Lochinvar: A Novel

by S. R. Crockett

"Care or no care," said Scarlett, "it is time for us to be on our feet!"

So Wat, rising obediently, kissed his hand behind his companion's back to the white tower which was now sinking in the utmost south.

As soon almost as the two adventurers had left the sand and shingle of the shore, they found themselves upon the short heather of certain rough, moorish foothills. No house pleasantly reeking was to be discerned—not so much as a deer nor even a wandering sheep in that wide, wild place.

So Wat and Scarlett fared forth straight to the east, keeping mostly parallel with the shores of a fine loch, which stretched inward in the direction of the notch in the hills which they had seen from their landing-place.

It was towards evening when the two friends came to the summit of a little knoll and stood looking down upon a curious scene. Beneath them, scattered among the débris of some prehistoric landslip, lay a small Highland village—if village it could be called—of which each house or hut was built against the side of a great bowlder or rock fallen from the hill-side. The cottages were no better than rude shelters of turf and stone, roofed with blackened heather and scattered at every conceivable angle, as if they had been dredged forcibly out of the bottom of a reluctant pepper-pot and had taken root where they fell.

In the centre, however, was a kind of open space—not levelled nor cleared of turf and stones, but with all its primeval rocks sticking through the scanty turf, blackened and smoothed by the rubbing they had received from the fundamental parts of innumerable generations of goats and children.

In this space a dozen men in rude kilts and plaids of ancient faded tartan were collected, arguing and threatening with as much apparent fierceness as though some one of them was to be killed during the next five minutes. A small army of women hovered on the outskirts and made independent forays into the affray, catching hold of this and that other valiant discourser, and, if she got the right hold and purchase, swinging him forthwith out of the turmoil—only, however, to return to it again as soon as her grasp relaxed.

There was, therefore, a centre of disturbance of which the elements were entirely male—while contemporary, and on the whole concentric, with it revolved a number of smaller cyclones, of which the elements were about equally male and female. Fists were shaken here and there in all of them, and voices rose loud and shrill. But from the heart of the darker and more permanent quarrel in the centre there came at intervals the threatening gleam of steel, as this one and that other stooped and flashed the skein dhu, plucked out of his garter, defiantly in the face of his opponent.

In the very midst Wat could see a thick-set man who carried over his shoulder a couple of ash-plants rudely tied together. This contrivance was of small dimensions, and the sharpened ends were burned black and further stained with blood and what looked like red wax.

The man who carried it had no other weapon—if this could be called a weapon—which appeared as harmless as a boy's sword of lath. Yet as the little man thrust it towards this one and that, the strong men of the circle shrank back instantly with the greatest alarm, shaking their heads and girning their teeth, as Scarlett said, "like so many wull-cats on a dike."