raining at the axe-handle.

"You and I, Wullie!
'Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!'"

The axe-head was as immoveable as the Muir Pike.

"'Let us do or die!'"

The shaft snapped, and the little man tottered back. Red Wull jumped
down from the table, and, in doing so, brushed against the Cup. It
toppled* over on to the floor, and rolled tinkling away in the dust.
And the little man fled madly out of the house, still screaming his
war-song.

*N.B.--You may see the dent in the Cup's white sides to this
day.

* * * * *

When, late that night, M'Adam returned home, the Cup was gone. Down on
his hands and knees he traced out its path, plain to see, where it had
rolled along the dusty floor. Beyond that there was no sign.

At first he was too much overcome to speak. Then he raved round the room
like a derelict ship, Red Wull following uneasily behind. He cursed;
he blasphemed; he screamed and beat the walls with feverish hands. A
stranger, passing, might well have thought this was a private Bedlam. At
last, exhausted, he sat down and cried.

"It's David, Wullie, ye may depend; David that's robbed his father's
hoose. Oh, it's a grand thing to ha' a dutiful son!"--and he bowed his
gray head in his hands.

David, indeed, it was. He had come back to the Grange during his
father's absence, and, taking the Cup from its grimy bed, had marched it
away to its rightful home. For that evening at Kenmuir, James Moore had
said to him:

"David, your father's not sent the Cup. I shall come and fetch it
to-morrow." And David knew he meant it. Therefore, in order to save a
collision between his father and his friend--a collision the issue of
which he dared hardly contemplate, knowing, as he did, the unalterable
determination of the one and the lunatic passion of the other--the boy
had resolved to fetch the Cup himself, then and there, in the teeth, if
needs be, of his father and the Tailless Tyke. And he had done it.

When he reached home that night he marched, contrary to his wont,
straight into the kitchen.

There sat his father facing the door, awaiting him, his hands upon his
knees. For once the little man was alone; and David, brave though he
was, thanked heaven devoutly that Red Wull was elsewhere.

For a while father and son kept silence, watching one another like two
fencers.

"'Twas you as took ma Cup?" asked the little man at last, lean