Each camp displayed the device of its own lord, but higher than all, from the top of every mound and broomy hillock floated the banner of the overlord.  This was the lion of Galloway, white on a ground of blue, and beneath it, but on the same staff, a pennon whereon was the bleeding heart of the Douglas family.

The lists were set up on the level meadow that is called the Boat Croft.  At either end a pavilion had been erected, and the jousting green was strongly fenced in, with a rising tier of seats for the ladies along one side, and a throne in the midst for the Douglas himself, as high and as nobly upholstered as if the King of Scots had been presiding in person.

At ten by the great sun-dial of Thrieve, the Earl, armed in complete armour of rare work, damascened with gold, and bearing in his hand the truncheon of commander, rode first through the fords of Lochar, and immediately after him came his brother David, a tall handsome boy of fourteen, whose olive skin and highbred beauty attested his Douglas birth.

Next rode the Earl of Angus, a red, foxy-featured man, with mean and shifty eyes.  He sat his horse awkwardly, perpetually hunching his shoulders forward as if he feared to fall over his beast’s head.  And saving among his own company, no man did him any honour, which caused him to grin with wicked sidelong smiles of hate and envy.

Then amid the shouting of the people there appeared, on a milk-white palfrey, Margaret, the Earl’s only sister, already famous over all Scotland as “The Fair Maid of Galloway.”  With her rode one who, in the esteem of most who saw the pair that day, was a yet rarer flower, even Maud Lindesay, who had come out of the bleak North to keep the lonely little maid company.  For Margaret of Douglas was yet no more than a child, but Maud Lindesay was nineteen years of age and in the first perfect bloom of her beauty.

Behind these two came the whole array of the knights and barons who owned allegiance to the Douglas,—­Herons and Maxwells, Ardwell Macullochs, Gordons from the Glen of Kells, with Agnews and MacDowalls from the Shireside.  But above all, and outnumbering all, there were the lesser chiefs of the mighty name—­Douglases of the North, the future Moray and Ormond among them, the noble young sons of James the Gross of Avondale, who rode nearest their cousin, the head of the clan.  Then came Douglases of the Border, Douglases of the Hermitage, of Renfrew, of Douglasdale.  Every third man in that great company which splashed and caracoled through the fords of Lochar, was a William, a James, or an Archibald Douglas.  The King himself could not have raised in all Scotland such a following, and it is small wonder if the heart of the young man expanded within him.

Presently, soon after the arrival of the cavalcade, the great wappenshaw was set in array, and forming up company by company the long double line extended as far as the eye could reach from north to south along the side of the broad and sluggish-moving river.