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"Say no more about it," answered Gordon. "I have seen the wolf so often at the Highlander's heart that I need not be wondering to find him snarling and clawing now. And still from a gentleman and a person of travel " "Say away, sir," said M'Iver, bitterly; "you have the whole plea with you this time, and I'm a rogue of the blackest I can say no more than I'm sorry for a most dirty action."
"What was the girl's name?" I asked M'Iver, leaning forward, finding his story in some degree had parallel with my own. "Her name, Colin I did not mention the girl, did I? How did you guess there was a girl in it?" said John, perplexed. The others were too busy on carnal appetites to feel the touch of a sentiment wrung from me by a moment's illusion.
"If it wasn't for the snow on the ground," said M'Iver, "I could find a score of safe enough hidings between here and the Beannan." "Heavens!" he added, "when I think on it, the Beannan itself is the place for us; it's the one safe spot we can reach by going through the woods without leaving any trace, if we keep under the trees and in the bed of the burn."
M'Iver rode beside flowering saugh and alder tree through those old arches, now no more, those arches that were the outermost posterns where good-luck allowed farewells. He dare not once look round, and his closest friends dare not follow him, as he rode alone on the old road so many of our people have gone to their country's wars or to sporran battles.
"Said ten thousand fiends in Hell!" cried M'Iver. "I may be vexed I angered the man; but I'll never let him know it by my words, if he cannot make it out from my acts."
I had made up my mind for the twentieth time to go the length of Carlunnan and face her plump and plain, when behold she came suddenly round the corner at the Maltland where the surviving Lowland troops were gathered! M'Iver was with her, and my resolution shrivelled and shook within me like an old nut kernel.
I have brought the matter to my closet I have prayed " "Pshaw!" exclaimed M'Iver, but at once he asked pardon. " I am a man come or wellnigh come to the conclusion that his life was never designed by the Creator to be spent in the turmoil of faction and field.
I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M'Iver was no less, but he mingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for the first chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in a dark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay with a broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must have stumbled.
"Auchinbreac was a soldier by trade and a good one too," answered M'Iver, at his usual trick of prevarication. "And a flatterer like yourself, you mean," said his lordship. "He and you learned the lesson in the same school, I'm thinking. And as ill-luck had it, his ill counsel found me on the swither, as yours did when Colkitto came down the glens there to rape and burn.
"Just so; to Inverlochy," answered M'Iver. "I suppose we are to give them a call when we can muster enough men?" "Hadn't we better consider where we are first?" said MacCailein. Then he put his fair hand through his ruddy locks and sighed. His reverence here has had his will of me on that score."
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