"Am I not as honest of my word as any in a matter of honour? I but gloze sometimes for the sake of the affection I have for all God's creatures."
I was losing patience of his attitude and speaking perhaps with bitterness, for here were his foolish ideas of punctilio bringing us a mile or two off our road and into a part of the country where we were more certain of being observed by enemies than in the way behind us.
"You jink from ambuscade to ambuscade of phrase like a fox," I cried.
"Call it like a good soldier, and I'll never quarrel with your compliment," he said, good-humouredly. "I had the second excuse for the woman in my mind before the first one missed fire."
"Not a bit of it: it is but applying a rule of fortification to a peaceful palaver. Have bastion and ravelin as sure as may be, but safer still the sally-port of retreat."
I stood on the road and looked at him, smiling very smug and self-complacent before me, and though I loved the man I felt bound to prick a hole in his conceit.
But at that moment a dead branch snapped in a little plantation that lay by the way, and we turned quickly to see come to us a tall lean man in MacDonald clothing.
He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime, with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in his dress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin. I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visage than was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two of a clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on a forenoon in Badenoch.
"You're taking your walk?" he said, with a bantering tone, after a moment's pause.
"You couldn't have guessed better," said John. "We are taking all we're likely to get in so barren a country."
The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a group surveying each other. "My name," said he, in his odd north Gaelic, and throwing out his narrow chest, "is John MacDonad I'm Keppoch's bard, and I've no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I'm namely in the world for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the ditty of the lover? Here's the songster to break hearts. Since the start of time there have been 'prentices at my trade: I have challenged North and East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back their master."