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The walls at the far end were hung with tapestry very like MacCailein's rooms at home in Inneraora, and down the long sides, whose windows streamed the light upon the hall, great stag-heads glowered with unsleeping eyes, stags of numerous tines.
"I wish he might be," said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein's head on a post "Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?" "Yes," she said; "an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein's home-coming?"
Tradesmen from the Lowlands were busy fitting shops and houses with doors and windows, or filling up the gaps made by fire in the long lands, for MacCailein's first thought on his return from Edinburgh had been the comfort of the common people.
Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was then with the sweat on her brow she gave the hint I speak of, the hint of the war's end and the end of MacCailein Mor. "Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!" said she; "I see the heather above the myrtle on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein's head on a post." That was all.
Four or five companies of Lowland soldiers from Dunbarton and Stirling eked out the strength; much was expected from the latter, for they were, unlike our clansmen, never off the parade-ground, and were in receipt of pay for their militant service; but as events proved, they were MacCailein's poor reed.
"What a fury!" said Master Gordon. "And that's the lady of omens! What about her blessing now?" "Ay, and what about her prophecies?" asked M'Iver, sharply. "She was not so far wrong, I'm thinking, about the risks of Inverlochy; the heather's above the gall indeed." "But at any rate," said I, "MacCailein's head is not on a pike." "You must be always on the old key," cried M'Iver, angrily.
I muttered, giving him parry of low quarte like a good swordsman, and he came to the recover with a laugh. "Foil, Elrigmore!" he cried. "But we're soldiers and lads of the world, and you need hardly be so canny. You see MacCailein's points as well as I do.
And though now they were divided between the making of coronachs and the building of their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, off the lichened stone. "Don't think," said he, "that MacCailein's beat yet, or that the boar's tusks are reaped from his jaw.
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