"In the Scots Brigade, sir?" I asked M'lver, eyeing him with greater interest than ever. He was my senior by about a dozen years seemingly, a neat, well-built fellow, clean-shaven, a little over the middle height, carrying a rattan in his hand, though he had a small sword tucked under the skirt of his coat.
"With Lumsden's regiment," he said. "His lordship here has been telling me you have just come home from the field."
"But last night. I took the liberty while Inneraora was snoring. You were before my day in foreign service, and yet I thought I knew by repute every Campbell that ever fought for the hard-won dollars of Gustavus even before my day. There were not so many of them from the West Country."
"I trailed a pike privately," laughed M'lver, "and for the honour of Clan Diarmaid I took the name Munro. My cousin here cares to have none of his immediate relatives make a living by steel at any rank less than a cornal's, or a major's at the very lowest Frankfort, and Landsberg, and the stark field of Leipzig were the last I saw of foreign battles, and the God's truth is they were my bellyful. I like a bit splore, but give it to me in our old style, with the tartan instead of buff, and the target for breastplate and taslets. I came home sick of wars."
"Our friend does himself injustice, my dear Elrigmore," said Argile, smiling; "he came home against his will, I have no doubt, and I know he brought back with him a musketoon bullet in the hip, that couped him by the heels down in Glassary for six months."
"The result," M'Iver hurried to exclaim, but putting out his breast with a touch of vanity, "of a private _rencontre_, an affair of my own with a Reay gentleman, and not to be laid to my credit as part of the war's scaith at all."
"You conducted your duello in odd style under Lums-den, surely," said I, "if you fought with powder and ball instead of steel, which is more of a Highlander's weapon to my way of thinking. All our affairs in the Reay battalion were with claymore--sometimes with targe, sometimes wanting."
"This was a particular business of our own," laughed John Splendid (as I may go on to call M'lver, for it was the name he got oftenest behind and before in Argile). "It was less a trial of valour than a wager about which had the better skill with the musket. If I got the bullet in my groin, I at least showed the Mackay gentleman in question that an Argile man could handle arquebus as well as _arme blanche_ as we said in the France. I felled my man at one hundred and thirty paces, with six to count from a ritt-master's signal. Blow, present, God sain Mackay's soul! But I'm not given to braggadocio."