rang sharply out in front of us.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
Though little better than bairns Mary Gordon and I cowered with the instinctive craft born of years of persecution and concealment. Again the man cried, “Show yourselves there, or I fire!”
But as we lay still as death behind the tree he did not think it necessary to enter the wood – where, indeed, for all he knew a score of armed and desperate Whigs might have been in hiding.
Then we could hear his neighbours hail him from the next post and ask what the matter was.
“I heard a noise in the wood,” he returned, gruffly enough.
“A wandering pig or a goat from the hill!” cried his comrade higher up, cheerily. “There are many of them about.” But the man in front of us was sullen and did not reply.
“Sulky dog!” cried the man who had spoken – as it were, in order to close the conversation pleasantly.
The sound of his voice caused me to stop and reflect.
The hail of the second soldier had come distinctly from the rocks of the Bennan, therefore their commander had established a cordon of sentries in order to prevent the escape of some noted fugitive. What chance was there for a couple of children to pass the guarded line? By myself I might, indeed, have managed. I could well enough have rushed across the line when the sentry was at the extreme point of his beat, and risked a bullet as I plunged into the next belt of woodland; but, cumbered with the care of a maiden of tender years, this was impossible.
The night had drawn down into a cool, pleasant darkness. Softly Mary Gordon and I withdrew, taking care that no more rotten sticks should snap beneath our feet. For I knew that in the present state of the sentry’s temper we would certainly not escape so easily.
Presently, at the southern verge of the straggling copse of hazel, and therefore close to the edge of the lake, we came upon a couple of sheepfolds. One of these belonged to our own farm of Ardarroch, and the other to our kindly neighbour, John Fullerton of the Bennan.
“I am tired – take me home. You promised to take me home!”
The little maid’s voice was full of pitifulness and tears as she found herself going further and further from the house of Earlstoun.
“We cannot pass that way – the soldier men would shoot us,” I answered her with truth.
“Then take me to my Auntie Jean,” she persisted, catching at my hand pettishly, and then throwing it from her, “and my mother will come for me in the morning.”
“But where does your Auntie Jean live?”
“How can I tell – it is such a long way?” she answered. “It is in a house in the middle of a loch!”
Now this could only mean in the old tower of Lochinvar. But that was a yet longer and more difficult road than to the Earlstoun, and the line of sentries up the Bennan side barred our progress as completely as ever.
Nevertheless there was something attractive in the little maid’s idea. For that ancient strength, alone among all the neighbouring houses, sheltered no band of troopers. Kenmure, Earlstoun, Gordonston, and even our own little farm town of Ardarroch were all manned and watched, but the half-ruinous block-house of Lochinvar set in the midst of its moorland loch had been left untenanted. Its owner, Walter Gordon, the famous swordsman, was in exile abroad, so they said, and the place, save for a room or two, totally disrupted and broken down.
There was, therefore, no safer refuge for little Mary, if indeed her aunt dwelt there and we could find our way. Suddenly, as we looked about, an idea came to me, and, what is not so common, the means of carrying it out.
The sheepfolds (or “buchts”) in which we were hiding were walled in with rough stones from the hill, piled so as to form dry dykes, high and strong, and the entrances were defended by heavy wooden gates swung upon posts driven deep into the ground. The gates lifted away easily from their hinges. Two or three of these would make a secure enough raft if I could only fasten them together. And even as I set about to find ways and means, I was conscious of a change. A strange elation took me at the heart, and ran through my veins like unaccustomed wine.
I was no longer the careless herd laddie. I had entered life. I knew the penalty of failure. The man in the brown coat lying prone on his face up there above me on the crest of the Bennan quite clearly and sufficiently pointed that moral.
So, with the little girl close behind me, I searched both sets of “buchts” from end to end. I found three gates which could be easily detached from their posts. These I dismounted one after another.
How, then, was I to get them to the water’s edge, for they were far too heavy for my puny strength? I could only break a limb from a tree and draw them down to the loch shore on that, even as I had often helped my father to bring home his faggots of firewood from the hill upon a carr, or trail-cart of brushwood.
So we set off for the wood to break our branch. It was not long before I had one of beech lying upon the ground, with all its wealth of rustling leaves upon it. But the snap I made in breaking it off from the tree would certainly have betrayed us, had I not been cautious to keep a sufficient breadth of wood between us and our surly sentry.
Trailing this behind us we came again to the “ewe-buchts.”
It was now no difficult job to transport the raft of gates down to the water. I gave Mary Gordon a branch to tug at, which made her happier than anything I had done since Anna committed her to my care, for she pleased herself with thinking that she did the whole work.
I was almost on the point of using a hay-rope to bind them together as the best I could do, when I remembered that in the corner of our own “buchts” my father kept some well-tarred hempen cord, which I had seen him place there only the day before he had been compelled to go into hiding. If it chanced not to be removed, without doubt it would prove the very thing.
I found it where he had laid it, in the little shelf-press rudely constructed in the wall of four blocks of stone split into faces. There was little enough of it when I rove it out, but I thought I could make shift with it. It was, at any rate, far better than miles of hay-rope.
With this I tied the bars closely together by the corners and cross-bars, and presently had built up a very commodious raft indeed, though one more than a trifle heavy. It was some time before I hit upon a plan of launching my top-heavy craft. With the loose “stob” of a gatepost I managed to lever the crank construction to the edge of a sloping bank down which she slid so quickly that I had to set my heels into the grass and hold back with all my might.
But a moment after, without a splash more than a wild duck might make, the raft floated high above the water. With the end of the rope in my hand I climbed on board, but soon found that with my weight the top “liggate” of my craft was within an inch of the water. Clearly, then, it could not keep both of us dry.
But this troubled me little. I had not lived all my life on the shores of a loch to be afraid of swimming behind a raft on a midsummer night. For among other ploys Hob and I would often play at a sort of tilting or tournament, sitting astride of logs and trying to knock each other off into the water in the warm summer shallows.
So I placed the little girl upon the raft, cautioning her that as she hoped to see her mother again, she must in no circumstances make the least noise nor yet move from the centre of the raft where I had placed her. Soon she had begun to take an interest in the adventure, and had forgotten her weariness.
