“Are no people here but men?” he asked Para Mor, who was sergeant of the company, and to all appearance in charge of the place. He caught me looking at him in some wonder, and felt bound, seemingly, to explain himself. “I had half the hope,” said he, “that my cousin had come here; but she’ll be in the castle after all, as her father thought.” John Splendid gave me the pucker of an eye and a line of irony about the edge of his lips, that set my blood boiling. I was a foolish and ungoverned creature in those days of no-grace. I cried in my English, “One would think you had a goodman’s interest in this bit girl.” MacLachlan leered at me with a most devilish light in his black eyes, and said, “Well, well, I might have even more. Marriage, they say, makes the sweetest woman wersh. But I hope you’ll not grudge me, my dear Elrigmore, some anxiety about my own relatives.” The fellow was right enough (that was the worst of it), for a cousin’s a cousin in the friendly North; but I found myself for the second time since I came home grudging him the kinship to the Provost of Inneraora’s daughter. That little tirravee passed, and we were soon heartily employed on a supper that had to do duty for two meals. We took it at a rough table in the tower, lighted by a flambeau that sent sparks flying like pigeons into the sombre height of the building which tapered high overhead as a lime-kiln upside down. From this retreat we could see the proof of knavery in the villages below. Far down on Knapdale, and back in the recesses of Lochow, were burning homes, to judge from the blotched sky. Dunchuach had never yet been attacked, but that was an experience expected at any hour, and its holders were ready for it They had disposed their guns round the wall in such a way as to command the whole gut between the hills, and consequently the path up from the glens. The town side of the fort wall, and the east side, being on the sheer face (almost) of the rock, called for no artillery. It was on the morning of the second day there that our defence was put to the test by a regiment of combined Irish and Athole men. The day was misty, with the frost in a hesitancy, a raw gowsty air sweeping over the hills. Para Mor, standing on the little north bastion or ravelin, as his post of sergeant always demanded, had been crooning a ditty and carving a scroll with his hunting-knife on a crook he would maybe use when he got back to the tack where his home was in ashes and his cattle were far to seek, when he heard a crackle of bushes at the edge of the wood that almost reached the hill-top, but falls short for lack of shelter from the sinister wind. In a second a couple of scouts in dirty red and green tartans, with fealdags or pleatless kilts on them instead of the better class philabeg, crept cannily out into the open, unsuspicious that their position could be seen from the fort.