it a difficulty. But still a
ghillie of better strategy would have kept those cattle and, what is
worse, my friend, saved the suspicion which has fallen upon me."

"Nae for the first time," Red Murdo shot at the Black Colonel.

"It's not first times that matter," he retorted more quietly, being
pleased, in a manner, with Red Murdo's spirit; "it's last times that
count, and the need is to take care of them."

Possibly the Black Colonel might have met his material troubles for a
while longer without having to fly from them, because he was full of
stratagems. But on the sentimental side he fell into an affair of much
sadness for a comely lady who, at her mid-age, should have known
better, though, indeed, the forties have their storms, like the sea
latitudes sailors call the "roaring forties." Delectable as detail
might be, and desirable to illumine what all befell, I must, for I am
no scandal-monger, be content to give you the romance and the tragedy
in three snatches of verse begotten by the same.

First, you must make what you like of--

"She kept him till mornin', then bade him begane,
And showed him the road that he might na be ta'en."

Next, you have the news let loose, for--

"Word went to the kitchen
An' word went to the ha'."

Finally, when my lord of the lady rides home from a far journey and
hears that news, and meets her, he goes red, wud mad and--

"O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth
And cherry were her cheeks;
And cleir, cleir was her yellow hair
Whereon the reid blude dreips."

There the Black Colonel had found a tangle which he could not cut
through, and he sought a side-way out. How he discovered it he was
good enough to inform me, though I had no claim to his confidence, in
an epistle drafted in his best style, which reached me at Corgarff,
hard on the tidings of what had made the necessity for it.

"To Captain Ian Gordon, for his privy knowledge only," it opened, and
it continued, in his usual, even manner, for, mind you, he had the
trick of writing, as well as the odd weakness towards it already
remarked on, all of which appears in what follows, so:

"It may oblige your calculations that I have a proposal through proper
channels to go on a special mission to New France, where a state of war
now exists between the British and the French. Ordinarily I should
have hesitated to take a step which would remove me, even for a time,
from my most particular affairs here,