ew sentinels), glad
for a time to escape the sight of yon shambles of friend and foe that
the battle had left us. The air had softened of a sudden from its
piercing cold to a mildness balmy by comparison; the sky had leadened
over with a menacing vapour, and over the water--in the great glen
between Ben Ime and Ardno--a mist hurried to us like driving smoke. A
few flakes of snow fell, lingering in the air as feathers from a nest in
spring.

"Here's a friend of Argile back again," said an old halberdier,
staunching a savage cut on his knee, and mumbling his words because he
was chewing as he spoke an herb that's the poultice for every wound.

"Frost and snow might have been Argile's friend when that proverb was
made," said John Splendid, "but here are changed times; our last snow
did not keep Colkitto on the safe side of Cladich. Still, if this be
snow in earnest," he added with a cheerier tone, "it may rid us of these
vermin, who'll find provand iller to get every extra day they bide.
Where are you going, Master Gordon?"

"To the well," said the minister, simply, stopping at the port, with
a wooden stoup in his hand. "Some of our friends must be burning for a
mouthful, poor dears; the wounded flesh is drouthy."

John turned himself round on a keg he sat on, and gave a French shrug he
had picked up among foreign cavaliers.

"Put it down, sir," he said; "there's a wheen less precious lives in
this hold than a curate's, and for the turn you did us in coming up to
alarm us of the rear attack, if for nothing else, I would be sorry to
see you come to any skaith. Do you not know that between us and the
well there might be death half-a-dozen times? The wood, I'll warrant, is
hotching still with those disappointed warriors of Clanranald, who would
have no more reverence for your life than for your Geneva bands."

"There's no surer cure for the disease of death in a hind than for the
same murrain in a minister of the Gospel--or a landed gentleman," said
Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as
we heard them at the kirk-session.

John showed some confusion in his face, and the minister had his feet on
the steps before he could answer him.

"Stop, stop!" he cried. "Might I have the honour of serving the Kirk for
once? I'll get the water from the well, minister, if you'll go in again
and see how these poor devils of ours are thriving. I was but joking
when I hinted at the risk; our Athole gen