"Truth," said I quickly, gaining my tongue, "will force you to eat those words, for I knew nothing of all this. It will be a bitter meal for you to digest, if I, by good chance, am there to assist you."
"A Highland welcome will be yours," quoth he arrogantly; "a welcome as warm as if I were to bring my riding whip round your shoulders now."
His words, cracking as if they were a lash, stung me beyond endurance. I made a step to strike him, and we might have been at it, like common brawlers, only he saved us from that shame. He had been waiting with his left foot in the stirrup. When I drove at him he swung on to the back of Mack, who turned half round, as a spirited horse does in the process of being mounted. This threw his big body between us, but the Black Colonel leant down and said in my ear, "To our next meeting, my kinsman! May it be soon!"
Then he rode for an opening in the undergrowth which braided the lower slopes of the precipitous Pass, and I was left alone, a man all a-wonder, for events were growing beyond me, as they do when suddenly we find our whole personal fortune, even our spiritual destiny, put to the ordeal of the unexpected.
III.—Over the Hills of Home
How shall I tell, with proper restraint and yet efficiency, what followed the going of the Black Colonel on his black horse?
The Pass, wherein we had met so sharply, lies almost due east and due west. You would have a good idea of its appearance, if you were to suppose a hill twice as long from east to west as it is broad from north to south. Then imagine its length sliced in two, and each half, by force of dead weight, falling away from the other. Heather and whins had seeded on the sliced faces, and after them the hardy silver birch and the hardier green fir had sprung up. Nature makes coverings for the sores suffered by Mother Earth, as a dog licks a bruise until the hair grows again.
The strong Highland winds and the heavy Highland rains and snows had wrinkled the riven hill in a hundred ways. Its twin faces were warted with rocks, from which most of the soil had been washed away, leaving them as though suspended in mid-air. Waters, draining from the higher hills, had run down those faces, making ribboned scores to the bottom. There had been constant falls of earth from above, and here and there a large tree had been thrown over the abyss, and, in that position, holding on by its roots, had taken a new lease of life.
Thanks then to Nature, working for long years, the twin, or rather the divorced hill-cheeks which, at their separation, were raw earth, now had a covering of undergrowth and overgrowth. It would be dead in the winter when the sap is down, budding in the spring when the sap rises, green in the summer when it has run into leafage, brown in the autumn when the storage roots begin to call their own back again.
A sort of rough road, worn by usage, as a short-cut for the folk of the region, ran on the level between the halves of the Pass. Big rocks fallen from above lay around, and I confusedly sat down beside one of these. It broke the snellish wind which had begun to blow with the first dawn, as it often does in those parts, a blast to the parting night and the coming day.