’We ride to meet my lord, and to do his bidding!’ I said, making my words brief and curt, because I liked not the man, for all his fine figure and commanding presence. ’Your master Sir Thomas, is, I hear, laid by with his ancient trouble. I asked John Dick concerning him. Tell him that I grieve to hear of it.’ ’Without doubt, you were on your way to visit him,’ I said, with mockery in my manner of speech, for it was a strange thing to meet John Mure on the wrong side of the town of Maybole at daybreak of a winter’s morning. ’Without doubt,’ he answered readily; ’but now that I know of his weak state of health, I need not trouble him this day!’ ’There is the greater need, Laird Auchendrayne,’ I made reply, ’that you should go on and cheer him with your pleasant discourse.’ He answered to that not a word good nor bad, but turned his horse and rode away to the right, making, as I guessed, a detour to avoid my lord and join our enemies of Bargany. It was early in the morning of this famous eleventh of December (as I have been told) that there was a goodly stir and commotion in the town of Ayr. Gilbert Kennedy had resolved that he would ride that day to Bargany by way of the town of Maybole. Sorely and often they of his faction tried to dissuade him, but he was set immovably on it, as he was on anything to which he had once made up his mind. ’Think ye,’ he said, ’that I am feared of John, Earl of Cassillis, or of all the Kennedies of the shore edge that ever scarted other folk’s siller into their wallets like sclate-stanes?’ ’Ye needna be feared,’ said his brother Thomas, the Wolf of Drummurchie, ’but ye surely have enough of sense to take care of your pelt. Even a swine has that muckle. Do you think that Cassillis, and those that are with him, have not as much sense as we? They will be standing by some roadside where we have to ride by, and they will have holes cutted out, I warrant you, long or this, to shoot us in the by-ganging—-even as we did for Earl Johnnie at the limekilns of the Dalgorrachies.’ But that debauched villain, the Laird of Benane, and his little-wit sister, moved him to that pride, to which also his own heart ever too easily inclined. So, in spite of all entreaty, Bargany leaped on his charger and rode forward himself, with only ten or twelve horsemen as a first vanguard. Behind him there came other seventy, making in all the number of fourscore armed men on horseback, all good riders of mettle. Some of these were such burghers of Ayr as had a soul beyond the ell-wand, and could follow a foray and bend the pull of a pistolet with any man. For I have learned that all townsfolk are not nidderlings, as once I thought in my hot youth and little knowledge.