Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/285

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A Museum of Souls
275

Turnbull, genially, “and sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following.”

“I alone am loyal,” insisted MacIan; “for I alone am in rebellion. I am ready at any instant to restore the Stuarts. I am ready at any instant to defy the Hanoverian brood—and I defy it now even when face to face with the actual ruler of the enormous British Empire!”

And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face, he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and the eccentric elbow.

“What right had you stunted German squires,” he cried, “to interfere in a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen? Who made you, whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall, who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchy of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of Jimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the blood of Lochiel?” MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood

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