“Sit down and have a glass with me,” said the latter.  “Who are they?”

“A recruiting party,” answered Greenlaw, accepting the invitation.  “I like to hear their talk!  I’ll listen, drinking your wine and thanking you, sir! and riding home I’ll make a song about them.”

He sat with his arm over the chair-back, his right hand now lifting and now lowering the wine-glass.  He had a look of strength and inner pleasure that rested and refreshed.

“What are they saying now?” asked Strickland.

The soldiers made the center of attention.  More or less all in the room harkened to their talk, disconnected, obscure, idle, and boisterous as much of it was.  The revenue officer, by virtue of being also the king’s paid man, had claimed comrade’s right and was drinking with them and putting questions.  He was so obliging as to ask these in a round tone of voice and to repeat on the same note the information gathered.

“Recruits for the King’s army, fighting King Louis on the river Main.—­Where’s that?—­It’s in Germany.  Our King and the Hanoverians and the King of Prussia and the Queen of Austria are fighting the King of France.—­Aye, of course ye know that, neighbors, being intelligent Scots folk, but recapitulation is na out of order!”

“Ask them what’s thought of the Hanoverians.”  It was the lawyer’s clerk’s question.  Thereupon rose some noisy difference of opinion among the drinking redcoats.  The excise man finally reported.  “They’re na English, nor Scots, nor even Irish.  But they’re liked weel enough!  They’re good fighters.  Oh, aye, when ye march and fight alangside them, they’re good enough!  They’re his Majesty’s cousins.  God save King George!”

The recruiting party banged with tankards upon the table.  One of the number put a question of his own.  He had a look half pedant, half bully, and he spoke with a one-quarter-drunken, owllike solemnity.

“I may take it from the look of things that there are none hereabouts but good Whigs and upholders of government?  No Tories—­no damned black Jacobites?”

The excise man hemmed.  “Why, ye see we’re no sae muckle far from Hielands and Hielandmen, and it’s known what they are, chief, chieftain, and clan—­saving always the duke and every Campbell!  And I wadna say that there are not, here and there, this side the Hielands, an auld family with leanings the auld way, and even a few gentlemen who were out in the ’fifteen.  But the maist of us, gentle and simple, are up and down Whig and Kirk and reigning House.—­Na, na! when we drink to the King we dinna pass the glass over the water!”

A dark, thin soldier put in his word, well garnished with oaths.  “Now that there’s war up and down and so many of us are going out of the country, there’s a saying that the Pretender may e’en sail across from France and beat a drum and give a shout!  Then there’ll be a sorting—­”

“Them that would rise wouldn’t be enough to make a graveyard ghost to frighten with!”