“Amn’t I like myself this morning?” asked John, jocularly, dandling the bairn in his arms.
Betty turned away without a reply, and when the child was put down and ran to her, she scarcely glanced on it, but took it by the hand and made to go before us, through the underwood she had come from.
“Here’s my home, gentlemen,” she said, “like the castle of Colin Dubh, with the highest ceiling in the world and the stars for candles.”
We might have passed it a score of times in broad daylight and never guessed its secret. It was the beildy side of the hill. Two fir-trees had fallen at some time in the common fashion of wind-blown pines, with their roots clean out of the earth, and raised up, so that coming together at two edges they made two sides of a triangle. To add to its efficiency as a hiding-place, some young firs grew at the open third side of the triangle.
In this confined little space (secure enough from any hurried search) there was still a greasach as we call it, the ember of a fire that the girl had kindled with a spark from a flint the night before, to warm the child, and she had kept it at the lowest extremity short of letting it die out altogether, lest it should reveal her whereabouts to any searchers in the wood.
We told her our story and she told us hers. She had fled on the morning of the attack, in the direction of the castle, but found her way cut off by a wing of the enemy, a number of whom chased her as she ran with the child up the river-side to the Cairnbaan, where she eluded her pursuers among his lordship’s shrubberies, and discovered a road to the wood. For a week she found shelter and food in a cow-herd’s abandoned bothy among the alders of Tarra-dubh; then hunger sent her travelling again, and she reached Leacainn Mhor, where she shared the cotter’s house with a widow woman who went out to the burn with a kail-pot and returned no more, for the tardy bullet found her. The murderers were ransacking the house when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament, told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely to escape further search.
“And so I am here with my charge,” said the girl, affecting a gaiety it were hard for her to feel “I could be almost happy and content, if I were assured my father and mother were safe, and the rest of my kinsfolk.”
“There’s but one of them in all the countryside,” I said. “Young MacLachlan, and he’s on Dunchuach.”
To my critical scanning her cheek gave no flag.
“Oh, my cousin!” she said. “I am pleased that he is safe, though I would sooner hear he was in Cowal than in Campbell country.”