'Dioul! do you begin to think so?'
'Fair, delicate, and gentle, too, Callum,' I urged, warming a little.
'But what of that? she is a stranger, and not one of us! It was not at such dainty breasts as hers that Lachlan Mohr, who could twist a horse-shoe, or Angus your ancestor, or Alisdair Mac Coll Keitach, who could cleave men from beard to breeks, were suckled.'
'What the deuce does all this matter? I would rather have a silver pound in my pocket than a pedigree an ell long; but wind your horn, and then let us shout.'
Callum blew his horn, but the echoes of the rocks alone replied in prolonged reverberations to the sound. Then we shouted together, and again the echoes were our sole reply. The more I thought of the fair and timid girl now at my mother's house, the more anxious I felt for her father's fate.
Myriads of stars were mirrored in the lone and deep blue Loch of the Spirits, a thousand feet below us, and as we traversed the beetling cliff, the stones we disengaged, rolled over and plashed into the water, with a dull faint sound that was long in ascending to the ear.
'By the Black Stone of Scone,' said Callum, with a Highland grin, 'if the stranger has gone over here on the sheltie, he will have a skinful of cold water by this time.'
'For heaven's sake, don't say so, Callum!'
'Why not?' returned my companion, tartly; 'his first threat, on coming among us, was to put me in prison, because a deer-hide was found in my hut; if he has gone over the Craig-na-tuirc it was his own fate, and you know our proverb—Ni droch dhuine dan na fein! Me in prison, indeed! I swore that I found the deer drowned in the moss, though I shot him at the waterfall, and a brave animal he was—thirty-four stone weight—devil an ounce less, after the gralloch was out of him; so every man in the glen had a savoury supper that night. Must we starve, while the Englishman and the Lowlander have sport enough and to spare, and when the poor are driven mad by the depredations of the game on the crops?'
'Hark! I hear voices!'