-of the inevitable.

I was awakened from these thoughts by the entrance of my lieutenant,
who said, "Still sighing that you were out of the chase after the Black
Colonel?"

I answered vaguely, "A soldier who is a real soldier, which I may or
may not be, is always sorry to miss an enterprise, whether it be duty
or merely an adventure."

"Well," he remarked, "you had not been long gone when word came from
Braemar Castle that the Black Colonel was to be in the Pass of Ballater
about midnight, meeting some unknown person, and asking us to help
capture him. We saw nothing of the other person, whether man or woman."

He looked slyly at me, and I remembered having said to him that I had
had a tryst to keep among the hills. You must not, I think, mislead
people by telling what is untrue, but you need not tell everything if
it is going to make mischief. Mostly it is poor policy to try and ram
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, down a man's
throat, because your version of it may not be his, and, anyhow, it
makes dry eating.

My thoughts have a habit of wandering, of dreaming dreams, often when
they should be otherwise occupied, and isn't there a bunch of
manuscript verse somewhere in testimony of the same? Knowing this the
lieutenant lighted and smoked a pipe of American tobacco, then a
novelty and a luxury in the Scottish Highlands. With a wink of the eye
he asked, "Who was she, captain? Wench or maid?" And he pronounced
the words in different tones, as if I needed to be instructed about the
difference he implied by them. A man says nothing to an
arch-pleasantry like that, unless he be no man and only a babbler and
boaster of his conquests. Then he has had none, and is a liar. No
sort of fellow more fills men with contempt, and women, by their
woman's instinct, pass him by, for any confidence whatever, in word or
in deed.

"Don't let it be one of the Black Colonel's flames," said the
lieutenant with a laugh, as he went out again, without the answer he
had not expected, being himself a gentleman. "It needs a long spoon to
sup with that dark devil at any time, but come between him and his
rustic gallantries and you'll need a longer spoon than Corgarff Castle
happens to possess."

The Black Colonel and I, as you will have gathered, were on different
sides in politics, though we belonged to neighbouring clans which had
many associations; he a Farquharson, I a Gordon. He was Jock
Farquharson