“Look out!” cried one of the others laughing, “I’m thinking that I would need the blazing eyes of the devil himself to be able to look at anything here.”
“What’s the matter?” shouted the sentinel at the door of the bothy; and as he said so, he halted in the midst of his walk, and bent his body forward in all directions in his eagerness to descry the cause of the alarm.
“Tut, nothing,” replied another of the watchmen, “all’s well, I warrant me.”
“Aye, aye,” said another, “we’re safe enough from all surprise this night; for, as Archy says, it would need the fiery e’en of the red de’il himself to grope a way through the forest in such darkness as this.”
“It’s dark enough to confound an owl or a bat, indeed,” said the watchman who first spoke, “but mine are eyes that can note a buck on Ben Nevis’ side of an autumn morning a good hour before the sun hath touched his storm-worn top; and, by St. Colm, I swear I saw some dark-looking thing glide over the lip of the bank yonder.”
“It must have been a dark-looking thing, indeed, to have been visible there,” replied his comrade; “but if it were not fancy, it must have been a fox or a badger.”
“Be it what it might,” replied the man, “I swear I saw the back of the creature as it came creeping over the round of the bank.”
“What, think ye, makes the’ cattle rout so strangely?” demanded the sentinel.
“That which makes the pipes skirl so loudly,” replied one of the men below, “a stomach full of wind. I promise you the poor beasts got but a scanty supper ere the sun went to. And here, unless they can eat gravel or sand in this hole, or heather as hard as pike-heads, they have little chance of filling their bellies with aught else but wind.”
A noise of talking was now heard within the bothy, where all had been so quiet previously, and immediately afterwards the doorway was darkened by the figures of two or three men, who came crowding out to gaze ineffectually around them. Some talking took place between them and the sentinel; and Macfarlane and his people gave up all hope of the success of the manœuvres they had planned. But after some moments of most painful suspense, the talk of the Lochaber men terminated in a loud laugh, produced, no doubt, by some waggish remark made against some individual of the little knot, after which the figures retired into the hut. The sentinel resumed his silent walk, and the watchmen in the hollow below seemed to relapse into their former state of slumber.