e of the
silver-mine," would John insist; "and who in heaven's name would think
Alasdair _mosach_ knew the trick of it? I saw his horsemen fire one
pistol-shot and fall on at full speed. That's old Gustavus for you,
isn't it? And yet," he would continue, reflecting, "Auchin-breac knew
the Swedish tactics too. He had his musketeers and pikemen separate,
as the later laws demand; he had even a hint from myself of the due
proportion of two pikes to three muskets."

"But never a platoon fired a volley," I recalled. "It was steel and
targe from the onset." And then I would add, "What's to be said for
MacCailein?"

On this John Splendid would ruffle up wrothily with blame for my harping
on that incident, as if it were a crime to hint at any weakness in his
chief.

"You are very much afraid of a waff of wind blowing on your cousin's
name," I would cry.

"My chief, Elrigmore, my chief. I make no claim to consideration for
a cousin, but I'll stand up for Argile's name so long as the gyrony of
eight and the galley for Lorn are in his coat of arms."

Inverlochy, Inverlochy, Inverlochy--the black name of it rang in my head
like a tolling bell as I sought to doze for a little in Dalness house.
The whole events of the scandalous week piled up on me: I no sooner
wandered one thought away in the mists of the nether mind than a new
one, definite and harassing, grew in its place, so that I was turning
from side to side in a torture-rack of reflection when I should be lost
in the slumber my travel and weariness so well had earned me. Something
of an eeriness at our position in that genteel but lonely house lay
heavy on me too: it had no memories of friendship in any room for me; it
was haunted, if haunted at all, with the ghosts of people whose names we
only breathed with bitterness in the shire of Argile. And constantly the
wind would be howling in it, piping dismally in the vent of the room the
minister and I were in together; constant the rain would be hissing on
the embers of the fire; at a long distance off a waterfall, in veering
gusts of greater vehemence, crashed among its rocks and thundered in its
linn.

M'Iver, who was the first to take watch for the night, paced back and
forth along the lobbies or stood to warm himself at the fire he fed at
intervals with peat or pine-root Though he had a soldier's reverence for
the slumbers of his comrades, and made the least of noises as he moved
around in his deer-skins, the slighte