“By the black stones of Baillinish!” said he in an unmistakable Hielan' accent, “and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed the bylie? You were not in your mother's bosom when you got that stroke!”
I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, 'twas no other than MacKellar of Kilbride!
He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade in another part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised me for a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot.
Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him) I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over the frontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of all the Continent of Europe in these stirring days.
I mended rapidly, and cheery enough were these days of travel in a cart, so cheery that I never considered what the end of them might be, but was content to sit in the sunshine blithely conversing with this odd surgeon of the French army who had been roving the world for twenty years like my own Uncle Andrew, and had seen service in every army in Europe, but yet hankered to get back to the glens of his nativity, where he hoped his connection with the affair of Tearlach and the Forty-five would be forgotten.
“It's just this way of it, Hazel Den,” he would say to me, “there's them that has got enough out of Tearlach to make it worth their while to stick by him and them that has not. I am of the latter. I have been hanging about Paris yonder for a twelvemonth on the promise of the body that I should have a post that suited with my talents, and what does he do but get me clapped into a scurvy regiment that goes trudging through Silesia since Whitsunday, with never a sign of the paymaster except the once and then no more than a tenth of what was due to me. It is, maybe, glory, as the other man said; but my sorrow, it is not the kind that makes a clinking in your pouches.”
He had a comfortable deal of money to have so poor an account of his paymaster, and at that I hinted.
“Oh! Allow me for that!” he cried with great amusement at my wonder. “Fast hand at a feast and fast feet at a foray is what the other man said, and I'm thinking it is a very good observation, too. Where would I be if I was lippening on the paymaster?”
“Man! you surely have not been stealing?” said I, with such great innocency that he laughed like to end.
“Stealing!” he cried. “It's no theft to lift a purse in an enemy's country.”