For some days after the cracking of guns was heard echoing for miles round the hollow of Kincreggan. That sent the island mad with an itching curiosity. On all the roads men and women travelled, and up the face of Ben Buidhe, to lie on the myrtle and look at Alasdair Dhu and his clerk shooting and fishing as in the fine free ancient days. It was no secret that many admired the outlaw; his state of nature seemed so enviable compared with their own poor prosaic lives as fishers or shepherds, that he might have had recruits if he had been more accessible. The people were vexed for the Captain, it is true, but not so vexed that they could not admire the cleverness of the man who, bred in towns and brought up to the pen, had lifted the laird’s cattle as neatly as if he had tramped a lifetime through night and mist with his forebears. They got a new light upon society and its rights and wrongs, though they might not have the philosophy to explain it clearly; they seemed to see that might was right at any time; they searched themselves in vain to see wherein Macaulay and his clerk, possessing themselves of Macaulay’s ancient home and of things not made with hands, but nature’s gifts, were any worse than the long line of Kilree’s family that, ending in the Captain himself, had used cunning and contrivance to get and keep these things. It was said that a kind of fever went through the men when they saw the example of Macaulay, that they abandoned their common tasks awhile, and might, but for mothers and wives, have gone wholly wrong. The Captain was no sooner out of his doctor’s hands than he sent a corps of his workmen to expel the outlaws and pull down Kincreggan House. “By heavens!” he said, “I’m hardly angry at the fellow for his mischievousness; it takes so uncommon a form. He might have robbed me all these years decently like a man of business in quite another fashion far less interesting. It’s madness, of course, but it’s in a lot of blood that runs very sluggishly in these parts nowadays. I sometimes have had a touch of it myself; so I’ll give the rogue law.” Up to Kincreggan, then, went his men with picks, and the first of them had only got round the bend of the pass when a bullet flew over his head and another close behind it. The lawyer and his clerk were determined to hold Kincreggan as Ranald More Macaulay had held it against the Captain’s grandfather! Next the Captain himself went up, and reached as far as the wall of the fold where his own cattle were imprisoned. A cry stopped him at the wall, and he looked up to see the pieces of Macaulay and the lad directed at his breast. “A parley, Kincreggan!” he cried, slyly giving his late factor the honour.