"Worry about you or worry you?"
It hurt me to have her go so chilly all of a sudden, but I replied frankly, "Both. It does indeed worry me to have you breakfastless in these wilds through my doings."
"Yes," she said, smiling down on me, "I ken fine the distinction between water-brose and ham and eggs."
"We are still in Staffordshire," I said cheerily, "and I'll go ahead and see what I can do for you. Now, Donald, your best foot first!"
He and I started ahead again, leaving her waiting for the rest of the party, detained by some explanation on the Colonel's part of the military aspects of the lie of the land.
"There's a wheen foine leddies wi' ta Prince, Got bless him," said Donald, "but when yon carline gets amangst 'em she'll pe like a muircock amangst a thrang o' craws. She'll ding 'em a'."
I expected that Donald would cherish ill will to me for my blow, but in this I was wrong. So far from bearing me a grudge, he quite obviously liked me for it. He had a fist, or nief, as he called it, nearly as big as a leg of lamb, and almost the first thing he did when we were alone was to hold it out, huge, dirty, and hairy, and put it alongside mine. He scratched his rough head in his perplexity.
"At Gladsmuir," he said, "'er nainsell did take ten Southron loons wi' 'er own hant, wi' nobody to help 'er, an' now one callant had dinged 'er clean senseless wi' nothin' but a bairn's nief."
"It wasn't clean fighting, Donald," said I. "Nothing but a sort of trick. If you were to hit me fair and square I should snap in two like a carrot. Tell me how you captured the ten men!"
It was a longish story, at any rate as he told it, in quaint uncertain English, intermixed with spates of his own Gaelic as he got excited over the account of his prowess. One of them was an officer, and Donald finished up by ferreting out of his meal-bag a magnificent gold watch, lawful prize from his point of view, taken out of the officer's fob.