“How?” asked Argile, shortly, and he was looking wistfully at the hills we were leaving--the hills that lay between him and his books. “There’s not a Highlander in your corps but has bowed his head to her blessing; there’s not one but looks upon her curse of the MacDonalds as so much of a gain in this enterprise.” “Oh,” said his lordship, “you are a little extravagant We have our foolish ways, Gordon, but we are not altogether heathen; and do you think that after all there might not be something in the portents of a witch like yon in her exaltation?” “No more than’s in the howling of the wind in the chimney,” said Gordon, quickly. “Perhaps not,” said Argile, after a little, “perhaps not; but even the piping of the vent has something of prophecy in it, though the wind bloweth where it listeth. I have only a scholar’s interest in these things, I give you my word, and----” He laughed with a little restraint before he went on. “Do you know, John,” he called out to M’Iver--“do you know what our _cailleach_ friend says of our jaunt? She put a head in at my tent last night, and ‘Listen, MacCailein,’ said she, ‘and keep on high roads,’ said she, ‘and Inverlochy’s a perilous place,’ said she, ‘and I’d be wae to see the heather above the gall.’” John Splendid’s back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame. He never turned: he made no answer for a moment, and when he spoke it was with a laughing allusion in English to the folly of portents. This was so odd an attitude for a man usually superstitious to take up, that I engaged him on the point whenever we landed. “You seem to have no great respect for the Dark Dame’s wizardy,” said I. He took me aside from some of the clansmen who could overhear. “Never let these lads think that you either lightly Dame Dubh or make overmuch of her talk about the heather and gall, for they prize her blessing, strangely enough, and they might lay too great stress on its failure. You catch me?” I nodded to keep him going, and turned the thing over in my mind. “What do you think of the prophecy yourself?” he asked; “is it not familiar?” In a flash it came to my mind that I had half-hinted to him at what the Macaulay woman had said in the fold of Elrigmore. “I think,” said I, “the less the brooding on these things the better.” If we had our own misgivings about the end of this jaunt, our companions had none. They plunged with hearts almost jocular into the woods on Lochaber’s edge, in a bright sunshine that glinted on the boss of the target and on the hilt of the knife or sword, and we came by the middle of the day to the plain on which lay the castle of Inverlochy--a staunch quadrangular edifice with round towers at the angles, and surrounded by a moat that smelled anything but freshly. And there we lay for a base, and thence we sent out round Keppoch and Locheil some dashing companies that carried on the work we began in Athole.