"And to the abbey?"
"It is beside the clachan."——"Good."
During that night Gray slept with his door and window well secured, with his sword drawn under his head, and his armour on a chair by his bedside, to be ready for any emergency. The lassitude incident to his long journey on horseback by such rough roads—for then they went straight over hill and down valley, through forest, swamp, and river—made him sleep long and late on his bed of freshly-pulled heather; thus the noon of the next was far advanced before he set out once more.
Malise MacKim, his sullen acquaintance of the preceding evening, conducted him for some distance beyond the Urr, and told him, what Gray already knew well, that if he wished to reach the clachan of Tongland, he must pass the Loch of Carlinwark on his right, and pursue the road that lay through the wood on the left bank of the Dee.
"And whither go you, my friend?" he asked, as the gigantic smith was about to leave him.
"To join my seven sons, and scheme our vengeance; yet what can mortal vengeance avail against the earl of Douglas?"——"How?" said Gray; "in what manner?"
"Know you not that he wears a warlock jacket, against which the sharpest swords are pointless?"
"What do you mean?" asked the soldier, keeping his horse in check.
"I mean a doublet made for him by a warlock in Glenkens, woven of the skins of water-snakes caught in a south-running burn where three lairds' lands met, and woven for him under the beams of a March moon, on the haunted Moat of Urr."
Gray laughed and said, "I should like to test this dagger, my poor MacLellan's gift, upon that same doublet."