John Splendid Part 13

"Stand fast, Campbell Halberdiers!" he cried. "It's b.l.o.o.d.y death, whether we take it like cravens or Gaelic gentlemen!" He laid about him with a good purpose, and whether they tried us in front or rear, the scamps found the levelled pikes and the ready swords. Some dropped beside, but more dropped before us, for the tod in a hole will face twenty times what he will flee from in the open wood, but never a man of all our striving company fought st.u.r.dier than our minister, with a weapon s.n.a.t.c.hed from an Athole man he had levelled at a first blow from an oaken rung.

"The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" he would cry; "for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered together against us." A slim elder man he was, ordinarily with a wan sharp face; now it was flushed and hoved in anger, and he hissed his texts through his teeth as he faced the dogs. Some of youth's schooling was there, a Lowland youth's training with the broadsword, for he handled it like no novice, and even M'Iver gave him "Bravo, _suas e!_"

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 a.s.sailants 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 G.o.d!" cried John Splendid, "that I had a drink of Alta.n.a.luinn 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.

"Frost and snow might have been Argile's friend when that proverb was made," said John Splendid, "but here are changed times; our last snow did not keep Colkitto on the safe side of Cladich. Still, if this be snow in earnest," he added with a cheerier tone, "it may rid us of these vermin, who'll find provand iller to get every extra day they bide.

Where are you going, Master Gordon?"

"To the well," said the minister, simply, stopping at the port, with a wooden stoup in his hand. "Some of our friends must be burning for a mouthful, poor dears; the wounded flesh is drouthy."

John turned himself round on a keg he sat on, and gave a French shrug he had picked up among foreign cavaliers.

"Put it down, sir," he said; "there's a wheen less precious lives in this hold than a curate's, and for the turn you did us in coming up to alarm us of the rear attack, if for nothing else, I would be sorry to see you come to any skaith. Do you not know that between us and the well there might be death half-a-dozen times? The wood, I'll warrant, is hotching still with those disappointed warriors of Clanra.n.a.ld, who would have no more reverence for your life than for your Geneva bands."

"There's no surer cure for the disease of death in a hind than for the same murrain in a minister of the Gospel--or a landed gentleman," said Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as we heard them at the kirk-session.

John showed some confusion in his face, and the minister had his feet on the steps before he could answer him.

"Stop, stop!" he cried. "Might I have the honour of serving the Kirk for once? I'll get the water from the well, minister, if you'll go in again and see how these poor devils of ours are thriving. I was but joking when I hinted at the risk; our Athole gentry are, like enough, far off by this time."

"I liked you better when you were selfish and told the truth, than now that you're valiant (in a small degree) and excuse it with a lie," quo'

the minister, and off he set.

He was beyond the wall, and stepping down the brae before we could be out at the door to look after him.

"d.a.m.n his nipped tongue!" fumed John. "But man! there's a lovable quirk in his character too. I'll give twenty pounds (Scots) to his kirk-plate at the first chance if he wins out of this fool's escapade of his without injury."

There was no doubt the minister's task had many hazards in it, for he carried stave nor steel as he jogged on with the stoup, over the frank open brae-side, down to the well. Looking at him going down into the left of the gut as unafeared as he had come up on the right of it, I put myself in his place, and felt the skin of my back pimp-ling at the instinct of lurking enemies.

But Gordon got safely to the well, through the snow, now falling in a heavy shower, dipped out a stoupful, and turned about to come home. A few yards off his path back, to the right and closer to the wood, lay the only man of all the bodies lying in the valley who seemed to have any life left in him. This fellow lay on his side, and was waving his hands feverishly when the minister went up to him, and--as we saw in a dim way through the snow--gave him a drink of the water from the lip of the stoup.

"Sa.s.senach fool!" said young MacLachlan, parched with thirst, gathering in with a scooped hand the snow as it fell on the wall, and gluttonously sucking it.

"There are many kinds of folly, man," said I; "and I would think twice before I would grudge a cleric's right to give a mouthful of water to a dying man, even if he was a Mac Donald on his way to the Pit."

"Tuts, tuts! Elrigmore," cried John, "let the young c.o.c.k crow; he means no more than that it's hard to be hungry and see your brother feed a foeman. Indeed I could be wishing myself that his reverence was the Good Samaritan on a more fitting occasion."

We were bandying words now, and not so closely watching our friend in the hollow, and it was Sir Donald, standing to a side a little, who called our attention anew, with a cry of alarm.

"Look, lads, look!" he cried, "G.o.d help Gordon!"

We looked through the snow--a grey veil--and saw two or three men fall on the minister.

John Splendid but stopped a second to say, "It may be a feint to draw us off the fort; bide where ye are," and then he leaped over the wall, armed with a claymore picked from the haunch of a halberdier beside him.

I was over at his heels, and the pair of us scoured down the brae.

There was some hazard in the enterprise; I'm ashamed to this day to tell I thought that, at every foot of the way as we ran on. Never before nor since have I felt a wood so sinister, so ghastly, so inspired by dreadful airs, and when it was full on our flank, I kept my head half turned to give an eye to where I was going and an eye to what might come out on my rear. People tell you fear takes wings at a stern climax, that a hot pa.s.sion fills the brain with blood and the danger blurs to the eye. It's a theory that works but poorly on a forlorn-hope, with a certainty that the enemy are outnumbering you on the rear. With man and ghost, I have always felt the same: give me my back to the wall, and I could pluck up valour enough for the occasion, but there's a spot between the shoulders that would be coward flesh in Hector himself.

That, I'm thinking, is what keeps some armies from turning tail to heavy odds.

Perhaps the terror behind (John swore anon he never thought on't till he learned I had, and then he said he felt it worse than I) gave our approach all the more impetuousness, for we were down in the gut before the MacDonald loiterers (as they proved) were aware of our coming. We must have looked unco numerous and stalwart in the driving snow, for the scamps dashed off into the wood as might children caught in a mischief.

We let them go, and bent over our friend, lying with a very gashly look by the body of the MacDonald, a man well up in years, now in the last throes, a bullet-wound in his neck and the blood frothing at his mouth.

"Art hurt, sir?" asked John, bending on a knee, but the minister gave no answer.

We turned him round and found no wound but a bruise on the head, that showed he had been attacked with a cudgel by some camp-followers of the enemy, who had neither swords, nor reverence for a priest who was giving a brotherly sup to one of their own tartan. In that driving snow we rubbed him into life again, cruelly pallid, but with no broken bit about him.

"Where's my stoup?" were his first words; "my poor lads upbye must be wearying for water." He looked pleased to see the same beside him where he had set it down, with its water untouched, and then he cast a wae glance on the dead man beside him.

"Poor wretch, poor wretch!" said he.

We took the stoup and our minister up to the summit, and had got him but safely set there when he let out what gave me the route again from Dunchuach, and led to divers circ.u.mstances that had otherwise never come into this story if story there was, which I doubt there had never been.

Often I've thought me since how pregnant was that Christian act of Gordon in giving water to a foe. Had I gone, or had John gone, for the stoup of water, none of us, in all likelihood, had stirred a foot to relieve yon enemy's drouth; but he found a G.o.dly man, though an austere one too on occasion, and paid for the cup of water with a hint in broken English that was worth all the gold in the world to me. Gordon told us the man's dying confidence whenever he had come to himself a little more in the warmth of the fort fire.

"There's a woman and child," said he, "in the wood of Strongara."

CHAPTER XIII.--WHERE TREADS THE DEER.

When the English minister, in his odd lalland Scots, had told us this tale of the dying MacDonald, I found for the first time my feeling to the daughter of the Provost of Inneraora, Before this the thought of her was but a pleasant engagement for the mind at leisure moments; now it flashed on my heart with a stound that yon black eyes were to me the dearest jewels in the world, that lacking her presence these glens and mountains were very cold and empty. I think I gave a gasp that let John Splendid into my secret there and then; but at least I left him no doubt about what I would be at.

"What's the nearer way to Strongara?" I asked; "alongside the river, or through Tombreck?"

He but peered at me oddly a second under his brows--a trifle wistfully, though I might naturally think his mood would be quizzical, then he sobered in a moment That's what I loved about the man; a fool would have laughed at the bravado of my notion, a man of thinner sentiment would have marred the moment by pointing out difficulties.

"So that's the airt the wind's in!" he said, and then he added, "I think I could show you, not the shortest, but the safest road."

"I need no guidance," I cried in a hurry, "only----"

"Only a friend who knows every wood in the country-side, and has your interest at heart, Colin," he said, softly, putting a hand on my elbow and gripping it in a homely way. It was the first time he gave me my Christian name since I made his acquaintance.