CHAPTER LIV.
THE FINAL ATTEMPT OF ATHOLE.
It was the Lammas now of 1724, when the gool or wild marigold began to make its appearance among the little corn patches on the sunny side of the Highland hills; and in this month the mother of Rob Roy (a daughter of the house of Glenfalloch), then in extreme old age, being nearly a century old, expired at Muirlaggan, the house which he had built for her.
Though her passing away had been long expected, her death was accompanied by the omens and mysterious warnings then and still so universally believed in among the Highlanders. Rob's grey staghounds howled mournfully the livelong night, a sure sign that they had seen what the eyes of men could not—the shadow of Death enter the house of Muirlaggan; and Paul Crubach, now aged, half-blind, and bent with years, averred that on last Midsummer-eve he had beheld her figure pass before him into the churchyard of Balquhidder with a shroud high upon her breast, a certain token that her death was close at hand.
On the day preceding the funeral, and before the clan, tenants, and gillies assembled to drink the dredgie, he came close to the chair of Rob, who was seated at window, full of thought.
"Paul, you have been absent some days," said Rob kindly to the old man, "and at your years——"
"I have been on Inchcailloch, and there I spent three nights," said he, with unusual solemnity.
"Three dreary nights they must have been," said Rob, with a sad smile; "a ruined church for shelter and the graves of the dead below you."
"But I slept thereon, knowing that the dead would give me counsel just and true; and in my dreams there appeared unto me twice one whom I knew to be Dugald Ciar Mhor."
"How knew you this?"