sy as to
reivers--for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?--when
a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last
days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled
with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in
the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.

We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set
proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the
young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of
strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might
be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.

The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them
came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could
look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.

"Co tha'n sud's an uchd air a bhuaile?" ("Who is there leaning on the
fold?") asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.

He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly
eerie in their silence on the wall.

"Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m'inthaidh aig an fhear as gile
broilleach agaibh" ("My arrow's for the whitest breast, if ye make no
answer "), said my man, and there was no answer.

The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white
breast fell--shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan
they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we
rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.

They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but
namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of
their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.

And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved
at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the
blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each
other in their hurry from her foul lips.

"Dogs! dogs!--heaven's worst ill on ye, dogs!" she cried, a waeful
spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try
and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would
have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and
she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.

Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was
t