“How?” quo’ he.
“Because you botch life,” said she. “Let a girl tell it you. And the pity of it is you’ll do it to the end.”
At the worst of Ealasaid’s heart-break and the folly of Alan and his boon companion, the men of Antrim and Athol came scouring over from Lorn into the glens of MacCailein Mor. They found a country far from ready to meet them, the leader himself from home, the sentinels sleeping, the forts without tenants. It was a bitter winter, and those gentlemen of Antrim and Athol kept their hides warm by chasing new-made orphans on to the frozen rivers. When the bairns ran on the ice crying, and went through it to a cold death, the good gentry laughed at the merriment of the spectacle. Down Aora glen went the bulk of them, and round the Gearran road to Shira glen, behind them smoking thatch and plundered folds.
Death struck with an iron hand at the doors of Maam, Elrigmore and Elrigbeg, Kilblane and Stuckgoy, and at Stuckgoy lived the girl of my story. She would have been butchered like her two brothers, by the fringe of Athol’s army, but for her lover and his friend, who came when the need was the sorest for them, and led her out behind the spoiled township in the smoke of the burning byres.
There had been a break in the frost. It was a day of rain and mist, so the men who chased them lost them early.
“If we can reach the head of the glen first,” said Alan, “there’s safety in the Ben Bhuidhe cave.” So the cave they ran for.
The cave is more on Ben Shean than Ben Bhuidhe, for all its name; a cunning hiding-place on the face of Sgornoch-mor rock, hanging over the deer wallows where the waters of Shira and Stacan sunder, seeking Lochow and Loch Finne. It was the home of the reiver when reiving was in vogue, a hold snug and easy for sleep, and deep enough for plunder. Fires might flash at night far ben in the heart of it, or songs might shake its roof, but never the wiser was the world outbye.
The way to the cave was off Shira side at the head of the glen, among whin bush and hazel, bending to the left over the elbow of Tomgorm, and a haw-tree hung above the face of Sgornoch-mor. The cave itself lay half-way down the rock, among a cluster of wild berry bushes that clung finger and claw to a ledge so narrow that a man with a dirk could keep it against a score of clans. To reach it there was but one way all Glenshira folk knew, and none beside them—by a knotted rope that always lay at the root of the haw-tree for that purpose. Once in, and the rope with you, and your way to the foot of the rock was easy; but once in, and the rope awanting, and the place was your grave, for you might starve in the face of the birds that flapped on black feathers to their nests that were lower still on the rock.
The girl and her friends reached the head of the glen well before the band that followed them on the beaten road. There the mist fell off, and the bare hills closed in on a gullet the wind belched through. Before them was Tomgorm, and they took to the left and the climbing, Ealasaid and Alan in front and Red John behind them, checking the whistling of pibrochs at his lips.
“Poor girl, poor girl!” said he to himself, “I was wrong to have come between you in the long summer day, for here’s in truth the black winter and the short day, homelessness and hunger, and the foe on our heels.”