"Did you ever kill a man?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes; many men. That is what soldiers are meant to do. But one doesn't like to think of them as men. Somehow it seems different when one calls them simply the enemy."
"Then you've been in a real battle?"
The soldier nodded.
"That must have been very exciting," remarked Colin, with boyish enthusiasm. "I should like to be in a real battle—that is, if it were against Frenchmen, or Spaniards, or blackamoors, or people of that sort. I don't think I'd like it so much if they were Britons."
"I suppose not," agreed Colonel Ossington, with a sigh. "Somehow it does seem to make a difference."
"Once," went on Colin, growing more communicative now that he had discovered a soldier to be very little different in human nature from any other man—"once, there was a battle near here—near this castle, I mean—over on Culloden Moor, where our sheep pastures are. And last spring, when Peter Reid of the Mains of Kilravock was ploughing, he turned up a rusty old claymore. He[!-- [Pg 124] --] gave it to me, and I polished it. There it is, hanging up with that Lochaber axe upon the wall."
Colonel Ossington moved his chair to look round at the old sword. His glance travelled to other parts of the dimly lighted room, surveying the few family portraits in their tarnished frames, the dusty antlered heads of stags, the old Highland targets, crossbows, and battle-axes that decorated the dark oak panels of the walls.
"There used to be a rack of muskets in that farther[!-- [Pg 125] --] corner," he remarked. "And where is the portrait of the beautiful Lady Leslie—Bonnie Belinda, they called her—that used to hang up there above that carved settle?"