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One of the men dodged round, and laid hold of Hector from behind; the other made a move towards him in front. Hector stood motionless for an instant, watching his chief, but when he saw him knock down the man before him, he had his own assailant by the throat in an instant, gave him a shake, and threw him beside his companion. "You shall suffer for this, Macruadh!" cried Mr.
"It is so delightful," said Ian at length, "to come out of the motion and the heat and the narrowness into the still, cold greatness!" "You seemed to be enjoying yourself pretty well notwithstanding, Captain Macruadh!" "What made you think so?" he asked, turning to her with a smile.
As she read, the letter dropped from her hands, and she threw them up in unconscious appeal to heaven. She saw a vision of bloated men and white-faced women, drawing with trembling hands from torn pockets the money that had bought the wide acres of the Clanruadh. To think of the Macruadh marrying the daughter of such a man!
His men told him the story their own way, never hinting a doubt as to whose was the land on which the deer had been killed. "Where is the nearest magistrate?" he inquired with grand severity. "The nearest is the Macruadh, sir!" answered a highlander who had come from work in the garden to see what was going on. "I cannot apply to him; the fellow is one of his own men!"
He seemed to see much to ponder in the proposal. "Well, Macruadh," he said at length, hesitating with hum and with haw, "the thing is well, to speak the truth, you take me a good deal by surprise! I do not know how the thing may appear to Mrs. Palmer. And then the girl herself, you will allow, ought, in a free country, to have a word in the matter!
Palmer any pity for his people: it would but give zest to his rejoicing in iniquity! Something nevertheless must be determined, and speedily, for winter was at hand. The Macruadh had to consider not only the immediate accommodation of the ejected but how they were to be maintained.
How many, if they ever heard of it, would believe that the poor, high-souled Macruadh declined to receive a single hundred from his father-in-law's affluence! That he took his daughter poor as she was born his one stipulation that she should be clean from her father's mud! For one to whom there would even be a chance of stating the truth of the matter, a hundred would say, "That's your plan!
"You too, my chief!" she cried. "You turned against the poor of your people!" "No, Mistress Conal," he answered. "I am too much your friend to let you kill yourself!" "We have orders, Macruadh, to set fire to the hovel," said one of the men, touching his hat respectfully. "They'll roast my black one!" shrieked the old woman.
Isobel Macruadh was a woman of real thinking-power. Her sons being but boys when their father died, she at once took the part of mediator between the mind of the father and that of his sons; and besides guiding them on the same principles, often told them things their father had said, and talked with them of things they had heard him say.
Into the tomb they went, and found everything strangely comfortable the stone-floor covered with warm and woolly skins of black-faced sheep, a great fire glowing, plenty of provisions hung and stored, and the deaf, keen-eyed father with the swift keen-eared son for attendants. "You will not mind sharing your bed with me will you, my child?" said Mrs. Macruadh: "Our accommodation is scanty.
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