the others I issued my orders as I grew warmer.
‘Lazy slug-a-beds––’ it was my way thus to speak, ordering the youngsters about like a skipper ‘––get about your work! You, John Allison, get the boat and go over to Craigdarroch for the milk, and be back by breakfast-time; and gin ye so muckle as lift the lid of the can, I’ll thrash ye till ye canna stan’ – forbye, ye’ll get no breakfast.’
John got his cap, grumbling and shaking his head. But he went.
‘You, Rab, clean the fish, and you, Jerry MacWhirter, get a fire started, and hae the breakfast on the table in an hour. Dry my clothes before the fire.’
‘It’s Andra’s day!’ said Jerry.
‘Maybe it is,’ said I, ‘but for the present Andrew has other business on hand. He was tired yestreen, and he’s the better o’ a rest this morning. Get the breakfast and be nimble. It’ll be better for ye.’
‘But, Rab says––’ began Jerry, who was reluctantly putting on his clothes.
‘Not another word out of the mouth o’ ye!’ I cried, imperatively.
It is wonderful what firmness does in a household. In this way I had a good sleep before breakfast.
When I awoke Andrew was on foot. He had stolen out of bed and taken a sea plunge from the southernmost rocks, drying himself on the sand by running naked in the brisk airs of the morning which drew off the sea.
There is no finer breakfast than flounders fried in oatmeal with a little salt butter as soon as ever they come out of the water – their tails jerking Flip, flap, in the frizzle of the pan.
‘Gracious,’ said Jerry, ‘but it’s guid. I’m gled I got up o’ my ain free will.’
Andrew and I being captain and lieutenant of the gang, had forks; the rest had none, by which lack for eating flounders they were the better off. It is most amazing the number of bones a flounder can carry, and that without trouble. Also it is a mercy that none of us choked on any of them, in so unseemly a haste did we eat.
RATHAN ISLAND lay in the roughest tumble of the seas. Its southern point took the full sweep of the Solway tides as they rushed and surged upwards to cover the great deadly sands of Barnhourie. From Sea Point, as we named it, the island stretched northward in many rocky steeps and cliffs riddled with caves. For just at this point the softer sandstone you meet with on the Cumberland shore set its nose out of the brine. So the island was more easily worn into sea caves and strange arches, towers and haystacks, all of stone, sitting by themselves out in the tideway for all the world like bairns’ playthings.
In these caves, which had many doors and entries, I had played with the tide ever since I was a boy. I knew them all as well as I knew our own backyard under the cliff. And the knowledge was before long to stand me in better stead than the Latin grammar I had learned from my father.
In fine weather it was a pleasant thing to go up to the highest point of the island, which, though little of a mountain, was called Ben Rathan, and see the country all about one. Thence was to be seen the reek of many farm- towns and villages, besides cot-houses without number, all blowing the same way when the wind was soft and equal. The morning was the best time to go there. Upon Rathan, close under the sky, the bees hummed about among the short, crisp heather, which was springy just like our little sheltie’s mane after my father had done docking it. There was a great silence up there – only a soughing from the south, where the tides of the Solway, going either up or down, kept for ever chafing against the rocky end of our little Isle of Rathan.
Then nearest to us, on the eastern shore of Barnhourie Bay, there was fair to be seen the farmhouse of Craigdarroch, with the Boreland and the Ingleston above it, which is always the way in Galloway. Wherever there is a Boreland you may be sure that there is an Ingleston not far from it. The way of that is, as my father used to say, because the English came to settle in their ‘tons’, and brought their ‘boors’, or serfs, with them. So that near the English towns are always to be found the boor-lands. Which is as it may be, but the fact is at any rate sufficiently curious. And from Ben Rathan also, looking to the westward, just over the cliffs of our isle, you saw White Horse Bay, much frequented of late years for convenience of debarkation by the Freetraders of Captain Yawkin’s band, with whom, as my father used to say quaintly, no honest smuggler hath company.
For there were, as everyone knows, in this land of Galloway two kinds of the lads who bring over the dutiless gear from Holland and the Isle of Man. There be the decent lads who run it for something honest to do in the winter and for the spice of danger, and without a thought of hurt to King George, worthy gentleman; and there are also the ‘Associated Illdoers’, as my father would often call them in his queer, daffing way – the Holland rogues who got this isle its by-name of Rogues’ Island by running their cargoes into our little land-locked cove which looks towards White Horse Bay. These last were fellows who would stick at nothing, and quite as often as not they would trepan a lass from the Cumberland shore, or slit the throat of a Dumfries burgher to see the colour of his blood. But the Black Smugglers never could have come to such a pitch of daring and success unless they had made to themselves friends of the disaffected of these parts. The truth of the matter was that in the wilds of Galloway that look toward Ayrshire, up the springs of Doon and Dee, there lies a wide country of surpassing wildness, whither resorted all the evil gypsies of the hill – red-handed loons, outlaw and alien to all this realm of well-affected men.
When a vessel came in these openly marched down to the shore with guns, swords, and other weapons – Marshalls, Macatericks, and Millers, often under the leadership of Hector Faa – and escorted to their fastnesses the smuggled stuff and the stolen goods, for there was as much by wicked hands reived and robbed, as of the stuff which was only honestly smuggled.
My father had fallen out with Yawkins when he began the robbing of man and the seizing of maids. I can remember him coming to the Rathan, a thick-set dark man, with his head very low between his shoulders. He had a black beard on his breast, and there was a cast in his eye. He swore many strange oaths. Being a Hollander, the most of his conversation seemed to be ‘dam’, but between whiles he was trying to persuade my father to something.
‘It’s clottered nonsense,’ said my father over and over to him; ‘and, more than that, it’s rank blackguardism; and as for me, I shall have no trokings wi’ the like o’ ye aboot the maitter.’
From which and other things I gathered that in the days of his wildness my father had had his hands pretty deep in the traffic.
Away at the back yonder, across the fertile valley of the Dee, we could see from Rathan Head the blue shadowy hills, where, among the wild heather and the solitudes where the whaups cried all summer long, the hill gypsies had their fastnesses. On those blue hills, to us so sweet and solemn, no king’s man had been of his own free will since the days of Clavers. Little did I think, as I used to sit and watch them, with Andrew and young Jock Allison, Rab Nicoll, and little Jerry, on the smooth brindled heather of Ben Rathan, that I should so often tread the way up to those fastnesses about the Dungeon of Buchan or all were done.
It was after the time of dishwashing, and the most part of us were out on the heuchs, looking to seaward with my father’s
