bow;" but he forgot that the fire whose
embers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite as
well as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered only
struck him when the man, after but one glance in, went bounding down the
hill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.

It was "Bundle and Go" on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of the
hill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in the
direction of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fall
upon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we came
upon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in the
heart of the forest of Creag Dubh,--or rather more on the upper edge
of it,--their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of the
mountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-trees
lay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, with
the wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charred
arms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or about
these once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them,
had been spared by the robbers.

But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our way
along the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sure
to have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was bound
to be round it.

It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and raw
in the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves and
moss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick nor
massive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, so
that we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation.
We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our first
check came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood
and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But
there was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, plopping
and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a
wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way
in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry--a
laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder
than a child's toy.

On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump
of beech, strewed generously ab