But he got an answer to his question. For in the sudden quiet he could hear many iron horseshoes, and a few iron wheel-rims, assaulting the paving-stones of the causeway. They could be any group of riders, followed by a wagon. But the piper down the lane, who’d been silent these last few minutes, now let pent-up breath sing in his drone, and began to play a battle-song of the MacDonalds: a tune Rufus MacIan hadn’t heard since the eve of the Massacre of Glen Coe, when the soldiers had danced to it. The tune came in not through his ears but his skin, which erupted in goose-pimples all over; ’twas as if his blood were oil, and fire had been laid to it, and serrated flames were racing from his heart to his extremities, and probing through the uncanny mazes and dark recesses of his brain. And this was how he knew that they were not just any riders but his kinsmen, his blude-friends, riding at last to slake the wrake-lust that had burned in them for twenty-two years.