Kincreggan is in a cleft of the mountain where the River Glas is joined
by the Water of Maam, its situation chosen with cunning for that purpose
it used so well to serve. For weeks after the lawyer had ludicrously
cast off his coat on the highway and disposed of his trews in the
planting behind his office, and was seen making for Kilree forest wrapped
ingeniously in a web of tartan filched from a weaver’s waulking-wicker,
Kincreggan, for all the Isles, at least, was the most interesting place
in the world. People quitted work, put on their Sabbath clothes, and
came a long day’s journey to see it, not approaching it by the narrow
pass that led to its front walls, but laboriously climbing the hills from
whose tops they could in safety get a view of the old place where there
had so suddenly flared up fires dead two hundred years.
What they saw—all they could see—was a grey whinstone tower built
extraordinarily with its back against Cnoc Dearg, a red precipice
hundreds of feet high, a gable and front to the very edge of the rock
that hung over a deep dark pool made by the falls at the fork of the
rivers, its main gable opening on the cattle-fold and the pass that gave
the only entrance to Kincreggan. They saw a place as ill to storm as
though it crowned a mountain, a place devised strictly for hours of
war—but still a beautiful place, wherein a person of fancy might be
content to dwell for ever as in a petty kingdom, the fish of the pool
his, the birds that clucked or sang in the alder thickets round the fold
at the mountain foot, the deer that came down for the sun of the
afternoon, the cattle that lowed in the pen.
And Alasdair Dhu had the cattle! The people could see them plainly from
the hill, and in certain puffs of the spring wind hear their
_geumnaich_—the sad complaint that Highland kyloes make on strange
pastures, remembering the sweeter taste of the grass of home. The cattle
were Kilree’s. They had gone from his hill at night as by magic, and in
the morning they were in Kincreggan fold, where stolen herds were
harboured before the old Macaulays went into the mist, and where there
had not been a hoof in four generations. With the cattle, furthermore,
went missing a number of muskets from the armoury of Kilree. Macaulay
the lawyer was back at his forefathers’ business!
The first thing a man to-day would do in the like circumstances would be
to call for the police; but even to-day, in the Islands, the police are
rare and remote from Kilree, and at that time it was as ill to reach them
as to reach St Kilda, even had there been no popular conviction that the
civil law alone is all that a Highland gentleman can with propriety call
into action. So Kilree for a while did nothing but nurse his wound, and
Macaulay lurked in his fastness alone, no one—by the Captain’s
orders—lifting a hand against him. But the stabbing of his master and
the lifting of his bestial were only the start of his escapade, which
became the more astonishing after his clerk, the lad Macdonald, out of
Moidart, was sent to him on a curious mission.
Macdonald was a fellow without fear, and it must be added, without brains
either, otherwise he might never have done a thing that made all the
Isles laugh at him when they heard later what he had carried, and another
thing that bears out my premiss that the primitive man is immediately
below a good many well-laundered modern shirts.
“I think I could bring that madman of mine to his senses,” Macaulay’s
wife said to the clerk one day.
“The sooner the better, then,” said Macdonald, “for there’s much to do
before the rent collection.” He spoke as if his master were only out
upon a drinking-bout.
“If I just had him here for ten minutes!” said Mrs Macaulay.
“You might—you might venture to go to Kincreggan and see him,” suggested
the clerk.
“I have more regard for my life,” said the woman. “I’m ower much of the
Lowlander to trust myself in a den with a mad Highlander—even if he’s my
own man. Forbye” (here she smiled), “forbye, I’ve tried it already. I
have been twice at Kincreggan in the early morning, and he kept me fifty
yards off the walls with his gun. But I would not care to have that
mentioned in the place; it’s perhaps as little to my credit as to his
own. Oh, if I had him under this roof again for ten minutes, or could
get a certain thing delivered in his hands—” She broke off, and looked
into Macdonald’s face quickly as with an inspiration.
“What is it?” asked the clerk.
“A little packet,” she replied; “just a small packet you could carry in
your hand.”
“_Buidseachas_—I mean witchcraft?” said Macdonald, who had brought a good
many superstitions from Moidart.
“Well, well—in a way, a sort of witchcraft,” she admitted, with a smile.
“It is part of a charm that wiles men from their wild ways.”
“I don’t know but what I might risk taking it to him, then,” said
Macdonald, and so it happened that that very evening he found himself
challenged fifty yards from the wall of Kincreggan, with a pair of
slippers wrapped carefully in paper in his hands—nothing more.
“What have you there, Macdonald?” cried the master, girning over the neck
of a musket at his clerk, who shook on the edge of the river at the
narrowest part of the pass.
“I do not know,” was the lad’s answer, for indeed his knowledge of what
he carried was due to his own curiosity and not to any information he had
got from the lady who sent him. “I do not know; I was sent with it by
your wife, Mr Macaulay.”
“Kincreggan, you mean,” corrected the factor, plainly determined on the
old territorial honours.
“Kincreggan.”
“Drop it into the pool, then,” commanded the madman, snuggling closer to
his weapon, and Macdonald did as he was told.
“Now come in and I will speak to you,” said Macaulay, and so the clerk
got into Kincreggan, and however his master coaxed or cozened him, he
stayed there.
For some days after the cracking of guns was heard echoing for miles
round the hollow of Kincreggan. That sent the island mad with an itching
curiosity. On all the roads men and women travelled, and up the face of
Ben Buidhe, to lie on the myrtle and look at Alasdair Dhu and his clerk
shooting and fishing as in the fine free ancient days. It was no secret
that many admired the outlaw; his state of nature seemed so enviable
compared with their own poor prosaic lives as fishers or shepherds, that
he might have had recruits if he had been more accessible. The people
were vexed for the Captain, it is true, but not so vexed that they could
not admire the cleverness of the man who, bred in towns and brought up to
the pen, had lifted the laird’s cattle as neatly as if he had tramped a
lifetime through night and mist with his forebears. They got a new light
upon society and its rights and wrongs, though they might not have the
philosophy to explain it clearly; they seemed to see that might was right
at any time; they searched themselves in vain to see wherein Macaulay and
his clerk, possessing themselves of Macaulay’s ancient home and of things
not made with hands, but nature’s gifts, were any worse than the long
line of Kilree’s family that, ending in the Captain himself, had used
cunning and contrivance to get and keep these things. It was said that a
kind of fever went through the men when they saw the example of Macaulay,
that they abandoned their common tasks awhile, and might, but for mothers
and wives, have gone wholly wrong.
The Captain was no sooner out of his doctor’s hands than he sent a corps
of his workmen to expel the outlaws and pull down Kincreggan House.
“By heavens!” he said, “I’m hardly angry at the fellow for his
mischievousness; it takes so uncommon a form. He might have robbed me
all these years decently like a man of business in quite another fashion
far less interesting. It’s madness, of course, but it’s in a lot of
blood that runs very sluggishly in these parts nowadays. I sometimes
have had a touch of it myself; so I’ll give the rogue law.”
Up to Kincreggan, then, went his men with picks, and the first of them
had only got round the bend of the pass when a bullet flew over his head
and another close behind it. The lawyer and his clerk were determined to
hold Kincreggan as Ranald More Macaulay had held it against the Captain’s
grandfather!
Next the Captain himself went up, and reached as far as the wall of the
fold where his own cattle were imprisoned. A cry stopped him at the
wall, and he looked up to see the pieces of Macaulay and the lad directed
at his breast.
“A parley, Kincreggan!” he cried, slyly giving his late factor the
honour.
The lawyer was hard to recognise, so oddly had he changed from the shaven
and well-put-on man of business who had plied an industrious quill but
lately at a desk. A beard blackened his face; the pilfered web of tartan
was belted round his loins into a kilt, with the end of it dragged round
his shoulder for a plaid in the fashion of the age of Mar; a blue bonnet
was scrugged down upon his brow, and on his feet, that used to enjoy the
slippers of his own fireside, were _cuarains_—roughly-made moccasins of
ox-hide with the hair still on them. It was, to the eye and imagination
of the Captain, as if time and change had someway overlooked the shelter
of Kincreggan in its mountain cleft, and there had remained in it,
unknown and unsuspected, some eddying backwater of the wild old days. In
faith, Macaulay in such an ancient polity had been a chief of chiefs; he
had it in his aspect and his mien. He stood against the crenels of a
bastion, his whole figure revealed, an elbow on the stones and the musket
balanced in his hands, a kind of lazy elegance in his attitude, ease and
independence, health and pride. He looked at his old client as an eagle
might look at a lamb, swithering whether he should swoop or stay still.
The only thing to mar the dignity of the picture was the presence of his
clerk in an angle of the wall besides him—still the ’prentice lawyer,
doubtless even to the ink on the very finger that hung on the trigger of
the weapon with which he covered the Captain.
“I will be giving you three minutes, Kilree,” said Macaulay, “to get the
length of the boulder yonder on your way back. If I see so much as your
heel after that I will shoot at it, and you will not escape with your
life a second time.”
“That is very fine, and I’ll not deny it is picturesque,” said the
Captain, “but it’s a little out of date and a cursed folly. More than
that, it’s robbery, to say nothing about the—the accident with the knife,
and nowadays there’s admitted to be no grace about a robbery even
committed in a kilt. It might be all very well for your grandfather and
my own to fight like this over these walls, but—”
“How did Kincreggan come into the hands of your family?” interrupted the
lawyer.
“You have me there,” admitted the Captain, with a little awkward laugh.
“You have me there, and I’m not a lawyer to obscure the facts. Our folk
fought yours for it, and having got it—”
“Well, the fighting was not finished,” said the outlaw; “I have begun it
again, and Kincreggan is Macaulay’s. Go back, Kilree, go back; and if
you come again, bring a coffin under your arm.”
The Captain went, and it was the last he was to see of his factor till
that stormy Lammas day when the outlaw came home.
Macaulay roved the moors and forest while his clerk kept ward in their
fortress. Stags fell to his gun, the best linns gave him fish. At the
market in Marinish, over the ford on the other island, where the
Captain’s clan was unpopular, Macaulay one day appeared at a cattle tryst
and sold beasts the buyers did not inquire too closely about, and he
replaced them in his fold with others lifted boldly from Kilree’s home
farm on his way back from the market. Night and day he was watched for,
but night or day either he or Macdonald was awake and waiting; and more
than once he was at the other end of the parish on some exploit while
Kilree’s men kept an eye on the pass.
He became the glory of his own island, and a toast at fairs in all the
Islands. “Alasdair Dhu” was the name on every lip; his wife shared his
popularity, and people sent her gifts of sheep and fowl from as far as
the mainland. And all she would say was, “What a silly thing! An island
of men against one man in a dream! If I had just had him here!”