The Dark Mile. D. K. Broster

though his face seemed suddenly drained of colour, neither sprang nor flinched. He again moved forward a little until he was quite near the table, and, drawing himself up to his full six feet of height said, with surprising coolness:

      “If by that hyperbole you mean the late Dr. Cameron’s blood, then I can only assume that your affection for that unfortunate gentleman has unsettled your intellects, and that I need not therefore take with you the course I should pursue with any other man who had made such a suggestion to me.” Here his hand fell upon Ewen’s riding whip, which was now lying within his reach, and he fingered it significantly, looking the while at its owner, who stood with clenched hands well within range of a slash across the face. Ian, afraid to move for fear of precipitating such a catastrophe, nevertheless braced his muscles to fling himself upon the assailant the moment he should grasp the handle.

      But Finlay MacPhair went on contemptuously, “You were once good enough to assure me that some day in the Highlands we should settle accounts over the question of the late Dr. Cameron’s connection with the Loch Arkaig treasure. But I don’t think I am disposed ever to go out with a man who has not yet disproved that he is . . . a cattle-thief!”

      The word came out with all the sting of the lash which had not been lifted from the table. Ewen took a step backward and gripped one hand hard round the wrist of the other. With an immense effort he succeeded in answering quietly, though he was exceedingly pale, and his eyes sparkled like blue diamonds.

      “I have already undertaken to disprove that. If you will wait a moment, I will go and give the necessary orders.” And, turning abruptly on his heel, he went out of the room. Ian followed him.

      “Ewen,” he burst out, “that man—he’s insufferable! What are you going to do now?”

      There was sweat on Ardroy’s brow. He put up his hand and wiped it off. “Give orders instantly to have all my cattle driven in and go through the tally,” he answered, gritting his teeth together. “God give me patience! . . . And I have not seen Alison yet . . . I’d best not, I think, till this business is over, and he’s out of my house.” And he flung through the porch, almost into the midst of Glenshian’s waiting gillies, and Ian heard him calling, “Angus—where is Angus MacMartin?”

      § 2

      An immense, blood-red and ominous sunset was towering in the west, high over the heads of antlike men and their dwarf cattle, ere the business of disproving the Chief of Glenshian’s accusation was finished. Yet a warm, brown dusk was already beginning to rest upon the great spaces of bloomless heather, seeming, indeed, rather to be breathed out by the ground itself, just as from Ardroy’s own little loch, Loch na h-Iolaire, the Loch of the Eagle, there was already rising a ghostly film of mist. Ewen’s shaggy cattle, thus unusually driven down and herded together in this comparatively level stretch not far from the loch, lowed uneasily, pushed at each other with their spreading horns, or looked about from under their tawny fringes in mild perplexity. Hours of the hardest and hottest work had gone to their collecting, not because they were so numerous, but because they were so scattered in their grazing.

      “There still want three,” said Ewen, glancing at the list in his hand. He and Ian stood on the edge of the herd, with never a glance behind them, where on a little knoll Glenshian sat with a gillie at his back. The only person who occasionally turned his eyes that way was eight year old Donald, who, heated from his assistance in the chase, now stood by his father’s side and perpetually counted the cattle, reaching a different total every time.

      “Those will be the three,” said Ewen, “which gave Duncan the slip up there. But he sent a couple of men after them.”

      “And there they come, I fancy,” observed Ian, pointing to a small group of cattle and two men who were making their way slowly round the end of the loch. “But your list is incorrect, Ewen, or else the beasts have been miscounted, for there are five steers there instead of three.” He said this in all innocence, suddenly realised the possible significance of what he had seen, and ejaculated under his breath, “It’s not possible!”

      As for the laird of Ardroy beside him, he might have become one of the pines by the loch, he was so still. Nearer and nearer came the five steers, in a leisurely, lurching fashion, and the sunset glowed upon their lion-coloured pelts and touched their enormous horns with light. They were all of the same breed, indistinguishable save to the eyes of a herdsman. “They must all be Ewen’s!” thought Ian. “Someone has miscounted.”

      Ardroy roused himself and beckoned.

      “What is the meaning of this, Duncan?” he asked hoarsely. “Why have I two more beasts than the tally shows?”

      Duncan looked at his master with eyes at once shrewd and visionary. “Witchcraft, Mac ’ic Ailein,” he replied. “Four days ago you had them not. Yet they may have strayed into the herd.”

      “They have been stolen!” said Ardroy in a fierce, ashamed voice. “They could never have strayed so far from Mac ’ic Fhionnlaigh’s land. Stolen by one of my men—in effect, then, stolen by me! And I so certain——”

      “Father,” broke in Donald’s little voice by his side, “here is the gentleman coming down to speak to you.”

      And Ewen Cameron turned to meet the bitter chagrin and humiliation he saw falling upon him. Glenshian, descending leisurely from his mound, walked towards him through the rustling heather-stems, his hair glowing like fire beneath the red canopy spread above them all.

      “It was well I had patience until the end,” he observed with a very disagreeable smile. “Yet, as I said, truth will out. Here come two of my best steers, Ardroy—well hidden away they were, no doubt.”

      “Prove your ownership!” said Ewen, short and sharp.

      “Seumas!” called the Chief over his shoulder. The gillie went forward, seized one of the beasts by a horn, tugged it nearer, pushed it sideways, and, lifting the shaggy hair on one flank, disclosed a large “G” roughly branded there. In the same dead silence he repeated the performance with another. A long breath went up from the assemblage of hot and weary men, and Glenshian’s gillies began to talk excitedly together. Ardroy’s were silent. And the colour on their master’s face was not from the sunset.

      “You’ll allow my men, I suppose, to take my stolen property home?” queried Fionnlagh Ruadh. “And, since you were so insistent that you knew all about your people’s doings, Ardroy, I must conclude that this petty theft—one can hardly dignify it with the name of a creach—had your connivance.”

      This he said so that all could hear; stepping closer, he added in a lower tone, “Your own glove will be the better of a wash in the gutter now!”

      He swung on his heel, went to his horse, which a gillie brought forward from the mound, gave an order, and mounted. With sulky, puzzled faces the Camerons watched the two alien steers being separated from the rest and driven off after him. Ian and little Donald saw Ewen himself, as if stung by a gadfly, go striding away from all of them, under that yet tremendous sunset which might have been painted for the setting of some great tragedy rather than of this ignominious little exposure.

      Ian took his small relative’s hand. “Come home, Donald; we’ll not wait for your father.”

      And Donald, knitting his brows, came obediently. He asked questions, of course, which young Invernacree did his best to answer, in spite of his own bewilderment. What an odious and inexplicable scene! . . . Poor Ewen!

      “Cousin Ian, Cousin Ian, our house is on fire!”

      For they were now come in sight of the House of Ardroy, and its western windows did flame and glitter as if a conflagration raged within.

      “ ’Tis only the reflection of the sunset, laochain,” answered the young man. (“Or else the house is angry, like its owner, at the affront put upon him.”) But he did not pass on this fancy to the astonished and excited little boy at his side.

      §