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Betty almost ran to meet me as we came closer together, with an agreeableness that might have pleased me more had I not the certainty that she would have been as warm to either of the two men who had rescued her from her hiding in the wood of Strongara, and had just come back from her country's battles with however small credit to themselves in the result.
A storm of fury possessed him; he saw nothing, heard nothing. Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbed by the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meeting with the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with hints of rain on the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a storm not far distant.
The murderers were ransacking the house when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament, told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely to escape further search.
She evaded his supercilious eyes by going round the hedges, and in ten minutes she came upon Gilian, waiting patiently for her to keep her own tryst. His first words showed her the way to a speedy explanation. "Next week," said he, "we'll try Strongara; the place is as full of berries as the night is full of stars. Here they're not so ripe as on the other side."
Gordon told us the man's dying confidence whenever he had come to himself a little more in the warmth of the fort fire. "There's a woman and child," said he, "in the wood of Strongara."
"They're all right, so far as I went with them," said he; "but if your Grace in my position came upon a foreigner in the wood of Strongara a gentleman by the looks of him and a Frenchman by his moustachio, all alone and looking after Sergeant Donald's company, what would your Grace's inference be?"
He pocketed the money after a vagabond's spit on the coin for luck, and in twenty words exposed his by-love's device. They had just come from Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost's daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town. "But how did your wife guess the interest of the lady in a man of Argile's army?" I asked.
It was not till we were in the very heart of Strongara wood that I came to my reason and thought what folly was this to seek the wanderer in such a place in dead of night.
I think I gave a gasp that let John Splendid into my secret there and then; but at least I left him no doubt about what I would be at. "What's the nearer way to Strongara?" I asked; "alongside the river, or through Tombreck?"
M'lver, natheless, let me flounder through that perplexity for a time, fearful, I suppose, to hurt my feelings by showing me how little I knew of it, and finally he hinted at three cairns he was acquaint with, each elevated somewhat over the general run of the country, and if not the harbourage a refugee would make for, at least the most suitable coign to overlook the Strongara wood.
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