d stayed with me
last was Argile standing in his chamber in the castle of Inneraora, the
pallor of the study on his face, and his little Archie, with his gold
hair and the night-gown, running out and clasping him about the knees.

We struggled through the night, weary men, hungry men. Loch Leven-head
may be bonny by day, but at night it is far from friendly to the
unaccustomed wanderer. Swampy meadows frozen to the hard bone, and
uncountable burns, and weary ascents, and alarming dips, lie there at
the foot of the great forest of Mamore. And to us, poor fugitives, even
these were less cruel than the thickets at the very head where the
river brawled into the loch with a sullen surrender of its mountain
independence.

About seven or eight o'clock we got safely over a ford and into the
hilly country that lies tumbled to the north of Glencoe. Before us lay
the choice of two routes, either of them leading in the direction of
Glenurchy, but both of them hemmed in by the most inevitable risks,
especially as but one of all our party was familiar (and that one but
middling well) with the countryside. "The choice of a cross-road at
night in a foreign land is Tall John's pick of the farmer's daughters,"
as our homely proverb has it; you never know what you have till the
morn's morning. 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. From the hillside we emerged
upon, the valley lay revealed, a great hack among the mountains.

CHAPTER XXIII.--THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.

Of the seven of us, Stewart was the only one with a notion of the lie of
the country. He had bought cattle in the glen, and he had borrowed (as
we may be putting it) in the same place, and a man with the gifts of
observation and memory, who has had to guess his way at night among
foreign clans and hills with a drove of unwilling and mourning cattle
before him, has many a feature of the neighbourhood stamped upon his
mind. Stewart's idea was that to-night we might cross Glencoe, dive
into one of the passes that run between the mountains called the Big and
Little Herdsman, or between the Little Herd and Ben Fhada, into the foot
of the fo