“But I tell you he will,” she insisted earnestly. “You didn’t see him charge those campers yesterday. I did.”

“A mob of Cockney hikers, I suppose,” said the bard contemptuously.

“I don’t know where they came from, but I do know he shook them one after another like so many rats.”

“Let him try to shake me,” said James Buchanan, his round head weaving the air like a boxer’s. “I’ll pull his lugs for him.”

“His what?” Myrtle asked.

“His ears. Ay, and his nose. Shake me, will he?” James threatened.

“He might shoot you,” said Myrtle. “He shot a crooner in a portable radio.”

“This is a really great chance for poetic action,” the bard observed, a dreamy smile quickening upon his rowan-red lips.

“It’s a great chance for action of any kind, poetic or otherwise,” James Buchanan declared. “Shake me, will he? Man, I hope fine he just tries. You’re sure the ploy is to start this afternoon, Miss Royde, because I have to go back to Glasgow to-morrow and I don’t want to miss this shaking?”

“But you forget, Mr Buchanan, that Ben Nevis has keepers and beaters, not to mention his two sons,” Myrtle said.

“So big a Chieftain’s sure to have a tail,” Alan Macmillan scoffed. “Well, maybe he and his tail will be able to throw James and me into the nearest loch. But if they do I promise James and I will come back with a tail of our own and throw him and his sons and his keepers and his beaters into every loch he owns, one after another.”

“You know, I’m crazy about Scotland,” Myrtle declared, gazing into Alan’s eyes. “You’re all so fierce. It makes Chicago seem kind of slow and sleepy. And you’re so much what my idea used to be about poets, Mr Macmillan, until I met two or three of them and found them sissie or highbrow. Well, I suppose if you’re set on shooting it out with Ben Nevis nothing I can say or do will change your mind. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my sister-in-law when I see her. I guess she’s going to call me the world’s worst diplomat. She’ll be sure that if she had given you the warning you’d have listened to her. Perhaps you would,” Myrtle added softly, with a sidelong glance from beneath her long-lashed lids at the poet, whose rose-browned complexion caught a deeper rose as he replied in a carefully indifferent tone that nobody could persuade him to run away from Ben Nevis.