"One o' them is dead auld, as auld as the wife here. She didn't
look to me very right in the head."

"And the other?"

"Oh, just a lassie."

"What was she like?"

Dougal seemed to be searching for adequate words. "She is..."
he began. Then a popular song gave him inspiration. "She's pure as
the lully in the dell!"

In no way discomposed by Heritage's fierce interrogatory air,
he continued: "She's either foreign or English, for she couldn't
understand what I said, and I could make nothing o' her clippit tongue.
But I could see she had been greetin'. She looked feared, yet
kind o' determined. I speired if I could do anything for her, and when
she got my meaning she was terrible anxious to ken if I had seen a man-
-a big man, she said, wi' a yellow beard. She didn't seem to ken his
name, or else she wouldna' tell me. The auld wife was mortal feared,
and was aye speakin' in a foreign langwidge. I seen at once that
what frightened them was Lean and his friends, and I was just starting
to speir about them when there came a sound like a man walkin' along
the passage. She was for hidin' me in behind a sofy, but I wasn't
going to be trapped like that, so I got out by the other door and down
the kitchen stairs and into the coal-hole. Gosh, it was a near thing!"


The boy was on his feet. "I must be off to the camp to give out the