nding this promise, however, the veteran listened with all
the attention he could to gather their discourse, or, as he described it
himself, "laid his ears back in his neck, like Gustavus, when he heard
the key turn in the girnell-kist." He could, therefore, owing to the
narrowness of the dungeon, easily overhear the following dialogue.

"Are you aware, Son of the Mist," said the Campbell, "that you will
never leave this place excepting for the gibbet?"

"Those who are dearest to me," answered MacEagh, "have trode that path
before me."

"Then you would do nothing," asked the visitor, "to shun following
them?"

The prisoner writhed himself in his chains before returning an answer.

"I would do much," at length he said; "not for my own life, but for the
sake of the pledge in the glen of Strath-Aven."

"And what would you do to turn away the bitterness of the hour?" again
demanded Murdoch; "I care not for what cause ye mean to shun it."

"I would do what a man might do, and still call himself a man."

"Do you call yourself a man," said the interrogator, "who have done the
deeds of a wolf?"

"I do," answered the outlaw; "I am a man like my forefathers--while
wrapt in the mantle of peace, we were lambs--it was rent from us, and ye
now call us wolves. Give us the huts ye have burned, our children whom
ye have murdered, our widows whom ye have starved--collect from the
gibbet and the pole the mangled carcasses, and whitened skulls of our
kinsmen--bid them live and bless us, and we will be your vassals and
brothers--till then, let death, and blood, and mutual wrong, draw a dark
veil of division between us."

"You will then do nothing for your liberty," said the Campbell.

"Anything--but call myself the friend of your tribe," answered MacEagh.

"We scorn the friendship of banditti and caterans," retorted Murdoch,
"and would not stoop to accept it.--What I demand to know from you, in
exchange for your liberty, is, where the daughter and heiress of the
Knight of Ardenvohr is now to be found?"

"That you may wed her to some beggarly kinsman of your great master,"
said Ranald, "after the fashion of the Children of Diarmid! Does not
the valley of Glenorquhy, to this very hour, cry shame on the violence
offered to a helpless infant whom her kinsmen were conveying to the
court of the Sovereign? Were not her escort compelled to hide her
beneath a cauldron, round which they fought till not one remained to
tell the tale? an