The lawyer was hard to recognise, so oddly had he changed from the shaven and well-put-on man of business who had plied an industrious quill but lately at a desk. A beard blackened his face; the pilfered web of tartan was belted round his loins into a kilt, with the end of it dragged round his shoulder for a plaid in the fashion of the age of Mar; a blue bonnet was scrugged down upon his brow, and on his feet, that used to enjoy the slippers of his own fireside, were _cuarains_—roughly-made moccasins of ox-hide with the hair still on them. It was, to the eye and imagination of the Captain, as if time and change had someway overlooked the shelter of Kincreggan in its mountain cleft, and there had remained in it, unknown and unsuspected, some eddying backwater of the wild old days. In faith, Macaulay in such an ancient polity had been a chief of chiefs; he had it in his aspect and his mien. He stood against the crenels of a bastion, his whole figure revealed, an elbow on the stones and the musket balanced in his hands, a kind of lazy elegance in his attitude, ease and independence, health and pride. He looked at his old client as an eagle might look at a lamb, swithering whether he should swoop or stay still. The only thing to mar the dignity of the picture was the presence of his clerk in an angle of the wall besides him—still the ’prentice lawyer, doubtless even to the ink on the very finger that hung on the trigger of the weapon with which he covered the Captain. “I will be giving you three minutes, Kilree,” said Macaulay, “to get the length of the boulder yonder on your way back. If I see so much as your heel after that I will shoot at it, and you will not escape with your life a second time.” “That is very fine, and I’ll not deny it is picturesque,” said the Captain, “but it’s a little out of date and a cursed folly. More than that, it’s robbery, to say nothing about the—the accident with the knife, and nowadays there’s admitted to be no grace about a robbery even committed in a kilt. It might be all very well for your grandfather and my own to fight like this over these walls, but—” “How did Kincreggan come into the hands of your family?” interrupted the lawyer. “You have me there,” admitted the Captain, with a little awkward laugh. “You have me there, and I’m not a lawyer to obscure the facts. Our folk fought yours for it, and having got it—” “Well, the fighting was not finished,” said the outlaw; “I have begun it again, and Kincreggan is Macaulay’s. Go back, Kilree, go back; and if you come again, bring a coffin under your arm.” The Captain went, and it was the last he was to see of his factor till that stormy Lammas day when the outlaw came home.