I had not yet recovered my breath when a voice came to me.
“Ah, Hob MacClellan, the ill deil tak’ your courting-jaunts this nicht! For had ye bidden at hame I would have gotten baith o’ the red foxes that have been killing our weakly lambs. As it is, I gat but this.”
And she held up a great dog fox by the brush before throwing the body into a convenient moss-hole.
It was Alexander-Jonita, the lass whom our college-bred Quintin had once called the Diana of Balmaghie. I care not what he called her. Without question she was the finest lass in the countryside. And that I will maintain to this day.
“Are you going home, Jonita?” cried I, for the direction in which she was proceeding led directly away from the house of Drumglass.
“No,” she answered carelessly, “I am biding all night in the upper ‘buchts.’ The foxes have been very troublesome of late, and I am thinning them with the gun. I have the feck of the lambs penned up there.”
“And who is with you to help you?” I asked her in astonishment.
“Only the dogs,” she made answer, shifting the gun from one shoulder to the other.
“But, lassie,” I cried, “ye surely do not sleep out on the hills all your lone like this?”
“And what for no?” she answered sharply. “What sweeter bed than a truss of heather? What safer than with two rough tykes of dogs and a good gun at one’s elbow, with the clear airs blowing over and the sheep lying snugly about the folds?”