“Marry!” cried Boboon, putting back his hair from his face with a nervous hand. “You would marry a wanderer's child?”
“Well, they'll talk, no doubt; but she has gifts to make them forget, and she's good enough to make a king's woman.”
“Sir,” said Boboon, “I have but one thing to say, and that's our own Gaelic old-word, 'There are few lapdogs in a fox's litter.'” The captain's face got as red as his vest, and he had a ready hand up for an answer to Boboon, but he had mind the man was the girl's father.
“I'll risk it,” he said, “and you can go your wandering ways, for Betty is willing.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Boboon, and he went. In the hollow of the night he was hooting back like a boy at the hoolets on the slopes of Coillevraid, and at the mouth of day, in a silver wet light, he was standing on the edge of the hills that look on two lochs, his head high like a scenting deer's. He turned him round about to all airts with his eyes from Cruachan to Cowal, and as far between Knapdale and Lorn as a wanderer has vision, and yonder, down at Kames, was the camp of his clan!
Betty his daughter left Macvicar's Land in the morning and went to be captain's wife, with a seat in the kirk and callers from the castle itself.
“Wait, wait,” said old Craignure, when the tale reached him, “you'll see the fox come out on her ere long.”
But the fox was not there; it was skipping a day, as the fox will do sometimes when the day before has been good hunting. All went well with the woman till the worst that might have been the best happened, and she died with her first child. It was the year of the stunted oats, that brought poverty to Inneraora and black bread to the captain's board; but black bread and brochan would have been the blithest of meat for him if Betty was left to share it. He took to the bottle, and left the boy to women who had no skill of wild youth.
And the child grew like a fir-tree, straight and tall, full of hot blood, swung about by whim and the moment's fancy. For him it was ever the horse and gun, a snatched dinner and hearty, and off to the wood or hill. He got to know the inner ways of the beasts that hide in the coarse grasses and the whin; at a whistle he could coax flapping birds to come to heel. A loose vest and a naked neck for ever were marring his gentility, and his closest friends were countrymen with hard hands and the loud ready laugh.
One day it came to the captain's mind that something must be made of this young blade, and he sent for him.