"Let us have an end of madness!" said Donald Ross, sternly; and for a second there was a gleam of fire in his black eyes. But that sudden flame, and a certain set expression of the mouth, almost instantly vanished; this young fellow, with the girlish complexion, was even now so curiously like his sister. "I do not answer you," Donald Ross went on, with a demeanour at once simple and austere. "You have chosen to insult me. I do not answer you. You are in my country: it is the same as if you were under my roof." "Your country!" the hot-headed young man cried, in open scorn, "What part of the country belongs to you! That rock of an island out there!—and I wish you would keep to it; and you’d better keep to it; for we don’t mean to have this kind of thing going on any longer. We mean to have an end of all this scringeing and poaching! We have been precious near getting hold of those scringe-nets: we’ll make sure of them the next time. And I want once for all to tell you that we mean to have the fishing for ourselves, and the shooting, too; and we want you to understand that there is such a thing as the law of trespass. What right have you to be here, at this moment, on this moor?" he demanded. "How can you explain your being here? What are you doing here—on the Twelfth? Do you know to whom this moor belongs? And by what right do you trespass on it?" "Fred," interposed Frank Meredyth, who was painfully conscious that the two keepers—though they had discreetly turned away—must be hearing something of this one-sided altercation, "enough of this: if there is any dispute, it can be settled another time—not before third persons." "One moment," said Donald Ross, turning with a grave courtesy to this intervener. "You have heard the questions I have just been asked. Well, I do not choose to account for my actions to any one. But this I wish to explain. I have no right to be where I am, I admit; I have trespassed some dozen yards on to this moor, in order to come up and speak to you. When you saw me first I was on the old footpath—there it is, you can see for yourself—that leads up this corrie, and through the Glen Orme forest to Ledmore; it is an old hill road that everyone has the right of using." "Oh, yes, thieves’ lawyers are always clever enough!" Fred Stanley said, disdainfully. Donald Ross regarded him for a moment—with a strange kind of look, and that not of anger: then he quietly said, "Good afternoon!" to Meredyth, and went on his way. Hector got out of the prevailing embarrassment by uncoupling the dogs; and Frank Meredyth put cartridges in his gun. This encounter did not augur well for steady shooting.