"I doubt if you would have objected to the arms about your neck if they had been Patsy"s, you and your "Seniores"!" Miss Aline observed rather tartly as she was borne off. They were soon all safe in a tiny cove, their feet on the pleasant wet sand, and the dark undefined shapes of the crags overhanging them on every side. A moment more and the boat disappeared into the darkness. A lantern flashed and was answered. They were free to proceed on their quest. Francis the Scholar led them carefully above tide-mark, turned at right-angles into a still deeper darkness, bade them keep their heads low, and with Patsy"s hand in his pa.s.sed into a cave-shelter, in one corner of which the embers of his watch-fire still smouldered red. Francis threw a handful of pine-cones upon the fire. It blazed up instantly with a clear light and a fragrant odour, and the four night-voyagers looked at each other, wondering at the wild eyes and haggard faces which they saw.
One corner of the cavern had been roughly screened off with sacking, and within was a comfortable couch of broom and heather twigs, upon which Miss Aline was advised to lie down. But this she refused emphatically to do.
"And me as near to my ain decent house at Ladykirk," she said, "what for should I do such a thing?"
"Because," said the Poor Scholar, "I have much to tell you, much you must hear, and you will not see Ladykirk this night. In fact you could not, without betraying the secrets of those who have been depending upon your aid."
"Say on, then," quoth Miss Aline; "the Mintos are no tale-pyets, and that ye shall ken. Let us hear what ye hae to say, laddie! Ye will be Nicholas Airie"s gyte--I kenned her when she was dairy la.s.s up at the Folds and mony is the time I warned her--but there"s nae use harkin"
back on the things noo, and when a" is said and dune ye carried me nane so ill, though the deil flee awa" wi" you and your "Seniores"!--I would have you know that the day has been when I was as young--I am no sayin"
sae bonnie or sae flichertsome as Miss Patsy there--but still weel eneuch and young eneuch. "Seniores," indeed, and you thinkin" I wad not tak" your meaning! Faith, I hae wasted my time ower Ruddiman"s Ruddiments as well as the best o" them."
CHAPTER x.x.xII
ORDEAL BY FIRE
The Bothy on the Wild of Blairmore was an entrenched camp, for Stair was too good a general not to see to the state of his defences, to his victualling and armament from the beginning. So, though the moment of the attack was a surprise, its manner had long been foreseen. As Stair had repeatedly said, "The sea is never shut!"
Landing parties from the _Britomart_ and _Vandeleur_ had marched up the Valleys, and the Preventive men of all the West of Galloway had quietly gathered at Stranryan in order to co-operate with them.
It was Stair who stumbled upon a picket of the _Britomart_ men hidden among the eastern sand-dunes. He was on his way to meet Joseph, Whitefoot as usual at his heels, when suddenly the dog sprang forward, eyes blazing, hackles stiff, his nose high in the air, and his teeth bared, ready to bound. Stair restrained him and crept to the lip of a little sandy cup where, from the midst of a clump of dry saw-edged sea-gra.s.s, he could look down on a group of men busied about their soup-kettle.
"Silly fools," he muttered to himself, "they do not know that the first handful of heather and dried bracken they throw on their fire, will send a skarrow to the sky that will warn every soul within twenty miles. If I had not been a blind idiot, and thinking of something else, I should have seen it long before I came so far."
And looking over his shoulder he saw to the right, to the left, and behind him towards the cliffs seaward, mult.i.tudinous pulsing ruddy camp-fire blooms, waking, waxing and falling, that told of a general investment of their fastness, so long secure. In spite of the surprise, however, Stair managed to meet Joseph and to warn him that nothing further must be attempted except by means of Whitefoot. He introduced the wise collie and made him give his two front paws to the confidential servant in token of amity, while he repeated his name over and over again--"Joseph! Joseph!"
"_Ao-ouch!_" whispered Whitefoot, as much as to say, "Of course I understand! Do you think that I, Whitefoot Garland, am some silly puppy gambolling through life?"
For Whitefoot was a grave dog and had had to do with many very serious things indeed--things which touched even the life of his master. So it is no wonder that at this time of day he rather resented pains being taken with his education. It was like setting a double-first to construe the first book of Caesar.
Stair returned to the Bothy with his heart heavy and many thoughts churning within him. He reached the Wild safely with nothing worse to report than the fact that he was fired upon by a sentry, which warned him that he must not come that way too often. He did not enter directly into the Bothy, where, as he knew, Julian Wemyss would be doing an hour"s reading before turning in. Instead he betook himself to the dam which his brothers and the band had constructed at the close of the autumnal peat-leading.
All the winter the _Sunk_ of Blairmore had been full of black moss water. For the greater part of the cold weather it had been frozen and snow-bound. But now, swollen with spring rains, the ditches of the _Sunk_ were lipping to the overflow. Stair took the great iron gelleck and with a blow or two knocked back the clutches of the flood-barriers.
Then flinging down the huge crow-bar, he fled for his life, the ink-black water hissing and spurting at his heels. It was not noisy, that water. It ran silently, almost oilily, but all the same it followed after, and it was swirling black about Stair Garland"s knees as he scrambled up the high platform of the Bothy, at the place where you could dig out the sand and sea-sh.e.l.ls of a past age from among the roots of the heather.
"That will put out one or two of their fires for them!" he exclaimed triumphantly, and even as he spoke he heard cries announcing danger, hasty preparations for flight, while the red "skarrows" in the sky winked only once or twice more and were then wiped out clean all along the east and west borders of the Wild. Only on the high southern cliffs the fires still shone. And Stair knew that it was thither that the drowned-out investing parties would be compelled to retreat.
From the north there came no sign, for there alone no fires had been lighted. But the Wild spread the farthest and was most dangerous and inaccessible in that direction. Only morning would reveal the solitary tiny zigzag of path which connected them with their fellows, a path which Stair believed to be quite impossible--_unless_--and here a suspicion went flashing through his mind which sent him indoors with a bound. No, Eben the Spy was lying on his bed apparently sound asleep.
Stair gazed at him with a bitter smile.
"That"s what comes of having a bad record against you," he murmured, "the man may be quite innocent. He may be really asleep. Yet as things are I dare not treat him as if he were either. To-morrow he must do a little scouting for us. He shall feel for the enemy, and if they fire upon him--well and good, then he has not brought the enemy down upon us.
But because of his past, he must undergo the ordeal by fire and water.
"Well, we will let him sleep, but all the same I shall keep an eye upon him to see that he does not take French leave during the night!"
Stair called Mr. Wemyss from his reading. The ex-amba.s.sador thought that a new parcel of books had arrived, and made haste to obey. He saw the door of the Bothy open and Stair, a large, dark shape vaguely outlined against a rosy illumination, the cause of which he did not understand, leaning easily with his shoulder against the lintel-post, blocking all exit.
"Well, Stair," said Julian, "did you find Joseph? Had he any word of the _Good Intent_?"
"I did find Joseph," said Stair curtly, "and it will be a long time before I find him again. Do you see that?"
"That" referred to the numerous fires which were now being lighted on the heights of the sand-hills, by the fugitives from the camps in the hollows of the Wild, who had been driven out by the invading waters of the dam constructed by the Garland brothers and their followers.
Julian Wemyss gazed a little stupidly. His eyes were unaccustomed to the dark, and he blinked like one who finds a difficulty in believing the evidence of his senses.
"Are these really fires?" he asked, covering his eyes with his hand.
Stair softly shut the door behind the two of them. It would not now matter whether the spy were asleep or awake.
"Now do you understand?" he said softly.
"They are fires, and we are surrounded by water. You have let out the dam!"
Stair sketched his night"s adventure, with his hand on Whitefoot"s head, who sat staring out at the winking fires gravely and wisely, as one who knew all about it and would have a great deal to say to the matter before all was done.
"Ah," said Julian Wemyss, "this is no chance business. They have been preparing it with the long hand. But why did they not charge from all sides at once and so rush the Bothy?"
"They could not," said Stair simply, "of course there were three easy paths then where there is only one very difficult one now. But, you see, they did not know that. They did not know and they do not know the strength of our garrison, or how soon we hope to be reinforced."
"I suppose," Julian whispered, "you have every confidence--?" And he indicated the ulterior of the Bothy where the ex-spy was sleeping.
"No," murmured Stair, "but I shall be sure to-morrow as soon as the sun is up. Possible treachery within the camp is not the sort of thing one can afford to let drag!"
"Provisions?" queried Julian.
"For a year!" said Stair.
"Water?"
"As you see!" And he swept his arm largely round the circle of the Wild.
"We shall make a filter with a little granite sand (silver sand they call it). After pa.s.sing it two or three times through this, the peat water will be fairly palatable. At least we shall need to put up with it!" And then Stair communicated to his fellow-prisoner his idea of the defence of the Bothy.
"We do not want to kill any of these men who have been ordered to come and starve us out," he said. "You have your house and your position. It is true that you have killed Lord Wargrove, but if he had not been a friend of the Regent and a confidant of Lyonesse, you might have walked the streets of London after a month or so, and no man would have dreamed of disquieting you. I am in a wholly different case. They are eager to see me hanged, and would not hesitate to make it high treason--"
"High treason only affects the person of the King," said Julian Wemyss; "not that that will help matters much, the Regent"s judges being what they are."
"At any rate," said Stair, "killing a blue-jacket or an exciseman will do us no good, and I am for firing blanks except in the very last extremity--of course, if it is our life or that of another man, I think we owe it to ourselves to see that the funeral is the other fellow"s!"
Stair Garland slept that night outside, wrapped in his plaid, with Whitefoot crouched in the corner of it. The watcher"s back was against the door of the Bothy, the key of which was in his pocket. He was taking care that his ex-spy did not take it into his head to escape the ordeal of the morning.
At daybreak Stair rose to his feet and shook himself comprehensively.
His limbs were stiff with the cold and damp. Whitefoot had been alert most of the night. He was unquiet and whined occasionally to himself, but very softly. The fires on the sand-dunes agitated him--perhaps also the unrest of his master, who with his own comfortable bed within a dozen yards, had chosen so incommodious a way of spending the night.
Every few minutes Whitefoot aroused himself and paced stealthily round the little hut, his head in the air, sniffing the four winds for information. He tried the black lipping water with his paw and shook it dry again. That also he did not understand. However, he believed that Stair Garland did. The knowledge comforted him and sent him back to the nook of his master"s plaid, where he nestled down without turning round, which was perhaps the most wonderful accomplishment of this wonderful dog.