BEN NEVIS FELT depressed for nearly five minutes when his eldest son told him that he had been refused by Myrtle Royde; but that sanguine disposition was incapable of protracted gloom and by the time Hector left on Friday for India he was as rumbustious as ever, having been particularly elated by the news that two of his gillies with Neil Maclennan had destroyed a small encampment on one of the spurs of Ben Cruet and that Smeorach, Neil’s wall-eyed dog, had bitten the leg of the hiker left in charge.

“I hope it was a really good bite, Neil?” he asked eagerly.

“Oh yes, it was a good bite, right enough, Ben Nevis.”

“Not just a scrape?”

“No, no; it was more than a scrape.”

“Good! I’ll teach these brutes to threaten me,” the Chieftain boasted in his pride.

“That guy’s chin would be worth biting,” Chester Royde observed pensively. “I reckon he’s the leader of the whole gang.”

“By Jove, that reminds me,” Ben Nevis exclaimed. “Old Duncan sent word last night that this fellow with the chin is camping in one of the corries of Ben Booey. What do you say, Royde? Shall we try and bag the brute?”

“Fine. Nothing would suit me better,” Chester Royde declared.

“We’ll have to do some stalking to get our quarry.”

“Stalking?” Chester repeated suspiciously. “Do you mean crawl along for miles on our bellies the way we did after that darned stag?”

“Oh, not quite such a tussle as that,” Ben Nevis said. “You wouldn’t put a hiker on a level with a noble beast like the muckle hart of Ben Glass. No, my idea was to approach the camp fairly cautiously and march them all back to Glenbogle in front of our guns. If this fellow with the chin is the leader and we bag him, that will put an end to the nuisance.”

“How?”

“Why, we’ll keep him a prisoner here till every hiker has cleared off my land. But I shan’t shut him up in a dungeon this time. I shall shut him up in the Raven’s Nest at the top of the Raven’s Tower.”

“A nest sounds a lot too comfortable for that guy with the chin,” Chester Royde objected.

“Oh, it’s not really a nest. It’s a little room at the top of the tower where the watchman used to keep a look-out for marauding Macintoshes once upon a time.”

All that night derisive boohs and catcalls round the Castle indicated that the hikers were growing bolder, as well they might with the reinforcements due to reach them in the course of next two days.