“Cruachan for ever!” I said lightly to M’Iver, though my heart was full.
He was as much touched by that homely lilt as myself. “The old days, the old styles!” said he. “God! how that pibroch stings me to the core!” And as the tune came more clearly in the second part, or Crunluadh as we call it, and the player maybe came round a bend of the road, my comrade stopped in his pace and added with what in another I might have thought a sob—“I’ve trudged the world; I have learned many bravadoes, so that my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one, and the piob mhor conquers me. What is it, Colin, that’s in us, rich and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?”
“Tis the Gaelic,” I said, cheered myself by the air. “Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but’s in the Gaelic tongue.”
“Maybe,” said he, “maybe: I’ve heard the scholars like yourself say the sheepskin and the drones were Roman—that or Spanish, it’s all one to me. I heard them at Boitzenburg when we gave the butt of the gun to Tilly’s soldadoes, they played us into Holstein, and when the ditch of Stralsund was choked with the tartan of Mackay, and our lads were falling like corn before the hook, a Reay piper stood valiantly in front and played a salute. Then and now it’s the pipes, my darling!”
“I would as lief have them in a gayer strain. My fondest memories are of reels I’ve danced to their playing,” I said, and by now we were walking down the glen.
“And of one reel you danced,” said he, quizzingly, “not more than two months gone in a town that was called Inneraora?”
“Two months!” I cried,—“two months! I could have sworn offhand we have been wandering in Lorn and Badenoch for as many years!”
Such spirit did my native pipes, played by a clansman, put in me that my weariness much abated, and we made great progress down the glen, so that before the tune had ceased we were on the back of Montrose’s men as they crept on quietly in the night.
The piper stopped suddenly enough when some shots rang out,—an exchange of compliments between our pickets ahead and some wandering scouts of Argile.
And yonder below us, Loch Linnhe and Locheil glanced in the moonlight, and the strong towers of Inverlochy sat like a scowl on the fringe of the wave!