"Where is the air like it?" said Dol' to himself, slacking a reed with a thumb-nail. "Well they ken it where little they love it with its vaunting!" But he up with his drones on his shoulder and into the tune that had the Cornal's fancy. Beside him the Cornal stood at his horse's stirrup in the grey-brown of the morning, his head still light with the bottle of claret wine his lady in Lecknamban had put before him ere he had boot over saddle.
Then the town stirred to its affairs. The Major's horse went clattering over the cobblestones to his door-end, the arm-room door opened, and old Nanny Bheag, who kept the key, was lifted off her feet and in, on the rush of young lads making for the new guns Lome Clerk had up from the Low Country. On the belts of the older men, loth to leave the fire-end, mothers and wives were hanging bags with thick farls of cake, and cheese, and the old Aora salve for swordcuts.
If they had their way of it, these _caille-achan_, the fighting gear would be all kebbucks of cheese and dry hose, and no powder and ball. The men blustered, high-breasted, with big words in their beards, and no name too dirty for the crew they were off to scatter--praising themselves and making the fine prophecies, as their folks did before them with better rights when the town was more in the way of going to wars. Or they roundly scolded the weans for making noise, though their eyes were learning every twist of the copper hair and every trick of the last moment, to think on when long and dreary would be the road before them.
There was a break in Dol' Dubh's music, and high over the big town rang the Cornal's voice, starting the bairns in their sleep and setting them up and screaming.
"Laggards! laggards! O lazy ones! Out! out! Campbells before were never so swear't to be marching. It is time to be steeping the withies!"
Hard back went the stout doors on the walls, and out ran the folk. The brogues skliffed and hammered; men with muskets, swords, dirks, and targes ran down the street, and women and children behind them. A tumult filled the town from side to side and end to end, and the lanes and closes were streaming with the light from gaping doors.
Old and young, the boy and the snooded girl, women with bairn at breast, _bodach_ and _cailleach_, took to the Cross muster, leaving the houses open to the wind and to the world. The cats thrummed by the fires, and the smell of the sea-wrack came in beside them.