Alister was dumb. For a moment he looked aghast.
"Ian!" he said: "You think he wants to be told anything? I always thought you believed in his divinity!"
"Ah!" returned Ian, "but do you? How am I to imagine it, when you go on like that in his hearing? Is it so you acknowledge his presence?"
"Oh, Ian! you don't know how it tortures me to think of that interloper, the low brute, killing the big stag, the Macruadh stag-and on my land too! I feel as if I could tear him in pieces. But for him I would have killed him on the spot! It is hard if I may not let off my rage even to you!"
"Let it off to him, Alister; he will give you fairer play than your small brother; he understands you better than I."
"But I could not let it off to him that way!"
"Then that is not a good way. The justice that, even in imagination, would tear and destroy and avenge, may be justice, but it is devil's justice. Come, begin now, and tell me all quietly-as if you had read it in a book."
"Word for word, then, with all the imprecations!" returned Alister, a little cooler; and Ian was soon in possession of the story.
"Now what do you think, Ian?" said the chief, ending a recital true to the very letter, and in a measure calm, but at various points revealing, by the merest dip of the surface, the boiling of the floods beneath.
"You must send him the head, Alister," answered Ian.