“Use his legs?” said his mother; “what do you mean?”
“That's what Don says, and Yankee made him. Yankee kept calling to him, 'Now get away, get away from him! Use your legs! Get away from him!' and whenever Ranald began to do as he was told, then he got the better of Aleck, and he gave Aleck a terrible hammering, and Don said if Macdonald Bhain had not stopped them Aleck McRae would not have been able to walk home. He said Ranald was awful. He said he never saw him like he was that day. Wasn't it fine, mother?”
“Fine, Hughie!” said his mother. “It is anything but fine. It is simply disgusting to see men act like beasts. It is very, very sad. I am very much disappointed in Ranald.”
“But, mother, Ranald couldn't help it. And anyway, I am glad he gave that Aleck McRae a good thrashing. Yankee said he would never be right until he got it.”
“You must not repeat what Yankee says,” said his mother. “I am afraid his influence is not of the best for any of those boys.”
“Oh, mother, he didn't set them on,” said Hughie, who wanted to be fair to Yankee. “It was when he could not help it that he told Ranald how to do. I am glad he did, too.”
“I am very, very sorry about it,” said his mother, sadly. It was a greater disappointment to her than she cared to acknowledge either to her husband or to herself.
But the commotion caused in the community by the fight was soon swallowed up in the interest aroused by the opening of the new church, an event for which they had made long and elaborate preparation. The big bazaar, for which the women had been sewing for a year or more, was held on Wednesday, and turned out to be a great success, sufficient money being realized to pay for the church furnishing, which they had undertaken to provide.
The day following was the first of the “Communion Season.” In a Highland congregation the Communion Seasons are the great occasions of the year. For weeks before, the congregation is kept in mind of the approaching event, and on the Thursday of the communion week the season opens with a solemn fast day.
The annual Fast Day, still a national institution in Scotland, although it has lost much of its solemnity and sacredness in some places, was originally associated with the Lord's Supper, and was observed with great strictness in the matter of eating and drinking; and in Indian Lands, as in all congregations of that part of the country, the custom of celebrating the Fast Day was kept up. It was a day of great solemnity in the homes of the people of a godly sort. There was no cooking of meals till after “the services,” and indeed, some of them tasted neither meat nor drink the whole day long. To the younger people of the congregation it was a day of gloom and terror, a kind of day of doom. Even to those advanced in godliness it brought searchings of heart, minute and diligent, with agonies of penitence and remorse. It was a day, in short, in which conscience was invited to take command of the memory and the imagination to the scourging of the soul for the soul's good. The sermon for the day was supposed to stimulate and to aid conscience in this work.