"God's grace for us all!" said the minister.

The man with the want fell fast asleep in his chair, with his limbs in gawky disposition. Stewart's bullet-head, with the line of the oval unbroken by ears, bobbed with affected eagerness to keep up with the fast English utterance and the foreign names of M'Iver, while all the time he was fingering some metal spoons and wondering if money was in them and if they could be safely got to Inneraora. Sonachan and the baron-bailie dipped their beaks in the jugs, and with lifted heads, as fowls slocken their thirst, they let the wine slip slowly down their throats, glucking in a gluttonous ecstasy.

"God's grace for us all!" said the minister again, as in a benediction.

M'Iver pushed back his chair without rising, and threw a leg across its arm with a complacent look at the shapely round of the calf, that his hose still fitted with wonderful neatness considering the stress they must have had from wind and rain.

"We had grace indeed," said he, "in Pomerania. We came at night, just as now, upon this castle of its most noble and puissant lord. It was Palm Sunday, April the third, Old Style. I mind, because it was my birthday; the country all about was bursting out in a most rare green; the gardens and fields breathed sappy odours, and the birds were throng at the Digging of their homes in bush and eave; the day sparkled, and river and cloud too, till the spirit in a person jigged as to a fiddle; the nights allured to escapade."

"What was the girl's name?" I asked M'Iver, leaning forward, finding his story in some degree had parallel with my own.

"Her name, Colin—I did not mention the girl, did I? How did you guess there was a girl in it?" said John, perplexed.

I flushed at my own transparency, and was glad to see that none but the minister (and M'Iver a little later) had observed the confession of my query. The others were too busy on carnal appetites to feel the touch of a sentiment wrung from me by a moment's illusion.

"It is only my joke," I stammered; "you have a reputation among the snoods."

M'Iver smiled on me very warm-heartedly, yet cunningly too.

"Colin, Colin," he cried. "Do I not know you from boot to bonnet? You think the spring seasons are never so fond and magic as when a man is courting a girl; you are minding of some spring day of your own and a night of twinkling stars. I'll not deny but there was a girl in my case in the parlour of Pomerania's cousin at Regenwalde; and I'll not deny that a recollection of her endows that season with something of its charm. We had ventured into this vacant house, as I have said: its larders were well plenished; its vaults were full of marshalled brigades of bottles and battaglia of casks. Thinking no danger, perhaps careless if there was, we sat late, feasted to the full, and drank deep in a house that like this was empty in every part It was 1631—I'll leave you but that clue to my age at the time—and, well I was an even prettier lad than I am to-day. I see you smile, Master Gordon; but that's my bit joke. Still there's some relevance to my story in my looks too. Though I was but a sergeant of pikes (with sons of good families below me, as privates, mind you), I was very trim and particular about my apparel. I carried myself with a good chest, as we say,—my features and my leg speak for themselves. I had sung songs—trifles of my own, foolishly esteemed, I'm hearing, in many parts of Argile. I'll not deny but I like to think of that, and to fancy young folks humming my ditties by warm Ares when I'm maybe in the cold with the divot at my mouth. And I had told a tale or two—a poor art enough, I'll allow, spoiled by bookcraft It was a cheery company as you may guess, and at last I was at a display of our Highland dancing. I see dancing to-day in many places that is not the thing as I was taught it by the strongest dancer in all Albainn. The company sat facing me as I stepped it over a couple of sword-blades, and their backs were to the door. Mackenzie was humming a port-a-bheul with a North Country twang even in his nose, and I was at my last step when the door opened with no noise and a girl looked in, her eyes staring hard at me alone, and a finger on her lips for silence. A man of less discernment would have stopped his dance incontinent and betrayed the presence of the lady to the others, who never dreamt so interesting a sight was behind them. But I never let on. I even put an extra flourish on my conclusion, that came just as the girl backed out at the door beckoning me to follow her. Two minutes later, while my friends were bellowing a rough Gaelic chorus, I was out following my lady of silence up a little stair and into a room below the eaves. There she narrated to me the plot that we unhappy lads were to be the victims of. The house was a trap: it was to be surrounded at night, when we had eaten and drunken over-well, and the sword was our doom arranged for. The girl told me all this very quietly in the French she learned I was best master of next to my own Gaelic, and—what a mad thing's the blood in a youth—all the time I was indifferent to her alarum, and pondering upon her charms of lip and eye. She died a twelvemonth later in Glogoe of Silesia, and—— God give her peace!"

"You may save your supplication," said Gordon; "her portion's assigned, a thing fixed and unalterable, and your prayer is a Popish conceit."

"God give her peace! I'll say it, Master Gordon, and I'll wish it in the face of every Covenanter ever droned a psalm! She died in Silesia, not careless, I'm thinking, of the memory of one or two weeks we spent in Frankfort, whose outer lanes and faubourgs are in my recollection blossoming with the almond-flower and scented at eve."

He rose to his feet and paced the floor beside us, strong, but loosened a little at the tongue by the generous wine of Dalness; his mien a blending of defiance against the cheatry of circumstance and a display of old ancient grief.

"Heart of the rose, gramachree, bird-song at the lip, star eye and wisdom, yet woman to the core! I wish I were so young as then I was, and ochanie, what availed my teens, if the one woman that ever understood me were no more but a dust in Glogoe!"

"Come, come, man," I cried; "it's a world full of very choice women."

"Is it indeed?" asked he, turning on me a pitiful eye; "I'm wrong if you ever met but one that was quite so fine as you must have them—— Tuts, tuts, here I'm on the key of old man's history. I cheat myself at times of leisure into the notion that once I loved a foreign girl who died a spotless maiden. You'll notice, Master Gordon, I have something of the sentiment you Low-landers make such show of, or I play-act the thing very well. Believe me, I'll hope to get a wife out of your parish some day yet; but I warn you she must have a tocher in her stocking as well as on her father's hill."

The minister surveyed him through half-shut eyes, leaning back on the rungs of his chair. I think he saw the truth as clearly as I did myself, for he spoke with more than common softness when he answered.

"I like your tale," he said, "which had a different conclusion and a more noble one than what I looked for at the opening." Then he leaned out and put a hand on John Splendid's sleeve. "Human nature," said he, "is the most baffling of mysteries. I said I knew you from boot to bonnet, but there's a corner here I have still to learn the secret of."

"Well, well," cried M'Iver, lifting a glass confusedly, and seating himself again at the board, "here's a night-cap—MacCailein Mor and the Campbell cause!"

"And a thought for the lady of Regenwalde," I whispered, pressing his foot with my toe beneath the table, and clinking my glass with his.

We drank, the two of us, in a silence, and threw the glasses on the hearth.

The windows, that now were shuttered, rattled to gowsty airs, and the rain drummed on. All about the house, with its numerous corners, turrets, gussets, and corbie-stepped gables, the fury of the world rose and wandered, the fury that never rests but is ever somewhere round the ancient universe, jibing night and morning at man's most valiant effort. It might spit and blow till our shell shook and creaked, and the staunch walls wept, and the garden footways ran with bubbling waters, but we were still to conquer. Our lanthorn gleamed defiance to that brag of night eternal, that pattern-piece of the last triumph of the oldest enemy of man—Blackness the Rider, who is older than the hoary star.

Fresh wood hissed on the fire, but the candles burned low in their sockets. Sonachan and the baron-bailie slept with their heads on the table, and the man with the want, still sodden at the eyes, turned his wet hose upon his feet with a madman's notion of comfort.

"I hope," said M'Iver, "there's no ambuscade here, as in the house of the cousin of his Grace of Pomerania. At least we can but bide on, whatever comes, and take the night's rest that offers, keeping a man-about watch against intrusion."

"There's a watch more pressing still," said Master Gordon, shaking the slumber off him and jogging the sleeping men upon the shoulders. "My soul watcheth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning. We have been wet with the showers of the mountain, like Job, and embracing the rock for want of a shelter. We are lone-haunted men in a wild land encompassed by enemies; let us thank God for our safety thus far, and ask. His continued shield upon our flight."

And in the silence of that great house, dripping and rocking in the tempest of the night, the minister poured out his heart in prayer. It had humility and courage too; it was imbued with a spirit strong and calm. For the first time my heart warmed to the man who in years after was my friend and mentor—Alexander Gordon, Master of the Arts, the man who wedded me and gave my children Christian baptism, and brought solace in the train of those little ones lost for a space to me among the grasses and flowers of Kilmalieu.



CHAPTER XXV.—THE ANGRY EAVESDROPPER.

It may seem, in my recounting of these cold wanderings, of days and nights with nothing but snow and rain, and always the hounds of fear on every hand, that I had forgotten to exercise my mind upon the blunder and the shame of Argile's defeat at Inverlochy. So far is this from the fact that M'Iver and I on many available occasions disputed—as old men at the trade of arms will do—the reasons of a reverse so much unexpected, so little to be condoned, considering the advantage we had in numbers compared with the fragments of clans Alasdair MacDonald brought down from the gorges of Lochaber to the waters of Loch Linnhe and Locheil. It was useless to bring either the baron-bailie or Sonachan into our deliberations; neither of them had any idea of how the thing had happened, though they were very well informed indeed about certain trivial departures from strict forms of Highland procedure in the hurried marshalling of the troops.

"Cheap trash of pennyland men from Lochow-side were put on the right of gentlemen cadets of the castle and Loch Finne-side lairds," was the baron-bailie's bitter protestation.

Sonachan, who was naturally possessed of a warm side to the people, even common quality, of his own part of the country, would sniff at this with some scorn.

"Pennyland here, pennyland there, they were closer in blood on Black Duncan than any of your shore-side par-tans, who may be gentrice by sheepskin right but never by the glaive."

So the two would be off again into the tanglements of Highland pedigree.

The mind of the man with the want was, of course, a vacant tablet, washed clean of every recollection by the copious tears he had wept in his silliness since ever the shock of the battle came on him; Stewart was so much of an unscrupulous liar that no word of his could be trusted; and the minister alone could give us any idea of what had been the sentiment in the army when the men of Montrose (who were really the men of Sir Alas-dair, his major-general) came on them. But, for reasons every true Gael need not even have a hint of, we were averse from querying this dour, sour, Lowland cleric on points affecting a Highland retreat.

So it was, I say, that the deliberations of M'Iver and myself were without any outside light in somewhat dark quarters: we had to guide us only yon momentary glimpse of the stricken field with its flying men, seen in a stupid blur of the senses,—as one lying by a dark hill tarn at night, waiting for mallard or teal, sees the birds wheeling above the water ere he has appreciated the whirr of their presence, lets bang his piece at the midst of them, and is in a dense stillness again before he comprehends that what he has waited for in the cold night has happened.

"The plan of old Gustavus did it, I'll wager my share of the silver-mine," would John insist; "and who in heaven's name would think Alasdair mosach knew the trick of it? I saw his horsemen fire one pistol-shot and fall on at full speed. That's old Gustavus for you, isn't it? And yet," he would continue, reflecting, "Auchin-breac knew the Swedish tactics too. He had his musketeers and pikemen separate, as the later laws demand; he had even a hint from myself of the due proportion of two pikes to three muskets."

"But never a platoon fired a volley," I recalled. "It was steel and targe from the onset." And then I would add, "What's to be said for MacCailein?"

On this John Splendid would ruffle up wrothily with blame for my harping on that incident, as if it were a crime to hint at any weakness in his chief.

"You are very much afraid of a waff of wind blowing on your cousin's name," I would cry.

"My chief, Elrigmore, my chief. I make no claim to consideration for a cousin, but I'll stand up for Argile's name so long as the gyrony of eight and the galley for Lorn are in his coat of arms."

Inverlochy, Inverlochy, Inverlochy—the black name of it rang in my head like a tolling bell as I sought to doze for a little in Dalness house. The whole events of the scandalous week piled up on me: I no sooner wandered one thought away in the mists of the nether mind than a new one, definite and harassing, grew in its place, so that I was turning from side to side in a torture-rack of reflection when I should be lost in the slumber my travel and weariness so well had earned me. Something of an eeriness at our position in that genteel but lonely house lay heavy on me too: it had no memories of friendship in any room for me; it was haunted, if haunted at all, with the ghosts of people whose names we only breathed with bitterness in the shire of Argile. And constantly the wind would be howling in it, piping dismally in the vent of the room the minister and I were in together; constant the rain would be hissing on the embers of the fire; at a long distance off a waterfall, in veering gusts of greater vehemence, crashed among its rocks and thundered in its linn.

M'Iver, who was the first to take watch for the night, paced back and forth along the lobbies or stood to warm himself at the fire he fed at intervals with peat or pine-root Though he had a soldier's reverence for the slumbers of his comrades, and made the least of noises as he moved around in his deer-skins, the slightest movement so advertised his zeal, and so clearly recalled the precariousness of our position, that I could not sleep. In an hour or more after I lay down M'Iver alarmed the advance-guard of my coming sleep by his unconscious whistle of a pibroch, and I sat up to find that the cleric was sharing my waukrife rest He had cast his peruke. In the light of a cruisie that hung at the mantel-breas he was a comical-looking fellow with a high bald head, and his eyes, that were very dark and profound, surrounded by the red rings of weariness, all the redder for the pallor of his face. He stretched his legs and rubbed his knees slowly, and smiled on me a little mournfully.

"I'm a poor campaigner," said he; "I ought to be making the best of the chance we have; but instead I must be thinking of my master and patron, and about my flock in Inneraora town."

I seized the opportunity as a gled would jump at a dove.

"You're no worse than myself," I said, rising to poke up the fire; "I'm thinking of Argile too, and I wish I could get his defalcation—if that it may be called—out of my mind. Was it a—was it—what you might call a desertion without dignity, or a step with half an excuse in policy? I know MacCailein had an injured arm."

Gordon rose and joined me at the fireside. He seemed in a swither as to whether I was a fit confidant or not in such a matter, but at last would appear to decide in my favour.

"You have heard me speak well of Argile," he said, quietly. "I never said a word in his praise that was not deserved; indeed I have been limited in my valuation of his virtues and ornaments, lest they should think it the paid chaplain who spoke and not the honest acquaintance. I know pious men, Highland and Lowland, but my lord of Argile has more than any of them the qualities of perfection. At home yonder, he rises every morning at five and is in private till eight. He prays in his household night and morning, and never went abroad, though but for one night, but he took his write-book, standish, and English New Bible, and Newman's Concordance with him. Last summer, playing one day with the bullats with some gentlemen, one of them, when the Marquis stopped to lift his bullat, fell pale, and said to them about him, 'Bless me, it is that I see my lord with his head off and all his shoulder full of blood.' A wicked man would have counted that the most gloomy portent and a fit occasion for dread, for the person who spoke was the Laird of Drimmindorren's seventh son, with a reputation for the second sight. But Argile laughed at the thing, no way alarmed, and then with a grave demeanour he said, said he, 'The wine's in your head, sir; and even if it was an omen, what then? The axe in troublous times is no disgrace, and a chief of Clan Diarmaid would be a poor chief indeed if he failed to surrender his head with some show of dignity."'

"But to leave his people twice in one war with no apparent valid excuse must look odd to his unfriends," I said, and I toasted my hose at the fire.

"I wish I could make up my mind whether an excuse is valid or not," said the cleric; "and I'm willing to find more excuses for MacCailein than I'll warrant he can find for himself this morning, wherever he may happen to be. It is the humour of God Almighty sometimes to put two men in the one skin. So far as I may humbly judge, Argile is the poor victim of such an economy. You have seen the sort of man I mean: to-day generous to his last plack, to-morrow the widow's oppressor; Sunday a soul humble at the throne of grace, and writhing with remorse for some child's sin, Monday riding vain-gloriously in the glaur on the road to hell, bragging of filthy amours, and inwardly gloating upon a crime anticipated. Oh, but were the human soul made on less devious plan, how my trade of Gospel messenger were easy! And valour, too, is it not in most men a fever of the moment; at another hour the call for courage might find them quailing and flying like the coney of the rocks."

"Then Argile, you think, was on those occasions the sport of his weaker self?" I pushed. I found so many obstacles in the way of satisfaction to my natural curiosity that I counted no persistence too rude now.

"He was the result of his history," said the minister, quickly, his face flushing with a sudden inspiration. "From the start of time those black moments for the first Marquis of Argile have been preparing. I can speak myself of his more recent environment He has about him ever flatterers of the type of our friend the sentinel out there, well-meaning but a woeful influence, keeping from him every rumour that might vex his ear, colouring every event in such a manner as will please him. They kept the man so long in a delusion that fate itself was under his heel, that when the stress of things came—"

"Not another word!" cried M'Iver from the doorway.

We turned round and found him standing there wrapped up in his plaid, his bonnet over a frowning brow, menace in his eye.

"Not another word, if it must be in that key. Has Archibald Marquis of Argile and Lord of Lochow no friends in this convocation? I would have thought his own paid curate and a neighbour so close as Elrigmore would never waste the hours due to sleep upon treason to the man who deserved better of them."

"You should have eavesdropped earlier and you would have learned that there was no treason in the matter. I'm as leal friend to my lord of Argile as you or any of your clan. What do I care for your bubbly-jock Highland vanity?" said Gordon.

"We were saying nothing of MacCailein that we would not say to you," I explained to M'Iver, annoyed in some degree by his interference.

"Ay, ay," said he, with a pitying shrug of the shoulder, and throwing off his last objection to my curiosity; "you're on the old point again. Man, but you're ill to satisfy! And yet we must have the story sooner or later, I suppose. I would rather have it anywhere than in this wauf and...

[Page 261 missing.]

...malcontents as we thought them, and found Montrose on the braes above us as the dawn broke. We had but a shot or two apiece to the musket, they tell me. Dun-barton's drums rolled, the pipes clamoured, the camp rose from its sleep in a confusion, and a white moon was fainting behind us. Argile, who had slept in a galley all night, came ashore in a wherry with his left arm in a sling. His face was like the clay, but he had a firm lip, and he was buckling a hauberk with a steady hand as the men fell under arms. Left alone then, I have a belief that he would have come through the affair gallantly; but the Highland double-dealings were too much for him. He turned to Auchinbreac and said 'Shall I take the command, or——?' leaving an alternative for his relative to guess at Auchinbreac, a stout soldier but a vicious, snapped him very short 'Leave it to me, leave it to me,' he answered, and busied himself again in disposing his troops, upon whom I was well aware he had no great reliance. Then Sir James Rollock-Niddry, and a few others pushed the Marquis to take his place in his galley again, but would he? Not till Auchinbreac came up a second time, and seeing the contention of his mind, took your Highland way of flattering a chief, and made a poltroon act appear one of judgment and necessity. 'As a man and soldier only, you might be better here at the onset,' said Auchinbreac, who had a wily old tongue; 'but you are disabled against using sword or pistol; you are the mainstay of a great national movement, depending for its success on your life, freedom, and continued exertion.' Argile took to the galley again, and Auchinbreac looked after him with a shamed and dubious eye. Well, well, Sir Duncan has paid for his temporising; he's in his place appointed. I passed the knowe where he lay writhing to a terrible end, with a pike at his vitals, and he was moaning for the chief he had helped to a shabby flight."

"A shabby flight!" said M'Iver, with a voice that was new to me, so harsh was it and so high-set.

"You can pick the word for yourself," said the minister; "if by heaven's grace I was out of this, in Inneraora I should have my own way of putting it to Argile, whom I love and blame."

"Oh you Lowland dog!" cried John Splendid, more high-keyed than ever, "you to blame Argile!" And he stepped up to the cleric, who was standing by the chimney-jambs, glowered hellishly in his face, then with a fury caught his throat in his fingers, and pinned him up against the wall.



CHAPTER XXVI.—TRAPPED.

I caught M'Iver by the coat-lapels, and took him off the gasping cleric.

"Oh man!" I cried, "is this the Highland brigadier to be throttling an old soldier of Christ?"

"Let me get at him and I'll set him in the way of putting the last truth of his trade to its only test," said he, still with a face corp-white, tugging at my hold and eyeing Master Gordon with a very uplifted and ferocious demeanour.

I suppose he must, in the midst of his fury, have got just a glisk of the true thing before him—not a worthy and fair opponent for a man of his own years, but an old wearied man of peace, with a flabby neck, and his countenance blotched, and his wig ajee upon his head so that it showed the bald pate below, for he came to himself as it were with a start. Then he was ashamed most bitterly. He hung his head and scraped with an unconscious foot upon the floor. The minister recovered his wind, looked with contempt in every line at the man who had abused him, and sat down without a word before the fire.

"I'm sorry about this," said M'Iver, fumbling about his waist-belt with nervous ringers; "I'm sorry about this, Master Gordon. A Highlander cannot be aye keeping God's gift of a temper in leash, and yet it's my disgrace to have laid a hand on a gentleman of your age and calling, even for the name of my chief. Will you credit me when I say I was blind to my own act? Something in me rose uncontrollable, and had you been Hector in armour, or my grandfather from the grave, I was at your neck."

"Say no more about it," answered Gordon. "I have seen the wolf so often at the Highlander's heart that I need not be wondering to find him snarling and clawing now. And still—from a gentleman—and a person of travel——"

"Say away, sir," said M'Iver, bitterly; "you have the whole plea with you this time, and I'm a rogue of the blackest I can say no more than I'm sorry for a most dirty action."

Gordon looked at him, and seemed convinced that here was a genuine remorse; at least his mien softened and he said quietly, "You'll hear no more of it from me."

We were standing, M'Iver and I, in front of the hearth, warming to the peat glow, and the cleric sat in an oak arm-chair. Out in the vacant night the rain still pattered and the gale cried. And all at once, above the sound of wind and water, there came a wild rapping at the main door of the house, the alarum of a very crouse and angry traveller finding a hostel barred against him at unseasonable hours. A whole childhood of fairy tale rose to my mind in a second; but the plain truth followed with more conviction, that likely here was no witch, warlock, nor fairy, but some one with a better right to the tenancy of Dal-ness than seven broken men with nor let nor tack. We were speedily together, the seven of us, and gathered in the hall, and listening with mouths open and hearts dunting, to the rapping that had no sign of ceasing.

"I'll have a vizzy from an upper window of who this may be," said John, sticking a piece of pine in the fire till it flared at the end, and hurrying with it thus lighted up the stair. I followed at his heels, while the rest remained below ready to give whatever reception was most desirable to the disturbers of our night's repose. The window we went to looked out on the most utter blackness, a blackness that seemed to stream in at the window as we swung it softly back on its hinge. M'Iver put oat his head and his torch, giving a warder's keek at the door below where the knocking continued. He drew in his head quickly and looked at me with astonishment.

"It's a woman," said he. "I never saw a campaign where so many petticoats of one kind or another were going. Who, in God's name, can this one be, and what's her errand to Dalness at this hour? One of its regular occupants would scarcely make such to-do about her summons."

"The quickest answer could be got by asking her," I said.

"And about a feint?" he said, musing. "Well, we can but test it."

We went down and reported to our companions, and Gordon was for opening the door on the moment "A wanderer like ourselves," said he, "perhaps a widow of our own making from Glencoe. In any case a woman, and out in the storm."

We stood round the doors while M'Iver put back the bars and opened as much as would give entry to one person at a time. There was a loud cry, and in came the Dark Dame, a very spectacle of sorrow! Her torn garments clung sodden to her skin, her hair hung stringy at her neck, the elements had chilled and drowned the frenzied gleaming of her eyes. And there she stood in the doorway among us, poor woman, poor wretch, with a frame shaking to her tearless sobs!

"You have no time to lose," she said to our query, "a score of Glencoe men are at my back. They fancy they'll have you here in the trap this house's owner left you. Are you not the fools to be advantaging yourselves of comforts you might be sure no fairy left for Campbells in Dalness? You may have done poorly at Inverlochy—though I hear the Lowlanders and not you were the poltroons—but blood is thicker than water, and have we not the same hills beside our doors at home, and I have run many miles to warn you that MacDonald is on his way." She told her story with sense and straightness, her frenzy subdued by the day's rigour. Our flight from her cries, she said, had left her a feeling of lonely helplessness; she found, as she sped, her heart truer to the tartan of her name than her anger had let her fancy, and so she followed us round Loch Leven-head, and over the hills to Glencoe. At the blind woman's house in the morning, where she passed readily enough for a natural, she learned that the eldest son in the bed had set about word of our presence before we were long out of his mother's door. The men we had seen going down in the airt of Tynree were the lad's gathering, and they would have lost us but for the beetle-browed rogue, who, guessing our route through the hills to Dalness, had run before them, and, unhampered by arms or years, had reached the house of Dalness a little before we came out of our journey in swamp and corry. A sharp blade, certes! he had seen that unless something brought us to pause a while at Dalness we would be out of the reach of his friends before they had gained large enough numbers and made up on him. So he had planned with the few folk in the house to leave it temptingly open in our way, with the shrewd guess that starved and wearied men would be found sleeping beside the fire when the MacDonalds came round the gusset. All this the Dame Dubh heard and realised even in her half frenzy as she spent some time in the company of the marching MacDonalds, who never dreamt that her madness and her denunciations of Clan Diarmaid were mixed in some degree with a natural interest in the welfare of every member of that clan.

M'Iver scrutinised the woman sharply, to assure himself there was no cunning effort of a mad woman to pay off the score her evil tongue of the day before revealed she had been reckoning; but he saw only here dementia gone to a great degree, a friend anxious for our welfare—so anxious, indeed, that the food Master Gordon was pressing upon her made no appeal to her famishing body.

"You come wonderfully close on my Frankfort story," said M'Iver, whimsically. "I only hope we may win out of Dalness as snugly as we won out of the castle of the cousin of Pomerania."

For a minute or two we debated on our tactics. We had no muskets, though swords were rife enough in Dalness, so a stand and a defence by weapons was out of the question. M'Iver struck on a more pleasing and cleanly plan. It was to give the MacDonalds tit for tat, and decoy them into the house as their friends had decoyed us into it, and leave them there in durance while we went on our own ways.

We jammed down the iron pins of the shutters in the salmanger, so that any exit or entrance by this way was made a task of the greatest difficulty; then we lit the upper flats, to give the notion that we were lying there. M'Iver took his place behind a door that led from the hall to other parts of the house, and was indeed the only way there, while the rest of us went out into the night and concealed ourselves in the dark angle made by a turret and gable—a place where we could see, without being seen, any person seeking entry to the house.

All the paths about the mansion were strewn with rough sand or gravel from the river, and the rain, in slanting spears, played hiss upon them with a sound I never hear to-day but my mind's again in old Dalness. And in the dark, vague with rain and mist, the upper windows shone blear and ghostly, dull vapours from a swamp, corp-candles on the sea, more than the eyes of a habitable dwelling warm and lit within. We stood, the seven of us, against the gable (for the woman joined us and munched a dry crust between the chittering of her teeth), waiting the coming of the MacDonalds.

I got to my musing again, puzzled in this cold adventure, upon the mystery of life. I thought it must be a dream such as a man has lying in strange beds, for my spirit floated and cried upon that black and ugly air, lost and seeking as the soul of a man struggling under sleep. I had been there before, I felt, in just such piteous case among friends in the gable of a dwelling, yet all alone, waiting for visitors I had no welcome for. And then again ( I would think), is not all life a dream, the sun and night of it, the seasons, the faces of friends, the flicker of fires and the nip of wine; and am not I now stark awake for the first time, the creature of God, alone in His world before the dusk has been divided from the day and bird and beast have been let loose to wander about a new universe? Or again (I would think), am I not dead and done with? Surely I fell in some battle away in Low Germanie, or later in the sack of Inneraora town, that was a town long, long ago, before the wave threshed in upon Dunchuach?

The man with the want, as usual, was at his tears, whispering to himself reproach and memory and omens of fear, but he was alert enough to be the first to observe the approach of our enemy. Ten minutes at least before they appeared on the sward, lit by the lights of the upper windows, he lifted a hand, cocked an ear, and told us he heard their footsteps.

There were about a score and a half of the Mac-Donalds altogether, of various ages, some of them old gutchers that had been better advised to be at home snug by the fire in such a night or saying their prayers in preparation for the looming grave, some of them young and strapping, all well enough armed with everything but musketry, and guided to the house by the blind woman's son and a gentleman in a laced coat, whom we took to be the owner of Dalness because two men of the bearing and style of servants were in his train and very pretentious about his safety in the course of a debate that took place a few yards from us as to whether they should demand our surrender or attack and cut us down with-out quarter.

The gentleman sent his two lackeys round the house, and they came back reporting (what we had been very careful of) that every door was barred.

"Then," said the gentleman, "well try a bland knock, and if need be, force the main door."

He was standing now in a half dusk, clear of the light of the windows, with a foot on the step of the door; behind him gathered the MacDonalds with their weapons ready, and I dare say, could we have seen it, with no very pretty look on their faces. As he spoke, he put his hand on the hasp, and, to his surprise, the heavy door was open. We had taken good care of that too.

The band gathered themselves together and dived into the place, and the plaiding of the last of them had scarcely got inside the door than Stewart ran up with the key and turned the lock, with a low whistle for the guidance of M'Iver at the inner door. In a minute or less, John was round in our midst again with his share of the contract done, and our rats were squealing in their trap.

For a little there was nothing but crying and cursing, wild beating against the door, vain attack on the windows, a fury so futile that it was sweet to us outsiders, and we forgot the storm and the hardship.

At last M'Iver rapped on the door and demanded attention.

"Is there any one there with the English?" he asked.

The gentleman of Dalness answered that he could speak English with the best cateran ever came out of MacCailein Mor's country, and he called for instant release, with a menace added that Hell itself could not excel the punishment for us if they were kept much longer under lock and bar. "We are but an advanced guard," said he, with a happy thought at lying, "and our friends will be at your back before long."

M'Iver laughed pawkily.

"Come, come, Dalness," said he, "do you take us for girls? You have every man left in Glencoe at your back there; you're as much ours as if you were in the tolbooth of Inneraora O; and I would just be mentioning that if I were in your place I would be speaking very soft and soothing."

"I'll argue the thing fairly with you if you let us out," said Dalness, stifling his anger behind the door, but still with the full force of it apparent in the stress of his accent.

M'Iver laughed again.

"You have a far better chance where you are," said he. "You are very snug and warm there; the keg of brandy's on the left-hand side of the fire, though I'm afraid there's not very much left of it now that my friend of Achnatra here has had his will of it. Tell those gentry with you that we intend to make ourselves cosy in other parts of the house till the morn's morning, and that if they attempt to force a way out by door or window before we let them, we'll have sentinels to blow out the little brains they have. I'm putting it to you in the English, Dalness—and I cry pardon for making my first gossip with a Highland gentleman in such a tongue—but I want you to put my message in as plausible a way as suits you best to the lads and bodachs with you."

The man drew away from the neighbourhood of the door; there was a long silence, and we concluded they were holding parley of war as to what was next to be done. Meantime we made preparations to be moving from a place that was neither safe nor homely. We took food from the pantries, scourged Stewart from a press he was prying in with clawing fingers and bulging pockets, and had just got together again at the rear of the house when a cry at the front told us that our enemies, in some way we never learned the manner of, had got the better of our bolted doors and shutters.

Perhaps a chance of planning our next step would have been in our favour; perhaps on the other hand it would have been the worse for us, because in human folly we might have determined on staying to face the odds against us, but there was no time for balancing the chances; whatever was to be done was to be done quickly.

"Royal's my race!" cried Stewart, dropping a pillowslip full of goods he carried with him—"Royal's my race—and here's one with great respect for keeping up the name of it" And he leaped to a thicket on his left. The man with the want ran weeping up to the Dark Dame and clung to her torn gown, a very child in the stupor of his grief and fear. The baron-bailie and Sonachan and the minister stood spellbound, and I cursed our folly at the weakness of our trap. Only M'Iver kept his wits about him.

"Scatter," said he in English—"scatter without adieus, and all to the fore by morning search back to the Brig of Urchy, comrades there till the middle of the day, then the devil take the hindmost."

More than a dozen MacDonalds came running round the gable end, lit by the upper windows, and we dispersed like chaff to the wind before M'Iver's speech concluded. He and I ran for a time together, among the bushes of the garden, through the curly kail, under low young firs that clutched at the clothing. Behind us the night rang with pursuing cries, with challenge and call, a stupid clamour that gave a clue to the track we could follow with greatest safety. M'Iver seemingly stopped to listen, or made up his mind to deviate to the side after a little; for I soon found myself running alone, and two or three men—to judge by their cries—keeping as close on me as they could by the sound of my plunging among twig and bracken. At last, by striking to an angle down a field that suddenly rolled down beside me, I found soft carpeting for my feet, and put an increasing distance between us. With no relaxation to my step, however, I kept running till I seemed a good way clear of Dalness policies, and on a bridle-path that led up the glen—the very road, as I learned later, that our enemy had taken on their way from Tynree. I kept on it for a little as well as I could, but the night was so dark (and still the rain was pouring though the wind had lowered) that by-and-by I lost the path, and landed upon rough water-broken rocky land, bare of tree or bush. The tumult behind me was long since stilled in distance, the storm itself had abated, and I had traversed for less than an hour when the rain ceased But still the night was solemn black, though my eyes by usage had grown apt and accustomed to separate the dense black of the boulder from the drab air around it. The country is one threaded on every hand by eas and brook that drop down the mountain sides at almost every yard of the way. Nothing was to hear but the sound of running and falling waters, every brook with its own note, a tinkle of gold on a marble stair as I came to it, declining to a murmur of sweethearts in a bower as I put its banks behind me after wading or leaping; or a song sung in a clear spring morning by a girl among heather hills muffling behind me to the blackguard discourse of banditty waiting with poignards out upon a lonely highway.

I was lost somewhere north of Glen Etive; near me I knew must be Tynrce, for I had been walking for two hours and yet I dare not venture back on the straight route to to-morrow's rendezvous till something of daylight gave me guidance At last I concluded that the way through the Black Mount country to Bredalbane must be so dote at hand it would be stupidity of the densest to go back by Dalness. There was so much level land round me that I felt sure I must be rounding the Bredalbane hills, and I chanced a plunge to the left. I had not taken twenty steps when I ran up against the dry-stone dyke that bordered the Inns of Tynrec.



CHAPTER XXVII.—A TAVERN IN THE WILDS.

Tynree is the Gaelic of a name that in the English is King's House. What humour gave so gaudy a title to so humble a place I have been always beat to know. For if the poorest of the chiefs of the poor isles had his choice of the gallows at once or Tynree for a long habitation, I'm thinking he would cry, "Out with your rope." Standing all its lee lone on the edge of the wildest moor of all the Scottish kingdom, blustered on by the winds of Glen-coe and Glen Etive, the house, far apart from any other (even a hunter's bothy among the corries), must be eerie, empty of all but its owner at most seasons of the year. He will have nothing about him but the flying plover that is so heart-breaking in its piping at the grey of morn, for him must the night be a dreariness no rowth of cruisie or candle may mitigate. I can fancy him looking out day after day upon plains of snow and cruel summits, blanching and snarling under sodden skies, and him wishing that God so good was less careless, and had given him a home and trade back among the cosy little glens, if not in the romping towns. But they tell me—people who rove and have tried Tynree in all weathers—that often it is cheerful with song and story; and there is a tale that once upon a time a little king, out adventuring in the kingly ways of winter stories, found this tavern in the wilds so warm, so hospitable, so resounding with the songs of good fellows, that he bided as a duc for a week of the winter weather.

When I came on Tynree, it was sounding with music, just, it might be, as in the day of the king in the story. Three of the morning, yet the hostel sent out a most hearty reek and firelight, the odours of stewing meats and of strong waters, and the sound of piping and trumping and laughing.

I stood back a piece from the house and debated with myself whether or not it was one where the tartan of Diarmaid would be sure of a welcome even if his sporran jingled with gold to the very jaws. All I wanted was shelter till the day broke and-this may seem odd to any one who has not known the utter wearisomeness of being a hunted man jinking in the dark among woods and alleys—the easy conversation of some human beings with no thought bothering them but what would be for the next meal, or the price of cattle at a town tryst And song and trump-come, I'll tell the G—s own truth upon that! They called me Sobersides in those days: Miver gave me the name and kept it on me lili the very last, and yet sobriety of spirit (in one way) was the last quality in those oh! days of no grace to find in my nature. I liknl to sit in taverns, drinking not deeply, but enough to keep the mood from flagging, with people of the young heart, people fond of each other, adrift from all commercial cunning, singing old staves and letting their fancy go free to a tunc twanged on a Jew's-tnimp or squeezed upon a lagulie or rigged upon a fiddle. So the merriment of I'ynree held me like a charm, and a mad whin last seized me, and in I went, confident that my insttn of comradery would not deceive me, and that at last I hail the boon-companion's chance.

Its company never even stopped their clamour to look at me; the landlord put a jug at my elbow, and a whang of bread and cheese, and I was joining with an affected gusto in a chorus less than ten minutes after I had been a hunted man on the edge of Moor Ran No ready to toss up a bawbee to learn whither my road should be.

It was an orra and remarkable gathering, convened surely by the trickery of a fantastic and vagabond providence,—"not a great many, but well picked," as Mac-gregor the Mottled said of his band of thieves. There were men and women to the number of a score, two or three travelling merchants (as they called themselves, but I think in my mind they were the kind of merchants who bargain with the dead corp on the abandoned battle-field, or follow expeditions of war to glean the spoil from burning homesteads); there were several gangrels, an Irishman with a silver eye, a strolling piper with poor skill of his noble instrument, the fiddler who was a drunken native of the place, a gipsy and his wife and some randy women who had dropped out of the march of Montrose's troops. Over this notable congregation presided the man of the house—none of your fat and genial-looking gentlemen, but a long lean personage with a lack-lustre eye. You would swear he would dampen the joy of a penny wedding, and yet (such a deceit is the countenance) he was a person of the finest wit and humour, otherwise I daresay Tynree had no such wonderful party in it that night.

I sat by the fire-end and quaffed my ale, no one saying more to me for a little than "There you are!" Well enough they knew my side in the issue—my tartan would tell them that—but wandering bodies have no politics beyond the conviction that the world owes them as easy a living as they can cheat it out of, and they never mentioned war. The landlord's dram was on, and 'twas it I had shared in, and when it was over I pulled out a crown and bought the heartiest goodwill of a score of rogues with some flagons of ale.

A beetle-browed chamber, long, narrow, stifling with the heat of a great fire, its flagged floor at intervals would slap with bare or bauchled feet dancing to a short reel. First one gangrel would sing a verse or two of a Lowland ballant, not very much put out in its sentiment by the presence of the random ladies; then another would pluck a tune upon the Jew's-trump, a chorus would rise like a sudden gust of wind, a jig would shake upon the fiddle. I never saw a more happy crew, nor yet one that—judging from the doctrine that thrift and sobriety have their just reward—deserved it less. I thought of poor Master Gordon somewhere dead or alive in or about Dalness, a very pupil of Christ, and yet with a share of His sorrows, with nowhere to lay his head, but it did not bitter me to my company.

By-and-by the landlord came cannily up to me and whispered in my ear a sort of apology for the rabble of his house.

"You ken, sir," said he in very good English—"you ken yourself what the country's like just now, given over to unending brawl, and I am glad to see good-humoured people about me, even if they are penniless gangrels."

"My own business is war," I acknowledged; "I'll be frank enough to tell you I'm just now making my way to Inneraora as well as the weather and the MacDonalds will let me."

He was pleased at my candour, I could see; confidence is a quality that rarely fails of its purpose. He pushed the bottle towards me with the friendliest of gestures, and took the line of the fellow-conspirator.

"Keep your thumb on that," said he; "I'm not supposed to precognosce every lodger in Tynree upon his politics. I'm off Clan Chattan myself, and not very keen on this quarrel—that's to say, I'll take no side in it, for my trade is feeding folk and not fighting them. Might I be asking if you were of the band of Campbells a corps of MacDonalds were chasing down the way last night?"

I admitted I was.

"I have nothing to do with it," said he; "and I'll do a landlord's duty by any clan coming my way. As for my guests here, they're so pleased to see good order broken in the land and hamlets half-harried that they'll favour any man whose trade is the sword, especially if he's a gentleman," he added. "I'm one myself, though I keep a sort of poor hostel here. I'm a young son."

We were joined by the gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse the courtesy.

"Would you like your fortune spaed, sir?" asked my black friend, twitching his thumb in the direction of his wife, who was leering on me with a friendliness begot of the bottle. The place was full of deafening noises and peat-smoke. Fiddle jigged and pipes snored in the deep notes of debauchery, and the little Jew's-trump twanged between the teeth of a dirty-faced man in a saffron shirt and hodden breeks, wanting jacket and hose—a wizen little old man, going around the world living like a poet in realms whereto trump and tipple could readily bring him.

"Spae my fortune!" said I, laughing; "such swatches of the same as I had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to follow."

"Still and on," said he, "who knows but you may find a wife and a good fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman," he cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very indifferent and dubious client.

I had got my hand read a score of times ere this (for I am of a nature curious and prying), and each time the reading was different, but it did not altogether shake my faith in wise women; so, half for the fun of it, I put some silver pieces in the loof of my hand and held it before the woman, the transaction unnoticed by the company. She gave the common harangue to start with. At last, "There's a girl with a child," said she.

"Faith, and she never went to the well with the dish-clout then," said the black man, using a well-known Gaelic proverb, meaning a compliment in his dirty assumption.

"She's in a place of many houses now," went on the woman, busy upon the lines of my hand, "and her mind is taken up with a man in the ranks of Argile."

"That's not reading the hand at all, goodwife," said I; "those small facts of life are never written in a line across the loof."

"Jean is no apprentice at the trade," said her man across her shoulder. "She can find a life's history in the space of a hair."

"The man found the woman and the child under a root of fir," said the woman, "and if the man is not very quick to follow her, he may find kinship's courting get the better of a far-off lover's fancy."

"Dhe!" said I; "you have your story most pat. And what now, would you say, would be the end of it all—coming to the real business of the palmist, which, I take it, is not to give past history but to forecast fate?"

I'll not deny but I was startled by the woman's tale, for here was Betty and here was MacLachlan put before me as plainly as they were in my own mind day and night since we left Inneraora.

The woman more closely scrutinised my hand, paused a while, and seemed surprised herself at its story.

"After all," said she, "the woman is not going to marry the man she loves."

I plucked my hand away with a "Pshaw! what does it matter? If I doubled your fee you would give me the very best fortune in your wit to devise."

The Irishman with the silver eye here jostled a merchantman, who drew his gully-knife, so that soon there was a fierce quarrel that it took all the landlord's threats and vigour of arm to put an end ta By this time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry, unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious a company. And Betty—home—love—peace—how all the tribe of them suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called myself, to be thinking your half-hearted wooing of the woman had left any fondness behind it. From the beginning you were second in the field, and off the field now—a soldier of a disgraced army, has the cousin not all the chances in the world? Hell be the true friend in trouble, hell console her loneliness in a sacked burgh town; a woman's affection is so often her reward for simple kindness that he has got her long ago at no greater cost than keeping her company in her lonely hours. And you are but the dreamer, standing off trembling and flushing like a boy when you should be boldly on her cheek, because you dare not think yourself her equal The father's was the true word: "There's one thing a woman will not abide, that her lover should think lightly either of himself or her."

All that black stream of sorry thought went rushing through me as I sat with an empty jug in my hand in a room that was sounding like a market-place. With a start I wakened up to find the landlord making a buffoon's attempt at a dance in the middle of the floor to the tune of the Jew-trump, a transparent trick to restore the good-humour of his roysterers, and the black man who had fetched the spae-wife was standing at my side surveying me closely out of the corners of his eyes. I stood to my feet and ganted with great deliberation to pretend I had been half-sleeping. He yawned too, but with such obvious pretence that I could not but laugh at him, and he smiled knowingly back.

"Well," said he in English, "you'll allow it's a fair imitation, for I never heard that a put-on gant was smittal. I see that you are put about at my wife's fortune: she's a miracle at the business, as I said; she has some secrets of fate I would rather with her than me. But I would swear a man may sometime get the better even of fate if he has a warning of its approach."

"I can scarcely see that by the logic of Porphyrius or Peter Hispanus with the categories, two scholars I studied at Glascow. But you are surely a queer man to be a vagabond at the petticoat-tails of a spae-wife," said I.

"I've had my chance of common life, city and town, and the company of ladies with broidery and camisole and washen faces," he answered with no hesitation, "and give me the highroad and freedom and the very brute of simplicity. I'm not of these parts. I'm not of the Highlands at all, as you may guess, though I've been in them and through them for many a day. I see you're still vexed about my woman's reading of your palm. It seems to have fitted in with some of your experience."

I confessed her knowledge of my private affairs surprised me, and his black eyes twinkled with humour.

"I'll explain the puzzle for just as much money as you gave her," said he, "and leave you more satisfied at the end than she did. And there's no black art at the bottom of my skill either."

"Very well," said I; "here's your drink-money; now tell me the trick of it, for trick I suppose it is."

He pocketed the money after a vagabond's spit on the coin for luck, and in twenty words exposed his by-love's device. They had just come from Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost's daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town.

"But how did your wife guess the interest of the lady in a man of Argile's army?" I asked.

"Because she spaed the lady's fortune too," he answered, "and she had to find out in the neighbourhood what it was like to be before she did so; you know that is half the art of the thing."

"Yet your woman's guess that I was the man—that's beyond me!"

"I was struck myself when she out with that," he confessed. "Oh, she's a deep one, Jean! But your manner and tongue betrayed the returned soldier of fortune; of such officers in the ranks of Argile there are not so many that it was risking too much to believe all of them knew the story of the Provost's daughter, and your conduct, once she got that length, did the rest."

"And about kinship's courting?" I asked, amazed at the simplicity of the thing.

The man dashed his fee on the board and ordered more liquor.

"Drink up," said he, "and drown care if you're the man my good-wife thought you, for faith there's a little fellow from over the loch making himself very snug in the lady's company in your absence."

There was no more drinking for me; the fumes of this wretched company stank in my nostril, and I must be off to be alone with melancholy. Up I got and walked to the door with not fair-good-e'en nor fair-good-day, and I walked through the beginnings of a drab disheartening dawn in the direction that I guessed would lead me soonest to Bredalbane. I walked with a mind painfully downcast, and it was not till I reached a little hillock a good distance from the Inns at Tynree, a hillock clothed with saugh saplings and conspicuously high over the flat countryside, that I looked about me to see where I was.



CHAPTER XXVIII.—LOST ON THIS MOOR OF KANNOCH.

I stood on the hillock clothed with its stunted saughtrees and waited for the day that was mustering somewhere to the cast, far by the frozen sea of moss and heather tuft. A sea more lonely than any ocean the most wide and distant, where no ship heaves, and no isle lifts beckoning trees above the level of the waves; a sea soundless, with no life below its lamentable surface, no little fish or proud leviathan plunging and romping and flashing from the silver roof of fretted wave dishevelled to the deep profound. The moorfowl does not cry there, the coney has no habitation. It rolled, that sea so sour, so curdled, from my feet away to mounts I knew by day stupendous and not so far, but now in the dark so hid that they were but troubled clouds upon the distant marge. There was a day surely when, lashing up on those hills around, were waters blue and stinging, and some plague-breath blew on them and they shivered and dried and cracked into this parched semblance of what they were in the old days when the galleys sailed over. No galleys now. No white birds calling eagerly in the storm. No stiver bead of spray. Only in its season the cannoch tuft, and that itself but sparsely; the very bluebell shuns a track so desolate, the sturdy gall itself finds no nourishment here.

The grey day crept above the land; I watched it from my hillock, and I shrunk in my clothing that seemed so poor a shielding in a land so chill. A cold clammy dawn, that never cleared even as it aged, but held a hint of mist to come that should have warned me of the danger I faced in venturing on the untravelled surface of the moor, even upon its safer verge. But it seemed so simple a thing to keep low to the left and down on Glenurchy that I thought little of the risk, if I reflected upon it at all.

Some of the stupidity of my venturing out on the surface of Rannoch that day must have been due to my bodily state. I was not all there, as the saying goes. I was suffering mind and body from the strain of my adventures, and most of all from the stormy thrashings of the few days before—the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account, even if it were a tinker's death in the sheuch. No words will describe the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is concerned, and his spirit, sorry to part company, goes lugging his flesh about the highways.

I was well out on Rannoch before the day was full awake on the country, walking at great trouble upon the coarse barren soil, among rotten bog-grass, lichened stones, and fir-roots that thrust from the black peatlike skeletons of antiquity. And then I came on a cluster of lochs—grey, cold, vagrant lochs—still to some degree in the thrall of frost Here's one who has ever a fancy for such lochans, that are lost and sobbing, sobbing, even-on among the hills, where the reeds and the rushes hiss in the wind, and the fowls with sheeny feather make night and day cheery with their call But not those lochs of Rannoch, those black basins crumbling at the edge of a rotten soil. I skirted them as far off as I could, as though they were the lochans of a nightmare that drag the traveller to their kelpie tenants' arms. There were no birds among those rushes; I think the very deer that roamed in the streets of Inneraora in the Novembers blast would have run far clear of so stricken a territory. It must be horrible in snow, it must be lamentable in the hottest days of summer, when the sun rides over the land, for what does the most kindly season bring to this forsaken place except a scorching for the fugitive wild-flower, if such there be?

These were not my thoughts as I walked on my way; they are what lie in my mind of the feelings the Moor of Rannoch will rouse in every stranger. What was in my mind most when I was not altogether in the swound of wearied flesh was the spae-wife's story of the girl in Inneraora, and a jealousy so strong that I wondered where, in all my exhausted frame, the passion for it came from. I forgot my friends left in Dalness, I forgot that my compact and prudence itself called for my hurrying the quickest way I could to the Brig of Urchy; I walked in an indifference until I saw a wan haze spread fast over the country in the direction of the lower hills that edged the desert I looked with a careless eye on it at first, not reflecting what it might mean or how much it might lead to. It spread with exceeding quickness, a grey silver smoke rolling out on every hand, as if puffed continually from some glen in the hills. I looked behind me, and saw that the same was happening all around. Unless I made speed out of this sorrowful place I was caught in the mist Then I came to the full understanding that trouble was to face. I tightened the thongs of my shoes, pinched up a hole in my waist-belt, scrugged my bonnet, and set out at a deer-stalker's run across the moor. I splashed in hags and stumbled among roots; I made wild leaps across poisonous-looking holes stewing to the brim with coloured water; I made long detours to find the most fordable part of a stream that twisted back and forth, a very devil's cantrip, upon my way. Then a smirr of rain came at my back and chilled me to the marrow, though the sweat of travail a moment before had been on every part of me, and even dripping in beads from my chin. At length I lifted my eyes from the ground that I had to scan most carefully in my running, and behold! I was swathed in a dense mist that cut off every view of the world within ten yards of where I stood. This cruel experience dashed me more than any other misadventure in all my wanderings, for it cut me off, without any hope of speedy betterment, from the others of our broken band. They might be all at Urchy Bridge by now, on the very selvedge of freedom, but I was couped by the heels more disastrously than ever. Down I sat on a tuft of moss, and I felt cast upon the dust by a most cruel providence.

How long I sat there I cannot tell; it may have been a full hour or more, it may have been but a pause of some minutes, for I was in a stupor of bitter disappointment And when I rose again I was the sport of chance, for whether my way lay before me or lay behind me, or to left or right, was altogether beyond my decision. It was well on in the day: high above this stagnant plain among tall bens there must be shining a friendly and constant sun; but Elrigmore, gentleman and sometime cavalier of Mackay's Scots, was in the very gullet of night for all he could see around him. It was folly, I knew; but on somewhere I must be going, so I took to where my nose led, picking my way with new caution among the bogs and boulders. The neighbourhood of the lochs was a sort of guidance in some degree, for their immediate presence gave to a nostril sharpened by life in the wild a moist and peaty odour fresh from the corroding banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to my feet, and once I had almost walked blindly into an ice-clear turgid little lake. My foot sank in the mire of it almost up to the knees ere I jumped to the nature of my neighbourhood, and with an effort little short of miraculous in the state of my body, threw myself back on the safe bank, clear of the death-trap.

And again I sat on a hillock and surrendered to the most doleful meditations. Noon came and went, the rain passed and came again, and passed once more, and still I was guessing my way about the lochs, making no headway from their neighbourhood, and, to tell the truth, a little glad of the same, for they were all I knew of the landscape in Moor Rannoch, and something of friendship was in their treacherous presence, and to know they were still beside me, though it said little for my progress to Glenurchy, was an assurance that I was not making my position worse by going in the wrong airt.

All about me, when the rain was gone for the last time, there was a cry of waters, the voices of the burns running into the lochans, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling merrily, and all out of key with a poor wretch in draggled tartans, fleeing he knew not whither, but going about in shortened circles like a hedgehog in the sea.

The mist made no sign of lifting all this time, but shrouded the country as if it were come to stay for ever, and I was doomed to remain till the end, guessing my way to death in a silver-grey reek. I strained my ears, and far off to the right I heard the sound of cattle bellowing, the snorting low of a stirk upon the hillside when he wonders at the lost pastures of his calfhood in the merry summer before. So out I set in that direction, and more bellowing arose, and by-and-by, out of the mist but still far off, came a long low wail that baffled me. It was like no sound nature ever conferred on the Highlands, to my mind, unless the rare call of the Benderloch wolf in rigorous weather. I stopped and listened, with my inner head cracking to the strain, and as I was thus standing in wonder, a great form leaped out at me from the mist, and almost ran over me ere it lessened to the semblance of a man, and I had John M'Iver of Barbreck, a heated and hurried gentleman of arms, in my presence.

He drew up with a shock, put his hand to his vest, and I could see him cross himself under the jacket.

"Not a bit of it," I cried; "no wraith nor warlock this time, friend, but flesh and blood. Yet I'm bound to say I have never been nearer ghostdom than now; a day of this moor would mean death to me."

He shook me hurriedly and warmly by the hand, and stared in my face, and stammered, and put an arm about my waist as if I were a girl, and turned me about and led me to a little tree that lifted its barren branches above the moor. He was in such a confusion and hurry that I knew something troubled him, so I left him to choose his own time for explanation. When we got to the tree, he showed me his black knife—a very long and deadly weapon—laid along his wrist, and "Out dirk," said he; "there's a dog or two of Italy on my track here." His mind, by the stress of his words, was like a hurricane.

Now I knew something of the Black Dogs of Italy, as they were called, the abominable hounds that were kept by the Camerons and others mainly for the hunting down of the Gregarich.

"Were they close on you?" I asked, as we prepared to meet them.

"Do you not hear them bay?" said he. "There were three on my track: I struck one through the throat with my knife and ran, for two Italian hounds to one knife is a poor bargain. Between us we should get rid of them before the owners they lag for come up on their tails."

"You should thank God who got you out of a trouble so deep," I said, astounded at the miracle of his escape so far.

"Oh ay," said he; "and indeed I was pretty clever myself, or it was all bye with me when one of the black fellows set his fangs in my hose. Here are his partners; short work with it, on the neck or low at the belly with an up cut, and ward your throat."

The two dogs ran with ferocious growls at us as we stood by the little tree, their faces gaping and their quarters streaked with foam. Strong cruel brutes, they did not swither a moment, but both leaped at M'Iver's throat. With one swift slash of the knife, my companion almost cut the head off the body of the first, and I reckoned with the second. They rolled at our feet, and a silence fell on the country. Up M'Iver put his shoulders, dighted his blade on a tuft of bog-grass, and whistled a stave of the tune they call "The Desperate Battle."

"If I had not my lucky penny with me I would wonder at this meeting," said he at last, eyeing me with a look of real content that he should so soon have fallen into my company at a time when a meeting was so unlikely. "It has failed me once or twice on occasions far less important; but that was perhaps because of my own fumbling, and I forgive it all because it brought two brave lads together like barks of one port on the ocean. 'Up or down?' I tossed when it came to putting fast heels below me, and 'up' won it, and here's the one man in all broad Albainn I would be seeking for, drops out of the mist at the very feet of me. Oh, I'm the most wonderful fellow ever stepped heather, and I could be making a song on myself there and then if occasion allowed. Some people have genius, and that, I'm telling you, is well enough so far as it goes; but I have luck too, and I'm not so sure but luck is a hantle sight better than genius. I'm guessing you have lost your way in the mist now?"

He looked quizzingly at me, and I was almost ashamed to admit that I had been in a maze for the greater part of the morning.

"And no skill for getting out of it?" he asked.

"No more than you had in getting into it," I confessed.

"My good scholar," said he, "I could walk you out into a drove-road in the time you would be picking the bog from your feet I'm not making any brag of an art that's so common among old hunters as the snaring of conies; but give me a bush or a tree here and there in a flat land like this, and an herb here and there at my feet, and while winds from the north blow snell, I'll pick my way by them. It's my notion that they learn one many things at colleges that are no great value in the real trials of life. You, I make no doubt, would be kenning the name of an herb in the Latin, and I have but the Gaelic for it, and that's good enough for me; but I ken the use of it as a traveller's friend whenever rains are smirring and mists are blowing."

"I daresay there's much in what you state," I confessed, honestly enough; "I wish I could change some of my schooling for the art of winning off Moor Rannoch."

He changed his humour in a flash. "Man," said he, "I'm maybe giving myself overmuch credit at the craft; it's so seldom I put it to the trial that if we get clear of the Moor before night it'll be as much to your credit as to mine."

As it happened, his vanity about his gift got but a brief gratification, for he had not led me by his signs more than a mile on the way to the south when we came again to a cluster of lochans, and among them a large fellow called Loch Ba, where the mist was lifting quickly. Through the cleared air we travelled at a good speed, off the Moor, among Bredalbane braes, and fast though we went it was a weary march, but at last we reached Loch Tulla, and from there to the Bridge of Urchy was no more than a meridian daunder.

The very air seemed to change to a kinder feeling in this, the frontier of the home-land. A scent of wet birk was in the wind. The river, hurrying through grassy levels, glucked and clattered and plopped most gaily, and bubble chased bubble as if all were in a haste to reach Lochow of the bosky isles and holy. Oh! but it was heartsome, and as we rested ourselves a little on the banks we were full of content to know we were now in a friendly country, and it was a fair pleasure to think that the dead leaves and broken branches we threw in the stream would be dancing in all likelihood round the isle of Innishael by nightfall.

We ate our chack with exceeding content, and waited for a time on the chance that some of our severed company from Dalness would appear, though M'Iyer's instruction as to the rendezvous had been given on the prospect that they would reach the Brig earlier in the day. But after an hour or two of waiting there was no sign of them, and there was nothing for us but to assume that they had reached the Brig by noon as agreed on and passed on their way down the glen. A signal held together by two stones on the glen-side of the Brig indeed confirmed this notion almost as soon as we formed it, and we were annoyed that we had not observed it sooner. Three sprigs of gall, a leaf of ivy from the bridge arch where it grew in dark green sprays of glossy sheen, and a bare twig of oak standing up at a slant, were held down on the parapet by a peeled willow withy, one end of which pointed in the direction of the glen.

It was M'Iver who came on the symbols first, and "We're a day behind the fair," said he. "Our friends are all safe and on their way before us; look at that."

I confessed I was no hand at puzzles.

"Man," he said, "there's a whole history in it! Three sprigs of gall mean three Campbells, do they not? and that's the baron-bailie and Sonachan, and this one with the leaves off the half-side is the fellow with the want And oak is Stewart—a very cunning clan to be fighting or foraying or travelling with, for this signal is Stewart's work or I'm a fool: the others had not the gumption for it. And what's the ivy but Clan Gordon, and the peeled withy but hurry, and—surely that will be doing for the reading of a very simple tale. Let us be taking our ways. I have a great admiration for Stewart that he managed to do so well with this thing, but I could have bettered that sign, if it were mine, by a chapter or two more."

"It contains a wonderful deal of matter for the look of it," I confessed.

"And yet," said he, "it leaves out two points I consider of the greatest importance. Where's the Dark Dame, and when did our friends pass this way? A few chucky-stones would have left the hour plain to our view, and there's no word of the old lady."

I thought for a second, then, "I can read a bit further myself," said I; "for there's no hint here of the Dark Dame because she was not here. They left the suaicheantas just of as many as escaped from——"

"And so they did! Where are my wits to miss a tale so plain?" said he. "She'll be in Dalness yet, perhaps better off than scouring the wilds, for after all even the MacDonalds are human, and a half-wit widow woman would be sure of their clemency. It was very clever of you to think of that now."

I looked again at the oak-stem, still sticking up at the slant "It might as well have lain flat under the peeled wand like the others," I thought, and then the reason for its position flashed on me. It was with just a touch of vanity I said to my friend, "A little coueging may be of some use at woodcraft too, if it sharpens Elrigmore's wits enough to read the signs that Barbreck's eagle eye can find nothing in. I could tell the very hour our friends left here."

"Not on their own marks," he replied sharply, casting his eyes very quickly again on twig and leaf.

"On nothing else," said I.

He looked again, flushed with vexation, and cried himself beat to make more of it than he had done.

"What's the oak branch put so for, with its point to the sky if———?"

"I have you now!" he cried; "it's to show the situation of the sun when they left the rendezvous. Three o'clock, and no mist with them; good lad, good lad! Well, we must be going. And now that we're on the safe side of Argile there's only one thing vexing me, that we might have been here and all together half a day ago if yon whelp of a whey-faced MacDonald in the bed had been less of the fox."

"Indeed and he might have been," said I, as we pursued our way. "A common feeling of gratitude for the silver——"

"Gratitude!" cried John, "say no more; you have fathomed the cause of his bitterness at the first trial. If I had been a boy in a bed myself, and some reckless soldiery of a foreign clan, out of a Sassenach notion of decency, insulted my mother and my home with a covert gift of coin to pay for a night's lodging, I would throw it in their faces and follow it up with stones."

Refreshed by our rest and heartened by our meal, we took to the drove-road almost with lightness, and walked through the evening till the moon, the same that gleamed on Loch Linnhe and Lochiel, and lighted Argile to the doom of his reputation for the time being, swept a path of gold upon Lochow, still hampered with broken ice. The air was still, there was no snow, and at Corryghoil, the first house of any dignity we came to, we went up and stayed with the tenant till the morning. And there we learned that the minister and the three Campbells and Stewart, the last with a bullet in his shoulder, had passed through early in the afternoon on their way to Cladich.



CHAPTER XXIX.—THE RETURN.

We got a cold welcome from the women of our own clan and country. They had been very warm and flattering as we passed north—the best they had was not good enough for us; now they eyed us askance as we went among them in the morning. Glenurchy at its foot was wailing with one loud unceasing coronach made up of many lamentations, for no poor croft, no keep, no steading in all the countryside almost, but had lost its man at Inverlochy. It was terrible to hear those sounds and see those sights of frantic women setting every thought of life aside to give themselves wholly to their epitaphs for the men who would come no more.

For ordinary our women keen but when they are up in years and without the flowers of the cheek that the salt tear renders ugly; women who have had good practice with grief, who are so far off from the fore-world of childhood where heaven is about the dubs of the door that they find something of a dismal pleasure in making wails for a penny or two or a cogie of soldier's brose. They would as soon be weeping as singing; have you not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse, with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest? Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom of lamentation! But Glenurchy and Lochow to-day depended for their sorrow upon no hired mourners, upon no aged play-actors at the passion of grief; cherry-cheeked maidens wept as copiously as their grand-dames, and so this universal coronach that rose and fell on the wind round by Stronmealchan and Inish-trynich, and even out upon the little isles that snuggle in the shadow of Cruachan Ben, had many an unaccustomed note; many a cry of anguish from the deepest well of sorrow came to the ear. To walk by a lake and hear griefs chant upon neighbouring isles is the chief of the Hundred Dolours. Of itself it was enough to make us melancholy and bitter, but it was worse to see in the faces of old women and men who passed us surly on the road, the grudge that we had been spared, we gentlemen in the relics of fine garments, while their own lads had been taken. It was half envy that we, and not their own, still lived, and half anger that we had been useless in preventing the slaughter of their kinsmen. As we walked in their averted or surly looks, we had no heart to resent them, for was it not human nature? Even when a very old crooked man with a beard like the foam of the linn, and eyes worn deep in their black sockets by constant staring upon care, and through the black mystery of life, stood at his door among his wailing daughters, and added to his rhyming a scurrilous verse whereof we were the subjects, we did no more than hurry our pace.

By the irony of nature it was a day bright and sunny; the londubh parted his beak of gold and warbled flutey from the grove, indifferent to all this sorrow of the human world. Only in far-up gashes of the hills was there any remnant of the snow we had seen cover the country like a cloak but a few days before. The crows moved briskly about in the trees of Cladich, and in roupy voices said it might be February of the full dykes but surely winter was over and gone. Lucky birds! they were sure enough of their meals among the soft soil that now followed the frost in the fields and gardens; but the cotters, when their new grief was weary, would find it hard to secure a dinner in all the country once so well provided with herds and hunters, now reft of both.

I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M'Iver was no less, but he mingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for the first chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in a dark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay with a broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must have stumbled. Up he hurried, and despatched and gralloched it with his sgian dubh in a twinkling, and then he ran back to a cot where women and children half craved us as we passed, and took some of them up to this lucky find and divided the spoil It was a thin beast, a prey no doubt to the inclement weather, with ivy and acorn, its last meal, still in its paunch.

It was not, however, till we had got down Glenaora as far as Carnus that we found either kindness or conversation. In that pleasant huddle of small cothouses, the Macarthurs, aye a dour and buoyant race, were making up their homes again as fast as they could, inspired by the old philosophy that if an inscrutable God should level a poor man's dwelling with the dust of the valley, he should even take the stroke with calmness and start to the building again. So the Macarthurs, some of them back from their flight before Antrim and Athole, were throng bearing stone from the river and turf from the brae, and setting up those homes of the poor, that have this advantage over the homes of the wealthy, that they are so easily replaced. In this same Carnus, in later years, I have made a meal that showed curiously the resource of its people. Hunting one day, I went to a little cothouse there and asked for something to eat A field of unreaped barley stood ripe and dry before the door. Out the housewife went and cut some straws of it, while her daughter shook cream in a bottle, chanting a churn-charm the while. The straw was burned to dry the grain, the breeze win'd it, the quern ground it, the fire cooked the bannocks of it Then a cow was milked, a couple of eggs were found in the loft, and I sat down in a marvellously short space of time to bread and butter, milk, eggs, and a little drop of spirits that was the only ready-made provand in the house. And though now they were divided between the making of coronachs and the building of their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, off the lichened stone.

There was one they called Niall Mor a Chamais (Big Neil of Karnes), who in his day won the applause of courts by slaying the Italian bully who bragged Scotland for power of thew, and I liked Niall Mor's word to us as we proceeded on our way to Inneraora.

"Don't think," said he, "that MacCailein's beat yet, or that the boar's tusks are reaped from his jaw. I am of an older clan than Campbell, and closer on Diarmaid than Argile himself; but we are all under the one banner now, and I'll tell you two gentlemen something. They may tear Castle Inneraora out at the roots, stable their horses in the yard of Kilmalieu, and tread real Argile in the clay, but well be even with them yet. I have an arm here" (and he held up a bloody-looking limb, hashed at Inverlochy); "I'll build my home when this is mended, and i'll challenge MacDonald till my mouth is gagged with the clod."

"And they tell me your son is dead yonder," I said, pitying the old man who had now no wife nor child.

"So they tell me," said he; "that's the will of God, and better a fast death on the field than a decline on the feather-bed. I'll be weeping for my boy when I have bigged my house again and paid a call to some of his enemies."

Niall Mot's philosophy was very much that of all the people of the glen, such of them as were left. They busily built their homes and pondered, as they wrought, on the score to pay.

"That's just like me," M'Iver would say after speeches like that of Niall Mor. He was ever one who found of a sudden all another person's traits in his own bosom when their existence was first manifested to him. "That's just like me myself; we are a beaten clan (in a fashion), but we have our chief and many a thousand swords to the fore yet I declare to you I am quite cheery thinking we will be coming back again to those glens and mounts we have found so cruel because of our loneliness, and giving the MacDonalds and the rest of the duddy crew the sword in a double dose."

"Ay, John," said I, "it's easy for you to be light-hearted in the matter. You may readily build your bachelor's house at Barbreck, and I may set up again the barn at Elrigmore; but where husband or son is gone it's a different story. For love is a passion stronger than hate. Are you not wondering that those good folk on either hand of us should not be so stricken that they would be sitting in ashes, weeping like Rachel?"

"We are a different stuff from the lady you mention," he said; "I am aye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to decay. The world's well divided after all, and the happiness as well as the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me, and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections upon the sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable in this world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it in the bottle. Amn't I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard of the idea in your classes?"

"It is a notion very antique," I confessed, to his annoyance; "but it is always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It is a notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a very comfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and would salve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed. And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; the lowest state—even the swineherd's—may have as many compensations as that of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say, that keeps the soul in a welter———"

"Does it indeed?" said John, lightly; "the merriest men ever I met were rogues. I've had some vices myself in foreign countries, though I aye had the grace never to mention them, and I ken I ought to be stewing with remorse for them, but am I?"

"Are you?" I asked.

"If you put it so straight, I'll say No—save at my best, and my best is my rarest But come, come, we are not going into Inneraora on a debate-parade; let us change the subject Do you know I'm like a boy with a sweet-cake in this entrance to our native place. I would like not to gulp down the experience all at once like a glutton, but to nibble round the edges of it We'll take the highway by the shoulder of Creag Dubh, and let the loch slip into our view."