anner in which it can best be done. I want it at once, because news
comes to me, through the early channel of our domestics, that the Black
Colonel means to ride over upon us one of these evenings, a friendly
call, I suppose. Marget does not know of this intention on his part,
and I am not going to tell her, for a mother's instinct naturally
wishes to shield a daughter from disturbance.

"If you would advise me how to say 'No' without bringing further
displeasure from high places upon our ruined house, you would be doing
us a service. If, besides that, you were to find a means of keeping
the Black Colonel away, why, you would be doing a further service."

As I read that last sentence an idea struck me, and I at once sent a
note to the dear lady, saying I would solve her difficulty. Then I
dispatched a pair of trusty scouts in quest of certain information I
needed, and in eight hours they were back with it. After that, I felt
more myself than I had done for some time, just because I was now
committed to definite, perhaps even dangerous, action.

_XI--The Crack of Thunder_

It is fine how the spur of danger, especially danger to somebody else,
dear if not near, helps a man's spirits upward. The blood flows more
quickly in him, his hand is surer, his brain works better. He feels
that the die has been cast, that nothing more matters, except the
reckoning, and, so feeling, he sheds all timorous self-consciousness
and is himself.

That, at all events, was how I felt as I took the road southward,
across the hills towards Deeside, with a cracking wind to walk against.
I would intercept the Black Colonel's raid on Marget and her mother,
and break the whole scheme behind it--if I could!

So we scheme, we glorious little fellows of this world, bent on love or
hatred, and the Great Beneficence smiles at us, at our cleverness, or
it may be the Great Furies, however you will have it. Anyway, Nature
has merely to move and our grandest plans may crinkle up like a feather
held to a "cruisie," the rude lamp, fed with dried splinters of
fir-wood, or mutton tallow and a wick, which our Highlanders used for
lighting.

But that was not in my thoughts when I came to the top of the last hill
dividing our strath from the Black Colonel's. My estimate was that if
I got there by break of day and waited I should, being in a high eyrie
with a wide view, see him come from the opposite direction. My
information from my scouts w