I caught MacLachlan by the sleeve of his shirt—he had on but that and a kilt and vest—and jerked him back from his fool’s employment; but I was a shave late. He ran back both wooden bars before I let him.
With a roar and a display of teeth and steel the MacNicolls came into the lobby from the crowded stair, and we were driven to the far parlour end. In the forefront of them was Nicol Beg MacNicoll, the nearest kinsman of the murdered Braleckan lad. He had a targe on his left arm—a round buckler of darach or oakwood covered with dun cow-hide, hair out, and studded in a pleasing pattern with iron bosses—a prong several inches long in the middle of it Like every other scamp in the pack, he had dirk out. Beg or little he was in the countryside’s bye-name, but in truth he was a fellow of six feet, as hairy as a brock and in the same straight bristly fashion. He put out his arms at full reach to keep back his clansmen, who were stretching necks at poor MacLachlan like weasels, him with his nostrils swelling and his teeth biting his bad temper.
“Wait a bit, lads,” said Nicol Beg; “perhaps we may get our friend here to come peaceably with us. I’m sorry” (he went on, addressing the Provost) “to put an honest house to rabble at any time, and the Provost of Inneraora specially, for I’m sure there’s kin’s blood by my mother’s side between us; but there was no other way to get MacLachlan once his tail was gone.”
“You’ll rue this, MacNicoll,” fumed the Provost—as red as a bubblyjock at the face—mopping with a napkin at his neck in a sweat of annoyance; “you’ll rue it, rue it, rue it!” and he went into a coil of lawyer’s threats against the invaders, talking of brander-irons and gallows, hame-sucken and housebreaking.
We were a daft-like lot in that long lobby in a wan candle-light. Over me came that wonderment that falls on one upon stormy occasions (I mind it at the sally of Lecheim), when the whirl of life seems to come to a sudden stop, all’s but wooden dummies and a scene empty of atmosphere, and between your hand on the basket-hilt and the drawing of the sword is a lifetime. We could hear at the close-mouth and far up and down the street the shouting of the burghers, and knew that at the stair-foot they were trying to pull out the bottom-most of the marauders like tods from a hole. For a second or two nobody said a word to Nicol MacNicoll’s remark, for he put the issue so cool (like an invitation to saunter along the road) that all at once it seemed a matter between him and MacLachlan alone. I stood between the housebreakers and the women-folk beside me—John Splendid looking wonderfully ugly for a man fairly clean fashioned at the face by nature. We left the issue to MacLachlan, and I must say he came up to the demands of the moment with gentlemanliness, minding he was in another’s house than his own.
“What is it ye want?” he asked MacNicoll, burring out his Gaelic r’s with punctilio.
“We want you in room of a murderer your father owes us,” said MacNicoll.
“You would slaughter me, then?” said MacLachlan, amazingly undisturbed, but bringing again to the front, by a motion of the haunch accidental to look at, the sword he leaned on.
“Fuil airson fuil!” cried the rabble on the stairs, and it seemed ghastly like an answer to the young laird’s question; but Nicol Beg demanded peace, and assured MacLachlan he was only sought for a hostage.
“We but want your red-handed friend Dark Neil,” said he; “your father kens his lair, and the hour he puts him in our hands for justice, you’ll have freedom.”
“Do you warrant me free of scaith?” asked the young laird.
“I’ll warrant not a hair of your head’s touched,” answered Nicol Beg—no very sound warranty, I thought, from a man who, as he gave it, had to put his weight back on the eager crew that pushed at his shoulders, ready to spring like weasels at the throat of the gentleman in the red tartan.
He was young, MacLachlan, as I said; for him this was a delicate situation, and we about him were in no less a quandary than himself. If he defied the Glen Shira men, he brought bloodshed on a peaceable house, and ran the same risk of bodily harm that lay in the alternative of his going with them that wanted him.
Round he turned and looked for guidance—broken just a little at the pride, you could see by the lower lip. The Provost was the first to meet him eye for eye.
“I have no opinion, Lachie,” said the old man, snuffing rappee with the butt of an egg-spoon and spilling the brown dust in sheer nervousness over the night-shirt bulging above the band of his breeks. “I’m wae to see your father’s son in such a corner, and all my comfort is that every tenant in Elrig and Braleckan pays at the Tolbooth or gallows of Inneraora town for this night’s frolic.”
“A great consolation to think of!” said John Splendid.
The goodwife, a nervous body at her best, sobbed away with her pock-marked hussy in the parlour, but Betty was to the fore in a passion of vexation. To her the lad made next his appeal.
“Should I go?” he asked, and I thought he said it more like one who almost craved to stay. I never saw a woman in such a coil. She looked at the dark Mac-Nicolls, and syne she looked at the fair-haired young fellow, and her eyes were swimming, her bosom heaving under her screen of Campbell tartan, her fingers twisting at the pleated hair that fell in sheeny cables to her waist.
“If I were a man I would stay, and yet—if you stay—— Oh, poor Lachlan! I’m no judge,” she cried; “my cousin, my dear cousin!” and over brimmed her tears.
All this took less time to happen than it tikes to tell with pen and ink, and though there may seem in reading it to be too much palaver on this stair-head, it was but a minute or two, after the bar was off the door, that John Splendid took me by the coat-lapel and back a bit to whisper in my ear—
“If he goes quietly or goes gaffed like a grilse, it’s all one on the street. Out-bye the place is hotching with the town-people. Do you think the MacNicolls could take a prisoner bye the Cross?”
“It’ll be cracked crowns on the causeway,” said I.
“Cracked crowns any way you take it,” said he, “and better on the causeway than on Madame Brown’s parlour floor. It’s a gentleman’s policy, I would think, to have the squabble in the open air, and save the women the likely sight of bloody gashes.”
“What do you think, Elrigmore?” Betty cried to me the next moment, and I said it were better the gentleman should go. The reason seemed to flash on her there and then, and she backed my counsel; but the lad was not the shrewdest I’ve seen, even for a Cowal man, and he seemed vexed that she should seek to get rid of him, glancing at me with a scornful eye as if I were to blame.
“Just so,” he said, a little bitterly; “the advice is well meant,” and on went his jacket that had hung on a peg behind him, and his bonnet played scrug on his forehead. A wiry young scamp, spirited too! He was putting his sword into its scabbard, but MacNicoll stopped him, and he went without it.
Now it was not the first time “Slochd a Chubair!” was cried as slogan in Baile Inneraora in the memory of the youngest lad out that early morning with a cudgel. The burgh settled to its Lowlandishness with something of a grudge. For long the landward clans looked upon the incomers to it as foreign and unfriendly. More than once in fierce or drunken escapades they came into the place in their mogans at night, quiet as ghosts, mischievous as the winds, and set fire to wooden booths, or shot in wantonness at any mischancy unkilted citizen late returning from the change-house. The tartan was at those times the only passport to their good favour; to them the black cloth knee-breeches were red rags to a bull, and ill luck to the lad who wore the same anywhere outside the Crooked Dyke that marks the town and policies of his lordship! If he fared no worse, he came home with his coat-skirts scantily filling an office unusual. Many a time “Slochd!” rang through the night on the Athole winter when I dosed far off on the fields of Low Germanie, or sweated in sallies from leaguered towns. And experience made the burghers mighty tactical on such occasions. Old Leslie or ‘Pallas Armata’ itself conferred no better notion