CHAPTER XXIIHUNTLY HILL (continued)CALLANDARsat a little apart from his men on the fringe of the fir-wood; on the other side of the clearing on which the party had bivouacked Wattie formed the centre of a group. It was past sunset, and the troop-horses, having been watered and fed, were picketed together. Callandar’s own horse snatched at the straggling bramble-shoots behind a tree.The officer sat on a log, his chin in his hand, pondering on the amazing story that the beggar had divulged. It was impossible to know what to make of it, but, in spite of himself, he was inclined to believe it. He had questioned and cross-questioned him, but he had been able to form no definite opinion. Wattie had described his meeting with Archie on the day of the taking of the ship; he had told him how he had accompanied him on his way, how he had been forced to ask shelter for him at the farm, how he had lain and listened in the darkness to his feverish wanderings and his appeals to Logie. If the beggar’s tale had been true, there seemed to beno doubt that the intelligence officer whose services were so much valued by Cumberland, had taken money from the rebels, though it seemed that he had hesitated over the business. His conscience must have smitten him even in his dreams. “I will say nothing, but I will tell you all!” he had cried to Logie. “I shall know where you are, but they shall never know!” In his delirium, he had taken the beggar for the man whose fellow-conspirator he was proving himself to be, and when consciousness was fighting to return, and he had sense enough to know that he was not speaking to Logie, it was his companion’s promise to deliver a message of reassurance that had given him peace and sleep. “Tell him that he can trust me,” he had said. What puzzled Callandar was the same thing that had puzzled Wattie: Why had these two men, linked together by a hidden understanding, fought? Perhaps Flemington had repented of the part he was playing, and had tried to cut himself adrift. “Let me go!” he had exclaimed. It was all past Callandar’s comprehension. At one moment he was inclined to look on Wattie as an understudy for the father of lies; at another, he asked himself how he could have had courage to invent such a calumny—how he had dared to choose a man for his victim who had reached the position that Archie had gained. But he realized that, had Wattie been inventing, he would hardly have invented the idea of a fight between Flemington and Captain Logie. That little incongruous touchseemed to Callandar’s reasonable mind to support the truth of his companion’s tongue.And then there was Flemington’s sudden departure. It did not look so strange since he had heard what the beggar had to say. He began to think of his own surprise at finding Archie in pain from a wound which seemed to have troubled him little, so far, and to suspect that his reliable wits had been stimulated to find a new use for his injured arm by the sight of Huntly Hill combined with the news in his pocket. His gorge rose at the thought that he had been riding all these days side by side with a very prince among traitors. His face hardened. His own duty was not plain to him, and that perturbed him so much that his habitual outward self-repression gave way. He could not sit still while he was driven by his perplexities. He sprang up, walking up and down between the trees. Ought he to send a man straight off to Brechin with a summary of the beggar’s statement? He could not vouch for the truth of his information, and there was every chance of it being disregarded, and himself marked as the discoverer of a mare’s nest. There was scarcely anything more repugnant to Callandar than the thought of himself in this character, and for that reason, if for no other, he inclined to the risk; for he had the overwhelmingly conscientious man’s instinct for martyrdom.His mind was made up. He took out his pocket-book and wrote what he had to say inthe fewest and shortest words. Then he called the corporal, and, to his extreme astonishment, ordered him to ride to Brechin. When the man had saddled his horse, he gave him the slip of paper. He had no means of sealing it, here in the fir-wood, but the messenger was a trusted man, one to whom he would have committed anything with absolute conviction. He was sorry that he had to lose him, for he could not tell how long he might be kept on the edge of the Muir, nor how much country he would have to search with his tiny force; but there was no help for it, and he trusted that the corporal would be sent back to him before the morrow. He was the only person to whom he could give the open letter. When the soldier had mounted, Callandar accompanied him to the confines of the wood, giving him instructions from the map he carried.Wattie sat on the ground beside his cart; his back was against a little raised bank. Where his feet should have been, the yellow dog was stretched, asleep. As Callandar and his corporal disappeared among the trees, he began to sing ‘The Tod’ in his rich voice, throwing an atmosphere of dramatic slyness into the words that made his hearers shout with delight at the end of each verse.When he had finished the song, he was barely suffered to take breath before being compelled to begin again; even the prisoner, who lay resting, still bound, within sight of the soldiers, listened,laughing into his red beard. But suddenly he stopped, rising to his feet:“A lang-leggit deevil wi’ his hand upon the gate,An’ aye the Guidwife cries to him——”Wattie’s voice fell, cutting the line short, for a rush of steps was bursting through the trees—was close on them, dulled by the pine-needles underfoot—sweeping over the stumps and the naked roots. The beggar stared, clutching at the bank. His three companions sprang up.The wood rang with shots, and one of the soldiers rolled over on his face, gasping as he tried to rise, struggling and snatching at the ground with convulsed fingers. The remaining two ran, one towards the prisoner, and one towards the horses which were plunging against each other in terror; the latter man dropped midway, with a bullet through his head.The swiftness of the undreamed-of misfortune struck panic into Wattie, as he sat alone, helpless, incapable either of flight or of resistance. One of his dogs was caught by the leaden hail and lay fighting its life out a couple of paces from where he was left, a defenceless thing in this sudden storm of death. Two of the remaining three went rushing through the trees, yelping as the stampeding horses added their share to the danger and riot. These had torn up their heel-pegs, which, wrenched easily from a resistance made for the most part of moss and pine-needles, swung and whipped at the ends of the flyingropes behind the crazy animals as they dashed about. The surviving trooper had contrived to catch his own horse, and was riding for his life towards the road by which they had come from Edzell. The only quiet thing besides the beggar was the yellow cur who stood at his master’s side, stiff and stubborn and ugly, the coarse hair rising on his back.Wattie’s panic grew as the drumming of hoofs increased and the horses dashed hither and thither. He was more afraid of them than of the ragged enemy that had descended on the wood. The dead troopers lay huddled, one on his face and the other on his side; the wounded dog’s last struggles had ceased. Half a dozen men were pursuing the horses with outstretched arms, and Callandar’s charger had broken loose with its comrades, and was thundering this way and that, snorting and leaping, with cocked ears and flying mane.The beggar watched them with a horror which his dislike and fear of horses made agonizing, the menace of these irresponsible creatures, mad with excitement and terror, so heavy, so colossal when seen from his own helpless nearness to the earth that was shaking under their tread, paralyzed him. His impotence enwrapped him, tragic, horrible, a nightmare woven of death’s terrors; he could not escape; there was no shelter from the thrashing hoofs, the gleaming iron of the shoes. The cumbrous perspective of the great animals blocked out the sky with its bulk astheir rocking bodies went by, plunging, slipping, recovering themselves within the cramped circle of the open space. He knew nothing of what was happening, nor did he see that the prisoner stood freed from his bonds. He knew James Logie by sight, and he knew Ferrier, but, though both were standing by the red-bearded man, he recognized neither. He had just enough wits left to understand that Callandar’s bivouac had been attacked, but he recked of nothing but the thundering horses that were being chased to and fro as the circle of men closed in. He felt sick as it narrowed and he could only flatten himself, stupefied, against the bank. The last thing he saw was the yellow coat of his dog, as the beast cowered and snapped, keeping his post with desperate tenacity in the din.The bank against which he crouched cut the clearing diagonally, and as the men pressed in nearer round the horses, Callandar’s charger broke out of the circle followed by the two others. A cry from the direction in which they galloped, and the sound of frantic nearing hoofs, told that they had been headed back once more. The bank was high enough to hide Wattie from them as they returned, but he could feel the earth shake with their approach, which rang in his ears like the roar of some dread, implacable fate. He could see nothing now, as he lay half-blind with fear, but he was aware that his dog had leaped upon the bank behind him, and he heard the well-known voice, hoarse and brutal with defiantagony, just above his head. All the qualities that have gone to make the dog the outcast of the East seemed to show in the cur’s attitude as he raised himself, an insignificant, common beast, in the path of the great, noble, stampeding creatures. It was the curse of his curship that in this moment of his life, when he hurled all that was his in the world—his low-bred body—against the danger that swooped on his master, he should take on no nobility of aspect, nothing to picture forth the heart that smote against his panting ribs. Another moment and the charger had leaped at the bank, just above the spot where Skirling Wattie’s grizzled head lay against the sod.The cur sprang up against the overwhelming bulk, the smiting hoofs, the whirl of heel-ropes, and struck in mid-air by the horse’s knee, was sent rolling down the slope. As he fell there was a thud of dislodged earth, and the charger, startled by the sudden apparition of the prostrate figure below him, slipped on the bank, stumbled, sprang, and checked by the flying rope, crashed forward, burying the beggar under his weight.James and Ferrier ran forward as the animal struggled to its feet, unhurt; it tore past the men, who had broken their line as they watched the fall. The three horses made off between the trees, and Logie approached the beggar. He lay crushed and mangled, as quiet as the dead troopers on the ground.There was no mistaking Wattie’s rigid stillness, and as James and Ferrier, with the red-beardedman, approached him, they knew that he would never rise to blow his pipes nor to fill the air with his voice again. The yellow dog was stretched, panting, a couple of paces from the grotesque body, which had now, for the first time, taken on dignity. As Logie bent to examine him, and would have lifted him, the cur dragged himself up; one of his hind-legs was broken, but he crawled snarling to the beggar’s side, and turned his maimed body to face the men who should dare to lay a hand on Wattie. The drops poured from his hanging tongue and his eye was alight with the dull flame of pain. He would have torn Logie to bits if he could, as he trailed himself up to shelter the dead man from his touch. He made a great effort to get upon his legs and his jaws closed within an inch of James’s arm.One of the men drew the pistol from his belt.“Ay, shoot the brute,” said another.James held up his hand.“The man is dead,” said he, looking over his shoulder at his comrades.“And you would be the same if yon dog could reach you,” rejoined Ferrier. “Let me shoot him. He will only die lying here.”“Let him be. His leg is broken, that is all.”The cur made another attempt to get his teeth into Logie, and almost succeeded.Ferrier raised his pistol again, but James thrust it back.“The world needs a few such creatures as thatin it,” said he. “Lord! Ferrier, what a heart there is in the poor brute!”“Stand away from him, Logie, he is half mad.”“We must get away from this place,” said James, unheeding, “or that man who has ridden away will bring the whole country about our ears. It has been a narrow escape for you, Gourlay,” he said to the released prisoner. “We must leave the old vagabond lying where he is.”“There is no burying him with that devil left alive!” cried Ferrier. “I promise you I will not venture to touch him.”“My poor fellow,” said James, turning to the dog, “it is of no use; you cannot save him. God help you for the truest friend that a man ever had!”He pulled off his coat and approached him. The men stood round, looking on in amazement as he flung it over the yellow body. The dog yelled as Logie grasped and lifted him, holding him fast in his arms; but his jaws were muffled in the coat, and the pain of the broken limb was weakening his struggles.Ferrier looked on with his hands on his hips. He admired the dog, but did not always understand James.“You are going to hamper yourself with him now?” he exclaimed.“Give me the piper’s bonnet,” said the other. “There! push it into the crook of my arm between the poor brute and me. It will make him go the easier. You will need to scatter now. Leave thepiper where he is. A few inches of earth will do him no good. Ferrier, I am going. You and I will have to lie low for awhile after this.”The cur had grown exhausted, and ceased to fight; he shivered and snuffled feebly at the Kilmarnock bonnet, the knob of which made a red spot against the shirt on James’s broad breast. Ferrier and Gourlay glanced after him as he went off between the trees. But as they had no time to waste on the sight of his eccentricities, they disappeared in different directions.Dusk was beginning to fall on the wood and on the dead beggar as he lay with his two silent comrades, looking towards the Grampians from the top of Huntly Hill.
CALLANDARsat a little apart from his men on the fringe of the fir-wood; on the other side of the clearing on which the party had bivouacked Wattie formed the centre of a group. It was past sunset, and the troop-horses, having been watered and fed, were picketed together. Callandar’s own horse snatched at the straggling bramble-shoots behind a tree.
The officer sat on a log, his chin in his hand, pondering on the amazing story that the beggar had divulged. It was impossible to know what to make of it, but, in spite of himself, he was inclined to believe it. He had questioned and cross-questioned him, but he had been able to form no definite opinion. Wattie had described his meeting with Archie on the day of the taking of the ship; he had told him how he had accompanied him on his way, how he had been forced to ask shelter for him at the farm, how he had lain and listened in the darkness to his feverish wanderings and his appeals to Logie. If the beggar’s tale had been true, there seemed to beno doubt that the intelligence officer whose services were so much valued by Cumberland, had taken money from the rebels, though it seemed that he had hesitated over the business. His conscience must have smitten him even in his dreams. “I will say nothing, but I will tell you all!” he had cried to Logie. “I shall know where you are, but they shall never know!” In his delirium, he had taken the beggar for the man whose fellow-conspirator he was proving himself to be, and when consciousness was fighting to return, and he had sense enough to know that he was not speaking to Logie, it was his companion’s promise to deliver a message of reassurance that had given him peace and sleep. “Tell him that he can trust me,” he had said. What puzzled Callandar was the same thing that had puzzled Wattie: Why had these two men, linked together by a hidden understanding, fought? Perhaps Flemington had repented of the part he was playing, and had tried to cut himself adrift. “Let me go!” he had exclaimed. It was all past Callandar’s comprehension. At one moment he was inclined to look on Wattie as an understudy for the father of lies; at another, he asked himself how he could have had courage to invent such a calumny—how he had dared to choose a man for his victim who had reached the position that Archie had gained. But he realized that, had Wattie been inventing, he would hardly have invented the idea of a fight between Flemington and Captain Logie. That little incongruous touchseemed to Callandar’s reasonable mind to support the truth of his companion’s tongue.
And then there was Flemington’s sudden departure. It did not look so strange since he had heard what the beggar had to say. He began to think of his own surprise at finding Archie in pain from a wound which seemed to have troubled him little, so far, and to suspect that his reliable wits had been stimulated to find a new use for his injured arm by the sight of Huntly Hill combined with the news in his pocket. His gorge rose at the thought that he had been riding all these days side by side with a very prince among traitors. His face hardened. His own duty was not plain to him, and that perturbed him so much that his habitual outward self-repression gave way. He could not sit still while he was driven by his perplexities. He sprang up, walking up and down between the trees. Ought he to send a man straight off to Brechin with a summary of the beggar’s statement? He could not vouch for the truth of his information, and there was every chance of it being disregarded, and himself marked as the discoverer of a mare’s nest. There was scarcely anything more repugnant to Callandar than the thought of himself in this character, and for that reason, if for no other, he inclined to the risk; for he had the overwhelmingly conscientious man’s instinct for martyrdom.
His mind was made up. He took out his pocket-book and wrote what he had to say inthe fewest and shortest words. Then he called the corporal, and, to his extreme astonishment, ordered him to ride to Brechin. When the man had saddled his horse, he gave him the slip of paper. He had no means of sealing it, here in the fir-wood, but the messenger was a trusted man, one to whom he would have committed anything with absolute conviction. He was sorry that he had to lose him, for he could not tell how long he might be kept on the edge of the Muir, nor how much country he would have to search with his tiny force; but there was no help for it, and he trusted that the corporal would be sent back to him before the morrow. He was the only person to whom he could give the open letter. When the soldier had mounted, Callandar accompanied him to the confines of the wood, giving him instructions from the map he carried.
Wattie sat on the ground beside his cart; his back was against a little raised bank. Where his feet should have been, the yellow dog was stretched, asleep. As Callandar and his corporal disappeared among the trees, he began to sing ‘The Tod’ in his rich voice, throwing an atmosphere of dramatic slyness into the words that made his hearers shout with delight at the end of each verse.
When he had finished the song, he was barely suffered to take breath before being compelled to begin again; even the prisoner, who lay resting, still bound, within sight of the soldiers, listened,laughing into his red beard. But suddenly he stopped, rising to his feet:
“A lang-leggit deevil wi’ his hand upon the gate,An’ aye the Guidwife cries to him——”
“A lang-leggit deevil wi’ his hand upon the gate,An’ aye the Guidwife cries to him——”
“A lang-leggit deevil wi’ his hand upon the gate,
An’ aye the Guidwife cries to him——”
Wattie’s voice fell, cutting the line short, for a rush of steps was bursting through the trees—was close on them, dulled by the pine-needles underfoot—sweeping over the stumps and the naked roots. The beggar stared, clutching at the bank. His three companions sprang up.
The wood rang with shots, and one of the soldiers rolled over on his face, gasping as he tried to rise, struggling and snatching at the ground with convulsed fingers. The remaining two ran, one towards the prisoner, and one towards the horses which were plunging against each other in terror; the latter man dropped midway, with a bullet through his head.
The swiftness of the undreamed-of misfortune struck panic into Wattie, as he sat alone, helpless, incapable either of flight or of resistance. One of his dogs was caught by the leaden hail and lay fighting its life out a couple of paces from where he was left, a defenceless thing in this sudden storm of death. Two of the remaining three went rushing through the trees, yelping as the stampeding horses added their share to the danger and riot. These had torn up their heel-pegs, which, wrenched easily from a resistance made for the most part of moss and pine-needles, swung and whipped at the ends of the flyingropes behind the crazy animals as they dashed about. The surviving trooper had contrived to catch his own horse, and was riding for his life towards the road by which they had come from Edzell. The only quiet thing besides the beggar was the yellow cur who stood at his master’s side, stiff and stubborn and ugly, the coarse hair rising on his back.
Wattie’s panic grew as the drumming of hoofs increased and the horses dashed hither and thither. He was more afraid of them than of the ragged enemy that had descended on the wood. The dead troopers lay huddled, one on his face and the other on his side; the wounded dog’s last struggles had ceased. Half a dozen men were pursuing the horses with outstretched arms, and Callandar’s charger had broken loose with its comrades, and was thundering this way and that, snorting and leaping, with cocked ears and flying mane.
The beggar watched them with a horror which his dislike and fear of horses made agonizing, the menace of these irresponsible creatures, mad with excitement and terror, so heavy, so colossal when seen from his own helpless nearness to the earth that was shaking under their tread, paralyzed him. His impotence enwrapped him, tragic, horrible, a nightmare woven of death’s terrors; he could not escape; there was no shelter from the thrashing hoofs, the gleaming iron of the shoes. The cumbrous perspective of the great animals blocked out the sky with its bulk astheir rocking bodies went by, plunging, slipping, recovering themselves within the cramped circle of the open space. He knew nothing of what was happening, nor did he see that the prisoner stood freed from his bonds. He knew James Logie by sight, and he knew Ferrier, but, though both were standing by the red-bearded man, he recognized neither. He had just enough wits left to understand that Callandar’s bivouac had been attacked, but he recked of nothing but the thundering horses that were being chased to and fro as the circle of men closed in. He felt sick as it narrowed and he could only flatten himself, stupefied, against the bank. The last thing he saw was the yellow coat of his dog, as the beast cowered and snapped, keeping his post with desperate tenacity in the din.
The bank against which he crouched cut the clearing diagonally, and as the men pressed in nearer round the horses, Callandar’s charger broke out of the circle followed by the two others. A cry from the direction in which they galloped, and the sound of frantic nearing hoofs, told that they had been headed back once more. The bank was high enough to hide Wattie from them as they returned, but he could feel the earth shake with their approach, which rang in his ears like the roar of some dread, implacable fate. He could see nothing now, as he lay half-blind with fear, but he was aware that his dog had leaped upon the bank behind him, and he heard the well-known voice, hoarse and brutal with defiantagony, just above his head. All the qualities that have gone to make the dog the outcast of the East seemed to show in the cur’s attitude as he raised himself, an insignificant, common beast, in the path of the great, noble, stampeding creatures. It was the curse of his curship that in this moment of his life, when he hurled all that was his in the world—his low-bred body—against the danger that swooped on his master, he should take on no nobility of aspect, nothing to picture forth the heart that smote against his panting ribs. Another moment and the charger had leaped at the bank, just above the spot where Skirling Wattie’s grizzled head lay against the sod.
The cur sprang up against the overwhelming bulk, the smiting hoofs, the whirl of heel-ropes, and struck in mid-air by the horse’s knee, was sent rolling down the slope. As he fell there was a thud of dislodged earth, and the charger, startled by the sudden apparition of the prostrate figure below him, slipped on the bank, stumbled, sprang, and checked by the flying rope, crashed forward, burying the beggar under his weight.
James and Ferrier ran forward as the animal struggled to its feet, unhurt; it tore past the men, who had broken their line as they watched the fall. The three horses made off between the trees, and Logie approached the beggar. He lay crushed and mangled, as quiet as the dead troopers on the ground.
There was no mistaking Wattie’s rigid stillness, and as James and Ferrier, with the red-beardedman, approached him, they knew that he would never rise to blow his pipes nor to fill the air with his voice again. The yellow dog was stretched, panting, a couple of paces from the grotesque body, which had now, for the first time, taken on dignity. As Logie bent to examine him, and would have lifted him, the cur dragged himself up; one of his hind-legs was broken, but he crawled snarling to the beggar’s side, and turned his maimed body to face the men who should dare to lay a hand on Wattie. The drops poured from his hanging tongue and his eye was alight with the dull flame of pain. He would have torn Logie to bits if he could, as he trailed himself up to shelter the dead man from his touch. He made a great effort to get upon his legs and his jaws closed within an inch of James’s arm.
One of the men drew the pistol from his belt.
“Ay, shoot the brute,” said another.
James held up his hand.
“The man is dead,” said he, looking over his shoulder at his comrades.
“And you would be the same if yon dog could reach you,” rejoined Ferrier. “Let me shoot him. He will only die lying here.”
“Let him be. His leg is broken, that is all.”
The cur made another attempt to get his teeth into Logie, and almost succeeded.
Ferrier raised his pistol again, but James thrust it back.
“The world needs a few such creatures as thatin it,” said he. “Lord! Ferrier, what a heart there is in the poor brute!”
“Stand away from him, Logie, he is half mad.”
“We must get away from this place,” said James, unheeding, “or that man who has ridden away will bring the whole country about our ears. It has been a narrow escape for you, Gourlay,” he said to the released prisoner. “We must leave the old vagabond lying where he is.”
“There is no burying him with that devil left alive!” cried Ferrier. “I promise you I will not venture to touch him.”
“My poor fellow,” said James, turning to the dog, “it is of no use; you cannot save him. God help you for the truest friend that a man ever had!”
He pulled off his coat and approached him. The men stood round, looking on in amazement as he flung it over the yellow body. The dog yelled as Logie grasped and lifted him, holding him fast in his arms; but his jaws were muffled in the coat, and the pain of the broken limb was weakening his struggles.
Ferrier looked on with his hands on his hips. He admired the dog, but did not always understand James.
“You are going to hamper yourself with him now?” he exclaimed.
“Give me the piper’s bonnet,” said the other. “There! push it into the crook of my arm between the poor brute and me. It will make him go the easier. You will need to scatter now. Leave thepiper where he is. A few inches of earth will do him no good. Ferrier, I am going. You and I will have to lie low for awhile after this.”
The cur had grown exhausted, and ceased to fight; he shivered and snuffled feebly at the Kilmarnock bonnet, the knob of which made a red spot against the shirt on James’s broad breast. Ferrier and Gourlay glanced after him as he went off between the trees. But as they had no time to waste on the sight of his eccentricities, they disappeared in different directions.
Dusk was beginning to fall on the wood and on the dead beggar as he lay with his two silent comrades, looking towards the Grampians from the top of Huntly Hill.