With a roar and a display of teeth and steel the MacNicolls came into the lobby from the crowded stair, and we were driven to the far parlour end. In the forefront of them was Nicol Beg MacNicoll, the nearest kinsman of the murdered Braleckan lad. He had a targe on his left arm—a round buckler of darach or oakwood covered with dun cow-hide, hair out, and studded in a pleasing pattern with iron bosses—a prong several inches long in the middle of it Like every other scamp in the pack, he had dirk out. Beg or little he was in the countryside’s bye-name, but in truth he was a fellow of six feet, as hairy as a brock and in the same straight bristly fashion. He put out his arms at full reach to keep back his clansmen, who were stretching necks at poor MacLachlan like weasels, him with his nostrils swelling and his teeth biting his bad temper.
“Wait a bit, lads,” said Nicol Beg; “perhaps we may get our friend here to come peaceably with us. I’m sorry” (he went on, addressing the Provost) “to put an honest house to rabble at any time, and the Provost of Inneraora specially, for I’m sure there’s kin’s blood by my mother’s side between us; but there was no other way to get MacLachlan once his tail was gone.”
“You’ll rue this, MacNicoll,” fumed the Provost—as red as a bubblyjock at the face—mopping with a napkin at his neck in a sweat of annoyance; “you’ll rue it, rue it, rue it!” and he went into a coil of lawyer’s threats against the invaders, talking of brander-irons and gallows, hame-sucken and housebreaking.
We were a daft-like lot in that long lobby in a wan candle-light. Over me came that wonderment that falls on one upon stormy occasions (I mind it at the sally of Lecheim), when the whirl of life seems to come to a sudden stop, all’s but wooden dummies and a scene empty of atmosphere, and between your hand on the basket-hilt and the drawing of the sword is a lifetime. We could hear at the close-mouth and far up and down the street the shouting of the burghers, and knew that at the stair-foot they were trying to pull out the bottom-most of the marauders like tods from a hole. For a second or two nobody said a word to Nicol MacNicoll’s remark, for he put the issue so cool (like an invitation to saunter along the road) that all at once it seemed a matter between him and MacLachlan alone. I stood between the housebreakers and the women-folk beside me—John Splendid looking wonderfully ugly for a man fairly clean fashioned at the face by nature. We left the issue to MacLachlan, and I must say he came up to the demands of the moment with gentlemanliness, minding he was in another’s house than his own.
“What is it ye want?” he asked MacNicoll, burring out his Gaelic r’s with punctilio.
“We want you in room of a murderer your father owes us,” said MacNicoll.
“You would slaughter me, then?” said MacLachlan, amazingly undisturbed, but bringing again to the front, by a motion of the haunch accidental to look at, the sword he leaned on.
“Fuil airson fuil!” cried the rabble on the stairs, and it seemed ghastly like an answer to the young laird’s question; but Nicol Beg demanded peace, and assured MacLachlan he was only sought for a hostage.
“We but want your red-handed friend Dark Neil,” said he; “your father kens his lair, and the hour he puts him in our hands for justice, you’ll have freedom.”
“Do you warrant me free of scaith?” asked the young laird.