“When MacCailein comes here,” said the bard, “he’ll get a Badenoch welcome.”
“And that is the thief’s welcome, the shirt off his very back,” cried M’Iver.
“Off his back very likely,” said the bard; “it’s the back we see oftenest of the bonny gentleman.”
M’Iver grew livid to the very lip, and sprang to his feet, dutching with great menace the black knife he had been whittling with. Not a bit abashed, the bard pulled out his dirk, and there was like to be a pretty to-do when I put between them.
The issue of the quarrel that thus I retarded was postponed altogether by a circumstance that changed the whole course of our adventure in this wild country,—severed us at a sharp wrench from the Campbell regiments, and gave us the chance—very unwelcome it was—of beholding the manner of war followed by Alasdair MacDonald’s savage tribes. It happened in a flash, without warning. No blow had been struck by the two gentlemen at variance, when we were all three thrown to the ground, and the bound prisoners of a squad of Macgregors who had got out of the thicket and round us unobserved in the heat of the argument.
They treated us all alike—the bard as curt as the Campbells, in spite of his tartan,—and without exchanging any words with us marched us before them on a journey of several hours to Kilcumin.
Long or ever we reached Kilcumin we were manifestly in the neighbourhood of Montrose’s force. His pickets held the road; the hillsides moved with his scouts. On a plain called Leiter-nan-lub the battalion lay camped, a mere fragment of the force that brought ruin to Argile: Athol men under the Tutor of Struan, Stewarts of Appin, Maclans of Glencoe, a few of the more sedate men of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Maclean, as well as a handful of the Gregaraich who had captured us. It was the nightfall when we were turned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a few ells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of a fir-root fire.
“Whom have we here?” said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse of us.
“Two Campbells and a man who says he’s bard of Keppoch,” he was told.
“A spy in an honest tartan, no doubt,” said Sir Alas-dair; “but well put it to the test with Keppoch himself: tell him to come over and throw an eye on the fellow.”