demolished the new fort, had, on the summons to face Cumberland, blown up and fired most of the residue. A small temporary garrison had been sent there after the victory to secure the abandoned stronghold for the Government; but it had now been taken possession of by a larger force in the shape of the Earl of Loudoun’s regiment, under the Earl himself, and eighteen ‘independent companies’. These had only marched in a few hours before, in consequence of which influx the whole place was in a state of great turmoil.
There was so little accommodation in the ruined fort that a small village of tents was being erected in the meadows by the mouth of the Tarff, and between the confusion of camp-pitching and the fact that nearly everyone whom he encountered was a new-comer, Keith found it difficult to discover who was or had been responsible for prisoners sent in before Lord Loudoun’s arrival. He did, however, elicit the information that Major Guthrie’s detachment was now somewhere on the road between Fort Augustus and Inverness. And at last, though he did not succeed in seeing anybody directly responsible, he was told that a wounded Cameron, said to be the head of one of the cadet branches of the clan, had been captured the previous week and sent in by that very detachment, and that he had been given proper care and was progressing favourably.
That was all Keith wanted to know for the moment, and he delayed no longer. A certain vague disquiet which had teased him during the past week about Guthrie’s possible treatment of his prisoner was allayed. For the rest, he had already made his plans about Ardroy. It was at Inverness, with Cumberland, that he could really do Ewen service, especially if the Duke did take him on to his personal staff. To His Royal Highness he could then represent what he owed to the captured rebel, and, before he himself returned with the Commander-in-Chief to Flanders, he might very well have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of his ‘philanthropy’ had been set at liberty.
As he turned away from Fort Augustus, where the vista of Loch Ness was completely blotted out in rain, and addressed himself to the long steep climb up the Inverness road, Keith’s thoughts went back to the Earl of Albemarle in Perth, craving like himself to get overseas once more—whence, though colonel of the Coldstream Guards, he had come to serve as a volunteer under Cumberland. His lordship, who had, moreover, greatly preferred commanding the front line in the recent battle to his present post with the Hessian troops in Perth, had lamented his situation quite openly to Cumberland’s messenger; he detested Scotland, he announced, and had fears, from a sentence in the despatch which that messenger had delivered to him, that he might be appointed to succeed Hawley in this uncongenial country. Having thus, somewhat unwisely, betrayed his sentiments to Major Windham, he was more or less obliged to beg his discretion, in promising which Keith had revealed his own fellow-feeling about the North. When they parted, therefore, Lord Albemarle had observed with much graciousness that if this horrid fate of succeeding General Hawley should overtake him, he would not forget Major Windham, though he supposed that the latter might not then be in Scotland for him to remember. No; Keith, though grateful for his lordship’s goodwill, distinctly hoped that he would not. He trusted to be by then in a dryer climate and a country less afflicted with steep roads . . . less afflicted also with punitive measures, though, since Perth was not Inverness, he was not so much dominated by those painful impressions of brutality as he had been a week ago.
The greater part of the lengthy and tiresome ascent from the level of Loch Ness was now over, and Keith and Dougal Mackay found themselves again more or less in the region of mist, but on a flat stretch of road with a strip of moorland on one hand. Water glimmered ahead on the left; it was little Loch Tarff, its charms dimmed by the weather. Keith just noticed its presence, tightened his reins, and, trotting forward on the welcome level, continued his dreams about the future.
Twenty-five yards farther, and these were brought abruptly to a close. Without the slightest warning there came a sharp report on his right, and a bullet sped in front of him, so close that it frightened his horse. Himself considerably startled too, he tried simultaneously to soothe the beast and to tug out a pistol from his holster. Meanwhile, Dougal Mackay, with great promptitude and loud Gaelic cries, was urging his more docile steed over the heather towards a boulder which he evidently suspected of harbouring the marksman.
As soon as he could get his horse under control Keith also made over the strip of moorland, and arrived in time to see a wild, tattered, tartan-clad figure, with a musket in its hands, slide down from the top of the boulder, drop on to hands and knees among the heather and bogmyrtle, and begin to wriggle away like a snake. Major Windham levelled his pistol and fired, somewhat at random, for his horse was still plunging; and the Highlander collapsed and lay still. Keith trotted towards him; the man had already abandoned his musket and lay in a heap on his side. The Englishman was just going to dismount when shouts from Dougal Mackay, who had ridden round the boulder, stayed him. “Do not pe going near him, sir; the man will not pe hit whateffer!” And as this statement coincided with Keith’s own impression that his bullet had gone wide, he stayed in the saddle and covered the would-be assassin with his other pistol, while Mackay, who certainly did not lack courage, slid off his own horse and came running.
And it was even as Mackay had said. At the sound of the feet swishing through the heather the heap of dirty tartan lying there was suddenly, with one bound, a living figure which, leaping up dirk in hand, rushed straight, not at the dismounted orderly, but at the officer on the horse. Had Keith not had his pistol ready he could hardly have saved himself, mounted though he was, from a deadly thrust. The man was at his horse’s head when he fired. . . . This time he did not miss; he could not. . . .
“I suppose I have blown his head to pieces,” he said next moment, with a slightly shaken laugh.
“Inteet, I will pe thinking so,” replied Mackay, on his knees in the heather. “But it will pe pest to make sure.” And he put his hand to his own dirk.
“No, no!” commanded Keith, as he bent from the saddle, for somehow the idea of stabbing a dead man, even a potential murderer, was repugnant to him. “It is not necessary; he was killed instantly.”
There could be small doubt of that. One side of the Highlander’s bearded face was all blackened by the explosion, and as he lay there, his eyes wide and fixed, the blood ran backwards through his scorched and tangled hair like a brook among waterweeds. The ball had struck high up on the brow. It came to Keith with a sense of shock that the very torn and faded philabeg which he wore was of the Cameron tartan. He was sorry. . . .
Deterred, unwillingly, from the use of his dirk, the zealous Mackay next enquired whether he should not put the cateran’s body over his horse and bring him to Inverness, so that, dead or alive, he could be hanged at the Cross there as a warning.
“No, leave him, poor devil,” said Keith, turning his horse. “No need for that; he has paid the price already. Let him lie.” He felt curiously little resentment, and wondered at the fact.
Dougal Mackay, however, was not going to leave the musket lying too.
“Ta gunna—she is Sassenach,” he announced, examining it.
“Take it, then,” said Keith. “Come, we must get on to the General’s Hut before this mist grows thicker.”
So they rode away, leaving the baffled assailant staring into vacancy, his dirk still gripped in his hand, and under his head the heather in flower before its time.
Once more the road mounted; then fell by a long steep gradient. The General’s Hut, a small and very unpretentious hostelry, of the kind known as a ‘creel house’, was at Boleskine, down on its lower levels, and before Keith reached it he could see that its outbuildings were occupied by soldiers. They were probably Major Guthrie’s detachment. Indeed, as he dismounted, a uniformed figure which he knew came round the corner of the inn, but it stopped dead on seeing him, then, with no further sign of recognition, turned abruptly and disappeared again. It was Lieutenant Paton.
So
