Said he to his wife, jingling the Geordies in his hand on the day he got them, "Here's the price of a hero; and troth it's little enough for a good armsmith's blood!"
"Och! I am but laughing at thee, good-wife. Brave dogs would they be that would face the tusks of the Diarmaid boars. Like the wind on the chaff--troosh!--we'll scatter them! In a week I'll be home."
"To be sure, Jean. I'll buy with the money a stot or two on the road to bring back with me, for there's little lifting in the Duke's corps, more's the pity! My grandfather seldom came back from the wars without a few head of cattle before him."
So the money went in Rob Donn's sporran, and Jean would have bit her tongue out before she would crave for part o't from a man going among strangers and swords.
The bairn had but one word for her father from then till he started, and that was "Cockade." What it was the little one never knew, but that it was something braw and costly, a plaything for a father to go far off for.
"Two or three of them, my white love!" would Rob Donn say, fond and hearty. "They'll be as thick as nuts on the ground when we're done of the gentry that wear them on their bonnets." And he had a soft wet eye for the child, a weakling, white and thin, never quite the better of the snell winds of winter. If cockades, indeed, were to be had for the fighting of a fortnight without sleep, Rob Donn would have them for her.
So now was the morning to put on fighting gear and go on the foray for white cockades.
By-and-by a cruisie-light crept out at the gables of the town, and the darkness filled with the smell of new peat burning. Aora, spluttering past Jean Rob's door with a gulp into the Cooper's Pool, made, within the house, the only sound of the morning.
Jean scraped the meal off her hands and went again to the door to look about and listen.
"Ay, ay! up at last," she said to herself.
"There's the Major's light, and Kate Mhor up for the making of his breakfast, and a lowe in the weaver's shed. The Provost's is dark--poor man!--it's little his lady is caring!"
She was going to turn about and in, when the squeal of a bagpipe came from the town-head, and the player started to put his drones in order. "Ochan! ochan!" said poor Jean, for here, indeed, was the end of her hopes; there was no putting back from the Duke's errand. She listened a little to the tuning as if it was the finest of _piobaireachds_, and it brought a curious notion to her mind of the first reel she danced with her man to the squeezing of that same sheepskin. Then the reeds roared into the air of "Baile Inneraora."