while
at Dalness we would be out of the reach of his friends before they had
gained large enough numbers and made up on him. So he had planned with
the few folk in the house to leave it temptingly open in our way, with
the shrewd guess that starved and wearied men would be found sleeping
beside the fire when the MacDonalds came round the gusset. All this the
Dame Dubh heard and realised even in her half frenzy as she spent some
time in the company of the marching MacDonalds, who never dreamt that
her madness and her denunciations of Clan Diarmaid were mixed in some
degree with a natural interest in the welfare of every member of that
clan.

M'Iver scrutinised the woman sharply, to assure himself there was no
cunning effort of a mad woman to pay off the score her evil tongue of
the day before revealed she had been reckoning; but he saw only here
dementia gone to a great degree, a friend anxious for our welfare--so
anxious, indeed, that the food Master Gordon was pressing upon her made
no appeal to her famishing body.

"You come wonderfully close on my Frankfort story," said M'Iver,
whimsically. "I only hope we may win out of Dalness as snugly as we won
out of the castle of the cousin of Pomerania."

For a minute or two we debated on our tactics. We had no muskets, though
swords were rife enough in Dalness, so a stand and a defence by weapons
was out of the question. M'Iver struck on a more pleasing and cleanly
plan. It was to give the MacDonalds tit for tat, and decoy them into the
house as their friends had decoyed us into it, and leave them there in
durance while we went on our own ways.

We jammed down the iron pins of the shutters in the salmanger, so
that any exit or entrance by this way was made a task of the greatest
difficulty; then we lit the upper flats, to give the notion that we were
lying there. M'Iver took his place behind a door that led from the hall
to other parts of the house, and was indeed the only way there, while
the rest of us went out into the night and concealed ourselves in the
dark angle made by a turret and gable--a place where we could see,
without being seen, any person seeking entry to the house.

All the paths about the mansion were strewn with rough sand or gravel
from the river, and the rain, in slanting spears, played hiss upon them
with a sound I never hear to-day but my mind's again in old Dalness. And
in the dark, vague with rain and mist, the upper windows shone blear and
ghos