“And, pray, what wars knew your valour?” said Halcro, who, though forbearing to contradict his landlord from a sense of respect, was not a whit inclined to abandon his argument to any meaner authority.
“I was pressed,” answered the old Triton, “to serve under Montrose, when he came here about the sixteen hundred and fifty-one, and carried a sort of us off, will ye nill ye, to get our throats cut in the wilds of Strathnavern[42][(k)]—I shall never forget it—we had been hard put to it for victuals—what would I have given for a luncheon of Burgh-Westra beef—ay, or a mess of sour sillocks?—When our Highlandmen brought in a dainty drove of kyloes, much ceremony there was not, for we shot and felled, and flayed, and roasted, and broiled, as it came to every man’s hand; till, just as our beards were at the greasiest, we heard—God preserve us—a tramp of horse, then twa or three drapping shots,—then came a full salvo,—and then, when the officers were crying on us to stand, and maist of us looking which way we might run away, down they broke, horse and foot, with old John Urry, or Hurry,[43] or whatever they called him—he hurried us that day, and worried us to boot—and we began to fall as thick as the stots that we were felling five minutes before.”
“And Montrose,” said the soft voice of the graceful Minna; “what became of Montrose, or how looked he?”
“Like a lion with the hunters before him,” answered the old gentleman; “but I looked not twice his way, for my own lay right over the hill.”
“And so you left him?” said Minna, in a tone of the deepest contempt.
“It was no fault of mine, Mistress Minna,” answered the old man, somewhat out of countenance; “but I was there with no choice of my own; and, besides, what good could I have done?—all the rest were running like sheep, and why should I have staid?”
“You might have died with him,” said Minna.
“And lived with him to all eternity, in immortal verse!” added Claud Halcro.
“I thank you, Mistress Minna,” replied the plain-dealing Zetlander; “and I thank you, my old friend Claud;—but I would rather drink both your healths in this good bicker of ale, like a living man as I am, than that you should be making songs in my honour, for having died forty or fifty years agone. But what signified it,—run or fight, ’twas all one;—they took Montrose, poor fellow, for all his doughty deeds, and they took me that did no doughty deeds at all; and they hanged him, poor man, and as for me”——
“I trust in Heaven they flogged and pickled you,” said Cleveland, worn out of patience with the dull narrative of the peaceful Zetlander’s poltroonery, of which he seemed so wondrous little ashamed.