"You are a stranger hereabout, I presume?" said Ewen drily.
"A stranger now, certainly; but I was pretty well known in this locality once. There are some bones buried hereabout that may remember me," he replied, with a grin that showed his fangless jaws.
"Bones!" reiterated Ewen, aghast.
"Yes, bones—Culloden Muir lies close by here, does it not?"
"It does—then you have travelled this road before?"
"Death and the Devil! I should think so, comrade; on this very night sixty years ago I marched along this road, from Nairn to Culloden, with the army of His Royal Highness, the Great Duke of Cumberland, Captain-General of the British troops, in pursuit of the rebels under the Popish Pretender——"
"Under His Royal Highness Prince Charles, you mean, comrade," said Ewen, in whose breast—Cameronian though he was—a tempest of Highland wrath and loyalty swelled up at these words.
"Prince—ha! ha! ha!" laughed the other; "had you said as much then, the gallows had been your doom. Many a man I have shot, and many a boy I have brained with the butt end of my musket, for no other crime than wearing the tartan, even as you this night wear it."
Ewen made a forward stride as if he would have taken the wicked boaster by the throat; his anger was kindled to find himself in presence of a veritable soldier of the infamous "German Butcher," whose merciless massacre of the wounded clansmen and their defenceless families will never be forgotten in Scotland while oral tradition and written record exist; but Ewen paused, and said in his quiet way,—
"Blessed be the Lord! these times and things have passed away from the land, to return to it no more. We are both old men now; by your own reckoning, you must at least have numbered four-score years, and in that, you are by twenty my better man. You are my guest to-night, moreover, so we must not quarrel, comrade. My father was killed at Culloden."