eeled wand like the others," I
thought, and then the reason for its position flashed on me. It was with
just a touch of vanity I said to my friend, "A little coueging may be
of some use at woodcraft too, if it sharpens Elrigmore's wits enough to
read the signs that Barbreck's eagle eye can find nothing in. I could
tell the very hour our friends left here."

"Not on their own marks," he replied sharply, casting his eyes very
quickly again on twig and leaf.

"On nothing else," said I.

He looked again, flushed with vexation, and cried himself beat to make
more of it than he had done.

"What's the oak branch put so for, with its point to the sky if------?"

"I have you now!" he cried; "it's to show the situation of the sun when
they left the rendezvous. Three o'clock, and no mist with them; good
lad, good lad! Well, we must be going. And now that we're on the safe
side of Argile there's only one thing vexing me, that we might have
been here and all together half a day ago if yon whelp of a whey-faced
MacDonald in the bed had been less of the fox."

"Indeed and he might have been," said I, as we pursued our way. "A
common feeling of gratitude for the silver----"

"Gratitude!" cried John, "say no more; you have fathomed the cause of
his bitterness at the first trial. If I had been a boy in a bed myself,
and some reckless soldiery of a foreign clan, out of a Sassenach notion
of decency, insulted my mother and my home with a covert gift of coin to
pay for a night's lodging, I would throw it in their faces and follow it
up with stones."

Refreshed by our rest and heartened by our meal, we took to the
drove-road almost with lightness, and walked through the evening till
the moon, the same that gleamed on Loch Linnhe and Lochiel, and lighted
Argile to the doom of his reputation for the time being, swept a path
of gold upon Lochow, still hampered with broken ice. The air was still,
there was no snow, and at Corryghoil, the first house of any dignity
we came to, we went up and stayed with the tenant till the morning. And
there we learned that the minister and the three Campbells and Stewart,
the last with a bullet in his shoulder, had passed through early in the
afternoon on their way to Cladich.

CHAPTER XXIX.--THE RETURN.

We got a cold welcome from the women of our own clan and country. They
had been very warm and flattering as we passed north--the best they had
was not good enough for us; now they eyed us aska