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.
Sholto, who in virtue of his courage and good marksmanship had been placed over the archer company which waited on the right of the ford, fell in immediately behind the _cortège_ of the Earl. He was first man of all to have his equipment examined, and his weapons obtained, as they deserved, the commendation of his liege lord, and the grim unwilling approval of Malise, the master armourer, whose unerring eye could not detect so much as a speck on the shirt of mail, or a grain of rust on the waist brace of shining steel.