"

"Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on
the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He'll know
himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least
leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all
it's not much of a weakness--the wish to save a wife and children from
danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has
deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding
courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should
be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except
for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little."

I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short
time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty
rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a
hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the
clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for
the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down
the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the
road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and
deserted countryside waiting them.

CHAPTER IX.--INVASION.

Eight hours after the beacon kindled on Dunchuach, the enemy was feeling
at the heart of Argile.

It came out years after, that one Angus Macalain, a Glencoe man, a
branded robber off a respectable Water-of-Duglas family, had guided the
main body of the invaders through the mountains of the Urchy and into
our territory. They came on in three bands, Alasdair Mac-Donald and
the Captain of Clanranald (as they called John MacDonald, the beast--a
scurvy knave!), separating at Accurach at the forking of the two glens,
and entering both, Montrose himself coming on the rear as a support As
if to favour the people of the Glens, a thaw came that day with rain and
mist that cloaked them largely from view as they ran for the hills to
shelter in the sheiling bothies. The ice, as I rode up the water-side,
home to Glen Shira to gather some men and dispose my father safely, was
breaking on the surface of the loch and roaring up on the shore in the
incoming tide. It came piling in layers in the bays--a most wonderful
spectacle! I could not hear my horse's hooves for the cracking and
crushing and cannonade of it as it flowed