"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.



CHAPTER XI.—ON BENS OF WAR.

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 Anglice, 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."



CHAPTER XIII.—WHERE TREADS THE DEER.

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 indifference. 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.



CHAPTER XIV.—MY LADY AND THE CHILD.

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 dan,—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.



CHAPTER XV.—CONFESSIONS OF A MARQUIS.

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."