There was a thick bit of a wood behind the stackyard at the big house, and as I lay listening to the sounds of the early morning there came often of late this clear melody, not loud but sweet and thrilling, as I had heard Ronny McKinnon whistle and Dan too, and the words of that tune are not to be talked about; but when I went quietly to the planting one morning there was only the little moving of birds in the greyness of the morning and the stillness of the wood.
I came back to the kitchen and rummaged the aumary for something to be eating, and made my way to the stable and put a feed before my beast, and watched him hard at it and the other beasts stamping and rattling at their chains in their impatience.
We were on the hill road before the sun, for there was the matter of a calf to be seeing to, and it was fine to be alone in the fresh day with the dew still heavy on the green grass and wetting the horse to the fetlocks; and the sun was coming up in the East, and here and there the curl of blue smoke rising up from far-out clachans. I would maybe be on the other side of the black hill and going finely, and relishing the green of the new growth, when there came to me that sweet whistling again, and cooried by the roadside beside a grey stone I saw a man sitting. He was the droll figure of a man, with outlandish garb and wee gold earrings. His teeth showed white as milk against his swarthy face, and he had many colours about him, at his throat and his waist, and useless tatters and tassels, but withal he had the proud bearing of mountain folk, and level black brows.
Abreast of him we came and he bended low, but with such grace and so much dignity that it were as though he were a king receiving a vassal.
"Have you the Gaelic?" said I in the old tongue.
"Cha nail, cha nail, cha nail," cried he, so quickly and with such gestures of his hands that I was startled.
"Geelp," said he—"Geelp."
"Are you McGilp's man?" said I.
"Man, yass," says he, and all his body would seem to be very glad; and then I questioned him of his whistling, and got his story from him.
By his way of it, he had been a camp-follower or servant to a horse-soldier in the Low Countries, which was maybe true, for I will not be denying these wandering folk have the way of horse, and he made a play of himself to be showing how he was beaten often with the stirrup-leather. Some time in his wanderings in the Low Countries he fell in with "les Ecossais," and he was at the play-acting again with his hands to be describing the Scotch soldiers, and then from some pouch or hidie-hole about his outlandish garb he brought Dan's letter.