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I walked with a mind painfully downcast, and it was not till I reached a little hillock a good distance from the Inns at Tynree, a hillock clothed with saugh saplings and conspicuously high over the flat countryside, that I looked about me to see where I was.
A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future.
The rain that was a smirr or drizzle on the north side of Glencoe grew to a steady shower in the valley itself, and when we had traversed a bit in the airt of Tynree it had become a pouring torrent slanting in our faces with the lash of whips, streaming from the hair and crinkling the hands, and leaving the bonnet on the head as heavy as any French soldier's salade.
In the obscurity of a great shower that set up a screen between us and the company marching to Tynree, we darted down the brae, across the valley, and over to the passage they call the Lairig Eilde, that is on the west of the great Little Herd hill of Etive, and between it and Ben Fhada or the Long Mount, whose peaks you will find with snow in their gullies in the height of summer.
And our picking was bad indeed, for instead of taking what we learned again was a drove-road through to Tynree, we stood more to the right and plunged into what after all turned out to be nothing better than a corrie among the hills. It brought us up a most steep hillside, and landed us two hours' walk later far too much in the heart and midst of Glencoe to be for our comfort.
The men we had seen going down in the airt of Tynree were the lad's gathering, and they would have lost us but for the beetle-browed rogue, who, guessing our route through the hills to Dalness, had run before them, and, unhampered by arms or years, had reached the house of Dalness a little before we came out of our journey in swamp and corry.
But they tell me people who rove and have tried Tynree in all weathers that often it is cheerful with song and story; and there is a tale that once upon a time a little king, out adventuring in the kingly ways of winter stories, found this tavern in the wilds so warm, so hospitable, so resounding with the songs of good fellows, that he bided as a duc for a week of the winter weather.
There was so much level land round me that I felt sure I must be rounding the Bredalbane hills, and I chanced a plunge to the left. I had not taken twenty steps when I ran up against the dry-stone dyke that bordered the Inns of Tynrec. Tynree is the Gaelic of a name that in the English is King's House. What humour gave so gaudy a title to so humble a place I have been always beat to know.
If they saw us, they seemed to suspect no evil, for they held on their way, still ahead of us, and making for Tynree. Whoever they were, they became at last so manifest a danger to our escape out of the head of the glen that we fell back anew on the first plan of going through the corries on the south side of the glen and piercing by them to Dalness.
At last, by striking to an angle down a field that suddenly rolled down beside me, I found soft carpeting for my feet, and put an increasing distance between us. With no relaxation to my step, however, I kept running till I seemed a good way clear of Dalness policies, and on a bridle-path that led up the glen the very road, as I learned later, that our enemy had taken on their way from Tynree.
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