“You’re mistaken there.  They’ll frighten ye all right when they answer the drum!  I’m thinking there’s some in the army would answer it!”

“Then they’ll be hanged, drawn, and quartered!” averred the corporal.  “Who are ye thinking would do that?”

“I’m not precisely knowing.  But there are some with King George were brought up on the hope of King James!”

More liquor appeared upon the table, was poured and drunk.  The talk grew professional.  The King’s shilling, and the advantage of taking it, came solely upon the board, and who might or might not ’list from this dale and the bordering hills.  Strickland and Robin Greenlaw left their corner.

“I must get back to the house.”

“And I to Littlefarm.”

They went out together.  There were few in the street.  The snow was beginning to fall.  Greenlaw untied his horse.

“I hope that we’re not facing another ’fifteen! ’Scotland’s ain Stewarts, and Break the Union!’ It sounds well, but it’s not in the line of progression.  What does Captain Ian Rullock think about it?”

“I don’t know.  He hasn’t been here, you know, for a long while.”

“That’s true.  He and Mr. Alexander are still like brothers?”

“Like brothers.”

Greenlaw mounted his horse.  “Well, he’s a bonny man, but he’s got a piece of the demon in him!  So have I, I ken very well, and so, doubtless, has he who will be Glenfernie, and all the rest of us—­”

“I sit down to supper with mine very often,” said Strickland.

“Oh yes, he’s common—­the demon!  But somehow I could find him in Ian Rullock, though all covered up with gold.  But doubtless,” said Greenlaw, debonairly, “it would be the much of the fellow in me that would recognize much in another!” He put his gray into motion.  “Good day, sir!” He was gone, disappearing down the long street, into the snow that was now falling like a veil.

Strickland turned homeward.  The snow fell fast and thick in large white flakes.  Glenfernie House rose before him, crowning the craggy hill, the modern building and the remnant of the old castle, not a great place, but an ancient, settled, and rooted, part of a land poor but not without grandeur, not without a rhythm attained between grandeur and homeliness.  The road swept around and up between leafless trees and green cone-bearing ones.  The snow was whitening the branches, the snow wrapped house and landscape in its veil.  It broke, in part it obliterated, line and modeling; the whole seemed on the point of dissolving into a vast and silent unity.  “Like a dying man,” thought Strickland.  He came upon the narrow level space about the house, passed the great cedar planted by a pilgrim laird the year of Flodden Field, and entered by a door in the southern face.

Davie met him.  “Eh, sir, Mr. Alexander’s come!”

“Come!”

“Aye, just!  An hour past, riding Black Alan, with Tam Dickson behind on Whitefoot, and weary enough thae horses looked!  Mr. Alexander wad ha’ gane without bite or sup to the laird’s room, but he’s lying asleep.  So now he’s gane to his ain auld room for a bit of rest.  Haith, sir,” said Davie, “but he’s like the auld laird when he was twenty-eight!”