“Your piper! How—”
Max was going to say horrible, as he recalled one of his pet abominations, a dirty, kilted and plaided Scotchman, who made night hideous about the Bloomsbury squares with his chanter and drone.
But he restrained himself, and, as Kenneth led the way here and there about the little rocky knoll, he kept on talking.
“Donald has a place up in one of the towers—that one at the far corner. He took to it to play in. He composes dirges and things up there.”
“But do you like having a piper?”
“Like it? I don’t know. He has always been here. He belongs to us. There always was a piper to the Clan Mackhai. There, you can see right up the loch here, and that’s where our salmon river empties itself over those falls. See that hill?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Ben Doy. You’ll like to climb up that. It isn’t one of the highest, but it’s four thousand, and jolly steep. There’s a loch right up in it full of little trout.”
Boom—boom—boom—boom.
“What’s that?”