The poor cat impaled upon the sword-blade was expiring now; half-roasted alive, its eyeballs yet protruded from their sockets; surcharged with blood, they had become red as rubies, and its mouth opened and shut spasmodically.
White as milk or thistle-down, Paul's long and tangled hair glittered in the wavering fire-light and in the livid gleams that shot athwart the sky; but still he tossed his skeleton arms aloft, and whirled the dying cat upon the sword-blade with a piece of burning brand.
In their sunken sockets Paul's eyeballs blazed like burning coals, for every moment he expected to see the trembling earth open, and the unchained fiend appear before him; but the rocks of the Coir nan Uriskin trembled by no demoniac spell, but with the boom of the pealing thunder alone.
Suddenly there was a splitting roar and a dreadful crash; a blinding sheet of livid flame filled the whole hollow; for a moment the wet rocks seemed to sparkle like masses of crystal, and the trees were seen to toss and twist wildly upward their rending branches in the blast. Then all became darkness and all silence, save when the thunder of the midnight storm grumbled in the distance far away.
A thunderbolt had struck the rocks of the hollow; Paul became senseless, and remembered no more till morning dawned, when he found himself lying near a thunder-riven rock in the Coir nan Uriskin amid the ashes of his extinguished fire, and close by him the charred remains of his victim still impaled by the sword-blade.
The adventures of the night—how much of these were true and how much were fancy the reader may easily determine—had sorely exhausted the strength of this strange old man, to whose narrative Rob Roy listened with astonishment, not unmingled with alarm, for the scene of his spells was fraught with innumerable terrors.
"Thus, MacGregor, I have sinned and perilled my soul for nothing," groaned Paul, closing his eyes, as if in exhaustion; "I have invoked in vain, and in vain has the terrible ordeal of the Tighghairm been undergone!"
"If all this be true, Paul, you were near rousing the devil to little purpose. For had he told you that we would be victorious, we would fight; if defeated and dispersed, still would we fight, till the last of us was gathered to his fathers. So for true tidings of the enemy I would rather trust to the lass Oina than to your devilish cantrips."
"You would trust in a woman?" said Paul, disdainfully.
"She can reckon every redcoat in Inversnaid as well as you or I could do, Paul."