in the
kitchen, and the entire Clan walked with Alan back to the bridge,
where they found the carriage waiting.

Alan made short work of his good-byes. He shook hands all round
and sprang quickly into the carriage, and as it rattled away with
him down the road, he stood up, waving his bonnet with the spray
of evergreen pine in it and whistling the pewit call.

"Dagon't," said Sandy, when the carriage passed out of sight
around a bend in the road. "Dagon't, we'll never find another
like the Chief." If Jean and Jock had felt able to say anything,
they would have echoed the statement. As it was, Sandy drew his
kilmarnock bonnet over his eyes, thrust his hands into his
pockets, and started dejectedly toward his own house, leaving
Jean and Jock, equally miserable, to return alone to the wee bit
hoosie on the brae.

XII. NEWS

The rest of the week seemed at least a month long to the lonely
twins. Sandy came to see them, to be sure, but with the passing
of the Chief, the flavor seemed gone from the play, and the Clan
made no further expeditions after Angus Niel.

"He can just kill all the game he wants to," said Jean. "It's
the worse for the Auld Laird, I doubt, but who cares for that, so
long as he leaves Tam alone and keeps away from here? It's
nothing to me."

Their father had been so taken up with his work and with turning
over in his mind plans for the future, when they should be
"walking the world," that he paid little attention to their
punishment of Angus Niel, about which he knew little and cared
less. He was absorbed in planning the best market for his sheep
and in getting as much from his garden as he could, hoping to
sell what he was unable to use himself, when the time came to
leave. His usually cheerful face had grown more and more troubled
as the summer wore on, and it was seldom now that his bagpipes
woke the mountain echoes, and whenever he did while away a rainy
evening with music, the melodies were as wild and mournful as his
own sad thoughts.

Angus Niel's barometer now rose again. Finding himself no longer
pursued by his unseen foes, his waning self-confidence returned, and
it was only a week or two after Alan's departure that wonderful
stories began to go about the village concerning his prowess in
ridding the woods of thieves and marauders single-handed.

"I've even found my boat," he announced one evening to a group of
men lounging about the village store, "and it was no human hand