Forgotten were the boats, behind lay all our loves and fortunes—was ever Highland heart but swelled on such a time? Sturdy black and hairy scamps the Irish—never German boor so inelegant—but venomous in their courage! Score upon score of them ran in on us through the Arches. Our lads had but one shot from the muskets, then into them with the dirk and sword.
“Montrose! Montrose!” cried the enemy, even when the blood glucked at the thrapple, and they twisted to the pain of the knife.
“A papist dog!” cried Splendid, hard at it on my right, for once a zealous Protestant, and he was whisking around him his broadsword like a hazel wand, facing half-a-dozen Lochaber-axes. “Cruachan, Cruachan!” he sang. And we cried the old slogan but once, for time pressed and wind was dear.
Sitting cosy in taverns with friends long after, listening to men singing in the cheery way of taverns the ditty that the Leckan bard made upon this little spulzie, I could weep and laugh in turns at minding of yon winter’s day. In the hot stress of it I felt but the ardour that’s in all who wear tartan—less a hatred of the men I thrust and slashed at with Sir Claymore than a zest in the busy traffic, and something of a pride (God help me!) in the pretty way my blade dirled on the ham-pans of the rascals. There was one trick of the sword I had learned off an old sergeant of pikes in Macka’s Scots, in a leisure afternoon in camp, that I knew was alien to every man who used the targe in home battles, and it served me like a Mull wife’s charm. They might be sturdy, the dogs, valorous too, for there’s no denying the truth, and they were gleg, gleg with the target in fending, but, man, I found them mighty simple to the feint and lunge of Alasdair Mor!
Listening, as I say, to a song in a tavern, I’m sad for the stout fellows of our tartan who fell that day, and still I could laugh gaily at the amaze of the ragged corps who found gentlemen before them. They pricked at us, for all their natural ferocity, with something like apology for marring our fine clothes; and when the end came, and we were driven back, they left the gentlemen of our band to retreat by the pends to the beech-wood, and gave their attention to the main body of our common townsmen.
We had edged, Splendid and Sir Donald and I, into a bit of green behind the church, and we held a council of war on our next move.
Three weary men, the rain smirring on our sweating, faces, there we were! I noticed that a trickle of blood was running down my wrist, and I felt at the same time a beat at the shoulder that gave the explanation, and had mind that a fellow in the Athole corps had fired a pistolet point-blank at me, missing me, as I had thought, by the thickness of my doublet-sleeve.
“You’ve got a cut,” said Sir Donald. “You have a face like the clay.”
“A bit of the skin off,” said I, unwilling to vex good company.
“We must take to Eas-a-chosain for it,” said Splendid, his eyes flashing wild upon the scene, the gristle of his red neck throbbing.