e laughing when
the moor-birds would be rising with a quick whirring of wings under the
horse's feet in the heather. At a long loping canter we crossed the
peat hags, and slithered into the valley on the other side and made the
burn. I mind I stood the horse in the burn to his knees, and he cooled
a little, and then started to be pawing at the water, and snoring at it
glinting past his legs, and tinkling and laughing down the glen. The
heather was dark and withered, and at the banks of the stream I am
seeing yet the long tufts of white grass, like an old man's beard,
shaking with a dry rustle, and there was the sparkle of the last of the
moon making a granite boulder gleam into jewel points, and then we made
our way to the Locker. I was not very sure of the place, but I made
the three long whistles on my fingers that the boys will be using when
there is help needed. From the hillside I got the answer, clear and
piercing like a shepherd's, and then all would be silent except for the
swishing of the heather and the thumping at the ribs of me, for I would
be sure now that Bryde was in the Locker on some mad ploy. When I was
come near the entrance I dismounted and left the beast loose, for I
kent he would make his way home to his stable. As I was clambering up
the last of it, a voice came to me.

"Oh man, Hamish, hurry," and it was not the voice of Bryde, but I kent
the voice, and the eagerness of it and the gladness.

"Dan," I cried, "och, Dan," and after that I am not remembering. How I
came to be sitting in the Locker with Dan beside me, and the smoke
eddying up, and the droll-shaped pond and the queer carving all there,
as it would be yon daft night twenty years ago, I am not remembering.

But there was Dan McBride with a sabre slash from his ear to the point
of his chin, and a proud set to his head, and a way of bending from his
hips like a man reared in the saddle. A great martial moustache curled
at the corners of his mouth. Dan McBride that was away for twenty
years, and mair. He was arrayed in some outlandish soldier rig, with
great boots and prodigious spurs.

"The lass," says he at the first go-off, "what came o' the lass that
will be my wife?" says he, with a great breath. "Is all things right
with Belle?"

"Finely," says I; "you will be seeing her with the daylight."

"Man, I will have been needing that word," says he.

"What am I to be calling ye, man?"

"Hooch," says he, and his words wer