ooker's part MacLachlan's quarrel
was not mine, the burgh was none of my blood, and the Glen Shira men
were my father's friends and neighbours. Splendid, too, candidly kept
out of the turmoil when he saw that young MacLachlan was safely free
of his warders, and that what had been a cause militant was now only a
Highland diversion.

"Let them play away at it," he said; "I'm not keen to have wounds in a
burgher's brawl in my own town when there's promise of braver sport over
the hills among other tartans."

Up the town drifted the little battle, no dead left as luck had it, but
many a gout of blood. The white gables clanged back the cries, in
claps like summer thunder, the crows in the beech-trees complained in
a rasping roupy chorus, and the house-doors banged at the back of men,
who, weary or wounded, sought home to bed. And Splendid and I were on
the point of parting, secure that the young laird of MacLachlan was at
liberty, when that gentleman himself came scouring along, hard pressed
by a couple of MacNicolls ready with brands out to cut him down. He was
without steel or stick, stumbling on the causeway-stones in a stupor of
weariness, his mouth gasping and his coat torn wellnigh off the back of
him. He was never in his twenty years of life nearer death than then,
and he knew it; but when he found John Splendid and me before him he
stopped and turned to face the pair that followed him--a fool's vanity
to show fright had not put the heels to his hurry! We ran out beside
him, and the MacNicolls refused the _rencontre_, left their quarry,
and fled again to the town-head, where their friends were in a dusk the
long-legged lad's flambeau failed to mitigate.

"I'll never deny after this that you can outrun me!" said John Splendid,
putting up his small sword.

"I would have given them their kail through the reek in a double dose if
I had only a simple knife," said the lad angrily, looking up the street,
where the fighting was now over. Then he whipped into Brown's close and
up the stair, leaving us at the gable of Craignure's house.

John Splendid, ganting sleepily, pointed at the fellow's disappearing
skirts. "Do you see yon?" said he, and he broke into a line of a Gaelic
air that told his meaning.

"Lovers?" I asked.

"What do you think yourself?" said he.

"She is mighty put about at his hazard," I confessed, reflecting on her
tears.

"Cousins, ye ken, cousins!" said Splendid, and he put a finger in my
side,