“What the foul fiend,” said Dalgetty, “is to be done here?  I must part with Gustavus, I fear.”

“Take no care for your horse,” said the outlaw; “he shall soon be restored to you.”

As he spoke, he whistled in a low tune, and a lad, half-dressed in tartan, half naked, having only his own shaggy hair, tied with a thong of leather, to protect his head and face from sun and weather, lean, and half-starved in aspect, his wild grey eyes appearing to fill up ten times the proportion usually allotted to them in the human face, crept out, as a wild beast might have done, from a thicket of brambles and briars.

“Give your horse to the gillie,” said Ranald MacEagh; “your life depends upon it.”

“Och! och!” exclaimed the despairing veteran; “Eheu! as we used to say at Mareschal-College, must I leave Gustavus in such grooming!”

“Are you frantic, to lose time thus!” said his guide; “do we stand on friends’ ground, that you should part with your horse as if he were your brother?  I tell you, you shall have him again; but if you never saw the animal, is not life better than the best colt ever mare foaled?”

“And that is true too, mine honest friend,” sighed Dalgetty; “yet if you knew but the value of Gustavus, and the things we two have done and suffered together—­See, he turns back to look at me!—­Be kind to him, my good breechless friend, and I will requite you well.”  So saying, and withal sniffling a little to swallow his grief, he turned from the heart-rending spectacle in order to follow his guide.

To follow his guide was no easy matter, and soon required more agility than Captain Dalgetty could master.  The very first plunge after he had parted from his charger, carried him, with little assistance from a few overhanging boughs, or projecting roots of trees, eight foot sheer down into the course of a torrent, up which the Son of the Mist led the way.  Huge stones, over which they scrambled,—­thickets of them and brambles, through which they had to drag themselves,—­rocks which were to be climbed on the one side with much labour and pain, for the purpose of an equally precarious descent upon the other; all these, and many such interruptions, were surmounted by the light-footed and half-naked mountaineer with an ease and velocity which excited the surprise and envy of Captain Dalgetty, who, encumbered by his head-piece, corslet, and other armour, not to mention his ponderous jack-boots, found himself at length so much exhausted by fatigue, and the difficulties of the road, that he sate down upon a stone in order to recover his breath, while he explained to Ranald MacEagh the difference betwixt travelling EXPEDITUS and IMPEDITUS, as these two military phrases were understood at Mareschal-College, Aberdeen.  The sole answer of the mountaineer was to lay his hand on the soldier’s arm, and point backward in the direction of the wind.  Dalgetty could spy nothing, for evening was closing fast, and they were at the bottom of a dark ravine.  But at length he could distinctly hear at a distance the sullen toll of a large bell.