I was in bed, there was no doubt about that, and a strange sort of bed too, for it moved lightly and deliciously through the keen, open air like the magic carpet of the Eastern tale. The bedposts at my feet were most curiously carved into life-like images of warriors, so life-like, indeed, that when the one on the right turned its shaggy head and spoke to the one on the left, I was not shocked and scarcely surprised. Bed it was, however, for mother's soft, smooth hand was on my cheek, and under the balm of its touch I went off to sleep again.
When my eyes opened again, the mists had cleared out of them and I was no longer in the land of shadows. The carven bedposts were Highlanders; the bed was a litter slung between four of them; the touch was hers. Somebody spoke, the Highlanders came to a halt, and Margaret bent over me. Her face was pale, grave, and anxious.
"Are you better, Oliver?" she whispered.
"As right as rain," I answered, pushing my new trouble behind me and speaking stoutly because of the whiteness of her face.
"Try to sleep again. You've had a bad fall, and there's an ugly cut in your skull."
"Indeed, I'll do no such thing," was my reply. "I don't want carrying like a great baby, and I do want my breakfast. I'm as empty as a drum."
"Can you stand?"
"Sure of it, and also hop, skip, jump, and, above all, eat and drink with any man alive. So, if you can make these men-women understand you, tell them I'm very grateful, but I've had enough."
The four tousled warriors were easily made to understand what I wanted, and, stout and strong as they were, welcomed the end of their labours with broad grins of satisfaction. They lowered me to the ground, and immediately Margaret's hands were outstretched to help me to my feet. But for the black death between us, it would have been new life indeed to see the colour and sunshine creeping back to her face, and to hear her whispered "Thank God!"
My head was bumming and throbbing, but nothing to speak of. The gash was behind and above my right ear, so I must have somersaulted down the stairs. Margaret, as I learned later, had bathed and bandaged the wound, and after my recovery of consciousness, it only gave me the happy trouble of persuading Margaret that it gave me no trouble.
I stamped and shook myself experimentally, took a few strides, and jumped once or twice, Margaret watching me as curiously and carefully as a hen watches her first chicken.
"Do mind, Oliver!" she said. "It bled horribly, and you'll start it again."
"I believe I needed a blood-letting," said I.
"Should you ever need another," she said crisply, "I hope you'll take it in the usual way. How did it happen?"
I had steeled myself for the inevitable question, and so answered ruefully, "I must have tripped over the domino."
"If it were not your mother's I would never wear it again," she said, plucking the skirt of it into her hand and shaking it as if it were a naughty child. "I thought you would never come round. For nearly an hour, I should think, you looked stone-dead. Then you just opened your eyes, but closed them before I dared speak, and lay so at least another hour. You have given me such a fright, sir, that, now you are up and about again, I'm beginning to feel I have a grievance against you."
"I'm sorry, madam," said I, very soberly.
"Now you're laughing at me, sir," was the brisk reply.
The word made me shiver. "Laughing"--over Jack's body! Margaret was in her stride back to her mistress-ship again yet her eye changed instantly with her mood when she saw me wince. Indeed, her mind flashed after my mind like a hawk after a pigeon, but I dodged the trouble by looking casually around to examine our whereabouts.
We were following a track down a dip in an open moorland. Across the shallow valley, and climbing the slope ahead of us, was another small body of Highlanders, whom I took to be our scouting party. The sun was a dim blob in the sky, and I saw from its position that our direction was easterly. A joyous hail from behind made me spin round, whereupon I saw the Colonel on Sultan and the young Chief on the sorrel turning the brow behind us. It took them a few minutes to trot down to us, and before they reached us four more wild warriors, our rear-guard apparently, came in view. One of them was my son of Anak, astride Margaret's mare, and so looking more gigantesque than ever.
"Good morning, commander!" was the Colonel's greeting. "Slids! But I'm glad to see you on your feet again. How's the head?"
"It still bumbles a bit," said I, "but, truth to tell, I'm thinking more of my breakfast than my head. I'm as empty as a drum."
"It's a guid prognostick to feel hungry after sic a crack o' the head," said the chieftain, smiling, and I thought with a twinge what a handsome, wholesome sight he made.
"I'm another drum," said the Colonel, "but deuce take me, Oliver, if I know how we're to be filled. Madge would have us start off with you at once, quite rightly too, and we'd neither bite nor sup before we took the road."
"And where were you taking me?" cried I.
"To the doctor's," explained the Colonel. "There's one in a village tucked away somewhere among these hills, and we've a lad on ahead to guide us. Colonel Ker, who commands the Highlanders who rescued us, gave us our friend here, Captain Maclachlan in the Prince's army, and a great chieftain among his own people"--here the chief and I bowed to one another--"and a dozen or so of his stout men as an escort. Two plaids were knitted into a litter, a log of a man named Wheatman was bundled into it, and off we started breakfastless, as I said before."
"I'm very grateful to you, Mistress Margaret," said I.
"Don't be silly!" she answered very sharply. "It is no praise to tell me I acted with common decency. And you weren't bundled in!"
"I was not praising you, madam," I retorted, quick as ever to return like for like. "I was thanking you, and I venture, with respect, to thank you again."
"Bother old Bloggs!" she said, suddenly all of a glow.
"Bloggs? Who's Bloggs?" asked the Colonel, plainly enjoying the fun.
"A rascally schoolmaster," she explained, "who flogged Oliver into a precision of speech which I find most trying. But I must not miscall the dear old man, for I stole his supper."
"I wish he'd flogged him into precision on a staircase," said the Colonel. "Damme, I am hungry."
"I'm thinking there'll be a dub of water in the bottom yonder," said the chieftain, "and Mistress Waynflete shall, if she will, take her first meal Highland fashion."
As I firmly declined to be carried another yard, the Highlanders unmade my litter and resumed their plaids. In the trough of the valley we found a streamlet of clear sweet water, and our repast consisted of a handful of oatmeal, of which every clansman carried a supply in a linen bag, stirred in a horn of water. It was not our Staffordshire notion of a breakfast, but it was better than nothing.
"Water-brose is a guid enough thing at a pinch," said Maclachlan to Margaret, "guid enough to take a big loon like yon Donald to London and back."
Donald, it appeared, liked an addition to it, notwithstanding his chief's praise of it, for he was taking a long pull from a leather bottle. This, he explained, was usquebaugh, "ta watter of life," and the spice of poetry in the description tempted the Colonel and me to try a dram. The Colonel probably had had worse drink in his time, but even he made no comment. I would almost as lief have had a blank charge fired into my mouth.
While we all took our brose, and Maclachlan squired Margaret, the Colonel told me how it had happened that the Highlanders chanced to come to our rescue in the very nick of time. My own trouble is to get my tale straight and simple, and I have no intention of making a hard task harder by trying to interweave with the threads of my own story a poor history of these important days. Mr. Volunteer Ray saw much more of these things than ever I did, and the curious reader may turn to his fat, little, brown volume for particulars. He was on the other side, and is too partial for a perfect historiographer, but the account of things is there, and reasonably well done too. But as what happened to Margaret, the Colonel, and me, happened because of the campaign of the rival armies, I must boil down what the Colonel told me if I am to make my tale clear. The Colonel, to his credit, as I think, was so enthusiastic over all matters military that he was rather long-winded in his account, and, in like fashion with our housewifely Kate, it behoves me, so to speak, to make a jar of jelly out of a pan of fruit, which is easier done with crab-apples than words.
According to the Colonel, one of the master maxims of the military art is, "Find out what the enemy thinks you are going to do, and then don't do it." My Lord George Murray, the Prince's chief adviser in military matters, had acted on this plan, and had given the go-by to the Duke of Cumberland in grand style. At Macclesfield, the traveller to London had choice of two high roads, one through Leek and Derby, and the other through Congleton and Stafford. Leaving the Prince at Macclesfield with the bulk of his men, Murray had pushed with a big force as far as Congleton on the Stafford road, and the news of his advance had made Cumberland withdraw all his northerly outposts to his head-quarters at Stone. It was the last body of horse, routed out of Congleton, which we had watched from the pines last night, racing in fear and disorder back to the main of their army. Before daybreak Murray had sent on a force of Highlanders under Colonel Ker towards Newcastle, to maintain the illusion that the Stafford road was the one the Prince would take, and the vanguard of this force, under Maclachlan, had saved us at the "Red Bull." Murray himself was marching from Congleton across country to Leek, while the Prince was marching thither also from Macclesfield. Murray would be there first, and did not mean to wait for the Prince, but to push on as far as possible towards Derby. We, too, were bound for Leek, where we should be safe at last, and the end of the Colonel's explanation came, not because he had said all he could have said, but because Donald was yelling to the clansmen in preparation for our retaking the road.
Maclachlan accepted with alacrity an offer I made to go ahead and join our advance. He ordered Donald to accompany me, giving as his reason: "For he kens the English fine when the spirit of understanding is on him, and ye'll easy get it on him by raxing him a crack in the wame, same as ye did back yonder at the yill-house."
The Highlander maintained the expression of a wooden doll throughout this explanation, but, as I leaped hard after him across the brook, I overtook a grin on his face that promised well for my future entertainment.
"She pe recovert," he said. "Tat was a foine shump."
Before I could reply Margaret was upon us.
"The mare is quite frisky. She thinks me a mere fardello after Donald. You're sure you're all right, Oliver?"
"So near right, madam, that I beg you not to worry about me further," said I.
"Worry about you or worry you?"
It hurt me to have her go so chilly all of a sudden, but I replied frankly, "Both. It does indeed worry me to have you breakfastless in these wilds through my doings."
"Yes," she said, smiling down on me, "I ken fine the distinction between water-brose and ham and eggs."
"We are still in Staffordshire," I said cheerily, "and I'll go ahead and see what I can do for you. Now, Donald, your best foot first!"
He and I started ahead again, leaving her waiting for the rest of the party, detained by some explanation on the Colonel's part of the military aspects of the lie of the land.
"There's a wheen foine leddies wi' ta Prince, Got bless him," said Donald, "but when yon carline gets amangst 'em she'll pe like a muircock amangst a thrang o' craws. She'll ding 'em a'."
I expected that Donald would cherish ill will to me for my blow, but in this I was wrong. So far from bearing me a grudge, he quite obviously liked me for it. He had a fist, or nief, as he called it, nearly as big as a leg of lamb, and almost the first thing he did when we were alone was to hold it out, huge, dirty, and hairy, and put it alongside mine. He scratched his rough head in his perplexity.
"At Gladsmuir," he said, "'er nainsell did take ten Southron loons wi' 'er own hant, wi' nobody to help 'er, an' now one callant had dinged 'er clean senseless wi' nothin' but a bairn's nief."
"It wasn't clean fighting, Donald," said I. "Nothing but a sort of trick. If you were to hit me fair and square I should snap in two like a carrot. Tell me how you captured the ten men!"
It was a longish story, at any rate as he told it, in quaint uncertain English, intermixed with spates of his own Gaelic as he got excited over the account of his prowess. One of them was an officer, and Donald finished up by ferreting out of his meal-bag a magnificent gold watch, lawful prize from his point of view, taken out of the officer's fob.
"Ta tam t'ing was alife when I raxed 'er out of 'is poke," he said, "but 'er went dead sune after. She can 'ave 'er for a shillin'."
He had no idea, nor could I make him understand, what it was and what purpose it served. When it had run down for want of winding, to his simple mind it had 'died.' He pushed it into my hand as indifferently as if it had been a turnip, and I promised to pay him at Leek, for my pockets were empty again and Margaret had the bag.
"'Er nainsell wad rather 'ave a new pair o' progues," said he. "And what for does anybody want a thing tat goes dead to tell ta time wi'? T'ere's ta sun and ta stars, tat never go dead."
As we walked rapidly we overtook our party soon after settling the matter of the watch. The plough-lad who had been pressed as guide told me we were near the road to Leek, and I let him return. We dropped down to a rough road running our way, and a mile or so along it the roofs of a village came in sight, and we halted till the main body came up.
"What is it, Oliver?" asked the Colonel.
"Breakfast, sir," said I.
We marched into the village in military array. At our head strode Donald, stout of heart and mighty of hand, with two pipers skirling away at his heels, and the clansmen stepping it out bravely two abreast behind them. Margaret came next, with me at her mare's head, and the Colonel and Maclachlan brought up the rear.
Our arrival created as much stir as an earthquake. The Highlanders, in twos and threes, swarmed into the houses and ordered their unwilling hosts to prepare them a meal. That it was war I was engaged in was, for the first time, brought clearly home to me when I saw a fearsome Highlander, with claymore, dirk, and loaded musket, posted at each end of the village. A touch of ordinary human nature was, however, added, when the children, fearless and happy in their ignorance, sidled up to the sentries and stared at them as eagerly as if they had been war-painted Indians in a travelling show.
At first, we, the gentry for short, intended to seek accommodation in the inn, poor and shabby though it looked, and Donald was ordered thither to give instructions. The Colonel and the chieftain rode along the village to observe how things were going, and this left Margaret and me together, and spectators of a delightful little passage. For as Donald approached the inn-door, the hostess, a sharp-nosed, vixenish woman, charged at him with a very dirty besom and routed him completely. Truth to tell, Donald, who had the sound, sweet nature of a child, had all the natural child's indifference to dirt, but even he, long-suffering in such matters as he was, had to stop to scrape the filth out of his eyes. This gave me the chance of making peace, and I went up and explained that we should pay for everything like ordinary travellers, good money for good fare.
"Oh aye!" she said.
"Jonnock!" said I.
"You're a Stafford chap," she asserted.
"I am," I agreed, "and I'll see you done well by."
That settled her, and Donald was settled too, for his immediate wants were satisfied by a large glass of brandy, and those more remote by a bucket of water and a towel.
"Gom!" said the virile little woman to me, "a wesh'll do him no harm. I've got the biggest gorby of a mon," she went on, "between Mow Cop and the Cocklow o' Leek. He's gone trapesing off, with our young Ted on his shoulders, to see yow chaps march into Leek. There's about a dozen on 'em gone, as brisk as if they were goin' to Stoke wakes. Fine fools they'll lukken when they comes whom to-nate."
As it happened, the "Dun Cow" was after all left to Donald and the pipers. When I rejoined Margaret, she said, "Pray help me down, Oliver, and we'll find the doctor, and have him dress your head. And, once out of Donald's sight, I'll have the laugh that's nearly killing me to keep under."
I helped her down, and said, "Never mind doctor! That fine old church yonder must be well worth looking into."
"You will mind, sir," she flashed. She beckoned to Donald to take charge of her mare, and then waylaid a passing girl, running from one sentry to the other, and got her to show us the doctor's.
So we started thither, and as we went she said, "Really, Oliver, you are inconsiderate at times."
"Nonsense," said I. "It's my head."
I was angry, not at her words, for I knew she did not mean them, but at my inability to see what the fascinating jade was driving at.
"Inconsiderate," she repeated firmly. "You'd be content to be introduced to the Prince with a great swathe of dirty, blood-stained linen round your head, regardless of how it reflected on me."
"Reflected on you?" I echoed blankly.
"Yes. We shouldn't match. I suppose dear old Bloggs was a bachelor?"
"He was," said I, resigning the contest in despair.
The doctor lived in a fair-sized stick-and-wattle house. He was a dapper little man, with a cleverish, weakling cast of face, and was all on the jump with the turn things had taken. He had just opened the door to us, and was eyeing us uncertainly, when the Colonel and the Chief, returning on foot from their inspection, having left their horses to be baited under the watchful eye of a Highlander, stopped beside us.
"Are you the doctor?" asked Margaret promptly, as if to forestall any backing out on my part. If I could have joyed at anything, I should have been overjoyed at her keenness in having me seen to.
"Yes," he said, but very softly.
"Then please attend to this gentleman's wound," she said.
"Is he a rebel?" he asked, so loudly that he might have been talking to some one across the street, and instinctively I turned round There, sure enough, was the parson, a pasty, pursy, mean-looking rogue, coming across to see what was doing.
"It's his head I want you to attend to," retorted Margaret, "not his politics."
"I doctor no rebels," said he, louder than ever.
"Man," intervened Maclachlan, taking a pistol from his belt, and emphasizing his words by gently tapping its barrel on the palm of his hand, "if in ten minutes yon head isn't doctored to pairfection, it's your own sel' will be beyond all the doctoring in England."
"It's against all law," said the doctor.
"I'm the law in this clachan to-day," said Maclachlan simply, still tapping away with his pistol. Hearing the parson behind, he turned round and added drily, "And the gospel." Hereupon the parson's face took on the appearance of ill-made, ill-risen dough, and he turned and slipped off with creeping, noiseless steps, like a cat.
"Come in," whispered the doctor.
"Ye're a man o' sense," said Maclachlan, and pushed his pistol back into his belt.
We all passed into the hall, and the doctor made the door carefully.
"That damned pudding-face is a Whig," said he, "and so, of course, he's a Justice. The Squire's a Whig, and he's a Justice. Here am I, well-reputed in the faculty, and my wife coming of the Parker Putwells, one of the rare old county stocks--none of your newfangled button-men and turnip-growers--and I'm no Justice, because I'm a Church-and-King man of the old school."
"They went out of fashion with flaxen bobs," said I.
"Come on, my tousled macaroni!" said he. "There's nothing the matter with the inside of your head at any rate, though the outside looks as if you'd been arguing with the parish bull."
"This is a verra fine house," said Maclachlan slowly and slily.
"A mere dog-kennel," said the doctor, "considering she's a Parker Putwell."
"And I'm thinking," said Maclachlan, very thoughtfully "that there'll be some guid victuals in the pantry and, mayhap, a gay wheen bottles of right liquor in the cellar."
"Oh aye!" said he, taken aback.
"Then I'm thinking we'll e'en have breakfast here and try their merits. And if it's a guid ane, I'll see you a Justice, whatever that may be, when the King enjoys his own again. A Maclachlan has spoken it."
The doctor went to an inner door and bawled, "Euphemia," and a discontented wisp of a woman answered his call.
"Madam and gentlemen, my wife, Mistress Snooks, born a Parker Putwell. Mistress Snooks, like me, will bow to your will with pleasure, nor will you mislike her table, I assure you. Now, my buck, let's see to this crack in your head."
He took me into his druggery, unwrapped the bandage, and examined my wound.
"So ho!" said he, "a right good sock on the head. How did it happen?"
I told him.
"It's lucky for you, my buck," he said, "that you've got a baby's flesh and a tup's skull, and some one had the sense to wash the cut clean as soon as it was done."
He set to work and made a good job of it, with a pledget of lint and strips of plaister, and meanwhile I speculated as to why, in all these bottles and jars and gallipots, neither nature nor art could contrive to store a drug magistral for the blow that had riven my heart asunder.
"That's better than two yards stripped off a wench's smock," he said at last. "And a damnably fine smock too, you lucky rascal."
He twittered a snatch of ribaldry that made my foot twitch in my boot. Behind his back, I pocketed the priceless relic, dank and red with my unworthy blood, and followed him back to the company.
We made a longish stay, and fared well at his table. The doctor was a good enough fellow in himself, but his wife, a salt, domineering woman, lived in the light of the Parker Putwells, and he, poor devil, in the shadow they cast. He was playing a double game too, for whenever the red-elbowed serving-wench came into the room, he roared his dissent from our lawlessness, and drank to the King with his glass over the water-bottle as soon as she went out. Once when she brought us a rare dish of calvered roach and, with wenchlike curiosity, lingered to pick up a crumb or two of gossip, we had a snap of comedy, for, in his play-acting, he would take none till Maclachlan, to keep up the farce, thrust a pistol at his head and forced him. Whereupon the maid, in plucky fashion, threw a cottage loaf at Maclachlan and took him fairly in the chest. The doctor, to his credit, rose to protect her, but she braved it out. She would, she averred, lend the thingamyjig a better petticoat than the one he'd got on. "If he mun wear 'em," she added, "he mought wear 'em long enough to be dacent." The doctor bustled her out at last, palpitating but triumphant.
Maclachlan had sprung up like a wild cat when the missile hit him. Luckily he was flustered by the bouncing of the loaf on the table and off again clean into Margaret's lap, or the ready trigger would surely have been drawn in earnest. Then Margaret promptly took the edge off his anger by saying with menacing sweetness, "I'm sorry the fun has gone further than was desirable, but I will not have the girl blamed for what was in her a brave deed, nor suffer any unpleasantness here on account of it. Pray be seated."
This ended the matter, and Maclachlan, with a wry smile, settled down again to his fish.
"It was a verra guid thing after a' said," he explained, "that it wasna my mouth, for it was an unco' ding. I'm half hungry yet, and, to be sure, breakfast and broillerie gang ill together."
It was well said, and Margaret rewarded him with a smile and engaged him in merry conversation. The Colonel, who had kept silent during the trouble, now plied the doctor with questions about the surrounding country.
"It's a poor biding-place for a Parker Putwell," he replied. "If there's a drearier or lonelier stretch in England than the moorlands of Leek, I would not care to see it. I go miles on end about it to visit my sick folk, and mostly in a day's riding I see nobody but a stray shepherd, a flash pedlar twanning his way across country with his gewgaws, and now and then a weaver scouring the outlying cottages for yarn."
When the meal was over Maclachlan insisted on paying for it, and bestowed a shilling on the loaf-thrower. In theory, I found, the clansmen paid for what they had, and Donald, being quartermaster to the party, was very busy discharging his obligations up and down the village. The only cause of dissatisfaction, but that not a slight one, was his Scots mode of reckoning, in which a pint was near on half a gallon, while his shilling was a beggarly penny. It always took a whirl of his dirk and a storm of Gaelic to convince a cottager of his accuracy, but he got through at last, and we reformed our order of march and started for Leek.
This time I took the sorrel and Maclachlan marched beside Margaret on her mare, for the Colonel wanted to give me an account, derived from the young Chief, of the Prince's marchings and victories. The Highlanders being astonishing foot-folk, and the Colonel being full of analogies and digressions, the tower of Leek church came in sight before we had got the Prince out of Edinburgh.
A halt was called to discuss what was to be done. The Colonel dismounted, and we followed his example. Margaret, I noticed, coloured slightly as Maclachlan lifted her down. 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."
"Of a certainty," retorted the Colonel, "Margaret and one of your pipers would be enough if we only had the townspeople to consider. There's no game much easier than walking into a lion's den when the lion isn't there, but it's pure foolishness to play the game till you're sure he's not at home."
"Lion! What's to do here wi' lions?" asked Maclachlan.
"As I'm only a volunteer," answered the Colonel, "and not yet a man of authority under the Prince's commission, which you are, I must ask your leave to explain that our getting into Leek is a military problem. I grant ye it's a little problem, since it wouldn't matter a pinch of snuff if we marched in and every one of us was promptly hanged in the market-place. But I undertook to make Oliver here a soldier, and, damme, what you want to do isn't soldiership, and he'll only learn soldiership by mastering the little problems first."
"Like sums at school," said I, whereat Margaret laughed aloud.
"Damme, you young rascal," stormed the Colonel, "if I'd got my commission in my pocket, I'd put you under arrest for impertinence."
"With great respect, sir," I answered, "I beg to say that I understand that, at a council of war, the youngest officer gives his opinion first."
"That's bowled you over, dad," said Margaret cheerfully.
"Damme, I'll bowl you off to Chester to-night," he retorted. "As sure as a gun's a gun, you'll ruin Oliver. Stop grinning like an ape, sir, at that jade's tricks, and listen to me."
"I'm thinking, sir," said Maclachlan, "that in my present responsible position I would greatly value your observations on the matter in hand."
This was a clever remark so far as the Colonel was concerned, for he would have talked to a viper about soldiering, but Maclachlan did not see, and I did, the delicate little mouth that Margaret made.
"My observations are simply these," said the Colonel: "We do not know where Murray is, we do not know where the Prince is, and we do not know where the Duke of Devonshire is. Any one of them may be in Leek."
"And who may be the Duke of Devonshire?" asked the chief. "I've never heard of him."
"One of Geordie's dandiprats, who has got together a big force of militia at Derby, and who, if he's any pluck, may have forestalled us all by marching to Leek."
"It's sair awkward," said Maclachlan, completely taken aback by the news.
"It is so," said the Colonel, "and seeing that Oliver knows the rules and procedures of courts martial, he shall deliver his judgment first."
"Sir," said I, bowing low, "I would, with respect, suggest...."
I got no further, for Donald, who was within a yard of my elbow, suddenly bounded into the air and let off a most astonishing yell. Then he ran up and down, like a foxhound after a lost scent, gabbling away in Gaelic. The clansmen put their hands to their ears, and their ears to the wind, listening intently, whereon Donald ceased his capering and chattering, and called out to us, "Ta pipes! Ta Prunce! Ta pipes! Ta Prunce!"
"Whist, ye auld fule," said the chief. "Ye're enough to deafen a clap of thunder."
"I'm telling it ye, ta pipes! ta Prunce!" he babbled, and then fell still, and we all listened.
The clansmen must have had ears like the bucks of their own mountains. I could hear nothing but the soft sough of the breeze as it swept o'er the rank grass of the moorlands, but they, Maclachlan as madly as any of them, yelled their slogan, and the pipers filled their bags and blew fit to burst. Like was calling to like across the wilds.
Margaret glowed with enthusiasm, and the Colonel's eyes sparkled as he handed me the box for the customary pinch--a courtesy, I found by later experience, he conferred on very few. Indeed, in my new trouble, the kindness and affection of the Colonel were becoming my best stand-by.
"The great game's afoot, Oliver," he said.
"And we'll play it to the end, sir."
"Good lad," said he.
"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. I took no advantage of my capacity as her body-servant, but leaped into my saddle and sat the sorrel like a wooden image as he dodged about to get her horsed again and ready for the road. He was, indeed, fit to serve a queen; the Highland fashion marvellously well set off the clean, strong lines of his body, and the single eagle's feather in his bonnet was the right sign to be waving over him. The top-dog spirit was fast oozing out of me, and I sat there sourly dusting the skirts of my poor country-tailor-made coat.
The men were lined up on the rough moorland track, Donald at their head, and the two pipers filling their bags and fingering their chanters behind him. Maclachlan took Margaret's rein and began to lead her mare up the slope of the path, but the Colonel called to him and diverted his attention, and she stopped beside me.
"Oliver," she said, "you must let me have your coat for half an hour when we are settled in the town, so that I can mend it. The holes in it make me shiver every time I see them."
"You are very kind, madam," said I, still dusting away, lest she should see how my hand trembled.
"Oliver!"
She forced me to look at her now, she spoke so peremptorily, and when the blue eyes met mine they were so clear and intent that I feared she might read my secret.
"Smile!"
Smile! I was to smile, was I? And when our Kate got the news at the Hanyards, the smile would die out of her eyes for ever, for Jack, dear, splendid Jack, was the weft that had been woven into the warp of her being.
"I do not smile to order, madam," said I.
She flicked the mare sharply and cantered up to the level, whither Maclachlan raced after her with the speed of a hound.
