“With the sword or the dagger in the hand, and a Diarmaid or two before me,” cried Calum.
“Well, there might be worse ways of travelling yont—indeed there could ill be better; but if the secret of the ale is not to be ours for the asking, ye'll die a less well-bred death.”
“Name it, man, name it,” said Calum. “Might it be tow at the throat and a fir-branch.”
“Troth,” said Niall Mor, “and that were too gentle a travelling. The Scaurnoch's on our way, and the crows at the foot of it might relish a Glen Shira carcass.”
Uileam whitened at the notion of so ugly an end, but Calum only said, “Die we must any way,” and Art whistled a bit of a pipe-tune, grinding his heel on the moss.
Niall Mor made to strike the father on the face, but stayed his hand and ordered the three in-by, with a few of his corps to guard them. Up and down Glen Shira went the Diarmaids, seeking the brewing-cave, giving hut and home to the flame, and making black hearths and low lintels for the women away in the sheilings. They buried their dead at Kilblaan, and, with no secret the better, set out for Scaurnoch with Calum and his sons.
The MacKellars were before, like a spreidh of stolen cattle, and the lot of the driven herd was theirs. They were laughed at and spat on, and dirk-hilts and cromags hammered on their shoulders, and through Blaranbuie wood they went to the bosky elbow of Dun Corr-bhile and round to the Dun beyond.
Calum, for all his weariness, stepped like a man with a lifetime's plans before his mind; Art looked about him in the fashion of one with an eye to woodcraft; Uileam slouched with a heavy foot, white at the jaw and wild of eye.
The wood opened, the hunting-road bent about the hill-face to give a level that the eye might catch the country spread below. Loch Finne stretched far, from Ardno to French Foreland, a glassy field, specked with one sail off Creaggans. When the company came to a stand, Calum Dubh tossed his head to send the hair from his eyes, and looked at what lay below. The Scaurnoch broke at his feet, the grey rock-face falling to a depth so deep that weary mists still hung upon the sides, jagged here and there by the top of a fir-tree. The sun, behind the Dun, gave the last of her glory to the Cowal Hills; Hell's Glen filled with wheeling mists; Ben Ime, Ben Vane, and Ben Arthur crept together and held princely converse on the other side of the sea.
All in a daze of weariness and thinking the Diarmaids stood, and looked and listened, and the curlews were crying bitter on the shore.