Out of the haze now and then, as we descended
to the valley, there would come the peculiar cry of the red-deer, or the
flaff of a wing, or the bleat of a goat It was maddening to be in the
neighbourhood of the meal that roe, or bird, or goat would offer, and
yet be unable to reach it.

Thus we were stumbling on, very weary, very hungry, the man with the
want in a constant wail, and Sonachan lamenting for suppers he had been
saucy over in days of rowth and plenty, when a light oozed out of the
grey-dark ahead of us, in the last place in the world one would look for
any such sign of humanity.

We stopped on the moment, and John Splendid went ahead to see what lay
in the way. He was gone but a little when he came back with a hearty
accent to tell us that luck for once was ours.

"There's a house yonder," said he, talking English for the benefit of
the cleric; "it has a roaring fire and every sign of comfort, and it's
my belief there's no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns.
The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post
and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching
clothes and crooning away at a dirge that's broken by her tears. If it
had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us
so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered
something at our hands. But we were never near this tack-house before,
so the housewife's sorrow, whatever it is, can scarcely be at our door.
Anyway," he went on, "here are seven cold men, and weary men and hungry
men too (and that's the worst of it), and I'm going to have supper and a
seat, if it's the last in the world."

"I hope there's going to be no robbery about the affair," said the
minister, in an apparent dread of rough theft and maybe worse.

M'Iver's voice had a sneer in every word of it when he answered in a
very affected tongue of English he was used to assume when he wished to
be at his best before a Saxon.

"Is it the logic of your school," he asked, "that what's the right
conduct of war when we are in regiments is robbery when we are but seven
broken men? I'm trying to mind that you found fault with us for
helping ourselves in this same Glencoe last week, and refused to eat
Corrycrick's beef in Appin, and I cannot just recall the circumstance.
Are we not, think ye, just as much at war with Glencoe now as then? And
have seven starving men not an even better right, before