“Whatever you do, Ballindalloch,” replied his faithful henchman, “it shall never be said that Ian Grant abandoned his master. I will”——
“Jesu Maria! what sound is that?” exclaimed the laird, suddenly interrupting him, and starting into an attitude of awe and dread.
And no marvel that he did so; for the wail of the rising whirlwind now came rushing upon them from the distant summit of Ben Rinnes. In an instant its roar was as if a tempestuous ocean had been rolling its gigantic billows over the mountain top; and on it swept so rapidly as to give them no further time for colloquy. A lurid glare of light shot across the sky from south to north. Shrieks,—fearful shrieks,—shrieks such as the mountain itself might have uttered, had it been an animated being, mingled with the blast. It was already upon them, and in one moment both master and man were whirled off through the air and over the bank, where they were tossed, one over the other, confounded and bruised, into the thickest part of a large and wide-spreading holly bush; and whilst they stuck there, jammed in among the boughs, and altogether unable to extricate themselves, they heard the huge granite stones, which had been that day employed in the work, whizzing through the air over their heads, as if they had been projected from one of those engines which that warlike people, the ancient Romans, called a balista or catapult; and ever and anon they heard them plunged into the river below, with a repetition of deep hollow sounds, resembling the discharge of great guns. The tempest swept off towards the north, as it had done on the previous night; and a laugh, that was like the laugh of a voice of thunder, seemed to them to re-echo from the distant hills, and made the very blood freeze in their veins. But what still more appalled them, this tremendous laugh was followed by a yet more tremendous voice, as if the mountain had spoken. It filled the whole of the double valley of the Aven and the Spey, and it repeated three times successively this whimsical command, “Build in the Cow-haugh!—Build in the Cow-haugh!—Build in the Cow-haugh!” and again all nature returned to its former state of stillness and of silence.
“Saint Mary help me!” cried Ian from his position, high up in the holly bush, where he hung doubled up over the fork of two boughs, with his head and his heels hanging down together like an old worsted stocking. “Saint Mary help me! where am I? and where is the laird?”
“Holy St. Peter!” cried the laird, from some few feet below him, “I rejoice to hear thy voice, Ian. Verily, I thought that the hurricane which these hellish—no—I mean these good people raised, had swept all mortals but myself from the face of this earth.”
“I praise the Virgin that thou art still to the fore, Ballindalloch,” said Ian. “In what sort of plight art thou, I pray thee?”
“In very sorry plight, truly,” said the laird, “sorely bruised and tightly and painfully jammed into the cleft of the tree, with my nose and my toes more closely associated together than they have ever been before, since my first entrance into this weary world. Canst thou not aid me, Ian?”
“Would that I could aid thee, Ballindalloch,” said Ian mournfully; “but thou must e’en take the will for the deed. I am hanging here over a bough, like a piece of sheep’s tripe, without an atom of fushon[2] in me, and confined, moreover, by as many cross-branches as would cage in a blackbird. I fear there is no hope for us till daylight.”
And in good sooth there they stuck maundering in a maze of speculation for the rest of the night.
When the morning sun had again restored sufficient courage to the men of the watch, curiosity led them to return to ascertain how things stood about the site of the building which they had so precipitately abandoned. They were horrorstruck to observe, that in addition to the utter obliteration of the whole of the previous day’s work, the laird himself, and his henchman Ian Grant, had disappeared. At first they most naturally supposed that they had both been swept away at once with the walls of the new building on which they stood, and that they could never hope to see them again, more than they could expect to see the stones of the walls that had been so miraculously whirled away. But piteous groans were heard arising from the bank below them; and on searching further, Ballindalloch and his man Ian were discovered and released from their painful bastile. The poor men-at-arms who had formed the watch were mightily pleased to observe that the laird’s temper was most surprisingly cooled by his night’s repose in the holly bush. I need not tell you that he spoke no more of hanging them. You will naturally yemagine, too, that he no longer persevered in pressing the erection of the ill-starred keep-tower on the proud spot he had chosen for it, but that he implicitly followed the dread and mysterious order he had received to “Build in the Cow-haugh!”