nst us." A slim elder man he was, ordinarily with a wan sharp face;
now it was flushed and hoved in anger, and he hissed his texts through
his teeth as he faced the dogs. Some of youth's schooling was there, a
Lowland youth's training with the broadsword, for he handled it like no
novice, and even M'Iver gave him "Bravo, _suas e!_"

That we held our ground was no great virtue--we could scarcely do less;
but we did more, for soon we had our enemy driven back on the walls.
They fought with a frenzy that made them ill to beat, but when a couple
of scores of our lads lined the upper wall again and kept back the leak
from that airt by the command of John Splendid, it left us the chance of
sweeping our unwelcome tenants back again on the lower wall. They stayed
stubbornly, but we had weight against them and the advantage of the
little brae, and by-and-by we pinned them, like foumarts, against the
stones. Most of them put back against the wall, and fought, even with
the pike at their vitals, slashing empty air with sword or dirk; some
got on the wall again and threw themselves over the other side, risking
the chance of an uglier death on the rocks below.

In less than an hour after the shot of Para Mor (himself a stricken
corpse now) rang over Dunchuach, our piper, with a gash on his face, was
playing some vaunting air on the walls again, and the fort was free of
the enemy, of whom the bulk had fallen back into the wood, and seemingly
set out for Inneraora.

Then we gathered and stroked our dead--twenty-and-three; we put our
wounded in the governor's house, and gave them the rough leech-craft of
the fighting field; the dead of the assailants we threw over the rock,
and among them was a clean-shaven man in trews and a tight-fitting _cota
gearr_, who left two halves of an otter-skin cap behind him.

"I wish to God!" cried John Splendid, "that I had a drink of Altanaluinn
at this minute, or the well of Beal-loch-an-uarain."

It was my own first thought, or something very like it, when the
fighting was over, for a most cruel thirst crisped my palate, and, as
ill luck had it, there was not a cup of water in the fort.

"I could be doing with a drop myself," said the English minister. "I'll
take a stoup and go down to the well yonder and fetch it."

He spoke of the spout in the gut, a clean little well of hill-water
that, winter or summer, kept full to the lip and accessible.

We had gathered into the tower itself (all but a f