“None at all—­no reason in the creation,” replied the ready Captain Dalgetty, who forthwith began to unpack the contents of a small basket which the stranger had brought under his cloak, while the Highlander, either in suspicion or disdain, paid no attention to the good cheer.

“Here’s to thee, my friend,” said the Captain, who, having already dispatched a huge piece of roasted kid, was now taking a pull at the wine-flask.  “What is thy name, my good friend?”

“Murdoch Campbell, sir,” answered the servant, “a lackey of the Marquis of Argyle, and occasionally acting as under-warden.”

“Then here is to thee once more, Murdoch,” said Dalgetty, “drinking to you by your proper name for the better luck sake.  This wine I take to be Calcavella.  Well, honest Murdoch, I take it on me to say, thou deservest to be upper-warden, since thou showest thyself twenty times better acquainted with the way of victualling honest gentlemen that are under misfortune, than thy principal.  Bread and water? out upon him!  It was enough, Murdoch, to destroy the credit of the Marquis’s dungeon.  But I see you would converse with my friend, Ranald MacEagh here.  Never mind my presence; I’ll get me into this corner with the basket, and I will warrant my jaws make noise enough to prevent my ears from hearing you.”

Notwithstanding this promise, however, the veteran listened with all the attention he could to gather their discourse, or, as he described it himself, “laid his ears back in his neck, like Gustavus, when he heard the key turn in the girnell-kist.”  He could, therefore, owing to the narrowness of the dungeon, easily overhear the following dialogue.

“Are you aware, Son of the Mist,” said the Campbell, “that you will never leave this place excepting for the gibbet?”

“Those who are dearest to me,” answered MacEagh, “have trode that path before me.”

“Then you would do nothing,” asked the visitor, “to shun following them?”

The prisoner writhed himself in his chains before returning an answer.

“I would do much,” at length he said; “not for my own life, but for the sake of the pledge in the glen of Strath-Aven.”

“And what would you do to turn away the bitterness of the hour?” again demanded Murdoch; “I care not for what cause ye mean to shun it.”

“I would do what a man might do, and still call himself a man.”

“Do you call yourself a man,” said the interrogator, “who have done the deeds of a wolf?”

“I do,” answered the outlaw; “I am a man like my forefathers—­while wrapt in the mantle of peace, we were lambs—­it was rent from us, and ye now call us wolves.  Give us the huts ye have burned, our children whom ye have murdered, our widows whom ye have starved—­collect from the gibbet and the pole the mangled carcasses, and whitened skulls of our kinsmen—­bid them live and bless us, and we will be your vassals and brothers—­till then, let death, and blood, and mutual wrong, draw a dark veil of division between us.”