I said it in Glenaora when we left,” said he, “and I say it again. They would be fairly good stuff against foreign troops; but they have no suspicion of the character of Gaelic war. I’m sore feared they’ll prove a poor reed to lean on. Why, in heaven’s name, does Mac-Cailein take the risk of a battle in such an awkward corner? An old soldier like Auchinbreac should advise him to follow the Kilcumin road and join forces with Seaforth, who must be far down Glen Albyn by now.”

As we were standing apart thus, up to us came Ian Lorn, shaking the brogue-money he got from Grahame in his dirty loof. He was very bitter.

“I never earned an honester penny,” he said, looking up almost insolently in our faces, so that it was a temptation to give him a clout on the cunning jowl.

“So Judas thought too, I daresay, when he fingered his filthy shekels,” said I. “I thought no man from Keppoch would be skulking aside here when his pipers blew the onset.”

“Och!” said M’Iver, “what need ye be talking? Bardery and bravery don’t very often go together.”

Ian Lorn scowled blackly at the taunt, but was equal to answer it.

“If the need arise,” said he, “you’ll see whether the bard is brave or not There are plenty to fight; there’s but one to make the song of the fight, and that’s John MacDonald, with your honours’ leave.”

We would, like enough, have been pestered with the scamp’s presence and garrulity a good deal longer; but Montrose came up at that moment and took us aside with a friendly enough beckon of his head.

“Gentlemen,” he said in English, “as cavaliers you can guess fairly well already the issue of what’s to happen below there, and as Cavaliers who, clansmen or no clansmen of the Campbell chief, have done well for old Scotland’s name abroad, I think you deserve a little more consideration at our hands at this juncture than common prisoners of war can lay claim to. If you care you can quit here as soon as the onset begins, abiding of course by your compact to use no arms against my friends. You have no objection?” he added, turning about on his horse and crying to Alasdair.

The Major-General came up and looked at us. “I suppose they may go,” said he,—“though, to tell my mind on the matter, I could devise a simpler way of getting rid of them. We have other methods in Erin O, but as your lordship has taken the fancy, they may go, I daresay. Only they must not join their clan or take arms with them until this battle is over. They must be on the Loch Linnhe road before we call the onset.”

Montrose flushed at the ill-breeding of his officer, and waved us away to the left on the road that led to Argile by Loch Linnhe side, and took us clear of the coming encounter.

We were neither of us slow to take advantage of the opportunity, but set off at a sharp walk at the moment that O’Kyan on the right flank was slowly moving in the direction of Argile’s line.

John broke his sharp walk so quickly into a canter that I wondered what he meant I ran close at his heels, but I forbore to ask, and we had put a good lump of moorland between us and the MacDonalds before he explained.

“You perhaps wondered what my hurry was,” he said, with the sweat standing in beads on his face, though the air was full of frost. “It wasn’t for exercise, as you might guess at anyrate. The fact is, we were within five minutes of getting a wheen Stewart dirks in our doublets, and if there was no brulzie on foot we were even yet as good as lost on Brae Lochaber.”

“How does that happen?” I asked. “They seemed to let us away generously enough and with no great ill-will.”

“Just so! But when Montrose gave us the congé, I happened to turn an eye up Glen Nevis and I saw some tardy Stewarts (by their tartan) come running down the road. These were the lads Dol Ruadh left behind last night, and they could scarcely miss in daylight the corpse we left by the road, and their clansmen missed in the mirk. That was my notion at the first glance I got of them, and when we ran they ran too, and what do you make of that?”

“What we should make of it,” I said in alarm, “is as good a pace into Lorn as we can: they may be on the heels of us now,”—for we were in a little dip of the ground from which the force we had just parted so gladly were not to be seen.

On that point M’Iver speedily assured me.

“No, no!” he said. “If Seumas Grahame himself were stretched out yonder instead of a Glenart cearnoch of no great importance to any one, Alasdair MacDonald would be scarcely zealous fool enough to spoil his battle order to prosecute a private feud. Look at that,” he proceeded, turning round on a little knowe he ran lightly up on and I after him— “Look at that! the battle’s begun.”

We stood on that knowe of Brae Lochaber, and I saw from thence a spectacle whose like, by the grace of God, I have never seen before nor since in its agony for any eye that was friendly to Diarmaid Clan. I need not here set down the sorry end of that day at Inverlochy. It has been written many times, though I harbour no book on my shelves that tells the story. We saw MacDonald’s charge; we saw the wings of Argile’s army—the rotten Lowland levies—break off and skurry along the shore; we saw the lads of the Diarmaid tartan hewn down on the edge of the tide till its waves ran red; but we were as helpless as the rush that waved at our feet. Between us and our friends lay the enemy and our parole—I daresay our parole was forgotten in that terrible hour.

John M’Iver laid him down on the tulaich and clawed with his nails the stunted grass that in wind-blown patches came through the snow. None of my words made any difference on his anguish. I was piping to the surrender of sorrow, nigh mad myself.

The horses of Ogilvie—who himself fell in the brulzie—chased the Lowlanders along the side of Loch Linnhe, and so few of the flying had the tartan that we had no great interest in them, till we saw six men with their plaid-ing cast run unobserved up the plain, wade waist-deep through the Nevis, and come somewhat in our direction. We went down to join them, and ran hard and fast and came on them at a place called the Rhu at the water of Kiachnish.

At last there was but one horseman in chase of the six men who were fleeing without a look behind them—a frenzied blackavised trooper on a short-legged garron he rode most clumsily, with arms that swung like wings from the shoulders, his boots keeping time to the canter with grotesque knockings against the gaunt and sweating flanks of his starven animal. He rode with a shout, and he rode with a fool’s want of calculation, for he had left all support behind him and might readily enough have been cut off by any judicious enemy in the rear. Before we could hurry down to join the fugitives they observed for themselves that the pursuit had declined to this solitary person, so up they drew (all but one of them), with dirks or sgians out to give him his welcome. And yet the dragoon put no check on his horse. The beast, in a terror at the din of the battle, was indifferent to the rein of its master, whom it bore with thudding hooves to a front that must certainly have appalled him. He was a person of some pluck, or perhaps the drunkenness of terror lent him the illusion of valour; at least, when he found a bloody end inevitable he made the best of the occasion. Into the heaving sides of the brute he drove desperate spurs, anew he shouted a scurrilous name at Clan Campbell, then fired his pistol as he fell upon the enemy. The dag failed of its purpose, but the breast of the horse struck an elderly man on the brow and threw him on his back, so that one of the hind-hooves of the animal crushed in his skull like a hazel-nut.

Who of that fierce company brought the trooper to his end we never knew, but when M’Iver and I got down to the level he was dead as knives could make him, and his horse, more mad than ever, was disappearing over a mossy moor with a sky-blue lochan in the midst of it.

Of the five Campbells three were gentlemen—Forbes the baron-bailie of Ardkinglas, Neil Campbell in Sonachan, Lochowside, and the third no other than Master Gordon the minister, who was the most woebegone and crestfallen of them all. The other two were small tacksmen from the neighbourhood of Inneraora—one Callum Mac-Iain vie Ruarie vie Allan (who had a little want, as we say of a character, or natural, and was ever moist with tears), and a Rob Campbell in Auchnatra, whose real name was Stewart, but who had been in some trouble at one time in a matter of a neighbour’s sheep on the braes of Appin, had discreetly fled that country, and brought up a family under a borrowed name in a country that kept him in order.

We were, without doubt, in a most desperate extremity, If we had escaped the immediate peril of the pursuing troopers of MacDonald, we had a longer, wearier hazard before us. Any one who knows the countryside I am writing of, or takes a glance at my relative Neill Bane’s diagram or map of the same, will see that we were now in the very heart of a territory hotching (as the rough phrase goes) with clans inimical to the house of Argile. Between us and the comparative safety of Bredalbane lay Stewarts, MacDonalds, Macgregors, and other families less known in history, who hated the name of MacCailein more than they feared the wrath of God. The sight of our tartan in any one of their glens would rouse hell in every heart about us.

Also our numbers and the vexed state of the times were against us. We could hardly pass for peaceable drovers at such a season of the year; we were going the wrong airt for another thing, and the fact that not we alone but many more of Argile’s forces in retreat were fleeing home would be widely advertised around the valleys in a very few hours after the battle had been fought For the news of war—good or ill—passes among the glens with a magic speed. It runs faster than the fiery cross itself—so fast and inexplicable on any natural law, that more than once I have been ready to believe it a witches’ premonition more than a message carried on young men’s feet.

“But all that,” said Sonachan, a pawky, sturdy little gentleman with a round ruddy face and a great store of genealogy that he must be ever displaying—“But all that makes it more incumbent on us to hang together. It may easily be a week before we get into Glenurchy; we must travel by night and hide by day, and besides the heartening influence of company there are sentinels to consider and the provision of our food.”

Ardkinglas, on the other hand, was a fushionless, stupid kind of man: he was for an immediate dispersion of us all, holding that only in individuals or in pairs was it possible for us to penetrate in safety to real Argile.

“I’m altogether with Sonachan,” said M’Iver, “and I could mention half a hundred soldierly reasons for the policy; but it’s enough for me that here are seven of us, no more and no less, and with seven there should be all the luck that’s going.”

He caught the minister’s eyes on him at this, and met them with a look of annoyance.

“Oh yes, I know, Master Gordon, you gentlemen of the lawn bands have no friendliness to our old Highland notions. Seven or six, it’s all the same to you, I suppose, except in a question of merks to the stipend.”

“You’re a clever man enough, M’Iver——”

“Barbreck,” corrected my friend, punctiliously.

“Barbreck let it be then. But you are generally so sensitive to other folk’s thoughts of you that your skin tingles to an insult no one dreamt of paying. I make no doubt a great many of your Gaelic beliefs are sheer paganism or Popery or relics of the same, but the charm of seven has a Scriptural warrant that as minister of the Gospel I have some respect for, even when twisted into a portent for a band of broken men in the extremity of danger.”

We had to leave the dead body of our friend, killed by the horse, on the hillside. He was a Knapdale man, a poor creature, who was as well done, perhaps, with a world that had no great happiness left for him, for his home had been put to the torch and his wife outraged and murdered. At as much speed as we could command, we threaded to the south, not along the valleys but in the braes, suffering anew the rigour of the frost and the snow. By midday we reached the shore of Loch Leven, and it seemed as if now our flight was hopelessly barred, for the ferry that could be compelled to take the army of Mac-Cailein over the brackish water at Lettermore was scarce likely to undertake the conveying back of seven fugitives of the clan that had come so high-handedly through their neighbourhood four days ago. On this side there was not a boat in sight; indeed there was not a vestige on any side of human tenancy. Glencoe had taken with him every man who could carry a pike, not to our disadvantage perhaps, for it left the less danger of any strong attack.

On the side of the loch, when we emerged from the hills, there was a cluster of whin-bushes spread out upon a machar of land that in a less rigorous season of the year, by the feel of the shoe-sole, must be velvet-piled with salty grass. It lay in the clear, grey forenoon like a garden of fairydom to the view—the whin-bushes at a distant glance floating on billows of snow, touched at their lee by a cheering green, hung to the windward with the silver of the snow, and some of them even prinked off with the gold flower that gives rise to the proverb about kissing being out of fashion when the whin wants bloom. To come on this silent, peaceful, magic territory, fresh out of the turmoil of a battle, was to be in a region haunted, in the borderland of morning dreams, where care is a vague and far-off memory, and the elements study our desires. The lake spread out before us without a ripple, its selvedge at the shore repeating the picture on the brae. I looked on it with a mind peculiarly calm, rejoicing in its aspect Oh, love and the coming years, thought I, let them be here or somewhere like it—not among the savage of the hills, fighting, plotting, contriving; not among snow-swept mounts and crying and wailing brooks, but by the sedate and tranquil sea in calm weather. As we walked, my friends with furtive looks to this side and yon, down to the shore, I kept my face to the hills of real Argile, and my heart was full of love. I got that glimpse that comes to most of us (had we the wit to comprehend it) of the future of my life. I beheld in a wave of the emotion the picture of my coming years, going down from day to day very unadventurous and calm, spent in some peaceful valley by a lake, sitting at no rich-laden board but at bien and happy viands with some neighbour heart A little bird of hope fluted within me, so that I knew that if every clan in this countryside was arraigned against me, I had the breastplate of fate on my breast “I shall not die in this unfriendly country,” I promised myself. “There may be terror, and there may be gloom, but I shall watch my children’s children play upon the braes of Shira Glen.”

“You are very joco,” said John to me as I broke into a little laugh of content with myself.

“It’s the first time you ever charged me with jocosity, John,” I said “I’m just kind of happy thinking.”

“Yon spectacle behind us is not humorous to my notion,” said he, “whatever it may be to yours. And perhaps the laugh may be on the other side of your face before the night comes. We are here in a spider’s web.”

“I cry pardon for my lightness, John,” I answered; “I’ll have time enough to sorrow over the clan of Argile. But if you had the Sight of your future, and it lay in other and happier scenes than these, would you not feel something of a gaiety?”

He looked at me with an envy in every feature, from me to his companions, from them to the country round about us, and then to himself as to a stranger whose career was revealed in every rag of his clothing.

“So,” said he; “you are the lucky man to be of the breed of the elect of heaven, to get what you want for the mere desire of it, and perhaps without deserve. Here am I at my prime and over it, and no glisk of the future before me. I must be ever stumbling on, a carouser of life in a mirk and sodden lane.”

“You cannot know my meaning,” I cried.

“I know it fine,” said he. “You get what you want because you are the bairn of content. And I’m but the child of hurry (it’s the true word), and I must be seeking and I must be trying to the bitter end.”

He kicked, as he walked, at the knolls of snow in his way, and lashed at the bushes with a hazel wand he had lifted from a tree.

“Not all I want, perhaps,” said I; “for do you know that fleeing thus from the disgrace of my countrymen, I could surrender every sorrow and every desire to one notion about—about—about——”

“A girl of the middle height,” said he, “and her name is——”

“Do not give it an utterance,” I cried. “I would be sorry to breathe her name in such a degradation. Degradation indeed, and yet if I had the certainty that I was a not altogether hopeless suitor yonder, I would feel a conqueror greater than Hector or Gilian-of-the-Axe.”

“Ay, ay,” said John. “I would not wonder. And I’ll swear that a man of your fate may have her if he wants her. I’ll give ye my notion of wooing; it’s that with the woman free and the man with some style and boldness, he may have whoever he will.”

“I would be sorry to think it,” said I; “for that might apply to suitors at home in Inneraora as well as me.”

M’Iver laughed at the sally, and “Well, well,” said he, “we are not going to be debating the chance of love on Leven-side, with days and nights of slinking in the heather and the fern between us and our home.”

Though this conversation of ours may seem singularly calm and out of all harmony with our circumstances, it is so only on paper, for in fact it took but a minute or two of our time as we walked down among those whins that inspired me with the peaceful premonition of the coming years. We were walking, the seven of us, not in a compact group, but scattered, and at the whins when we rested we sat in ones and twos behind the bushes, with eyes cast anxiously along the shore for sign of any craft that might take us over.

What might seem odd to any one who does not know the shrinking mood of men broken with a touch of disgrace in their breaking, was that for long we studiously said nothing of the horrors we had left behind us. Five men fleeing from a disastrous field and two new out of the clutches of a conquering foe, we were dumb or discoursed of affairs very far removed from the reflection that we were a clan at extremities.

But we could keep up this silence of shame no longer than our running: when we sat among the whins on Leven-side, and took a breath and scrutinised along the coast, for sign of food or ferry, we must be talking of what we had left behind.

Gordon told the story with a pained, constrained, and halting utterance: of the surprise of Auchinbrcac when he heard the point of war from Nevis Glen, and could not believe that Montrose was so near at hand; of the waver ing Lowland wings, the slaughter of the Campbell gentlemen.

“We were in a trap,” said he, drawing with a stick on the smooth snow a diagram of the situation. “We were between brae and water. I am no man of war, and my heart swelled at the spectacle of the barons cut down like nettles. And by the most foolish of tactics, surely, a good many of our forces were on the other side of the loch.”

“That was not Auchinbreac’s doing, I’ll warrant,” said M’Iver; “he would never have counselled a division so fatal.”

“Perhaps not,” said the cleric, drily; “but what if a general has only a sort of savage army at his call? The gentry of your clan——”

“What about MacCailein?” I asked, wondering that there was no word of the chief.

“Go on with your story,” said M’Iver, sharply, to the cleric.

“The gentry of your clan,” said Gordon, paying no heed to my query, “were easy enough to guide; but yon undisciplined kerns from the hills had no more regard for martial law than for the holy commandments. God help them! They went their own gait, away from the main body, plundering and robbing.”

“I would not just altogether call it plundering, nor yet robbing,” said John, a show of annoyance on his face.

“And I don’t think myself,” said Sonachan, removing, as he spoke, from our side, and going to join the three others, who sat apart from us a few yards, “that it’s a gentleman’s way of speaking of the doings of other gentlemen of the same name and tartan as ourselves.”

“Ay, ay,” said the minister, looking from one to the other of us, his shaven jowl with lines of a most annoying pity on it—“Ay, ay,” said he, “it would be pleasing you better, no doubt, to hint at no vice or folly in your army; that’s the Highlands for you! I’m no Highlander, thank God, or at least with the savage long out of me; for I’m of an honest and orderly Lowland stock, and my trade’s the Gospel and the truth, and the truth you’ll get from Alexander Gordon, Master of the Arts, if you had your black joctilegs at his neck for it!”

He rose up, pursing his face, panting at the nostril, very crouse and defiant in every way.

“Oh, you may just sit you down,” said McIver, sharply, to him. “You can surely give us truth without stamping it down our throats with your boots, that are not, I’ve noticed, of the smallest size.”

“I know you, sir, from boot to bonnet,” said Gordon.

“You’re well off in your acquaintance,” said M’Iver, jocularly. “I wish I kent so good a man.”

“From boot to bonnet,” said Gordon, in no whit abashed by the irony. “Man, do you know,” he went on, “there’s a time comes to me now when by the grace of God I can see to one’s innermost as through a lozen. I shudder, sometimes, at the gift. For there’s the fair face, and there’s the smug and smiling lip, and there’s the flattery at the tongue, and below that masked front is Beelzebub himself, meaning well sometimes—perhaps always—but by his fall a traitor first and last.”

“God!” cried M’Iver, with a very ugly face, “that sounds awkwardly like a roundabout way of giving me a bad character.”

“I said, sir,” answered Gordon, “that poor Beelzebub does not sometimes ken his own trade. I have no doubt that in your heart you are touched to the finest by love of your fellows.”

“And that’s the truth—when they are not clerics,” cried John.

“Touched to the finest, and set in a glow too, by a manly and unselfish act, and eager to go through this world on pleasant footings with yourself and all else.”

“Come, come,” I cried; “I know my friend well, Master Gordon. We are not all that we might be; but I’m grateful for the luck that brought me so good a friend as John M’Iver.”

“I never cried down his credit,” said the minister, simply.

“Your age gives you full liberty,” said John. “I would never lift a hand.”

“The lifting of your hand,” said the cleric with a flashing eye, “is the last issue I would take thought of. I can hold my own. You are a fair and shining vessel (of a kind), but Beelzebub’s at your heart. They tell me that people like you; this gentleman of Elrigmore claims you for his comrade. Well, well, so let it be! It but shows anew the charm of the glittering exterior: they like you for your weaknesses and not for your strength. Do you know anything of what they call duty?”

“I have starved to the bone in Laaland without complaint, stood six weeks on watch in Stralsund’s Franken gate, eating my meals at my post, and John M’Iver never turned skirts on an enemy.”

“Very good, sir, very good,” said the minister; “but duty is most ill to do when it is to be done in love and not in hate.”

“Damn all schooling!” cried John. “You’re off in the depths of it again, and I cannot be after you. Duty is duty in love or hate, is it not?”

“It would take two or three sessions of St Andrews to show you that it makes a great differ whether it is done in love or hate. You do your duty by your enemy well enough, no doubt,—a barbarian of the blackest will do no less,—but it takes the better man to do his duty sternly by those he loves and by himself above all Argile——”

“Yes,” cried I, “what about Argile?”

The minister paid no heed to my question.

“Argile,” said he, “has been far too long flattered by you and your like, M’Iver.”

“Barbreck,” put in my comrade.

“Barbreck be it then. A man in his position thus never learns the truth. He sees around him but plausible faces and the truth at a cowardly compromise. That’s the sorrow of your Highlands; it will be the black curse of your chiefs in the day to come. As for me, I’m for duty first and last—even if it demands me to put a rope at my brother’s neck or my hand in the fire.”

“Maybe you are, maybe you are,” said John, “and it’s very fine of you; and I’m not denying but I can fancy some admirable quality in the character. But if I’m no great hand at the duty, I can swear to the love.”

“It’s a word I hate to hear men using,” said I.

The minister relaxed to a smile at John’s amiability, and John smiled on me.

“It’s a woman’s word, I daresay, Colin,” said he; “but there’s no man, I’ll swear, turning it over more often in his mind than yourself.”

Where we lay, the Pap of Glencoe—Sgor-na-ciche, as they call it in the Gaelic—loomed across Loch Leven in wisps of wind-blown grey. Long-beaked birds came to the sand and piped a sharp and anxious note, or chattered like children. The sea-banks floated on the water, rising and dipping to every wave; it might well be a dream we were in on the borderland of sleep at morning.

“What about Argile?” I asked again.

The minister said never a word. John Splendid rose to his feet, shook the last of his annoyance from him, and cast an ardent glance to those remote hills of Lorn.

“God’s grandeur!” said he, turning to the Gaelic it was proper to use but sparingly before a Saxon. “Behold the unfriendliness of those terrible mountains and ravines! I am Gaelic to the core, but give me in this mood of mine the flat south soil and the dip of the sky round a bannock of country. Oh, I wish I were where Aora runs! I wish I saw the highway of Loch Firme that leads down the slope of the sea where the towns pack close together and fires are warm!” He went on and sang a song of the low country, its multitude of cattle, its friendly hearths, its frequented walks of lovers in the dusk and in the spring.

Sonachan and Ardkinglas and the tacksmen came over to listen, and the man with the want began to weep with a child’s surrender.

“And what about Argile?” said I, when the humming ceased.

“You are very keen on that bit, lad,” said the baron-bailie, smiling spitefully with thin hard lips that revealed his teeth gleaming white and square against the dusk of his face. “You are very keen on that bit; you might be waiting for the rest of the minister’s story.”

“Oh,” I said, “I did not think there was any more of the minister’s tale to come. I crave his pardon.”

“I think, too, I have not much more of a story to tell,” said the minister, stiffly.

“And I think,” said M’Iver, in a sudden hurry to be off, “that we might be moving from here. The head of the loch is the only way for us if we are to be off this unwholesome countryside by the mouth of the night.”

It is likely we would have taken him at his word, and have risen and gone on his way to the east, where the narrowing of the loch showed that it was close on its conclusion; but the Stewart took from his knapsack some viands that gave a frantic edge to our appetite and compelled us to stay and eat.

The day was drawing to its close, the sun, falling behind us, was pillowed on clouds of a rich crimson. For the first time, we noticed the signs of the relaxation of the austere season in the return of bird and beast to their familiar haunts. As the sun dipped the birds came out to the brae-side to catch his last ray, as they ever love to do. Whaups rose off the sand, and, following the gleam upon the braes, ascended from slope to slope, and the plover followed too, dipping his feet in the golden tide receding. On little fir-patches mounted numerous blackcock of sheeny feather, and the owls began to hoot in the wood beyond.

We had eaten to the last crumb, and were ready to be going, when again I asked Gordon what had come over Argile.

“I’ll tell you that,” said he, bitterly; but as he began, some wildfowl rose in a startled flight to our right and whirred across the sky.

“There’s some one coming,” said M’Iver; “let us keep close together.”

From where the wildfowl rose, the Dame Dubh, as we called the old woman of Carnus, came in our direction, half-running, half-walking through the snow. She spied us while she was yet a great way off, stopped a second as one struck with an arrow, then continued her progress more eagerly than ever, with high-piped cries and taunts at us.

“O cowards!” she cried; “do not face Argile, or the glens you belong to. Cowards, cowards, Lowland women, Glencoe’s full of laughter at your disgrace!”

“Royal’s my race, I’ll not be laughed at!” cried Stewart.

“They cannot know of it already in Glencoe!” said M’Iver, appalled.

“Know it!” said the crone, drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; “Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy’s in the air; it’s a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it’s a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan on you and the black rocks; die from home, and Hell itself reject you!”

We stood in front of her in a group, slack at the arms and shoulders, bent a little at the head, affronted for the first time with the full shame of our disaster. All my bright portents of the future seemed, as they flashed again before me, muddy in the hue, an unfaithful man’s remembrance of his sins when they come before him at the bedside of his wife; the evasions of my friends revealed themselves what they were indeed, the shutting of the eyes against shame.

The woman’s meaning. Master Gordon could only guess at, and he faced her composedly.

“You are far off your road,” he said to her mildly, but she paid him no heed.

“You have a bad tongue, mother,” said M’Iver.

She turned and spat on his vest, and on him anew she poured her condemnation.

“You, indeed, the gentleman with an account to pay, the hero, the avenger! I wish my teeth had found your neck at the head of Aora Glen.” She stood in the half-night, foaming over with hate and evil words, her taunts stinging like asps.

“Take off the tartan, ladies!” she screamed; “off with men’s apparel and on with the short-gown.”

Her cries rang so over the land that she was a danger bruiting our presence to the whole neighbourhood, and it was in a common panic we ran with one accord from her in the direction of the loch-head. The man with the want took up the rear, whimpering as he ran, feeling again, it might be, a child fleeing from maternal chastisement: the rest of us went silently, all but Stewart, who was a cocky little man with a large bonnet pulled down on the back of his head like a morion, to hide the absence of ears that had been cut off by the law for some of his Appin adventures. He was a person who never saw in most of a day’s transactions aught but the humour of them, and as we ran from this shrieking beldame of Camus, he was choking with laughter at the ploy.

“Royal’s my race,” said he at the first ease to our running—“Royal’s my race, and I never thought to run twice in one day from an enemy. Stop your greeting, Callum, and not be vexing our friends the gentlemen.”

“What a fury!” said Master Gordon. “And that’s the lady of omens! What about her blessing now?”

“Ay, and what about her prophecies?” asked M’Iver, sharply. “She was not so far wrong, I’m thinking, about the risks of Inverlochy; the heather’s above the gall indeed.”

“But at any rate,” said I, “MacCailein’s head is not on a pike.”

“You must be always on the old key,” cried M’Iver, angrily. “Oh man, man, but you’re sore in want of tact” His face was throbbing and hoved. “Here’s half-a-dozen men,” said he, “with plenty to occupy their wits with what’s to be done and what’s to happen them before they win home, and all your talk is on a most vexatious trifle. Have you found me, a cousin of the Marquis, anxious to query our friends here about the ins and outs of the engagement? It’s enough for me that the heather’s above the gall. I saw this dreary morning the sorrow of my life, and I’m in no hurry to add to it by the value of a single tear.”

Sonachan was quite as bitter. “I don’t think,” said he, “that it matters very much to you, sir, what Argile may have done or may not have done; you should be glad of your luck (if luck it was and no design), that kept you clear of the trouble altogether.” And again he plunged ahead of us with Ardkinglas, to avoid my retort to an impertinence that, coming from a younger man, would have more seriously angered me.

The minister by now had recovered his wind, and was in another of his sermon moods, with this ruffling at Mac-Cailein’s name as his text.

“I think I can comprehend,” said he, “all this unwillingness to talk about my lord of Argile’s part in the disaster of to-day. No Gael though I am, I’m loath myself to talk about a bad black business, but that’s because I love my master—for master he is in scholarship, in gifts, in every attribute and intention of the Christian soldier. It is for a different reason, I’m afraid, that our friend Barbreck shuffles.”

“Barbreck never shuffles,” said John, stiffly. “If he did in this matter, it would be for as true an affection for his chief as any lalland cleric ever felt for his patron.”

“And yet, sir, you shuffle for another reason too. You do not want to give your ridiculous Highland pride the shock of hearing that your chief left in a galley before the battle he lost had well begun.”

A curious cry came from M’Iver’s lips. He lifted his face, lined with sudden shadows, to the stars that now were lighting to the east, and I heard his teeth grind.

“So that’s the bitter end of it!” said I to myself, stunned by this pitiful conclusion. My mind groped back on the events of the whole waeful winter. I saw Argile again at peace among his own people; I heard anew his clerkly but wavering sentiment on the trade of the sword; I sat by him in the mouth of Glen Noe, and the song and the guess went round the fire. But the picture that came to me first and stayed with me last was Argile standing in his chamber in the castle of Inneraora, the pallor of the study on his face, and his little Archie, with his gold hair and the night-gown, running out and clasping him about the knees.

We struggled through the night, weary men, hungry men. Loch Leven-head may be bonny by day, but at night it is far from friendly to the unaccustomed wanderer. Swampy meadows frozen to the hard bone, and uncountable burns, and weary ascents, and alarming dips, lie there at the foot of the great forest of Mamore. And to us, poor fugitives, even these were less cruel than the thickets at the very head where the river brawled into the loch with a sullen surrender of its mountain independence.

About seven or eight o’clock we got safely over a ford and into the hilly country that lies tumbled to the north of Glencoe. Before us lay the choice of two routes, either of them leading in the direction of Glenurchy, but both of them hemmed in by the most inevitable risks, especially as but one of all our party was familiar (and that one but middling well) with the countryside. “The choice of a cross-road at night in a foreign land is Tall John’s pick of the farmer’s daughters,” as our homely proverb has it; you never know what you have till the morn’s morning. And our picking was bad indeed, for instead of taking what we learned again was a drove-road through to Tynree, we stood more to the right and plunged into what after all turned out to be nothing better than a corrie among the hills. It brought us up a most steep hillside, and landed us two hours’ walk later far too much in the heart and midst of Glencoe to be for our comfort. From the hillside we emerged upon, the valley lay revealed, a great hack among the mountains.

Of the seven of us, Stewart was the only one with a notion of the lie of the country. He had bought cattle in the glen, and he had borrowed (as we may be putting it) in the same place, and a man with the gifts of observation and memory, who has had to guess his way at night among foreign clans and hills with a drove of unwilling and mourning cattle before him, has many a feature of the neighbourhood stamped upon his mind. Stewart’s idea was that to-night we might cross Glencoe, dive into one of the passes that run between the mountains called the Big and Little Herdsman, or between the Little Herd and Ben Fhada, into the foot of the forest of Dalness, then by the corries through the Black Mount of Bredalbane to Glen-urchy. Once on the Brig of Urchy, we were as safe, in a manner, as on the shores of Loch Finne. On Neill Bane’s map this looks a very simple journey, that a vigorous mountaineer could accomplish without fatigue in a couple of days if he knew the drove-roads; but it was a wicked season for such an enterprise, and if the Dame Dubh’s tale was right (as well enough it might be, for the news of Argile’s fall would be round the world in a rumour of wind), every clan among these valleys and hills would be on the hunting-road to cut down broken men seeking their way back to the country of MacCailein Mor. Above all was it a hard task for men who had been starving on a half-meal drammock for two or three days. I myself felt the hunger gnawing at my inside like a restless red-hot conscience. My muscles were like iron, and with a footman’s feeding, I could have walked to Inneraora without more than two or three hours’ sleep at a time; but my weakness for food was so great that the prospect before me was appalling.

It appalled, indeed, the whole of us. Fancy us on barren hills, unable to venture into the hamlets or townships where we had brought torch and pike a few days before; unable to borrow or to buy, hazarding no step of the foot without a look first to this side and then to yon, lest enemies should be up against us. Is it a wonder that very soon we had the slouch of the gangrel and the cunning aspect of the thief? But there’s something in gentle blood that always comes out on such an occasion. The baron-bailie and Neil Campbell, and even the minister, made no ado about their hunger, though they were suffering keenly from it; only the two tacksmen kept up a ceaseless grumbling.

M’Iver kept a hunter’s ear and eye alert at every step of our progress. He had a hope that the white hares, whose footprints sometimes showed among the snow, might run, as I have seen them do at night, within reach of a cudgel; he kept a constant search for badger-hamlets, for he would have dug from his sleep that gluttonous fat-haunched rascal who gorges himself in his own yellow moon-time of harvest. But hare nor badger fell in our way.

The moon was up, but a veil of grey cloud overspread the heavens and a frosty haze obscured the country. A clear cold hint at an odour of spring was already in the air, perhaps the first rumour the bush gets that the sap must rise. Out of the haze now and then, as we descended to the valley, there would come the peculiar cry of the red-deer, or the flaff of a wing, or the bleat of a goat It was maddening to be in the neighbourhood of the meal that roe, or bird, or goat would offer, and yet be unable to reach it.

Thus we were stumbling on, very weary, very hungry, the man with the want in a constant wail, and Sonachan lamenting for suppers he had been saucy over in days of rowth and plenty, when a light oozed out of the grey-dark ahead of us, in the last place in the world one would look for any such sign of humanity.

We stopped on the moment, and John Splendid went ahead to see what lay in the way. He was gone but a little when he came back with a hearty accent to tell us that luck for once was ours.

“There’s a house yonder,” said he, talking English for the benefit of the cleric; “it has a roaring fire and every sign of comfort, and it’s my belief there’s no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns. The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that’s broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near this tack-house before, so the housewife’s sorrow, whatever it is, can scarcely be at our door. Anyway,” he went on, “here are seven cold men, and weary men and hungry men too (and that’s the worst of it), and I’m going to have supper and a seat, if it’s the last in the world.”

“I hope there’s going to be no robbery about the affair,” said the minister, in an apparent dread of rough theft and maybe worse.

M’Iver’s voice had a sneer in every word of it when he answered in a very affected tongue of English he was used to assume when he wished to be at his best before a Saxon.

“Is it the logic of your school,” he asked, “that what’s the right conduct of war when we are in regiments is robbery when we are but seven broken men? I’m trying to mind that you found fault with us for helping ourselves in this same Glencoe last week, and refused to eat Corrycrick’s beef in Appin, and I cannot just recall the circumstance. Are we not, think ye, just as much at war with Glencoe now as then? And have seven starving men not an even better right, before God, to forage for themselves than has an army?”

“There’s a difference,” said the minister, stiffly. “We were then legitimate troops of war, fighting for the Solemn League and Covenant under a noble lord with Letters. It was the Almighty’s cause, and——”

“Was it indeed?” said John Splendid. “And was Himself on the other side of Loch Leven when His tulzie was on?”

“Scoffer!” cried Gordon, and M’Iver said no more, but led us through the dark to the house whose light so cheerfully smiled before us.

The house, when we came to it, proved a trig little edifice of far greater comfort than most of the common houses of the Highlands—not a dry-stone bigging but a rubble tenement, very snugly thacked and windowed, and having a piece of kail-plot at its rear. It was perched well up on the brae, and its light at evening must have gleamed like a friendly star far up the glen, that needs every touch of brightness to mitigate its gloom. As we crept close up to it in the snow, we could hear the crooning John Splendid had told us of, a most doleful sound in a land of darkness and strangers.

“Give a rap, and when she answers the door we can tell our needs peaceably,” said the minister.

“I’m not caring about rapping, and I’m not caring about entering at all now,” said M’I ver, turning about with some uneasiness. “I wish we had fallen on a more cheery dwelling, even if it were to be coerced with club and pistol. A prickle’s at my skin that tells me here is dool, and I can smell mort-cloth.”

Sonachan gave a grunt, and thumped loudly on the fir boards. A silence that was like a swound fell on the instant, and the light within went out at a puff. For a moment it seemed as if our notion of occupancy and light and lament had been a delusion, for now the grave itself was no more desolate and still.

“I think we might be going,” said I in a whisper, my heart thud-thudding at my vest, my mind sharing some of John Splendid’s apprehension that we were intruders on some profound grief. And yet my hunger was a furious thing that belched red-hot at my stomach.

“Royal’s my race!” said Stewart “I’ll be kept tirling at no door-pin in the Highlands,—let us drive in the bar.”

“What does he say?” asked the cleric, and I gave him the English of it.

“You’ll drive no doors in here,” said he firmly to Stewart “We can but give another knock and see what comes of it Knock you, M’Iver.”

“Barbreck.”

“Barbreck be it then.”

“I would sooner go to the glen foot, and risk all,” said John.

Sonachan grunted again; out he drew his dirk, and he rapped with the hilt of it loud and long at the door. A crying of children rose within, and, behold, I was a child again! I was a child again in Shira Glen, alone in a little chamber with a window uncurtained and unshuttered, yawning red-mouthed to the outer night My back was almost ever to the window, whose panes reflected a peat-fire and a face as long as a fiddle, and eyes that shone like coal; and though I looked little at the window yawning to the wood, I felt that it never wanted some curious spy outside, some one girning or smiling in at me and my book. I must look round, or I must put a hand on my shoulder to make sure no other hand was there,—then the Terror that drives the black blood from the heart through all the being, and a boy unbuckling his kilt with fevered fingers and leaping with frantic sobs to bed! One night when the black blood of the Terror still coursed through me, though I was dovering over to sleep, there came a knocking at the door, a knock commanding, a knock never explained. It brought me to my knees with a horror that almost choked me at the throat, a cold dew in the very palms of the hands. I dare not ask who rapped for fear I should have an answer that comes some day or other to every child of my race,—an answer no one told me of, an answer that then I guessed.

All this flashed through my mind when the children’s crying rose in the dark interior—that cry of children old and young as they go through the mysteries of life and the alley-ways of death.

The woman soothed her children audibly, then called out, asking what we wanted.

“I’m a man from Appin,” cried out Stewart with great promptness and cunning, “and I have a friend or two with me. I was looking for the house of Kilinchean, where a cousin of mine—a fine spinner and knitter, but thrawn in the temper—is married on the tenant, and we lost our way. We’re cold and we’re tired, and we’re hungry, and——”

“Step in,” said the woman, lifting back the door. “You are many miles from Kilinchean, and I know Appin Mary very well.”

But three of us entered, Stewart, M’Iver, and myself, the others on a sudden inspiration preferring not to alarm the woman by betraying the number of us, and concealing themselves in the byre that leaned against the gable of the dwelling.

“God save all here!” said M’Iver as we stepped in, and the woman lit the cruisie by sticking its nose in the peat-embers. “I’m afraid we come on you at a bad time.”

She turned with the cruisie in her hands and seemed to look over his head at vacancy, with large and melting eyes in a comely face.

“You come,” said she, “like grief, just when we are not expecting it, and in the dead of night But you are welcome at my door.”

We sat down on stools at her invitation, bathed in the yellow light of cruisie and peat. The reek of the fire rose in a faint breath among the pot-chains, and lingered among the rafters, loath, as it were, to emerge in the cold night In a cowering group beneath the blankets of a bed in a corner were four children, the bed-clothes hurriedly clutched up to their chins, their eyes staring out on the intruders. The woman put out some food before us, coarse enough in quality but plenty of it, and was searching in a press for platters when she turned to ask how many of us there were. We looked at each other a little ashamed, for it seemed as if she had guessed of our divided company and the four men in the byre. It is likely she would have been told the truth, but her next words set us on a different notion.

“You’ll notice,” said she, still lifting her eyes to a point over our heads, “that I have not my sight.”

“God! that’s a pity,” said M’Iver in genuine distress, with just that accent of fondling in it that a Highlander in his own tongue can use like a salve for distress.

“I am not complaining of it,” said the woman; “there are worse hardships in this world.”

“Mistress,” said John, “there are. I think I would willingly have been bl—— dim in the sight this morning if it could have happened.”

“Ay, ay!” said the woman in a sad abstraction, standing with plates in her hand listening (I could swear) for a footstep that would never come again.

We sat and warmed ourselves and ate heartily, the heat of that homely dwelling—the first we had sat in for days—an indulgence so rare and precious that it seemed a thing we could never again tear ourselves away from to encounter the unkindness of those Lorn mounts anew. The children watched us with an alarm and curiosity no way abated, beholding in us perhaps (for one at least was at an age to discern the difference our tartan and general aspect presented from those of Glencoe) that we were strangers from a great distance, maybe enemies, at least with some rigour of warfare about our visage and attire.

The mother, finding her way with the readiness of long familiarity about the house, got ease for her grief, whatever it was, in the duties thus suddenly thrust upon her: she spoke but seldom, and she never asked—in that she was true Gael—any more particulars about ourselves than Stewart had volunteered. And when we had been served with our simple viands, she sat composedly before us with her hands in her lap, and her eyes turned on us with an appearance of sedate scrutiny no whit the less perplexing because we knew her orbs were but fair clean window-panes shuttered and hasped within.

“You will excuse my dull welcome,” she said, with a wan smile, speaking a very pleasant accent of North Country Gaelic, that turned upon the palate like a sweet “A week or two ago you would have found a very cheerful house, not a widow’s sorrow, and, if my eyes were useless, my man (beannachd leis!) had a lover’s eyes, and these were the eyes for himself and me.”

“Was he at Inverlochy?” I asked softly; “was he out with Montrose?”

“He died a week come Thursday,” said the woman. “They’re telling me of wars—weary on them and God’s pity on the widow women they make, and the mothers they must leave lonely—but such a thing is sorrow that the world, from France to the Isles, might be in flames and I would still be thinking on my man that’s yonder in the cold clods of the yard.... Stretch your hands; it’s your welcome, gentlemen.”

“I have one or two other friends out-bye there in the byre,” put in Stewart, who found the vigilance of the youths in the bed gave no opportunity for smuggling provand to the others of our party.

The woman’s face flamed up a little and took on the least of a look of alarm that Stewart—who was very cunning and quick in some matters—set about removing at once with some of those convenient lies that he seemed never out of the want of.

“Some of our lads,” said he, with a duck of apology at M’Iver and myself for taking liberties with the reputation of our friends. “They’re very well where they are among the bracken, if they had but the bite and sup, and if it’s your will I could take them that.”

“Could they not be coming in and sitting by the fire?” asked the woman, set at rest by Stewart’s story; but he told her he would never think of filling her room with a rabble of plain men, and in a little he was taking out the viands for our friends in the byre.

The woman sat anew upon her stool and her hands on her lap, listening with a sense so long at double exercise that now she could not readily relax the strain on it M’Iver was in a great fidget to be off. I could see it in every movement of him. He was a man who ever disliked to have his feelings vexed by contact with the everlasting sorrows of life, and this intercourse with new widowhood was sore against his mind. As for me, I took, in a way of speaking, the woman to my heart She stood to me for all the griefs I had known in life, and was yet the representative, the figure of love—revealing an element of nature, a human passion so different from those tumults and hatreds we had been encountering. I had been thinking as I marched among the wilds of Lochaber and Badenoch that vengeance and victory and dominion by the strong hand were the main spurs to action, and now, on a sudden, I found that affection was stronger than them all.

“Are you keeping the place on?” I asked the widow, “or do you go back to your folks, for I notice from your tongue that you are of the North?”

“I’m of the Grants,” she said; “but my heart’s in Glencoe, and I’ll never leave it I am not grieving at the future, I am but minding on the past, and I have my bairns.... More milk for the lads outside; stretch your hands.... Oh yes, I have my bairns.”

“Long may they prosper, mistress,” said M’Iver, drumming with a horn spoon on his knee, and winking and smiling very friendly to the little fellows in a row in the bed, who, all but the oldest, thawed to this humour of the stranger. “It must be a task getting a throng like yon bedded at evening. Some day they’ll be off your hand, and it’ll be no more the lullaby of Crodh Chailein, but them driving at the beasts for themselves.”

“Are you married?” asked the woman.

“No,” said John, with a low laugh, “not yet. I never had the fortune to fill the right woman’s eye. I’ve waited at the ferry for some one who’ll take a man over without the ferry fee, for I’m a poor gentleman though I’m of a good family, and had plenty, and the ones with the tocher won’t have me, and the tocherless girls I dare not betray.”

“You ken the old word,” said the woman; “the man who waits long at the ferry will get over some day.”

Stewart put down a cogie and loosened a button of his vest, and with an air of great joviality, that was marred curiously by the odd look his absence of lugs conferred, he winked cunningly at us and slapped the woman in a rough friendship on the shoulder.

“Are you thinking yourself——” he began, and what he would finish with may be easily guessed. But M’Iver fixed him with an eye that pricked like a rapier.

“Sit ye down, Stewart,” said he; “your race is royal, as ye must be aye telling us, but there’s surely many a droll bye-blow in the breed.”

“Are you not all from Appin?” asked the woman, with a new interest, taking a corner of M’Iver’s plaiding in her hand and running a few checks through fine delicate fingers of a lady. Her face dyed crimson; she drew back her stool a little, and cried out—

“That’s not off a Stewart web—it was never waulked in Appin. Whom have I here?”

John Splendid bent to her very kindly and laid a hand on hers.

“I’ll tell you the God’s truth, mother,” said he; “we’re broken men: we have one Stewart of a kind with us, but we belong to parts far off from here, and all we want is to get to them as speedily as may be. I’ll put you in mind (but troth I’m sure it’s not needed) of two obligations that lie on every Gaelic household. One of them is to give the shelter of the night and the supper of the night to the murderer himself, even if the corpse on the heather was your son; and the other is to ask no question off your guest till he has drunk the deoch-an-doruis.”

“I’m grudging you nothing,” said the woman; “but a blind widow is entitled to the truth and frankness.”

M’Iver soothed her with great skill, and brought her back to her bairns.

“Ay,” said he, “some day they’ll be off your hands, and you the lady with sons and servants.”

“Had you a wife and bairns of your own,” said the woman, “you might learn some day that a parent’s happiest time is when her children are young. They’re all there, and they’re all mine when they’re under the blanket; but when they grow up and scatter, the nightfall never brings them all in, and one pair of blankets will not cover the cares of them. I do not know that,” she went on, “from what I have seen in my own house; but my mother told me, and she had plenty of chance to learn the truth of it, with sons who died among strangers, and sons who bruised her by their lives more than they could by their deaths.”

“You have some very ruddy and handsome boys there,” said M’Iver. And aye he would be winking and smiling at the young rogues in the corner.

“I think they are,” said the woman. “I never saw but the eldest, and he was then at the breast, the dear, his father’s image.”

“Then the father of him must have been a well-fared and pretty man,” said John, very promptly, not a bit abashed by the homeliness of the youth, who was the plainest of the nock, with a freckled skin, a low hang-dog brow, and a nose like the point of a dirk.

“He was that,” said the woman, fondly—“the finest man in the parish. He had a little lameness, but——”

“I have a bit of a halt myself,” said M’I ver, with his usual folly; “and I’m sure I’m none the worse for it.”

The oldest boy sat up in bed and gloomed at us very sullenly. He could scarcely be expected to understand the conceits of M’Iver’s tale about his lameness, that any one with eyes could behold had no existence.

“But I never think of my man,” the woman went on, “but as I saw him first before he met with his lameness. Eyes are a kind of doubtful blessing too in some ways. Mine have forgotten all the ugly things they knew, and in my recollection are but many bonny things: my man was always as young to me as when he came courting in a new blue bonnet and a short coat; my children will be changing to every one but to me.”

Stewart, with his own appetite satisfied, was acting lackey to the gentlemen in the byre—fetching out cogies of milk and whangs of bear-meal bannock, and the most crisp piquant white cheese ever I put tooth to. He was a man without a conscience, and so long as his own ends and the ends of his friends were served, he would never scruple to empty the woman’s girnel or toom her last basin, and leave her no morsel of food or drink at the long-run. But M’Iver and I put an end to that, and so won, as we thought, to the confidence of the elder lad in the bed, who had glunched low-browed among his franker brethren.

We slept for some hours, the seven of us, among the bracken of the byre, wearied out and unable to go farther that night, even if the very dogs were at our heels. We slept sound, I’m sure, all but M’Iver, whom, waking twice in the chill of the night, I found sitting up and listening like any sentinel.

“What are you watching for there?” I asked him on the second time.

“Nothing at all, Colin, nothing at all. I was aye a poor sleeper at the best, and that snore of Rob Stewart is the very trump of the next world.”

It was in the dawn again he confessed to his real apprehension,—only to my private ear, for he wished no more to alarm the others by day than to mar my courtship of slumber by night.

“The fact is,” said he, “I’m not very sure about our young gentleman yonder in the bed. He’s far too sharp in the eye and black in the temper, and too much of Clan Donallachd generally, to be trusted with the lives and liberties of seven gentlemen of a tartan he must know unfriendly to Glencoe. I wish I saw his legs that I might guess the length of him, or had had the wit to ask his mother, his age, for either would be a clue to his chance of carrying the tale against us down the valley there. He seemed tremendous sharp and wicked lying yonder looking at us, and I was in a sweat all night for fear he would be out and tell on us. But so far he’s under the same roof as ourselves.”

Sonachan and the baron-bailie quarrelled away about some point of pedigree as they sat, a towsy, unkempt pair, in a dusty corner of the byre, with beards of a most scraggy nature grown upon their chins. Their uncouthness gave a scruple of foppishness to M’I ver, and sent him seeking a razor in the widow’s house. He found the late husband’s, and shaved himself trimly, while Stewart played lackey again to the rest of us, taking out a breakfast the housewife was in the humour to force on us. He had completed his scraping, and was cracking away very freely with the woman, who was baking some bannocks on the stone, with sleeves rolled up from arms that were rounded and white. They talked of the husband (the one topic of new widowhood), a man, it appeared, of a thousand parts, a favourite with all, and yet, as she said, “When it came to the black end they left me to dress him for the grave, and a stranger had to bury him.”

M’Iver, looking fresh and spruce after his cleansing, though his eyes were small for want of sleep, aroused at once to an interest in the cause of this unneighbourliness.

The woman stopped her occupation with a sudden start and flared crimson.

“I thought you knew,” said she, stammering, turning a rolling-pin in her hand—“I thought you knew; and then how could you?... I maybe should have mentioned it,... but,... but could I turn you from my door in the night-time and hunger?”

M’Iver whistled softly to himself, and looked at me where I stood in the byre-door.

“Tuts,” said he, at last turning with a smile to the woman, as if she could see him; “what does a bit difference with Lowland law make after all? I’ll tell you this, mistress, between us,—I have a name myself for private foray, and it’s perhaps not the first time I have earned the justification of the kind gallows of Crief by small diversions among cattle at night It’s the least deserving that get the tow gravatte.”

(Oh you liar! I thought.)

The woman’s face looked puzzled. She thought a little, and said, “I think you must be taking me up wrong; my man was never at the trade of reiving, and——”

“I would never hint that he was, goodwife,” cried John, quickly, puzzled-looking himself. “I said I had a name for the thing; but they were no friends of mine who gave me the credit, and I never stole stot or quey in all my life.”

(I have my doubts, thinks I.)

“My man died of the plague,” said the woman, blurting out her news, as if eager to get over an awkward business.

I have never seen such a sudden change in a person’s aspect as came over John Splendid in every feature. The vain trim man of a minute ago, stroking his chin and showing a white hand (for the entertainment of the woman he must always be forgetting was without her sight), balancing and posturing on well-curved legs, and jauntily pinning his plaid on his shoulder, in a flash lost backbone. He stepped a pace back, as if some one had struck him a blow, his jaw fell, and his face grew ashen.

Then his eyes went darting about the chamber, and his nostrils sniffed as if disease was a presence to be seen and scented, a thing tangible in the air, maybe to be warded off by a sharp man’s instruction in combat of arms.

“God of grace!” he cried, crossing himself most vigorously for a person of the Protestant religion, and muttering what I have no doubt was some charm of his native glen for the prevention of fevers. He shut his mouth thereafter very quickly on every phrase he uttered, breathing through his nose; at the same time he kept himself, in every part but the shoe-soles he tiptoed on, from touching anything. I could swear the open air of the most unfriendly glen in Christendom was a possession to be envious of for John M’Iver of Barbreck.

Stewart heard the woman’s news that came to him as he was carrying in from the byre the vessels from which he had been serving his companions. He was in a stew more extraordinary than John Splendid; he blanched even to the scars of his half-head, as we say, spat vehemently out of his mouth a piece of bread he was chewing, turned round about in a flash, and into the byre past me as I stood (not altogether alarmed, but yet a little disturbed and uneasy) in the doorway. He emptied his clothing and knapsack of every scrap of food he had purloined, making a goodly heap upon the floor,—the very oaten flour he dusted off his finger-tips, with which he had handled cake that a little ago he was risking his soul’s salvation to secure. And—except the minister—the other occupants of the byre were in an equal terror.

For in this matter of smittal plagues we Highlanders are the most arrant cowards. A man whose life we would save on the field, or the rock-face, or the sea, at the risk of our own lives or the more abominable peril of wound and agony, will die in a ditch of the Spotted Death or a fever before the most valiant of us would put out a hand to cover him again with his blanket He will get no woman to sound his coronach, even if he were Lord of the Isles. I am not making defence or admitting blame, though I have walked in Hamburg when the pitch-barrels blazed in the street, fuming the putrid wind; but there is in the Gaelic character a dread of disfiguration more than of sudden and painful death. What we fear is the black mystery of such disorders: they come on cunning winds unheralded, in fair weather or bad, day or night, to the rich and to the poor, to the strong as to the weak. You may be robust to-day in a smiling country and to-morrow in a twist of agony, coal-black, writhing on the couch, every fine interest in life blotted out by a yellow film upon the eyes. A vital gash with a claymore confers a bloodier but a more comely and natural end. Thus the Gael abhors the very roads that lead to a plague-struck dwelling. If plagues do not kill, they will mar—yes, even against the three charms of Island! and that, too, makes heavier their terror, for a man mutilated even by so little as the loss of a hand is an object of pity to every hale member of his clan. He may have won his infirmity in a noble hour, but they will pity him, and pity to the proud is worse than the glove in the face.

Instantly there was a great to-do in getting away from this most unfortunate dwelling. The lads in the byre shook tartan and out to the fresh air, and rejoiced in the wind with deep-drawn gulping breaths, as if they might wash the smallest dust of disease from their bodily systems. So at last only M’Iver and I were left standing at the door.

“Well,” said John, with an effort, “we must be going. I never thought it was so late. And we must be on the other side of Dalness before very long. You have been very good to us, and my name’s John M’I ver of Barbreck—a kind of a Campbell with a great respect for the Mac-Donalds, of whom I kent a few perfect gentry in foreign wars I have been at the fighting of. And—good day, mistress, we must be going. My friends have the very small manners surely, for they’re off down the road. Well just let them go that way. What need ye expect off small men and gillies?”

He signed to me with a shake of his sporran to show it was empty, and, falling to his meaning, I took some silver from my own purse and offered it to the glum-faced lad in the blankets. Beetle-brow scowled, and refused to put a hand out for it, so I left it on a table without a clink to catch the woman’s ear.

“Would you not have a deoch-an-doruis?” asked the woman, making to a press and producing a bottle.

M’Iver started in a new alarm. “No, no. You’re very good,” said he; “but I never take it myself in the morning, and—good day, mistress—and my friend Elrigmore, who’s left with me here, is perhaps too free with it sometimes; and indeed maybe I’m that way myself too—it’s a thing that grows on you. Good-bye, mistress.”

She put out her hand, facing us with uplifted eyes. I felt a push at my shoulder, and the minister, who had left the four others down the brae, stepped softly into the room. M’Iver was in a high perplexity. He dare not shake the woman’s hand, and still he dare not hurt her feelings. “My thong’s loose,” said he, stooping to fumble with a brogue that needed no such attention. He rose with the minister at his shoulder.

“And good day to you again, mistress,” said M’Iver, turning about to go, without heeding the outstretched hand.

Master Gordon saw the whole play at a glance. He took the woman’s hand in his without a word, wrung it with great warmth, and, seized as it seemed by a sudden whim, lifted the fingers to his lips, softly kissed them, and turned away.

“O,” cried the woman, with tears welling to her poor eyes—“O Clan Campbell, I’ll never call ye down! Ye may have the guile they claim for ye, but ye have the way with a widow’s heart!”

I did it with some repugnance, let me own; but I, too, shook her hand, and followed the minister out at the door. M’Iver was hot with annoyance and shame, and ready to find fault with us for what we had done; but the cleric carded him like wool in his feelings.

“Oh, valour, valour!” he said in the midst of his sermon, “did I not say you knew your duty in hate better than in affection?”

John Splendid kept a dour-set jaw, said never a word, and the seven of us proceeded on our way.

It was well on in the morning, the land sounding with a new key of troubled and loosening waters. Mists clogged the mountain-tops, and Glencoe far off to its westward streamed with a dun vapour pricked with the tip of fir and ash. A moist feel was in the air; it relapsed anon to a smirr of rain.

“This is a shade better than clear airs and frost and level snow for quarries on a hunting,” said I.

“I’m glad it suits you,” said M’Iver. “I’ve seen the like before, and I’m not so sure about the advantage of it.”

The rain that was a smirr or drizzle on the north side of Glencoe grew to a steady shower in the valley itself, and when we had traversed a bit in the airt of Tynree it had become a pouring torrent—slanting in our faces with the lash of whips, streaming from the hair and crinkling the hands, and leaving the bonnet on the head as heavy as any French soldier’s salade. I am no great unlover of a storm in the right circumstances. There is a long strath between Nordlingen and Donauworth of Bavaria, where once we amazed our foreign allies by setting out, bare to the kilt and sark, in threshing hail, running for miles in the pelt of it out of the sheer content of encounter—and perhaps a flagon or two of wine. It was a bravado, perhaps, but a ploy to brace the spirit; we gathered from it some of the virtues of our simple but ample elders, who were strong men when they lay asleep with a cheek to the naked earth and held their faces frankly up to sun or rain. But if we rejoiced in the rains of Bavaria, there was no cause for glee in those torrents of Glencoe, for they made our passage through the country more difficult and more dangerous than it was before. The snow on the ground was for hours a slushy compost, that the foot slipped on at every step, or that filled the brogue with a paste that nipped like brine. And when the melting snow ran to lower levels, the soil itself, relaxing the rigour of its frost, became as soft as butter and as unstable to the foot The bums filled to the lip and brawled over, new waters sprung up among the rocks and ran across our path, so that we were for ever wading and slipping and splashing and stumbling on a route that seemed never to come to any end or betterment.

Seven more pitiful men never trod Highlands. The first smirr soaked our clothing; by the middle of the glen we were drenched to the hide, and the rain was flowing from the edges of our kilts in runnels. Thus heaven scourged us with waters till about the hour of noon, when she alternated water with wind and gales burst from the west, the profound gorges of Stob Dubh belching full to the throat with animus. There were fir-plantings by the way, whose branches twanged and boomed in those terrific blasts, that on the bare brae-side lifted up the snow with an invisible scoop and flung it in our faces.

Stewart and the man with the want led the way, the latter ever with his eyes red a-weeping, looking about him with starts and tremors, moaning lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd’s long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful valley. Then on the rear behind those commoners came the minister and John Splendid and myself, the minister with his breeks burst at the knees, his stockings caught up with a poor show of trimncss by a braid of rushes, contrived by M’Iver, and his coat-skirts streaming behind him. You could not but respect the man’s courage: many a soldier I’ve seen on the dour hard leagues of Germanie—good soldiers too, heart and body—-collapse under hardships less severe. Gordon, with a drawn and curd-white face, and eyes burning like lamps, surrendered his body to his spirit, and it bore him as in a dream through wind and water, over moor and rock, and amid the woods that now and again we had to hide in.

That we had to hide so little was one of the miracles of our traverse. At any other time perhaps Glencoe and the regions round about it would be as well tenanted as any low-country strath, for it abounded on either hand with townships, with crofts that perched on brief plateaux, here and there with black bothy-houses such as are (they say) the common dwellings over all the Hebrid Isles. Yet, moving, not in the ultimate hollow of the valley, but in fighting fashion upon the upper levels, we were out of the way of molestation, and in any case it was a valley for the time deserted of men. Women we could see in plenty, drawing water or bearing peats in from the bogs behind their dwellings, or crossing from house to house or toun to toun, with plaids drawn tightly over their heads, their bodies bent to meet the blasts that made their clothing banner and full. Nor children either were there in that most barren country, or they kept within, sheltering the storms assailing, and the want of them (for I have ever loved the little ones) added twenty-fold to my abhorrence of the place.

We had to hide but rarely, I say: two or three times when down in the valley’s depths there showed a small group of men who were going in the same direction as ourselves by the more natural route, at a quarter of a league’s distance in advance of us. They were moving with more speed than we, and for a time we had the notion that they might be survivors, like ourselves, of Argile’s clan. But at last this fancy was set at flight by the openness of their march, as well as by their stoppage at several houses by the way, from which they seemed to be joined by other men, who swelled their numbers so that after a time there would be over a score of them on the mission, whatever it might be. In that misty rain-swept day the eye could not carry far, and no doubt they were plainer to our view than we were to theirs among the drab vapours of the hillside. But once or twice we thought they perceived us, for they stopped and looked to the left and up the brae-face we were on, and then it was we had to seek the shelter of tree or bush. If they saw us, they seemed to suspect no evil, for they held on their way, still ahead of us, and making for Tynree. Whoever they were, they became at last so manifest a danger to our escape out of the head of the glen that we fell back anew on the first plan of going through the corries on the south side of the glen and piercing by them to Dalness. In the obscurity of a great shower that set up a screen between us and the company marching to Tynree, we darted down the brae, across the valley, and over to the passage they call the Lairig Eilde, that is on the west of the great Little Herd hill of Etive, and between it and Ben Fhada or the Long Mount, whose peaks you will find with snow in their gullies in the height of summer.

It was with almost a jocund heart I turned my back on Glencoe as we took a drove-path up from the river. But I glanced with a shiver down its terrible distance upon that nightmare of gulf and eminence, of gash, and peaks afloat upon swirling mists. It lay, a looming terror, forgotten of heaven and unfriendly to man (as one might readily imagine), haunted for ever with wailing airs and rumours, ghosts calling in the deeps of dusk and melancholy, legends of horror and remorse.

“Thank God,” said I, as we gave the last look at it—“thank God I was not born and bred yonder. Those hills would crush my heart against my very ribs.”

“It’s good enough for the people who are in it,” said John. “What are they but MacDonalds? ‘Take and not give’ is their motto. They can have Glencoe for me, with M’Millan’s right to Knapdale,—as long as wave beats on rock.”

Master Gordon, though we had spoken in the Gaelic, half guessed our meaning. “A black place and mournful,” said he; “but there may be love there too and warm hearts, and soil where the truth might flourish as in the champaign over against Gilgal beside the plains of Moreh.”

Now we were in a tract of country mournful beyond my poor description. I know comes in Argile that whisper silken to the winds with juicy grasses, corries where the deer love to prance deep in the cool dew, and the beasts of far-off woods come in bands at their seasons and together rejoice. I have seen the hunter in them and the shepherd too, coarse men in life and occupation, come sudden among the blowing rush and whispering reed, among the bog-flower and the cannoch, unheeding the moor-hen and the cailzie-cock rising, or the stag of ten at pause, while they stood, passionate adventurers in a rapture of the mind, held as it were by the spirit of such places as they lay in a sloeberry bloom of haze, the spirit of old good songs, the baffling surmise of the piper and the bard. To those corries of my native place will be coming in the yellow moon of brock and foumart—the beasts that dote on the autumn eves—the People of Quietness; have I not seen their lanthoms and heard their laughter in the night?—so that they must be blessed corries, so endowed since the days when the gods dwelt in them without tartan and spear in the years of the peace that had no beginning.

But the corries of Lorn; black night on them, and the rain rot! They were swamps of despair as we went struggling through them. The knife-keen rushes whipped us at the thigh, the waters bubbled in our shoes. Round us rose the hills grey and bald, sown with boulders and crowned with sour mists. Surely in them the sun never peeps even in the long days of summer: the star, I’ll warrant, never rains on them his calm influence!

Dolour left us speechless as we trudged, even when for a time we were lost We essayed in a silence at openings here and there, at hacks and water-currents, wandering off from each other, whistling and calling, peering from rock-brows or spying into wounds upon the hills, so that when we reached Dalness it was well on in the day. If in summer weather the night crawls slowly on the Highlands, the winter brings a fast black rider indeed. His hoofs were drumming on the hills when first we saw sight of Dalness; he was over and beyond us when we reached the plain. The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other till the dawn.

Dalness lies in Glen Etive, at a gusset of hills on either side of which lie paths known to the drover and the adventurer. The house receded from the passes and lay back in a plcasance walled by whin or granite, having a wattled gate at the entrance. When we were descending the pass we could see a glare of light come from the place even though the mist shrouded, and by the time we got to the gate h was apparent that the house was lit in every chamber. The windows that pierced the tall gables threw beams of light into the darkness, and the open door poured out a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling’s ghost, grey, eerie, full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness, a thing so different from the barren hills and black bothies behind us.

We gathered in a cluster near the wattle gate, the minister perhaps the only man who had the wit to acknowledge the reality of the vision. His eyes fairly gloated on this evidence of civilised state, so much recalling the surroundings in which he was most at home. As by an instinct of decency, he drew up his slack hose and bound them anew with the rushen garters, and pulled his coat-lapels straight upon his chest, and set his dripping peruke upon his head with a touch of the dandy’s air, all the time with his eyes on those gleaming windows, as if he feared to relinquish the spectacle a moment, lest it should fly like a dream.

We had thought first of pushing across the glen, over the river, through Corrie Ghuibhasan, and into the Black Mount; but the journey in a night like what was now fallen was not to be attempted. On the hills beyond the river the dog-fox barked with constancy, his vixen screeching like a child—signs of storm that no one dare gainsay. So we determined to seek shelter and concealment somewhere in the policies of the house. But first of all we had to find what the occasion was of this brilliancy in Dalness, and if too many people for our safety were not in the neighbourhood. I was sent forward to spy the place, while my companions lay waiting below a cluster of alders.

I went into the grounds with my heart very high up on my bosom, not much put about at any human danger, let me add, for an encounter with an enemy of flesh and blood was a less fearsome prospect than the chance of an encounter with more invulnerable foes, who, my skin told me, haunted every heugh and howe of that still and sombre demesne of Dalness. But I set my teeth tight in my resolution, and with my dirk drawn in my hand—it was the only weapon left me—I crept over the grass from bush to bush and tree to tree as much out of the revelation of the window-lights as their numbers would let me.

There was not a sound in the place, and yet those lights might have betokened a great festivity, with pipe and harp going, and dancers’ feet thudding on the floor.

At one of the gables there was a low window, and I made for it, thinking it a possible eye to a lobby or passage, and therefore not so hazardous to look in at I crept up and viewed the interior.

My window, to my astonishment, looked in on no bare plain lobby, but on a spacious salmanger or hall, very rosy with sconce-light and wood-fire—a hall that extended the whole length of the house, with a bye-ordinar high ceil of black oak carved very handsomely. The walls at the far end were hung with tapestry very like MacCailein’s rooms at home in Inneraora, and down the long sides, whose windows streamed the light upon the hall, great stag-heads glowered with unsleeping eyes, stags of numerous tines. The floor was strewn with the skins of the chase, and on the centre of it was a table laden with an untouched meal, and bottles that winked back the flicker of the candle and the hearth.

The comfort of the place, by contrast with our situation, seemed, as I looked hungrily on it through the thick glass of the lozen, more great and tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes. Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room, took long to swoon into nothingness in that tranquil interior.

But the most wonderful thing of all was, that though the supper seemed ready waiting for a company, and could not have been long left, I waited five or ten minutes with my face fast to the pane and no living footstep entered the room. I watched the larger door near the far-off end eagerly; it lay ajar, smiling a welcome to the parts of the house beyond, but no one came in.

“Surely they are throng in some other wing,” I thought, “and not so hungry as we, or their viands did not lie so long untouched in that dainty room.”

I went round the house at its rear, feeling my way slowly among the bushes. I looked upon parlours and bed-closets, kitchens and corridors; they were lighted with the extravagance of a marriage-night, and as tenantless and silent as the cells of Kilchrist The beds were straightened out, the hearths were swept, the floors were scrubbed, on every hand was the evidence of recent business, but the place was relinquished to the ghosts.

How it was I cannot say, but The mystery of the house made me giddy at the head. Yet I was bound to push my searching further, so round with a swithering heart went Elrigmore to the very front door of the mansion of Dalness—open, as I have said, with the light gushing lemon-yellow on the lawn. I tapped softly, my heart this time even higher than my bosom, with a foot back ready to retreat if answer came. Then I rasped an alarm on the side of the yett with a noise that rang fiercely through the place and brought the sweat to my body, but there was even then no answer.

So in I went, the soft soles of my brogues making no sound on the boards, but leaving the impress of my footsteps in a damp blot.

Now, to me, brought up in a Highland farm-steading (for the house of Elrigmore is without great spaciousness or pretence), large and rambling castles and mansions ever seem eerie. I must in them be thinking, like any boy, of the whisperings of wraiths in their remote upper rooms; I feel strange airs come whipping up their long or crooked lobbies at night; the number of their doors are, to my Highland instinct, so many unnecessary entrances for enemies and things mischancy.

But to wander over the house of Dalness, lit from tol-booth to garret with lowe—to see the fires, not green but at their prime with high-banked peat that as yet had not thrown an ash—to see so fine a supper waiting in a mansion utterly desolate and its doors open to the wilds, seemed a thing so magical that I felt like taking my feet from the place in a hurry of hurries and fleeing with my comrades from so unco a countryside. High and low I ranged in the interior. I had found a nut without a kernel, and at last I stood dumfoundered and afraid, struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through the interior.

I might have been there fifteen minutes or half an hour when M’Iver, impatient at my delay or fearing some injury to my person, came in and joined me. He too was struck with amazement at the desertion of the house.

He measured the candles, he scrutinised the fires, he went round the building out and in and he could but conclude that we must be close upon the gate when the house was abandoned.

“But why abandon it?” I asked.

“That’s the Skyeman’s puzzle; it would take seven men and seven years to answer it,” said he. “I can only say it’s very good of them (if there’s no ambuscade in it) to leave so fine an inn and so bonny a supper with a bush above the door and never a bar against entrance. We’ll just take advantage of what fortune has sent us.”

“The sooner the better,” said I, standing up to a fire that delighted my body like a caress. “I have a trick of knowing when good fortune’s a dream, and i’ll be awake and find myself lying on hard heather before the bite’s at my mouth.”

M’Iver ran out and brought in our companions, none of them unwilling to put this strange free hostel to the test for its warmth and hospitality. We shut and barred the doors, and set ourselves down to such a cold collation as the most fortunate of us had not tasted since the little wars began. Between the savage and the gentleman is but a good night’s lodging. Give the savage a peaceful hearth to sit by, a roof to his head, and a copious well-cooked supper, and his savagery will surrender itself to the sleek content of a Dutch merchantman. We sat at a table whose load would have rationed a company of twice our number, and I could see the hard look of hunting relax in the aspect of us all: the peering, restless, sunken eyes came out of their furrowed caverns, turned calm, full, and satisfied; the lines of the brow and mouth, the contour of the cheek, the carriage of the head, the disposition of the hands, altered and improved. An hour ago, when we were the sport of ferocious nature in the heart of a country infernal, no more than one of us would have swithered to strike a blow at a fellow-creature and to have robbed his corpse of what it might have of food and comfort Now we gloated in the airs benign of Dalness house, very friendly to the world at large, the stuff that tranquil towns are made of. We had even the minister’s blessing on our food, for Master Gordon accepted the miracle of the open door and the vacant dwelling with John Splen-did’s philosophy, assuring us that in doing so he did no more than he would willingly concede any harmless body of broken men such as we were, even his direst enemies, if extremity like ours brought them to his neighbourhood.

“I confess I am curious to know how the thing happened, but the hand of the Almighty’s in it anyway,” he said; and so saying he lay back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction that lost nothing of its zest by the influence of the rain that blattered now in drumming violence on the window-panes.

John Splendid, at the table-end, laughed shortly between his sups at a flagon of wine.

“All the same,” said he, “I would advise you to put some of the Almighty’s provand in your pouch, for fear the grace that is ours now may be torn suddenly enough from us.”

Sonachan pointed at Stewart, who had already filled every part of his garments with broken meat, and his wallet as well. “There’s a cautious man,” said he, “whatever your notion of sudden ceasing may be. He has been putting bite about in his wallet and his stomach since ever we sat down. Appin ways, no doubt.”

“Biadh an diugh, cogadh a maireach—food to-day, war to-morrow,” said the son of kings. “Royal’s my race! A man should aye be laying in as he goes: if I had not had my wallet on Loch Leven-side, I ken some gentry who would have been as hungry as common herds, and with nothing to help it.”

John Splendid laughed again. “Wise man, Rob!” said he; “you learnt the first principles of campaigning in Appin as nicely as ever I did in the wars of the Invincible Lion (as they called him) of the North. Our reverend comrade here, by the wisdom of his books, never questions, it seems, that we have a lease of Dalness house as long as we like to stay in it, its pendicles and pertinents, lofts, crofts, gardens, mills, multures, and sequels, as the lawyers say in their damned sheep-skins, that have been the curse of the Highlands even more than books have been. Now I’ve had an adventure like this before. Once in Regenwalde, between Danzig and Stettin, where we lay for two months, I spent a night with a company of Hepburn’s blades in a castle abandoned by a cousin of the Duke of Pomerania. Roystering dogs! Stout hearts! Where are they now, those fine lads in corslet and morgensterne, who played havoc with the casks in the Regenwalde cellar? Some of them died of the pest in Schiefelbein, four of them fell under old Jock Hepburn at Frankfort, the lave went wandering about the world, kissing and drinking, no doubt, and lying and sorrowing and dying, and never again will we foregather in a vacant house in foreign parts! For that is the hardship of life, that it’s ever a flux and change. We are here to-day and away to-morrow, and the bigger the company and the more high-hearted the merriment, the less likely is the experience to be repeated. I’m sitting here in a miraculous dwelling in the land of Lorn, and I have but to shut my eyes and round about me are cavaliers of fortune at the board. I give you the old word, Elrigmore: ‘Claymore and the Gael ‘; for the rest—pardon me—you gentlemen are out of the ploy. I shut my eyes and I see Fowlis and Farquhar, Mackenzie, Obisdell, Ross, the two balbiren and stabknechten with their legs about the board; the wind’s howling up from Stettin road; to-morrow we may be carrion in the ditch at Guben’s Gate, or wounded to a death by slow degrees in night scaladoe. That was soldiering. You fought your equals with art and science; here’s—— Well, well, God’s grace for MacCailein Mor!”

“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister.

The man with the want fell fast asleep in his chair, with his limbs in gawky disposition. Stewart’s bullet-head, with the line of the oval unbroken by ears, bobbed with affected eagerness to keep up with the fast English utterance and the foreign names of M’Iver, while all the time he was fingering some metal spoons and wondering if money was in them and if they could be safely got to Inneraora. Sonachan and the baron-bailie dipped their beaks in the jugs, and with lifted heads, as fowls slocken their thirst, they let the wine slip slowly down their throats, glucking in a gluttonous ecstasy.

“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister again, as in a benediction.

M’Iver pushed back his chair without rising, and threw a leg across its arm with a complacent look at the shapely round of the calf, that his hose still fitted with wonderful neatness considering the stress they must have had from wind and rain.

“We had grace indeed,” said he, “in Pomerania. We came at night, just as now, upon this castle of its most noble and puissant lord. It was Palm Sunday, April the third, Old Style. I mind, because it was my birthday; the country all about was bursting out in a most rare green; the gardens and fields breathed sappy odours, and the birds were throng at the Digging of their homes in bush and eave; the day sparkled, and river and cloud too, till the spirit in a person jigged as to a fiddle; the nights allured to escapade.”

“What was the girl’s name?” I asked M’Iver, leaning forward, finding his story in some degree had parallel with my own.

“Her name, Colin—I did not mention the girl, did I? How did you guess there was a girl in it?” said John, perplexed.

I flushed at my own transparency, and was glad to see that none but the minister (and M’Iver a little later) had observed the confession of my query. The others were too busy on carnal appetites to feel the touch of a sentiment wrung from me by a moment’s illusion.

“It is only my joke,” I stammered; “you have a reputation among the snoods.”

M’Iver smiled on me very warm-heartedly, yet cunningly too.

“Colin, Colin,” he cried. “Do I not know you from boot to bonnet? You think the spring seasons are never so fond and magic as when a man is courting a girl; you are minding of some spring day of your own and a night of twinkling stars. I’ll not deny but there was a girl in my case in the parlour of Pomerania’s cousin at Regenwalde; and I’ll not deny that a recollection of her endows that season with something of its charm. We had ventured into this vacant house, as I have said: its larders were well plenished; its vaults were full of marshalled brigades of bottles and battaglia of casks. Thinking no danger, perhaps careless if there was, we sat late, feasted to the full, and drank deep in a house that like this was empty in every part It was 1631—I’ll leave you but that clue to my age at the time—and, well I was an even prettier lad than I am to-day. I see you smile, Master Gordon; but that’s my bit joke. Still there’s some relevance to my story in my looks too. Though I was but a sergeant of pikes (with sons of good families below me, as privates, mind you), I was very trim and particular about my apparel. I carried myself with a good chest, as we say,—my features and my leg speak for themselves. I had sung songs—trifles of my own, foolishly esteemed, I’m hearing, in many parts of Argile. I’ll not deny but I like to think of that, and to fancy young folks humming my ditties by warm Ares when I’m maybe in the cold with the divot at my mouth. And I had told a tale or two—a poor art enough, I’ll allow, spoiled by bookcraft It was a cheery company as you may guess, and at last I was at a display of our Highland dancing. I see dancing to-day in many places that is not the thing as I was taught it by the strongest dancer in all Albainn. The company sat facing me as I stepped it over a couple of sword-blades, and their backs were to the door. Mackenzie was humming a port-a-bheul with a North Country twang even in his nose, and I was at my last step when the door opened with no noise and a girl looked in, her eyes staring hard at me alone, and a finger on her lips for silence. A man of less discernment would have stopped his dance incontinent and betrayed the presence of the lady to the others, who never dreamt so interesting a sight was behind them. But I never let on. I even put an extra flourish on my conclusion, that came just as the girl backed out at the door beckoning me to follow her. Two minutes later, while my friends were bellowing a rough Gaelic chorus, I was out following my lady of silence up a little stair and into a room below the eaves. There she narrated to me the plot that we unhappy lads were to be the victims of. The house was a trap: it was to be surrounded at night, when we had eaten and drunken over-well, and the sword was our doom arranged for. The girl told me all this very quietly in the French she learned I was best master of next to my own Gaelic, and—what a mad thing’s the blood in a youth—all the time I was indifferent to her alarum, and pondering upon her charms of lip and eye. She died a twelvemonth later in Glogoe of Silesia, and—— God give her peace!”

“You may save your supplication,” said Gordon; “her portion’s assigned, a thing fixed and unalterable, and your prayer is a Popish conceit.”

“God give her peace! I’ll say it, Master Gordon, and I’ll wish it in the face of every Covenanter ever droned a psalm! She died in Silesia, not careless, I’m thinking, of the memory of one or two weeks we spent in Frankfort, whose outer lanes and faubourgs are in my recollection blossoming with the almond-flower and scented at eve.”

He rose to his feet and paced the floor beside us, strong, but loosened a little at the tongue by the generous wine of Dalness; his mien a blending of defiance against the cheatry of circumstance and a display of old ancient grief.

“Heart of the rose, gramachree, bird-song at the lip, star eye and wisdom, yet woman to the core! I wish I were so young as then I was, and ochanie, what availed my teens, if the one woman that ever understood me were no more but a dust in Glogoe!”

“Come, come, man,” I cried; “it’s a world full of very choice women.”

“Is it indeed?” asked he, turning on me a pitiful eye; “I’m wrong if you ever met but one that was quite so fine as you must have them—— Tuts, tuts, here I’m on the key of old man’s history. I cheat myself at times of leisure into the notion that once I loved a foreign girl who died a spotless maiden. You’ll notice, Master Gordon, I have something of the sentiment you Low-landers make such show of, or I play-act the thing very well. Believe me, I’ll hope to get a wife out of your parish some day yet; but I warn you she must have a tocher in her stocking as well as on her father’s hill.”

The minister surveyed him through half-shut eyes, leaning back on the rungs of his chair. I think he saw the truth as clearly as I did myself, for he spoke with more than common softness when he answered.

“I like your tale,” he said, “which had a different conclusion and a more noble one than what I looked for at the opening.” Then he leaned out and put a hand on John Splendid’s sleeve. “Human nature,” said he, “is the most baffling of mysteries. I said I knew you from boot to bonnet, but there’s a corner here I have still to learn the secret of.”

“Well, well,” cried M’Iver, lifting a glass confusedly, and seating himself again at the board, “here’s a night-cap—MacCailein Mor and the Campbell cause!”

“And a thought for the lady of Regenwalde,” I whispered, pressing his foot with my toe beneath the table, and clinking my glass with his.

We drank, the two of us, in a silence, and threw the glasses on the hearth.

The windows, that now were shuttered, rattled to gowsty airs, and the rain drummed on. All about the house, with its numerous corners, turrets, gussets, and corbie-stepped gables, the fury of the world rose and wandered, the fury that never rests but is ever somewhere round the ancient universe, jibing night and morning at man’s most valiant effort. It might spit and blow till our shell shook and creaked, and the staunch walls wept, and the garden footways ran with bubbling waters, but we were still to conquer. Our lanthorn gleamed defiance to that brag of night eternal, that pattern-piece of the last triumph of the oldest enemy of man—Blackness the Rider, who is older than the hoary star.