Eight hours after the beacon kindled on Dunchuach, the enemy was feeling
at the heart of Argile.
It came out years after, that one Angus Macalain, a Glencoe man, a
branded robber off a respectable Water-of-Duglas family, had guided the
main body of the invaders through the mountains of the Urchy and into
our territory. They came on in three bands, Alasdair Mac-Donald and
the Captain of Clanranald (as they called John MacDonald, the beast--a
scurvy knave!), separating at Accurach at the forking of the two glens,
and entering both, Montrose himself coming on the rear as a support As
if to favour the people of the Glens, a thaw came that day with rain and
mist that cloaked them largely from view as they ran for the hills to
shelter in the sheiling bothies. The ice, as I rode up the water-side,
home to Glen Shira to gather some men and dispose my father safely, was
breaking on the surface of the loch and roaring up on the shore in the
incoming tide. It came piling in layers in the bays--a most wonderful
spectacle! I could not hear my horse’s hooves for the cracking and
crushing and cannonade of it as it flowed in on a south wind to the
front of the Gearran, giving the long curve of the land an appearance
new and terrible, filled as it was far over high-water mark with
monstrous blocks, answering with groans and cries to every push of the
tide.
I found the glen wrapped in mist, the Gearran hamlet empty of people,
Maam, Kilblaan, Stuchgoy, and Ben Bhuidhe presenting every aspect of
desolation. A weeping rain was making sodden all about my father’s house
when I galloped to the door, to find him and the _sgalag_ the only ones
left.
The old man was bitter on the business.
“Little I thought,” said he, “to see the day when Glen Shira would turn
tail on an enemy.”
“Where are they?” I asked, speaking of our absent followers; but indeed
I might have saved the question, for I knew before he told me they were
up in the conies between the mounts, and in the caves of Glen Finne.
He was sitting at a fire that was down to its grey ash, a mournful
figure my heart was vexed to see. Now and then he would look about him,
at the memorials of my mother, her chair and her Irish Bible (the first
in the parish), and a posy of withered flowers that lay on a bowl on a
shelf where she had placed them, new cut and fresh, the day she took
to her deathbed. Her wheel, too, stood in the corner, with the thread
snapped short in the heck--a hint, I many times thought, at the sundered
interests of life.
“I suppose we must be going with the rest,” I ventured; “there’s small
sense in biding here to be butchered.”
He fell in a rain of tears, fearing nor death nor hardship, I knew, but
wae at the abandonment of his home. I had difficulty in getting him to
consent to come with me, but at last I gave the prospect of safety in
the town and the company of friends there so attractive a hue that he
consented So we hid a few things under a _bruach_ or overhanging brae
beside the burn behind the house, and having shut all the doors--a
comical precaution against an army, it struck me at the time--we rode
down to Inneraora, to the town house of our relative Craignure.
It was a most piteous community, crowded in every lane and pend with
men, women, and children dreadful of the worst All day the people had
been trooping in from the landward parts, flying before the rumour of
the Athole advance down Cladich. For a time there was the hope that
the invaders would but follow the old Athole custom and plunder as they
went, sparing unarmed men and women, but this hope we surrendered when a
lad came from Camus with a tale of two old men, who were weavers there,
and a woman, nailed into their huts and burned to death.
Had Inneraora been a walled town, impregnable, say, as a simple Swabian
village with a few sconces and redoubts, and a few pieces of cannon, we
old soldiers would have counselled the holding of it against all comers;
but it was innocently open to the world, its back windows looking into
the fields, its through-going wynds and closes leading frankly to the
highway.
A high and sounding wind had risen from the south, the sea got in a
tumult, the ice-blocks ran like sheep before it to the Gearran bay and
the loch-head. I thought afterwards it must be God’s providence that
opened up for us so suddenly a way of flight from this lamentable trap,
by the open water now free from shore to shore in front of the town.
Generalling the community as if he was a marshal of brigade, John
Splendid showed me the first of his manly quality in his preparation
for the removal of the women and children. He bade the men run out
the fishing smacks, the wherries and skiffs, at the Cadger’s Quay, and
moving about that frantic people, he disposed them in their several
places on the crafts that were to carry them over the three-mile ferry
to Cowal. A man born to enterprise and guidance, certes! I never saw his
equal. He had the happy word for all, the magic hint of hope, a sober
merriment when needed, sometimes a little raillery and laughing,
sometimes (with the old) a farewell in the ear. Even the better
gentry, Sir Donald and the rest, took a second place in the management,
beholding in this poor gentleman the human heart that at a pinch is
better than authority in a gold-braided coat.
By noon we had every bairn and woman (but for one woman I’ll mention) on
their way from the shore, poor dears! tossing on the turbulent sea, the
women weeping bitterly for the husbands and sons they left, for of men
there went with them but the oldsters, able to guide a boat, but poorly
equipped for battling with Irish banditty. And my father was among
them, in the kind hands of his _sgaiag_ and kinswomen, but in a vague
indifference of grief.
A curious accident, that in the grace of God made the greatest
difference on my after-life, left among them that found no place in the
boats the daughter of Provost Brown. She had made every preparation to
go with her father and mother, and had her foot on the beam of the boat,
when an old woman set up a cry for an oe that had been forgot in the
confusion, and was now, likely, crying in the solitude of the back
lands. It was the love-bairn of a dead mother, brought up in the kindly
Highland fashion, free of every gimel and kail-pot. Away skirted Betty
up the causeway of the Cadger’s Quay, and in among the lanes for the
little one, and (I learned again) she found it playing well content
among puddled snow, chattering to itself in the loneliness of yon
war-menaced town. And she had but snatched it up to seek safety with her
in the boats when the full tide of Colkitto’s robbers came pelting in
under the Arches. They cut her off from all access to the boats by that
way, so she turned and made for the other end of the town, hoping to
hail in her father’s skiff when he had put far enough off shore to see
round the point and into the second bay.
We had but time to shout her apparent project to her father, when we
found ourselves fighting hand-to-hand against the Irish gentry in trews.
This was no market-day brawl, but a stark assault-at-arms. All in
the sound of a high wind, broken now and then with a rain blattering
even-down, and soaking through tartan and _clo-dubh_ we at it for dear
life. Of us Clan Campbell people, gentrice and commoners, and so many of
the Lowland mechanics of the place as were left behind, there would
be something less than two hundred, for the men who had come up the
loch-side to the summon of the beacons returned the way they came when
they found MacCailein gone, and hurried to the saving of wife and bairn.
We were all well armed with fusil and sword, and in that we had some
advantage of the caterans bearing down on us; for they had, for the
main part, but rusty matchlocks, pikes, billhooks--even bows and arrows,
antique enough contrivance for a time of civilised war! But they had
hunger and hate for their backers, good guidance in their own savage
fashion from MacDonald, and we were fighting on a half heart, a body
never trained together, and stupid to the word of command.
From the first, John took the head of our poor defence. He was
_duine-uasail_ enough, and he had, notoriously, the skill that earned
him the honour, even over myself (in some degree), and certainly over
Sir Donald.
The town-head fronted the upper bay, and between it and the grinding
ice on the shore lay a broad tract of what might be called esplanade,
presenting ample space for our encounter.
“Gentlemen,” cried John, picking off a man with the first shot from a
silver-butted _dag_ he pulled out of his waist-belt at the onset, “and
with your leave, Sir Donald (trusting you to put pluck in these Low
Country shopkeepers), it’s Inneraora or Ifrinn for us this time. Give
them cold steel, and never an inch of arm-room for their bills!”
Forgotten were the boats, behind lay all our loves and fortunes--was
ever Highland heart but swelled on such a time? Sturdy black and hairy
scamps the Irish--never German boor so inelegant--but venomous in their
courage! Score upon score of them ran in on us through the Arches. Our
lads had but one shot from the muskets, then into them with the dirk and
sword.
“Montrose! Montrose!” cried the enemy, even when the blood glucked at
the thrapple, and they twisted to the pain of the knife.
“A papist dog!” cried Splendid, hard at it on my right, for once a
zealous Protestant, and he was whisking around him his broadsword like a
hazel wand, facing half-a-dozen Lochaber-axes. “Cruachan, Cruachan!” he
sang. And we cried the old slogan but once, for time pressed and wind
was dear.
Sitting cosy in taverns with friends long after, listening to men
singing in the cheery way of taverns the ditty that the Leckan bard made
upon this little spulzie, I could weep and laugh in turns at minding of
yon winter’s day. In the hot stress of it I felt but the ardour that’s
in all who wear tartan--less a hatred of the men I thrust and slashed
at with Sir Claymore than a zest in the busy traffic, and something of
a pride (God help me!) in the pretty way my blade dirled on the ham-pans
of the rascals. There was one trick of the sword I had learned off an
old sergeant of pikes in Macka’s Scots, in a leisure afternoon in camp,
that I knew was alien to every man who used the targe in home battles,
and it served me like a Mull wife’s charm. They might be sturdy, the
dogs, valorous too, for there’s no denying the truth, and they were
gleg, gleg with the target in fending, but, man, I found them mighty
simple to the feint and lunge of Alasdair Mor!
Listening, as I say, to a song in a tavern, I’m sad for the stout
fellows of our tartan who fell that day, and still I could laugh gaily
at the amaze of the ragged corps who found gentlemen before them. They
pricked at us, for all their natural ferocity, with something like
apology for marring our fine clothes; and when the end came, and we were
driven back, they left the gentlemen of our band to retreat by the pends
to the beech-wood, and gave their attention to the main body of our
common townsmen.
We had edged, Splendid and Sir Donald and I, into a bit of green behind
the church, and we held a council of war on our next move.
Three weary men, the rain smirring on our sweating, faces, there we
were! I noticed that a trickle of blood was running down my wrist, and I
felt at the same time a beat at the shoulder that gave the explanation,
and had mind that a fellow in the Athole corps had fired a pistolet
point-blank at me, missing me, as I had thought, by the thickness of my
doublet-sleeve.
“You’ve got a cut,” said Sir Donald. “You have a face like the clay.”
“A bit of the skin off,” said I, unwilling to vex good company.
“We must take to Eas-a-chosain for it,” said Splendid, his eyes flashing
wild upon the scene, the gristle of his red neck throbbing.
Smoke was among the haze of the rain; from the thatch of the town-head
houses the wind brought on us the smell of burning heather and brake and
fir-joist.
“Here’s the lamentable end of town Inneraora!” said John, in a doleful
key.
And we ran, the three of us, up the Fisherland burn side to the wood of
Creag Dubh.