“Oh, ay! I'll alio' I've seen it no' sae empty, if that's what ye mean; but if it's no' jist Dumbarton or Dunedin, it's still auld bauld Doom, and an ill deevil to crack, as the laddie said that found the nutmeg.”
“But surely,” conceded Montaiglon, “and yet, and yet—have you ever heard of Jericho, M. Boyd? Its capitulation was due to so simple a thing as the playing of a trumpet or two.”
“I ken naething aboot trumpets,” said Mungo curtly, distinguishing some arrière pensée in the interrogator.
“Fi donc! and you so much the old sabreur! Perhaps your people marched to the flageolet—a seductive instrument, I assure you.”
The little man betrayed confusion. “Annapla thrieps there's a ghaistly flageolet aboot Doom,” said he, “but it'll hae to toil away lang or the wa's o' oor Jericho fa',—they're seeven feet thick.”
“He plays divinely, this ghostly flageoleteer, and knows his Handel to a demi-semi-quaver,” said Count Victor coolly.
“O Lord! lugs! I told them that!” muttered Mungo.
“Pardon!”
“Naething; we're a' idiots noo and then, and—and I maun awa' in.”
So incontinently he parted from Count Victor, who, to pass the afternoon, went walking on the mainland highway. He walked to the south through the little hamlet he and Doom had visited earlier in the day; and as the beauty of the scenery allured him increasingly the farther he went, he found himself at last on a horn of the great bay where the Duke's seat lay sheltered below its hilly ramparts. As he had walked to this place he had noticed that where yesterday had been an empty sea was now a fleet of fishing-boats scurrying in a breeze off land, setting out upon their evening travail—a heartening spectacle; and that on either side of him—once the squalid huts of Doom were behind—was a more dainty country with cultivated fields well-fenced, and so he was not wholly unprepared for the noble view revealed when he turned the point of land that hid the policies of MacCailen Mor.