"You should thank God who got you out of a trouble so deep," I said, astounded at the miracle of his escape so far.
"Oh ay," said he; "and indeed I was pretty clever myself, or it was all bye with me when one of the black fellows set his fangs in my hose. Here are his partners; short work with it, on the neck or low at the belly with an up cut, and ward your throat."
The two dogs ran with ferocious growls at us as we stood by the little tree, their faces gaping and their quarters streaked with foam. Strong cruel brutes, they did not swither a moment, but both leaped at M'Iver's throat. With one swift slash of the knife, my companion almost cut the head off the body of the first, and I reckoned with the second. They rolled at our feet, and a silence fell on the country. Up M'Iver put his shoulders, dighted his blade on a tuft of bog-grass, and whistled a stave of the tune they call "The Desperate Battle."
"If I had not my lucky penny with me I would wonder at this meeting," said he at last, eyeing me with a look of real content that he should so soon have fallen into my company at a time when a meeting was so unlikely. "It has failed me once or twice on occasions far less important; but that was perhaps because of my own fumbling, and I forgive it all because it brought two brave lads together like barks of one port on the ocean. 'Up or down?' I tossed when it came to putting fast heels below me, and 'up' won it, and here's the one man in all broad Albainn I would be seeking for, drops out of the mist at the very feet of me. Oh, I'm the most wonderful fellow ever stepped heather, and I could be making a song on myself there and then if occasion allowed. Some people have genius, and that, I'm telling you, is well enough so far as it goes; but I have luck too, and I'm not so sure but luck is a hantle sight better than genius. I'm guessing you have lost your way in the mist now?"
He looked quizzingly at me, and I was almost ashamed to admit that I had been in a maze for the greater part of the morning.
"And no skill for getting out of it?" he asked.
"No more than you had in getting into it," I confessed.
"My good scholar," said he, "I could walk you out into a drove-road in the time you would be picking the bog from your feet I'm not making any brag of an art that's so common among old hunters as the snaring of conies; but give me a bush or a tree here and there in a flat land like this, and an herb here and there at my feet, and while winds from the north blow snell, I'll pick my way by them. It's my notion that they learn one many things at colleges that are no great value in the real trials of life. You, I make no doubt, would be kenning the name of an herb in the Latin, and I have but the Gaelic for it, and that's good enough for me; but I ken the use of it as a traveller's friend whenever rains are smirring and mists are blowing."