"Not one morsel of meat had I eaten for twenty hours, and the inside of me just one hole full of hunger, but out went Col and his pipes to herding!
"Oh King of the Elements! but that was the night most foul, with the kingdom of France a rag for wetness, and mire to the hose-tops. Rain lashed; a scourging wind whipped over the country, and it was stinking like a brock from tatters that had been men. The German guns were pelting it, the sound of them a bellow no more broken than the roar on skerries at Martinmas, the flash of them in the sky like Merry Dancers.
"I got in a while to the length of a steading with a gable standing; tuned up piob mhor and played the gathering. They heard me, the lads—the living of them; two-over-twenty of them came up to me by the gable, with no more kenning of what airt they were in than if a fog had found them midway on the Long Ford of Uist. I led them back to King George's furrows where our folk were, and then, mo chreach! when we counted them, one was missing!
"'It is not a good herd you are, Maclean,' said the Cornal, 'you will just go back and find Duncan Ban; he's the only man in the regiment I can trust to clean my boots.'
"So back went Col in search of Duncan."
"Oh lad! weren't you the gallant fellow!" cried Margaret's mother, adoring.
"I was that, I assure you! If it were not the pipes were in my arm-pit like a girl, my feet would not keep up on me the way I would be pelting any other road than the way I had to go. But my grief! I never got my man, nor no man after ever found him. I went to the very ditches where am boche was lying, and 't was there that a light went up that made the country round about as white-bright as the day, and I in the midst of it with my pipes in hand. They threw at me grey lead as if it had been gravel, and I fell."
"Och, a mheudail bhochd!—Oh treasure!" said the women of Trosdale all together.
"I got to my knees in a bit and crawled, as it might be for a lifetime, one ache from head to heel, till I came to a hole as deep's a quarry where had been the crossing of roads, and there my soul went out of me. When I came to myself I was playing pipes and the day was on the land. The Good Being knows what I played, but who should come out across the plain to me but a Frenchman!