That we held our ground was no great virtue--we could scarcely do less; but we did more, for soon we had our enemy driven back on the walls. They fought with a frenzy that made them ill to beat, but when a couple of scores of our lads lined the upper wall again and kept back the leak from that airt by the command of John Splendid, it left us the chance of sweeping our unwelcome tenants back again on the lower wall. They stayed stubbornly, but we had weight against them and the advantage of the little brae, and by-and-by we pinned them, like foumarts, against the stones. Most of them put back against the wall, and fought, even with the pike at their vitals, slashing empty air with sword or dirk; some got on the wall again and threw themselves over the other side, risking the chance of an uglier death on the rocks below. In less than an hour after the shot of Para Mor (himself a stricken corpse now) rang over Dunchuach, our piper, with a gash on his face, was playing some vaunting air on the walls again, and the fort was free of the enemy, of whom the bulk had fallen back into the wood, and seemingly set out for Inneraora. Then we gathered and stroked our dead--twenty-and-three; we put our wounded in the governor’s house, and gave them the rough leech-craft of the fighting field; the dead of the assailants we threw over the rock, and among them was a clean-shaven man in trews and a tight-fitting _cota gearr_, who left two halves of an otter-skin cap behind him. “I wish to God!” cried John Splendid, “that I had a drink of Altanaluinn at this minute, or the well of Beal-loch-an-uarain.” It was my own first thought, or something very like it, when the fighting was over, for a most cruel thirst crisped my palate, and, as ill luck had it, there was not a cup of water in the fort. “I could be doing with a drop myself,” said the English minister. “I’ll take a stoup and go down to the well yonder and fetch it.” He spoke of the spout in the gut, a clean little well of hill-water that, winter or summer, kept full to the lip and accessible. We had gathered into the tower itself (all but a few sentinels), glad for a time to escape the sight of yon shambles of friend and foe that the battle had left us. The air had softened of a sudden from its piercing cold to a mildness balmy by comparison; the sky had leadened over with a menacing vapour, and over the water--in the great glen between Ben Ime and Ardno--a mist hurried to us like driving smoke. A few flakes of snow fell, lingering in the air as feathers from a nest in spring. “Here’s a friend of Argile back again,” said an old halberdier, staunching a savage cut on his knee, and mumbling his words because he was chewing as he spoke an herb that’s the poultice for every wound.