"Boboon! oh, Boboon! old hero! come and collogue with your children."
He would go to the wall, which was lower on the inside than the out (and is, indeed, the wall of old Quinten, where a corps of Campbells, slaughtered by Inverlochy dogs, lie under a Latin stone), and he would look down at his friends running about like pole-cats in the darkness, in their ragged kilts and trews, their stringy hair tossing in the wind. The women themselves would be there, with the bairns whining on their backs.
"Ay! ay! this is you, my hearty folk!" he would say; "glad am I to see you and smell the wood-fire reek off you. How is it on the road?"
"From here we have not moved since you left us, John Fine. We are camped in the Blue Quarry, and you never came near your children and friends."
"God! and here's the one that's sorry for that same. But over the walls they will not let me. 'If gentleman you would be,' says the captain, 'you must keep out of woods and off the highway.'"
"Like it, heroes! But for the honour and ease of it, give me a fir-root fire in Glen Croe and a dinner of _fuarag_. It is not the day so much as the night. Lying in-by there on a posted-bed, I choke for the want of air, though the windows and doors are open wide."
"Come away with us, Boboon; we have little lack with the fish, and few are our stories since you took to the town."
"No, no, dears. Conan's curse, and I tell you no! In this place there is comfort, and every day its own bellyful."
"But the freedom outbye, John, old hero! Last night we had the bravest of fires; the sparks flew like birds among the Duke's birches, the ground was snug and dry, and-"
"Listen! To-day we were among the white hares beyond the Beannan, thwacking the big fat fellows with our clubs. Such sport was not in all Albainn!"
"White hares, old John! And Alasdair Beag has some new tunes since you left us--a _piobaireachd_ he picked up from a Mull man."
"Better than that by far; a masterly tune! Come out and hear him."
But Old Boboon leaned with his arms on the wall and made no move to be off with his children.
"Come and stravaig," said the girls, and his daughter Betty put a foot in a cranny and pulled herself up beside him to put coaxing arms round his neck.