For the middle of the street the invaders made at once, half ready for attack from before or behind, but ill prepared to meet it from all airts as attack came. They were not ten yards on their way when Splendid and I, emerging behind them, found them pricked in the rear by one company, brought up short by another in front at Stonefield’s land, and harassed on the flanks by the lads from the closes. They were caught in a ring. Lowland and Highland, they roared lustily as they came to blows, and the street boiled like a pot of herring: in the heart of the commotion young MacLachlan tossed hither and yond--a stick in a linn. A half-score more of MacNicolls might have made all the difference in the end of the story, for they struck desperately, better men by far as weight and agility went than the burgh half-breds, but (to their credit) so unwilling to shed blood, that they used the flat of the claymore instead of the edge and fired their pistols in the air. The long-legged lad flung up a window and lit the street with the flare of the flambeau he had been teasing out so earnestly, and dunt, dunt went the oaken rungs on the bonnets of Glen Shira, till Glen Shira smelt defeat and fell slowly back. In all this horoyally I took but an onlooker’s part MacLachlan’s quarrel was not mine, the burgh was none of my blood, and the Glen Shira men were my father’s friends and neighbours. Splendid, too, candidly kept out of the turmoil when he saw that young MacLachlan was safely free of his warders, and that what had been a cause militant was now only a Highland diversion. “Let them play away at it,” he said; “I’m not keen to have wounds in a burgher’s brawl in my own town when there’s promise of braver sport over the hills among other tartans.” Up the town drifted the little battle, no dead left as luck had it, but many a gout of blood. The white gables clanged back the cries, in claps like summer thunder, the crows in the beech-trees complained in a rasping roupy chorus, and the house-doors banged at the back of men, who, weary or wounded, sought home to bed. And Splendid and I were on the point of parting, secure that the young laird of MacLachlan was at liberty, when that gentleman himself came scouring along, hard pressed by a couple of MacNicolls ready with brands out to cut him down. He was without steel or stick, stumbling on the causeway-stones in a stupor of weariness, his mouth gasping and his coat torn wellnigh off the back of him. He was never in his twenty years of life nearer death than then, and he knew it; but when he found John Splendid and me before him he stopped and turned to face the pair that followed him--a fool’s vanity to show fright had not put the heels to his hurry! We ran out beside him, and the MacNicolls refused the _rencontre_, left their quarry, and fled again to the town-head, where their friends were in a dusk the long-legged lad’s flambeau failed to mitigate.