“Yonder: to the right.”
“And you are not going there?”
“No. I am going to the steading of Andrew Blair. Maybe you are for knowing it? It is called the Baile-na-Chlais-nambuidheag.”[6]
“I do not remember. But it is remembering a Blair I am. He was Adam, the son of Adam, the son of Robert. He and my father did many an ill deed together.”
“Ay, to the stones be it said. Sure, now, there was, even till this weary day, no man or woman who had a good word for Adam Blair.”
“And why that … why till this day?”
“It is not yet the third hour since he went into the silence.”
Neil Ross uttered a sound like a stifled curse. For a time he trudged wearily on.
“Then I am too late,” he said at last, but as though speaking to himself. “I had hoped to see him face to face again, and curse him between the eyes. It was he who made Murtagh Ross break his troth to my mother, and marry that other woman, barren at that, God be praised! And they say ill of him, do they?”
“Ay, it is evil that is upon him. This crime and that, God knows; and the shadow of murder on his brow and in his eyes. Well, well, ’tis ill to be speaking of a man in corpse, and that near by. ’Tis Himself only that knows, Neil Ross.”