"He was like a fellow that would be under spells!
"'The Good Being be about me!' cried he, and his eyes like flambeaux, 'what tune is that?'
"You never, never, never saw a man so much uplifted!
"'They call it,' said I, 'Come to me Kinsman,' (Thigibh a so a charaid!), and it has the name, in the small Isles of the West, of the Oldest Air of the World. The very ravens know it; what is it but the cry of men in trouble? It's older than the cairns of Icolmkill, and cried the clans from out of the Isles to Harlaw. Listen you well!' and I played it to him again—not all the MacCrimmons that ever came from Skye could play it better! For grand was the day and white with sun, and to-morrow we were marching. And many a lad of ours was dead behind us.
"When I was done, he did a droll thing then, the red fellow—put his arms about my shoulders and kissed me on the face! And the beard of him like a flaming whin!
"What must he do but learn it? Over and over again I had to whistle it to him till he had it to the very finish, and all the time the guns were going in the east.
"'If ever you were in trouble,' I said to him—though of course he could not understand me, 'and you whistled but one blast of that air, it is Col Maclean would be at your side though the world were staving in below your feet like one of your father's barrels!'"
II
The day was done in Trosdale. Beyond the rim of the sea the sun had slid to make a Sabbath morning further round the world, and all the sky in the west was streaming fire. Over the flats of Heisker the light began to wink on the Monach islets. Ebbed tide left bare sand round Kirkibost, and the sea-birds settled on them, rising at times in flocks and eddying in the air as if they were leaves and a wind had blow them. Curlews were piping bitterly.
Behind the creek where the folk were gathered on the sea-pinks, talking, Trosdale clachan sent up the reek of evening fires, and the bairns were being cried in from the fields.