Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to the humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they may have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in a magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed untenanted and empty through the jealous night. It happened on a night of nights--as the saying goes--that thus we were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to reivers--for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?--when a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air. We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch. The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire. “Co tha’n sud’s an uchd air a bhuaile?” (“Who is there leaning on the fold?”) asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands. He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly eerie in their silence on the wall. “Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m’inthaidh aig an fhear as gile broilleach agaibh” (“My arrow’s for the whitest breast, if ye make no answer “), said my man, and there was no answer. The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white breast fell--shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field. They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of their men in battles threw them upon their own resource. And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each other in their hurry from her foul lips.