“You have no time to lose,” she said to our query, “a score of Glencoe men are at my back. They fancy they’ll have you here in the trap this house’s owner left you. Are you not the fools to be advantaging yourselves of comforts you might be sure no fairy left for Campbells in Dalness? You may have done poorly at Inverlochy--though I hear the Lowlanders and not you were the poltroons--but blood is thicker than water, and have we not the same hills beside our doors at home, and I have run many miles to warn you that MacDonald is on his way.” She told her story with sense and straightness, her frenzy subdued by the day’s rigour. Our flight from her cries, she said, had left her a feeling of lonely helplessness; she found, as she sped, her heart truer to the tartan of her name than her anger had let her fancy, and so she followed us round Loch Leven-head, and over the hills to Glencoe. At the blind woman’s house in the morning, where she passed readily enough for a natural, she learned that the eldest son in the bed had set about word of our presence before we were long out of his mother’s door. The men we had seen going down in the airt of Tynree were the lad’s gathering, and they would have lost us but for the beetle-browed rogue, who, guessing our route through the hills to Dalness, had run before them, and, unhampered by arms or years, had reached the house of Dalness a little before we came out of our journey in swamp and corry. A sharp blade, certes! he had seen that unless something brought us to pause a while at Dalness we would be out of the reach of his friends before they had gained large enough numbers and made up on him. So he had planned with the few folk in the house to leave it temptingly open in our way, with the shrewd guess that starved and wearied men would be found sleeping beside the fire when the MacDonalds came round the gusset. All this the Dame Dubh heard and realised even in her half frenzy as she spent some time in the company of the marching MacDonalds, who never dreamt that her madness and her denunciations of Clan Diarmaid were mixed in some degree with a natural interest in the welfare of every member of that clan. M’Iver scrutinised the woman sharply, to assure himself there was no cunning effort of a mad woman to pay off the score her evil tongue of the day before revealed she had been reckoning; but he saw only here dementia gone to a great degree, a friend anxious for our welfare--so anxious, indeed, that the food Master Gordon was pressing upon her made no appeal to her famishing body. “You come wonderfully close on my Frankfort story,” said M’Iver, whimsically. “I only hope we may win out of Dalness as snugly as we won out of the castle of the cousin of Pomerania.”