“No remedy in this way for the folks besieged,” thought I, and stepping aside I began to wonder how best to aid our friends by strategy rather than force of arms. All at once I had mind that at the back of the land facing the shore an outhouse with a thatched roof ran at a high pitch well up against the kitchen window, and I stepped through a close farther up and set, at this outhouse, to the climbing, leaving my friends fighting out in the darkness in a town tumultuous. To get up over the eaves of the outhouse was no easy task, and I would have failed without a doubt had not the stratagem of John Splendid come to his aid a little later than my own and sent him after me. He helped me first on the roof, and I had him soon beside me. The window lay unguarded (all the inmates of the house being at the front), and we stepped in and found ourselves soon in a household vastly calm considering the rabble dunting on its doors. “A pot of scalding water and a servant wench at that back-window we came in by would be a good sneck against all that think of coming after us,” said John Splendid, stepping into the passage where we had met Mistress Betty the day before--now with the stair-head door stoutly barred and barricaded up with heavy chests and napery-aumries. “God! I’m glad to see you, sir!” cried the Provost, “and you, Elrigmore!” He came forward in a trepidation which was shared by few of the people about him. Young MacLachlan stood up against the wall facing the barricaded door, a lad little over twenty, with a steel-grey quarrelsome eye, and there was more bravado than music in a pipe-tune he was humming in a low key to himself. A little beyond, at the door of the best room, half in and half out, stood the goodwife Brown and her daughter. A long-legged lad, of about thirteen, with a brog or awl was teasing out the end of a flambeau in preparation to light it for some purpose not to be guessed at, and a servant lass, pock-marked, with one eye on the pot and the other up the lum, as we say of a glee or cast, made a storm of lamentation, crying in Gaelic-- “My grief! my grief! what’s to come of poor Peggy?” (Peggy being herself.) “Nothing for it but the wood and cave and the ravishing of the Ben Bhuidhe wolves.” Mistress Betty laughed at her notion, a sign of humour and courage in her (considering the plight) that fairly took me. “I daresay, Peggy, they’ll let us be,” she said, coming forward to shake Splendid and me by the hand. “To keep me in braws and you in ashets to break would be more than the poor creatures would face, I’m thinking. You are late in the town, Elrigmore.” “Colin,” I corrected her, and she bit the inside of her nether lip in a style that means temper. “It’s no time for dalliance, I think. I thought you had been up the glen long syne, but we are glad to have your service in this trouble, Master--Colin” (with a little laugh and a flush at the cheek), “also Barbreck. Do you think they mean seriously ill by MacLachlan?”