“For after all,” pursued Ewen, throwing down his plaid, “since you are not witnessing our preparations of your own free will, I suppose you are at liberty to make what observations you please upon them.”
“You seem bent upon making allowances for me!” returned Keith with a smile. “However, I do not complain of that; and if Fate should ever reverse our positions, and give you, for instance, into my hands, I hope I may be able to show the same generosity.”
Ardroy, who was now unbuckling his broadsword, stopped and gazed at him rather intently in the feeble lantern-light, feeble because it still had to contend with a measure of wet daylight. “Why, do you then anticipate our meeting again, Captain Windham?” he asked after a moment.
“I anticipate nothing, Mr. Cameron. I am no wizard to foretell the future. Yet, but for the fact that we could not meet save as enemies, I vow ’twould give me pleasure to think that we might one day encounter each other again.” But, feeling somehow that the young man standing there looking at him took this for a mere façon de parler, he added, with a return to his bantering tone, “You can have no notion how much this tour—albeit a trifle too reminiscent of a Roman triumph—has been alleviated by having so agreeable a cicerone. Though indeed in the last twenty-four hours my glimpses of you have been few—too few.”
So expressed, his sentiments had of course small chance of being taken for sincere. The Highlander, indeed, for all reply gave a little shrug that was almost like a Frenchman’s, spread his plaid upon the bare earth floor and laid his broadsword beside it.
“Surely you are not going to sleep in that plaid!” exclaimed Keith, stirred out of his levity. “Why, ’tis drenched! Take my cloak, I have no mind to sleep yet, and shall not need it.”
But Ewen, without stiffness, declined, saying that a wet plaid was of no consequence, and indeed but kept one the warmer. Some, he added, and the Englishman gasped at the information, wrung them out at night in water for that reason. All he would accept was some handfuls of heather for a pillow, and then, lying down, his sword convenient to his hand, he wrapped himself in the folds of damp tartan and in five minutes was fast asleep.
But Keith, as he had said, was not sleepy; and after a while, feeling restless, he strolled to the doorway—door the hut had none. When he got there he was aware of a rigid figure, muffled in a plaid, standing in the rain, just out of the direct line of vision—the inevitable Lachlan watching over his master’s slumbers. He turned his head, and Keith could see a contraction pass over his dark features. But the English officer was not to be intimidated by a scowl from studying, if he wished, the sodden, cloud-enfolded landscape, and the sheets of rain driving in the twilight over the waters of Loch Eil, though it was not a cheerful prospect.
What was going to happen to him when his parole expired to-morrow? At the far end of Loch Eil Loch Linnhe joined it at right angles, and on Loch Linnhe was Fort William, with its loyal garrison. To-morrow the Highland force would proceed along Loch Eil, and every step would bring him nearer to his friends. . . .
He left the doorway after a few moments, and looked down at the sleeper on the floor, his head sunk in the bundle of heather and his arm lying across his broadsword. “The embraces of the goddess of ague seem to be agreeable,” he thought. “I shall be sorry to say farewell to-morrow, my friend—deuce take me if I quite know why—but I hardly think you will!”