He would have said more, but I never heard him finish his words. Sudden as a springing deer, he tore from the covert of the wall by my side and bounded across the court, threading the surprised group and overleaping the swords and the bodies of the slain men. He disappeared in a moment through the door into the tower, within which the flames still glowed red, and from which every instant the crash of falling timber and the leaping flames answered each other. Ere my father sprang back, his figure stood plain and dark against the fire within, like that of a smith at his forge seen in the bygoing upon a snowy night. He held the unburned Bible clasped to his breast, but his left hand hung straight down by his side. A moment after he had sprung from a window and fallen upon his face on the pavement with the Bible beneath him. A dozen men ran towards him and seized him—Thomas of Drummurchie the first among them. ’A traitor! A spy!’ he cried, lifting a sword from the pile with clear purpose to kill. ’To the death with him! It is John Kennedy of Kirrieoch—I ken him well, a rank Cassillis thief!’ And he would have slain my father forthwith, but that I ran among his legs and gripped him so close to me that he fell clattering on the pavement among the swords. Then I went and took my father’s hand, standing by his side and crying out the while,— ’Ye shallna, ye shallna kill my father. He never did ye harm a’ the days o’ his life!’ ’Who are you, and what do you here?’ asked young Bargany in a voice of command, when they had set my father on his feet. ’I am John Kennedy of Kirrieoch on Minnochside, and I came to Ballantrae to bury the corpse of my sister’s man, Hew Grier, merchant and indweller there, that was this day laid in the earth.’ So, right quietly and calmly, my father spoke among them all. ’But what seek you in my burned Castle of Ardstinchar and alone with these dead men?’ asked the young Bargany. With a quietness that came of the hills my father told the chieftain his plain tale, and his words were not words that any man could gainsay. Then Bargany answered him without consulting the others, as none but a great chief does whose lightest word is life or death. ’Ye are here within my danger, and had I been even as your folk of Cassillis, ye should have died the death; but because ye stopped devil’s work and, it may be, kept away a curse from us for the burning of the Holy Book, ye shall not die in my house. Take your life and your son’s life, as a gift from Gilbert Kennedy of Bargany.’ My father bowed his head and thanked his house’s enemy. ’Bring a horse,’ cried the Laird, and immediately they set my father on a beast, and me in the saddle before him. ’Put the Bible for a keepsake in your winnock sole, turn out the steed on Minnochside, and come no more to Ballantrae in time of feud, lest a worse thing befall you!’ So said he, and waved us away, as I thought grandly.