The Loom of Destiny
the boy's face. He forgot the discomfort of his Sunday clothes. It must be the soldiers on church parade! Then the sound grew like the voice of a thousand sirens singing in his ears.
Still he faltered. He remembered the Sunday-school collection, and his story of Joseph, and the cold, green eyes, haunting and relentless, that watched him each morning to see that he did not take more than his share of porridge. He was dreadfully afraid of those cold, green eyes. But the fates were against Duncan Stewart McDougall.
At that moment a new sound fell on his childish ears. It was the unfamiliar note of bagpipes, the mingled chant and drone of the band of Highland pipers. At that moment it was not the smell of the crowded slums that stole into his little Scottish nostrils. It was heather—the scent of heather, remembered as a dream of years ago.
The sound awoke something dormant, ancestral, unconquerable, in his McDougall veins. Then it was he remembered watching Sandy McPherson, the Holland's coach-
28
