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I counted ten tartans in as many minutes between the cross and the kirk, most of them friendly with MacCailein Mor, but a few, like that of MacLachlan of that ilk, at variance, and the wearers with ugly whingers or claymores at their belts. Than those MacLachlans one never saw a more barbarous-looking set.
Even with its aid in clearing a course for him, Sultan tumbled over a brace of Highlanders, two of a swarm of Maclachlans and Macdonalds who were disputing possession of a cutler's shop on the corner of Bag Street.
"You ken," he went on, turning fuller round to me, to tell a story he guessed a new-comer was unlikely to know the ins and outs of "you ken that one of the MacLachlans, a cousin-german of old Lachie the chief, came over in a boat to Braleckan a few weeks syne on an old feud, and put a bullet into a Mac Nicoll, a peaceable lad who was at work in a field. Gay times, gay times, aren't they?
She had been as cool and unfluttered as a marble image when she lay in my arms. Maclachlan was for marching on into the town, and the doubt on the Colonel's face rather nettled him. "The considerable town of Manchester," he said, "was entered, and in part seized, by one Scots sergeant and his drummer. Of a certainty near a score of Maclachlans can intake yon little clachan."
"Donald, ye auld skaicher," said Maclachlan, "get your bairns agait. The Maclachlans are going to be last, where they should be first, at the intaking of a town, but the Prince, God bless him, will think me balm in Gilead when he sees the reinforcements I bring." He was in high feather, and it interested me to watch in another the tonic effect of Margaret's presence.
The candle was now guttering on the window-ledge. These glories over, Donald came hard up against the end of them all the Chief dead at his feet, slain by his own hand. For a time he faltered, playing only in little, melancholy snatches. Then he got surer, and the music began to come in blasts. He was seeing his way, learning what it all meant to him and the Maclachlans. Weird mun hae way.
I but bowed, and in a fashion saluted, saying nothing in answer, for the whole company glowered at me, all except the home-bred ones who had better manners. The two MacLachlans denied in the Gaelic the charge the sheriff clerk read to them in a long farrago of English with more foreign words to it than ever I learned the sense of in College.
I spent most of the day with John Splendid and one Tearlach Fraser, on old comrade, and as luck, good or ill, would have it, the small hours of morning were on me before I thought of going home. Earlier in the day, by a galley or wherry, the MacLachlans also had left, but not the young laird, who put up for the night at the house of Provost Brown.
"Taing! taing!" said one spokesman of the two MacLachlans in his hurried Cowal Gaelic, and his neighbour, echoing him word for word in the comic fashion they have in these parts; "Taing! taing! I never louted to the horseman that rode over me yet, and I would be ill-advised to start with the Gruamach one!" The man's face flushed up as he spoke.
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