Calum, for all his weariness, stepped like a man with a lifetime's plans before his mind; Art looked about him in the fashion of one with an eye to woodcraft; Uileam slouched with a heavy foot, white at the jaw and wild of eye.
The wood opened, the hunting-road bent about the hill-face to give a level that the eye might catch the country spread below. Loch Finne stretched far, from Ardno to French Foreland, a glassy field, specked with one sail off Creaggans. When the company came to a stand, Calum Dubh tossed his head to send the hair from his eyes, and looked at what lay below. The Scaurnoch broke at his feet, the grey rock-face falling to a depth so deep that weary mists still hung upon the sides, jagged here and there by the top of a fir-tree. The sun, behind the Dun, gave the last of her glory to the Cowal Hills; Hell's Glen filled with wheeling mists; Ben Ime, Ben Vane, and Ben Arthur crept together and held princely converse on the other side of the sea.
All in a daze of weariness and thinking the Diarmaids stood, and looked and listened, and the curlews were crying bitter on the shore.
"Oh, haste ye, lads, or it's not Carnus for us to-night," cried Niall Mor. "We have business before us, and long's the march to follow. The secret, black fellow!"
Calum Dubh laughed, and spat in a bravado over the edge of the rock.
"Come, fool; if we have not the word from you before the sun's off Sithean Sluaidhe, your sleep this night is yonder," and he pointed at the pit below.
Calum laughed the more. "If it was hell itself," said he, "I would not save my soul from it."
"Look, man, look! the Sithean Sluaidhe's getting black, and any one of ye can save the three yet. I swear it on the cross of my knife."
Behind the brothers, one, John-Without-Asking, stood, with a gash on his face, eager to give them to the crows below.
A shiver came to Uileam's lips; he looked at his father with a questioning face, and then stepped back a bit from the edge, making to speak to the tall man of Chamis.
Calum saw the meaning, and spoke fast and thick.
"Stop, stop," said he; "it's a trifle of a secret, after all, and to save life ye can have it."
Art took but a little look at his father's face, then turned round on Shira Glen and looked on the hills where the hunting had many a time been sweet. "Maam no more," said he to himself; "but here's death in the hero's style!"