CHAPTER XXI.—SEVEN BROKEN MEN.

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.



CHAPTER XXII.—DAME DUBH.

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.



CHAPTER XXIII.—THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.

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."



CHAPTER XXIV.—A NIGHT'S SHELTER.

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!"