PATSY

BY S. R. CROCKETT

AUTHOR OF "THE RAIDERS," "THE STICKIT MINISTER," "LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM," "ANNE OF THE BARRICADES," ETC.

SYNDICATE PUBLISHING COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1912,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1913.
Reprinted February, 1913; April, December, 1913.

"Yes, I," said Patsy.

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I. HEIRESS AND HEIR]
[CHAPTER II. THE MAIDENS' COVE]
[CHAPTER III. THE BOTHY]
[CHAPTER IV. BY FORCE OF ARMS]
[CHAPTER V. PATSY'S CONFESSIONS]
[CHAPTER VI. HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS]
[CHAPTER VII. THE LADS IN THE HEATHER]
[CHAPTER VIII. THE BLACK PEARL OF CAIRN FERRIS]
[CHAPTER IX. HIS LIFE IN HIS HAND]
[CHAPTER X. THE WICKED LAYETH A SNARE]
[CHAPTER XI. THE TRAMPLING OF HORSE IN THE NIGHT]
[CHAPTER XII. PATSY'S RESCUE]
[CHAPTER XIII. PLOTS AND PRINCES]
[CHAPTER XIV. THE END OF AN OLD FEUD]
[CHAPTER XV. THE FECHTIN' FOOL]
[CHAPTER XVI. A RIDER COMES TO CASTLE RAINCY]
[CHAPTER XVII. PATSY HELD IN HONOUR]
[CHAPTER XVIII. UNCLE JULIAN'S PRINCESS]
[CHAPTER XIX. MISS ALINE TAKES COMMAND]
[CHAPTER XX. LOUIS RAINCY ENDURES HARDNESS]
[CHAPTER XXI. THE CAVE OF ADULLAM]
[CHAPTER XXII. WINTER AFTERNOON]
[CHAPTER XXIII. PATSY HAS GREATNESS THRUST UPON HER]
[CHAPTER XXIV. THE LOST FOLK'S ACRE]
[CHAPTER XXV. THE HIGH STILE]
[CHAPTER XXVI. THE GIBBET RING]
[CHAPTER XXVII. THE DUKES ... AND SUPSORROW]
[CHAPTER XXVIII. THE "GREEN DRAGON"]
[CHAPTER XXIX. ENEMY'S COUNTRY]
[CHAPTER XXX. A CREDIT TO THE "GREEN DRAGON"]
[CHAPTER XXXI. THE NIGHT LANDING]
[CHAPTER XXXII. ORDEAL BY FIRE]
[CHAPTER XXXIII. PATSY RAISES THE COUNTRY]
[CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PRISON-BREAKERS]
[CHAPTER XXXV. THE PICTS' WAY IS THE WOMAN'S WAY]
[CHAPTER XXXVI. STIFF-NECKED AND REBELLIOUS]
[CHAPTER XXXVII. A PICTISH HONEYMOON]
[CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE LAND OF ALWAYS AFTERNOON]
[CHAPTER XXXIX. REBEL GALLOWAY]
[CHAPTER XL. "WHY DO THEY LOVE YOU?"]
[CHAPTER XLI. THE BATTLE OF THE CAUSEWAY]

CHAPTER I

HEIRESS AND HEIR

They stood high on the Abbey cliff-edge—an old man, eagle-profiled, hawk-beaked, cockatoo-crested, with angry grey eyebrows running peakily upwards towards his temples at either side ... and a boy.

They were the Earl Raincy and his grandson Louis—all the world knew them in that country of the Southern Albanach. For Leo Raincy was a great man, and the lad the heir of all he possessed.

For all—or almost all—they looked upon belonged to the Earl of Raincy. Even those blue hills bounding the meadow valleys to the north hid a fair half of his property, and he was sorry for that. Because he was a land miser, hoarding parishes and townships. He grudged the sea its fringe of foam, the three-mile fishing limit, the very high-and-low mark between the tides which was not his, but belonged to the crown—along which the common people had a right to pass, and where fisherfolk from the neighbouring villages might fish and dry their nets, when all ought to have been his.

The earl's dark eyes passed with carelessness over hundreds of farm-towns, snug sheltered villages, mills with little threads of white wimpling away from the unheard constant clack of the wheel, barns, byres and stackyards—all were his, but of these he took no heed.

Behind them Castle Raincy itself stood up finely from the plain of corn-land and green park, an artificial lake in front, deep trees all about, patterned gardens, the fiery flash of hot-house glass where the sun struck, and pinnacles high in air, above all the tall tower from which Margaret de Raincy had defied the English invader during the minority of James the Fifth. The earl's eyes passed all these over. He did not see them as aught to take pride in.

What he lingered upon was the wide pleasant valley beneath him, with a burn running and lurking among twinkling birches, interspersed with alders, many finely drained fields with the cows feeding belly-deep with twitching tails, and the sweep of the ripening crops which ran off to either side over knolls carefully planed down—and so back and back to the shelter of dark fir woods. Twelve hundred acres—and not his! Not a Raincy stone upon it, nor had been for four hundred years.

There were two houses on this twelve hundred acres of good land. First came Cairn Ferris, at the head of the glen of the Abbey Water. Close to the road that, under the lee of the big pines, a plain, douce, much-ivied house; and down in a nook by the sea, Abbey Burnfoot, called "The Abbey," a newer and brighter place, set like a jewel on the very edge of the sea, the white sand in front and the blue sweep of the bay widening out on either hand. Horrible—oh, most horrible! Not his—nor ever would be!

This was the blot which blackened all the rest—the property of the Ferrises of Cairn Ferris, of Adam, chief of the name at the top of the Glen, and of his brother Julian—he who had cursed the noble scythe-sweep of the Abbey Bay, which all ought to have been untouched Raincy property, with crow-stepped gables and beflowered verandahs.

"They stole it, boy, stole it!" muttered old Earl Raincy, setting a shaking hand on the boy's shoulder, "four hundred years ago they stole it. They came with the Stuart king who had nothing to do in the Free Province, and we stood for the Douglases, as was our duty. Your ancestor and mine was killed at Arkinholm with three earls and twenty barons, he not the least noble!"

He paused a moment to control his senile anger and then went quavering on.

"This Ferris was a mercenary—a fighter for his own hand, and they gave him this while we were exiled. And they have held it ever since—the pick of our heritage—the jewel in the lotus. Often we have asked it back—often taken it. But because they married into the Fife Wemysses—yes, even this last of them, they have always retaken and held it, to our despite!"

The boy on the stile, sprawling and thinking of something else (for he had heard all this fifty times before), yawned.

"Well, there's plenty more—why worry, grandfather?" he said, fanning himself with the blue velvet college cap that had a bright gold badge in front.

The old man started as if stung. He frowned and blinked like an angry bald eagle.

"There speaks the common wash of Whiggish blood. MacBryde will out!—No Raincy would thus have sold his birthright for a mess of pottage."

The eyes of the lad were still indolent, but also somewhat impudent in schoolboy fashion, as he answered, "Still, grandfather, mother's MacBryde money has paid off a good many Raincy—encumbrances, don't you call them here?—mortgages is the name for them in England! And more than that, don't go back and worry mother about these old cow-pastures. You know you are really very fond of her. As for me, I may not be a real Raincy, for I was born to do something in life, not to idle through it. You won't let me go into the navy, and fight as a man ought. If I go into the army, we shall have mother in a permanent fit. So I must just stop on and lend a hand where I can, till I am old enough to turn out that thief of an estate agent of yours and do something to help you—really, I mean!"

"Remember you are a Raincy by name, whatever you may be by nature," said the old man. Suddenly the boy stood up straight and firm before him, with a dourness on his face which was clearly not akin to the swoop and dash of his vulturine grandfather.

"If you don't let me do as I like here—do something real which will show that I have not been to school and the university for nothing, I shall go straight to the ship-building yard and get my uncle, mother's brother David, to take me on as an apprentice! We still own enough of the business to make him ready to do that."

Like one who hears and rebukes blasphemy, the old man made a gesture of despair with his hands, as though abandoning his grandson to his own evil courses, and then turned on his heel and walked slowly away towards the Castle.

With a sigh of relief the young man stretched himself luxuriously out on the broad triple plank of the stile, and drew from his pocket a brass spy-glass which he had been itching to make use of for the past ten minutes. He also had his reasons for being interested in the Ferris properties which lay beneath him, every field and dyke and hedgerow, every curve of coast and curvet of breaking wave as clear and near as if he could have touched them merely by reaching out his finger. But Louis Raincy nourished no historical wraths nor feudal jealousies.

"I am sorry the old fellow is savage with me," he muttered as he looked about to make sure that his grandfather was not turning round to forgive him. "I'm sure I don't mean to make him angry. I promise mother every day. But why he wants to be for ever trotting out a grievance four hundred years old—hang me if I see. Anyway, Dame Comfort will soon put him all right. He gets on with her—he and I never hit it off ... quite. I fear I wasn't born lordly, even though my father was a Raincy. They say he disgraced his family by being an artist, and that it was when he was painting Dame Comfort's portrait that—oh, I say, there's Patsy, or I'm the son of a Dutchman!"

As only the moment before he had been declaring himself the son of a De Raincy, this could hardly be. So there was good prima facie evidence that, in Louis's opinion, there was Patsy, whoever Patsy might be.

In a moment he had the spy-glass to his eye. He stilled the boyish flailing of his legs in the air as he lay prone on the stile-top, leaning on his elbows, and intently studying something that flashed and was lost among the birches that shaded the path up the glen of the Abbey Burn.

"Patsy it is, by Jove of the Capitol!" he proclaimed triumphantly, and shutting up the brass telescope with a facile snap of sliding tubes, he slipped it into his pocket and sprang off the stile. In three seconds he was on Ferris territory—and a trespasser. Louis Raincy was quick, impulsive, with fair Norse hair blown in what the country folk called a "birse" about his face, and dark-blue western eyes—the eyes of the island MacBrydes who had built ships to ride the sea, and whose younger branches had captained and made fortunes out of far sea adventuring. So with the thoroughness of these same privateer shipbuilders, Louis precipitated himself down the steep breakneck cliff, catching the trunk of a pine here, or snatching at a birch and swinging right round it there to keep his speed from becoming a mere avalanche, till at last, breathed a little and with a scraped hand, of which he took not the slightest notice, he stood on the winding, hide-and-seek path which meanders along the side of the Abbey Burn, as it were, keeping step with it.

The pines stood about still and solemn. The light breeze from the sea made no difference to them, but the birches quivered, blotting the white of the path with myriads of purple splashes, none of which were distinct or ever for a second stood still, criss-crossing and melting one into the other, all equally a-dither with excitement.

Louis checked for a moment to breathe and listen. He said to himself that Patsy, for whose sake he had torn through the underbrush at the imminent danger of life and limb, was still far away down the glen.

"I shall go a bit farther till I find a snug corner and then—wait for Patsy!"

What Louis Raincy meant was that he would find a place equally sheltered from the eyes of his grandfather and from possible spies in the front windows of Cairn Ferris, the quiet ivy-grown house at the head of the glen, against which his grandfather had hurled so many anathemas in vain.

At last he found his place—a chosen nook. The sound of voices would be drowned by the splash of the little waterfall. The pool into which it fell was deep enough to keep any one from breaking in upon them too suddenly, and through a rift in the leaves a piece of bluest sky peered down. White of waterfall, sleepy brown of pool, dusky under an eyelash of bracken, and blue of sky—Patsy, who noticed all things, would like that.

But Patsy did not come. Could she have passed and he not seen? Clearly not, for Louis had come downhill as fast as a big boulder set a-rolling. What, then, could she be doing?

Ah, who could ever tell what Patsy might be doing or call her to account afterwards for the deed? Louis only knew that he dared not even try. All the same he left his nook with some disrelish—it would have been so capital a conjuncture to have met her just there, and he had taken such pains! However, there was no choice. He must go to seek Patsy if Patsy would not come to him.

She was returning from her daily lesson at her uncle Julian's. He knew that she would most likely have a book under her arm, and an ashplant in her hand. She would come along quietly, whistling low to herself, tickling the tails of the trout in the shallows with her stick and laughing aloud as they scudded away into the Vandyke-brown shadows of the bank.

The glen opened out a little and Louis paused at the corner, standing still in shadow.

Twenty yards away Patsy was talking to a young man in a shabby grey suit, a broad blue bonnet set on his head, and they were conferring profoundly over a book which Patsy held in her hands. The young man in the shabby suit appeared to be instructing Patsy, or at least explaining a difficult passage, which he did with more zeal and gusto than Louis cared about.

He knew him in a moment, for of course the heir of Raincy knew everybody within thirty miles.

"Only Frank Airie, the Poor Scholar!" he said to himself, his jealousy melting like a summer cloud, "of course—what a fool I was. He's on his way home from teaching the Auchenmore brats. Though it is a miracle that he should happen to cross the glen at the same point exactly. Perhaps he had a spy-glass, too!"

What Louis noticed most of all was the pretty shape of Patsy's small head, the dense quavering blackness of the little curls that frothed about her brow, and the sidelong way she had of appealing to the giant who bent over her with his finger on the line of Virgil he was expounding.

Presently with a squaring of the shoulders and a grasp at the blue bonnet which lifted it clear of his head, the Poor Scholar strode away. He crossed the Abbey Burn in a couple of leaps, his feet hardly seeming to touch the stones, and in a moment more his tall figure was hoisting itself up the opposite bank, his hands grasping rock and tree-trunk, root and dry bent-grass indiscriminately, till presently, without once turning round, he was out of sight.

Louis Raincy detached himself from the rock by which he had stood silent during the interview with the Poor Scholar. He swung himself lightly up into the Y-shaped crotch of a willow that overhung the big pool.

The girl came along, her lips moving as she repeated the words of the passage she had just had explained. Then Louis Raincy whistled an air well known to both of them, "Can ye sew cushions, can ye sew sheets?"

Instantly the girl looked up, turning a vivid, scarlet-lipped face, crowned with a ripple of ink-black locks, to the notch of the willow, and said easily, "Hillo, Louis Raincy! What are you doing here, a mile off your own ground?"

"Watching you turn the head of that poor boy Francis Airie!"

"His head will not turn so easy as yours, Louis, lad," Patsy retorted; "there is a deal more in it!"

Louis Raincy was not in any way put out. Of course Patsy was different. You never knew in the least what she was going to say, and it would have grieved him exceedingly not to be abused. He would have been sure, either that the girl was sickening for a serious illness, or that he had mortally offended her.

"How did you leave the Wise Uncle this morning?" he asked, with a nod of his head in the direction of the house by the Abbey Burnfoot. Both had begun to climb a little way up out of the path by the waterside. They did so without any words. It was the regular order of things, as they both knew. For in the valley bottom Uncle Julian or Adam Ferris might come round the corner upon them in a moment, and being young, they wanted to talk without restraint. Besides, there was a constant coming and going of messengers between the two houses. A carriage road led along the highway to the cliffs, and then bent sharply down steep zigzags to the stables of the Abbey, but all ordinary intercourse between the houses was conducted along the footpath by the Abbey Burn.

"Uncle Julian," said the girl, as if continuing some former conversation, "is quite different from father. He has seen the world and can tell tales of black savages and Arab chiefs and piracy in the China seas. But father has just lived in his own house of Cairn Ferris all his life. You know he called me Patricia after my mother—Patricia Wemyss Ferris. Oh, not even your grandfather is better known than my father. They made him a justice of the peace, too, but because he can do no good to the poor folk against the great landlords, he mostly stays at home. You know our house? From the outside—yes, of course. Well, when your grandfather will let you, you shall know it from the inside too. But not till then. Oh, it is big, roomy and quite comfortable, and though it would not hold an army like Castle Raincy, it is quite big enough to get lost in."

"Of course," said Raincy, vaguely feeling the necessity of defending himself and those who were his, "if it were not for grandfather and his wretched old feud, mother and I would come and see you to-morrow. She is—well, she would love you!"

"Would she, I doubt?" said Patsy, giving her bonnet a vicious jerk to bid it stay on her head; "mothers seldom like those whom their sons—"

"Adore!" put in Louis Raincy smilingly.

"Out, traitor!" cried the girl with a quick, scornful upthrow of the chin, "it is the smile that saves you, Louis, lad. Easy it is to see that you have had little experience of talking to women, when you come firing off words that ought to mean great things into the middle of a talk about smuggling cases and justices of the peace."

"But I do mean—" began Louis, preparing to take solemn oath.

"You mean nothing of the sort, and well it is for you, little boy. Quiet, now, and listen! I am a Pict—yes, I, Patsy Ferris! Uncle Julian says so. I am (so he tells me) a throwback to my grandmother's folk who were Fingauls—and her father the Laird of Kirkmaiden was the chief of them. That is why I do nothing, say nothing, think nothing like a scone-faced maid of the Scots. I am centuries older than they. If it ever arrives to me to fall in love with any man—it seems impossible, but Uncle Julian says it will come—it is I who will seek that man and make him love me, and if he ever leaves me or is untrue, I shall kill him. For that is the way of the Fingaul. Uncle Julian says so."

As she explained her lot in life Patsy was peeling and eating a sappy root of rush which she had plucked. With this and a piece of clear brown gum, the exudation of a smooth-barked wild cherry tree, she made a delicious repast. She offered his share to Louis, who was in no mood for frivolities. In spite of his smile he had been hurt to the quick. But Patsy was perfectly calm, and having fixed a large lump of cherry-gum on a thorn, she licked round and round it with relish, occasionally holding it between her eye and the twinkle of the sun to see the effect of the deep amber hue.

Still she was circumspect, and when a figure in grey appeared tramping sturdily up the glen swinging a stick, she nudged her companion into sulky kind of attention.

"Uncle Julian," she said, after the tall clean-shaved man had turned the corner. "I wish you could see his house—properly, I mean, not just from the road."

"I have seen it from the sea!" said Louis, still grumpily.

"And that is no wise way to see it. There are always gentlemen of the Free Trade hanging about in the offing these days, and if they thought that the heir of Raincy was spying on them—well, they might take the liberty of throwing him overboard to sink or swim."

"But surely your uncle has nothing to do with smuggling or smugglers? My grandfather says that it is no business for a gentleman to dip his fingers in!"

"Your grandfather says a great many other things to which you do not pay great heed—else you would not be sitting here looking as gloomy as the raven that croaked when the old cow wouldn't die. No, sir, you would be sitting up on the stile yonder, cursing the Ferrises with bell, book and candle—and the old man helping you out when you forgot the words."

The girl went on sucking her cherry-gum without the least concern as to whether Louis Raincy was hurt in his feelings or no. If he were, the obvious alternative was before him. He could return to Castle Raincy the way he had come. About this or about him Patsy gave herself no trouble.

Indeed, Patsy gave herself no trouble about anything or anybody, and so accustomed herself to the management of men. Women, she knew, were different.

CHAPTER II

THE MAIDENS' COVE

Castle Raincy was a great lord's mansion, and the best of the neighbouring county folk were glad of a rare invitation there. Cairn Ferris was the ancient home of an ancient family, the house of a "bonnet" laird, but then the feather in the side of the Ferris bonnet had always been worn very proudly and gallantly indeed.

Abbey Burnfoot was the picturesque modern fancy of a cultured man of the world, who had come thither to live his life between his books, his paintings, his music, and the eternally fresh wash of the sea in the little white bay of pebble and shell underneath his windows.

But half a mile or a little more over the heuchs stood the farm of Glenanmays, which, with two or three smaller holdings and his own farm of Cairn Ferris, constituted the whole landed estate of Adam Ferris. The Garlands of Glenanmays had been holders of that farm and liegemen of Cairn Ferris almost from the days when the first Ferris settled on that noble brace of seaward-looking valleys, through which the Mays Water and the Abbey Burn trundled, roared and soughed to the sea.

The early years of the nineteenth century looked on no more characteristic farmhouse than that where dwelt Diarmid Garland and his brood, on the bank above the swift-running water-race which turned the corn-mill with such deftness that people came from as far as Stranryan to admire.

A large farm it was, needing many hands to work it,—byre, stable, plough-lands, hill pasture, flat and heathery in appearance and outline, but satisfactory for sheep-feeding—that was Glenanmays. Diarmid had three sons and four daughters, with most of whom this history must one time or another concern itself.

Diarmid also was no mean citizen of any state, hard to be driven, temperate, humorous and dour. He held for the old ways, and each day presided at meals, his bonnet of blue on his head, broad as a barrow-wheel, and brought all the way from Kilmarnock. All the rest of the table sat bareheaded—the sons and daughters whom God had given him, as well as the hired servant, and even the stranger within his gates.

For at Glenanmays there was no master but old Diarmid Garland. To each man and maid there was set down a plate of earthenware, a horn spoon, a knife and fork—that is, for all who fed at the high table, over which the blue Kilmarnock bonnet of the master presided. For the minute or so while he said grace or "returned thanks," Diarmid took off his bonnet, but resumed it the moment after. He doffed his blue crown of his to God alone, and even his liege lord, Adam Ferris, had to content himself with a hand carried half military fashion to its weather-beaten brim.

When Adam dined, as he often did, at the bountiful table of Glenanmays, he also found his horn spoon, his knife and fork beside his plate, and he was always careful to set his hat, his riding-whip and his gloves and cape behind the door. Then, bareheaded, he took his place on the right hand of his host at the long oaken table, to which in due order came son, daughter, house-maiden, out-lass, ploughman and herd. The only difference was that when it came to the blessing upon the food to be partaken of, Adam the Laird stood up, while the others sat still with bowed heads. Why this was, no one knew, not even Adam or Diarmid. But so it had been in the time of their fathers, and so it would continue till there was not a Ferris in Cairn Ferris—a time which neither liked to consider—for the same thought came to both—how that Patsy being an heiress, Patsy would marry, and the lands that had so long been those of Ferris of Cairn Ferris would pass to children of another name.

At the end of the long red-tiled kitchen in which the family meals were served opened out a sort of back-kitchen to which a wooden extension had been added. It was a sort of Court of the Young Lions, where herd-boys, out-workers of the daily-wage sort, turnip-singlers, Irish harvesters, Stranryan "strappers" and "lifters," crow-boys, and all the miscellany of a Galloway farm about the end of the Napoleonic wars ate from wooden platters, with only their own horn spoon and pocket-knife to aid their nimble fingers. There was no complaint, for Glenanmays was "a grand meat house," and with the broth served without stint and the meats rent asunder by the hands of the senior ploughman, the Young Lions did very well.

If quarrels arose, the senior ploughman kept a stick of grievous crab-tree handy, and was not loath to use it. Usually, however, his voice upraised in threatening sufficed. For Rob Dickson could stir the Logan Stone with his little finger. He had escaped from the press-gang on his way from Stanykirk Sacrament, and had carried away the slash of a cutlass with him, the scar of which was plain to be seen of all, beginning as it did a little below his ear and running to the point of the shoulder-blade. This made the prestige of Rob Dickson notable, especially among the Irish. Had he not resisted authority? So of him chiefly they sought counsel and direction—so much so that old Diarmid, quick to notice what made for the good of his farm, caused Rob Dickson to act as a kind of "grieve" during the time of harvest, when the land was overrun with "Islanders," "Paddies" and "Paipes"—for the religious hatred, though never crossing the North Channel, has yet made of the Irish Catholic in Wigtonshire a hewer of wood and a drawer of water to his Presbyterian masters.

Few things Adam Ferris liked better than a look at the Court of the Lions during feeding time, when Rob Dickson rose in his place to salute him and the Young Lions bent lower over their wooden platters, "eating away like murther" lest any neighbour should get ahead of them in the race. When their own proper broth was finished and the flesh sodden in it had all been distributed, the Young Lions were made free of the debris of the high table, and never were bones cleaned with greater dispatch. Scarce did those which were saved for the rough-tailed, soft-eyed collies, waiting expectant outside, emerge with a higher polish. The herds had to see to this final distribution themselves, each feeding his own pair at different corners of the yard, ready to check growlings which might end in fights with the stern toe of a mountain boot, very proper to the purpose.

Even oftener than her father, Patsy came to Glenanmays. It was good to get away from the dear but dull house of Cairn Ferris, the schooled and disciplined servants, the gentle but constant and masterful supervision of her old nurse, Annie McQuilliam.

She loved her home. She loved all who were in it. But there was no one of her own age at Cairn Ferris, and here at Glenanmays she could dip deep in the fountain of youth. Of the four girls, Faith and Elspeth were her seniors, and she looked up to them, sitting at their feet and keeping her secrets as carefully from them as she would have done from her own father.

But the third, Jean, a tall slight girl with head coiled about by swathes of fair hair, was year for year, month for month, Patsy's own age. And neither had any secrets from the other. Hopes, fears, anticipations were exchanged, but cautiously and in whispers, like young bathers who test the chill of the sea with bent, temerarious toes. So they touched and paused, shivering on the brink of the incoming tide of life.

Ménie Garland, the youngest of all, was then a slim girl still at Stranryan Grammar School, with the softest eyes and the most wonderful voice, round-throated and full-chested even at the ungrateful age of fourteen.

Not the three brothers Garland, Fergus, Stair and Agnew, stalwart and brown, nor yet the two elder girls—not little Ménie coming singing like a linnet over the moor, brought Patsy so often that way. But the quiet talks with Jean—Jean who had learned wisdom from her sisters' love affairs, from the escapades of her brothers, and who, by the rude rule of fact, could reduce to cautious verity the fiction which Patsy had learned from her Uncle Julian's books.

So Patsy went often to Glenanmays, and without interrupting the busy round of the afternoon's duties, prescribed by Diarmid for each member of his family, she made her way to the little shed hidden by the burnside, on the green in front of which the clothes-lines were strung, and clean garments fluttered in the sea-wind, fresh and glad as ship's bunting.

"Yes," Jean Garland would say after the girls had kissed one another, "I was up early this morning—soon after dawn. Madge Blair and I had our arms in the tubs by half-past three, and she had got the pot to boil before that. So now I am ready for the ironing, and—"

"Oh, let me help!" cried Patsy.

"Very well," Jean acquiesced, "you are getting to be none so ill with the goffering iron and the pliers—"

"Better with the fancy than the plain!" laughed Patsy.

"It is to be expected, you have the light hand, and you have taste—most have neither one nor the other, but iron for all the world like a roller going over a wet field."

They worked a while in silence, only looking up occasionally and smiling at each other, or Jean might throw in a hint as to a frill or tucker which must be dealt with in a particular way.

Suddenly Jeanie Garland came nearer, a pile of folded linen over her arm.

"Have you heard anything of the press-gang at your house, Patsy?"

"Nothing," said Patsy, busy with a best Sunday cap, all lace frills and furbelows. "Of course there is always Captain Laurence at Stranryan. On clear nights you can hear his fifes and drums by standing on the stile above our house, and they say there is a King's ship or two about Belfast Lough—but why do you ask?"

Jean Garland paused yet nearer to Patsy and spoke in her ear.

"It's the lads!" she murmured. "They are in it. I am feared for them."

"What?" exclaimed Patsy, but checked by a glance she instantly lowered her voice—"not Fergus and Stair and Agnew?"

Jean nodded slightly.

"Does their father know?" Patsy whispered back. Jean preserved a grave face.

"Not any one of us, his own family, can guess what Diarmid Garland knows and does not know. He had his time of the Free Trading. He was at the head of it, and if the boys head a clean run from the Dutch coast or the Isle of Man—why, if father is ignorant of the business, it is because he wishes to be."

"But there is nothing new in all that," said Patsy; "there have always been smugglers and shore lads who helped them—always King's cutters and preventive men to chase and lose them—what danger do the boys run more than at other times?"

"This," said Jean Garland, very gravely, "there is a new superintendent of enlistments at Stranraer. He is just a spy, one Eben McClure from Stonykirk, a man of our own country. He works with the preventive superintendent, and when they cannot or dare not meddle with the cargo-runners, as they dare not with my brothers, they set the press upon them—and the soldiers' press is the worst by far."

No more was said. The girls worked quietly for an hour till all was finished. The hedges and clothes-lines were cleared of their burden, and with a whisper of "Shall we go down to the cove—the tide is nearly full," the girls slipped each a cotton gown and a towel apiece into Patsy's little reticule and made off to the bathing cove, a well-hidden nook of sand, half cavern, half high shell-bank, which bygone tides had excavated in the huge flank of the Black Head. Fergus and his brothers knew about it, of course, and saw to it that none about the farm interfered with the girls at their play.

In a minute their young figures were lost among the birches of the valley, a wider and an opener one than that of the Abbey Burn, the banks higher and farther off, and from their ridges giving glimpses of the distant Mull of Galloway and the blue shores of Ireland.

They kept in the bottom of the glen, splashing and springing from stone to stone, with mirthful enjoyment of each other's slips. Far off on a heathery knoll Diarmid watched them go. He had noted the swift intaking of the white cleading on the hedges, the disappearance of fluttering garmentry from the clothes-lines. He approved of young people enjoying themselves, after their work was done—Diarmid's emphasis on the "after" was strong.

As they went Jean Garland pointed out a pony track high on the fells. "Careless fellows," she said, "that must have been Stair's band. For both Fergus and Agnew are more careful!"

Indeed, the trail by which the laden ponies had passed was still clearly evident, and Jean was roused to anger against the headstrong brother who had risked bringing all about the house into trouble.

"The others went by the bed of the burn," she said, "why could not Stair?"

Looking seaward, they saw all things more clearly than usual—the pause before a storm from the west, prophesied Jean Garland. The island at the Abbey Burnfoot divided itself into two peaks. They could see the houses at Donnahadee, and the boats turning sharply about to make for Belfast Lough, showing a sudden broadside of white canvas as they did so. But little they minded. At present the sky was glorious, the sea a mirror, and here was the Maidens' Cove, into which they dipped from the cliff edge, as suddenly as a kite swoops from the sky. In a moment they were lost to sight, and only the tinkle of their laughter among the blue, purple and creamy reflected lights of the cove told where they were.

Outside the sheltered sea rocked and laved the sands with a pleasant swishing invitation. Presently they looked out from the low mouth of the cove. All seemed still and lonely, and they were about to step down into the clear green water of the Atlantic, when a noise came to their ears. It was the sound of men rowing—many men, and many men at that time and place meant the pinnace of a King's ship. The thought of Stair's careless bridle-track high on the heathery side of the fell tortured the mind of his sister. What could they want? It was too early in the day for any surprise work in the interests of the Excise. There were no smuggling cellars near to search—but at that moment the girls of one accord drew in their heads. They moved stealthily into the dark of the cove. Here they could not be observed, but they could see a boat's crew of seamen which went past rapidly in the direction of Abbey Burnfoot, the salt water sparkling in a rain of silver and pearl from the oars, and an officer sitting spick and span at the tiller-ropes.

The next moment they were gone and in the clear submerged dark of the purple dulse that shaded the cavern mouth the girls looked at one another with dismay in their eyes.

"Can they be going to take Uncle Julian?" said Patsy.

"Uncle Julian—no," exclaimed Jean Garland, "of course not—what would they be doing with a learned man and a gentleman? It is that silly Stair who has set them on the track of my brothers. They will land at the Burnfoot and catch them all at the Bothy of Blairmore, where they gather to take their "four hours"—I must run and warn them—"

"Jean," said Patsy, "I can run two yards for your one. Lend me your scarf and I shall go and warn the lads."

"You—the laird's daughter!"

"Yes, I," said Patsy, girding her waist with the red sash, and looking to the criss-crossed ties of the bathing-sandals her uncle had given her out of his store of foreign things. Her kilted skirt came but a little way below her knee and her blouse of fine blue linen let her arms be seen to the elbow. Patsy looked more Pictish than ever thus, with a loose blown tassel of ink-black hair on her brow. Jean offered some faint objections but did not persist. After all, it was the main thing that the lads should be warned in time.

So Patsy, trim and slim as your forefinger with a string of red tied about it, sped eastward over the hills to the Bothy of Blairmore.

CHAPTER III

THE BOTHY

Patsy had always been a wonderful runner. She could outpace her pony. She could flee from Louis Raincy like the shadow of a wind-blown cloud crossing a mountain-side, and on the sands, with none but Jean Garland to see, Patsy could fleet it along the wet tide wash, sending the spray about her as a swallow that skims a pond and flirts the surface with its wings.

Old Diarmid mounted on the stile, balanced himself with his staff, and looked. The dogs accompanying him cocked their ears in hopes of a chase, but the next moment, their keen senses telling them that it was only Patsy running over the heather, they settled down, marvelling that men could be so strong with foot and hand and yet know so little.

There was half a mile to be run along the sands before turning up over the hot glacier-planed stones of the moor. Diarmid Garland watched and wondered. He had often seen Patsy giving his daughter Jean, of the heavier and slower-moving blonde Scandinavian blood, half the distance to Saythe Point and then passing her, as an arrow may miss and pass one who flees. Now she moved like a leaf blown by the hurricane. Her white feet in their sandals of yellow leather of Corinth hardly seemed to touch the sand. Then Patsy turned up the crumbling cliffs at their lowest point, mounting like a goat with an effortless ease till she crowned the causeway of seaworn rock and plunged to the armpits into the tall heather of the Wild of Blairmore.

Then Diarmid lost sight of the girl for a minute, but when he saw her again she was far out on the perilous goat-track which led down to the bothy itself. Diarmid scanned the distance with his eye—he knew the length of time it would have taken a hillsman to go from point to point.

"That girl is a miracle," he muttered to himself, "she can run through deep heather as fast as on the sand of the seashore."

He was wrong, however. She was only a Pictess, with some thousand years of the heather instinct in her blood. Her body was lithe and supple, her foot light, and her eye sure. Besides, she could hear what was hidden and unheard at the stile on which Diarmid stood, the rock-rock of the short, steady navy stroke, which was pulling the landing-party from His Majesty's ship Britomart nearer and nearer to the Bothy of Blairmore.

Then she passed quite out of sight. She had a long descent before her, sheltered seaward, so that she did not need to consider the danger of being seen by the enemy. The leather of her sandals pattered like rain on dry leaves on the narrow, twisted sheep-tracks, then mounted springily over the bulls'-fell of the knolls of stunted heather, and as it were in the clapping of a pair of hands, she appeared at the door of the Bothy of Blairmore, scarce heated, quite unbreathed, but with grave face and anxious eyes.

"Scatter!" she commanded, clapping her hands. "Off with you, lads! Take to the hills. The press-gang is landing at this moment at the Abbey Burnfoot to cut you off. Eben McClure is with them. He has heard of your cargo-running and he wants to send you all to the wars."

"And what will you do?" said Stair, who was always the boldest in speech as he was the most reckless in action.

"I—oh, pray don't give yourself the least trouble about me, Stair Garland. I shall stay here and wash the dishes."

The lads were declaring that under no circumstances should she remain where she was, but Patsy had made up her mind. She must see what a press-gang was like. She would see and speak with the officers who were at the head of it. Perhaps they had their side to it also, which would be worth the finding out. And the spy—she had never seen a spy, a marker-down of men—so she resolved to see this Eben McClure, the most hated man in all Wigtonshire. She would stay, and it was with a certain imperiousness that she ordered the boys away.

They went reluctantly, but they knew that because she was the daughter of a magistrate and a laird, nothing serious would happen to her, while they risked life and liberty every moment they stayed.

"Do you think I ran all the way from the bathing cove for nothing?" she said. "Save yourselves, lads. Do as I bid you and at once."

They went, though it was not with the best grace in the world. Stair wore a scowl on his handsome face as he slung his gun over his shoulder. Only Fergus thanked her for having come to warn them.

"Hold your tongue," said Patsy, peremptorily, "get out of sight. Keep yourselves safe. That is the best thanks, and all that I ask for from you."

So it came about that fifteen minutes later, Lieutenant Everard of the Britomart, disembarking with Captain Laurence of the Dragoons and the Superintendent of Enlistments, Mr. Ebenezer McClure, came upon a picture framed in the doorway of the Bothy of Blairmore. Patsy had spread Jean Garland's scarlet sash to its broadest, and so had been able to let down her skirt of blue linen till it came to almost her ankles, above which the yellow cross-gartering of the sandals was diamonded in the Greek fashion her Uncle Julian had taught her.

Patsy had found piles of unwashen dishes and spoons, for the boys of the Glenanmays family depended for cleaning up upon uncertain, semi-occasional visits, from one or other of their sisters. What they wanted at the time they took out and washed in the pleasant tumble of the hill brook which passed their door on its way down to meet the Abbey Burn a little above Uncle Julian's house. The rest they left.

The two officers of His Majesty stood a moment too astonished for speech. This was not at all what they had come out to find, nor what their men had been posted all about the bothy to secure in case of an attempt to escape.

Patsy nodded brightly to her visitors, and the officers saluted, without, however, abandoning their gravity. The third man, a long, lean, hook-nosed fellow with curly black hair plastered about his brow and tied in a greasy fall of ringlets on his shoulders, frowned and growled. He had understood at once that the game was up. If the authority had been his, he would have had the sailors and marines scouring the hillside and searching every rift in the rocks.

"May I ask you," said Captain Laurence, a tall, good-looking, blond officer, bowing to Patsy, "where the young men Garland are to be found? We had come with warrants for their taking. This is His Majesty's press."

"Ah," said Patsy easily, "so you are the press-gang—let me look at you. I have never seen a 'press' before. Where are your handcuffs? Which of you is the chief executioner? You tie up the poor fellows, they tell me."

"I must ask you to explain your presence here," said Captain Laurence, who had grown hot all over at being spoken to in this fashion.

"This is the Maid Marian of the gang," suggested Lieutenant Everard of the Britomart, with a sneer. "I have seen something like this get up in the Gulf of Corinth."

"Then you are a lucky man," said the captain of dragoons. "All the same I must ask you to account for your presence here, young lady."

"Rather might I ask you to explain yours," said Patsy, breathing on a glass, rubbing it, and holding it up to the light. "You are trespassing on my father's ground—and from what I see of your arms, in pursuit of game!"

"And who is your father, madame?"

"I have quite as good a right to ask you for the name of yours!"

The officers laughed and glanced at each other.

"Not quite," said the dragoon; "you observe that we are on special duty—"

"I should indeed hope so," said Patsy, standing up with her drying-cloth in her hand and shaking it contemptuously at them. "Special duty, indeed, that means the chasing of honest men and honest men's sons at the bidding of spies!"

"It is a duty which I perform as seldom as possible," said Captain Laurence. "Naturally I would rather be fighting the foes of my king and country, but as to that I am not consulted. Besides, the naval and military forces of the realm must be recruited in some way or other!"

"I should have thought that treating men like criminals was not the best way to make brave soldiers of them!"

"Tell us your father's name," broke in Lieutenant Everard, a small dark man, very nervous and restless, with eyes that winked continually and impatient fingers that fiddled endlessly with the tassel of his sword-hilt. "We will not be put off longer. The men are escaping all the time while you are left here to hold us in talk. If he be, as you say, a gentleman and a magistrate, he will give us assistance in our search, according to his oath."

"My father's name is Adam Ferris, of Cairn Ferris," said Patsy, pleasantly. "But whether he will be at your service or not, I cannot tell. As for me, if you are the gallant gentlemen you look, you will bring me a pailful of fresh water from the spring—see, yonder at the foot of the rock—ah, thank you!"

"Captain, we are wasting valuable time," insinuated Eben McClure, the superintendent of recruitment, touching the officer lightly on the arm.

"Keep your dirty fingers off my sleeve, sir, and go to the devil. I command here. Miss Ferris, I beg your pardon. I may as well fetch a pair when I am about it."

Captain Laurence had noticed that the second pail contained very little water. So with a quick heave he sent a shining spout in the direction of the spy, who was drenched from knee to shoe-buckle. Then he caught up the pails with a clash of their iron handles and with the easiest swagger in the world took the direction of the spring, his spurs jingling as he went. A sailor on guard behind the rock would have aided him to fill them, but he told the man to keep his station, and dipped for himself. He brought them back brimming and with a courtly bow inquired of Patsy if she had any further commands for him, because if not he must go about the duties of his service.

Patsy thanked him with the distinctive simplicity of one who has officers of dragoons to carry water for her every day of her life. But she went to the door and showed Captain Laurence the way over the ridges to the house of Cairn Ferris. "My father is likely to be at home," she said, "but if you do not find him, he is sure to be at my Uncle Julian's at the Abbey. You have only to follow the glen."

"Your uncle?" said Captain Laurence, "your father's brother?"

"No, my mother's," said Patsy. "Mr. Julian Wemyss of Auchenyards and Wellwood—and the best man in the world—the wisest too!"

"I shall have pleasure in making the acquaintance of your uncle; his family (and that of your mother) is from my part of Scotland."

He bowed low and withdrew. The lieutenant of the Britomart and the Superintendent of Enlistments were in a state of incipient lunacy. Oh, the fool! They would break him if they could. They would write to the Secretary. They would—but as they growled and cursed behind him, Eben McClure suddenly remembered that Julian Wemyss and my Lord Erskine were first cousins, and that so long as the government remained in office, it would be advisable to stand well with all friends and neighbours of the Secretary, Erskines, Wemysses, Melvilles, wherever found. He was unpopular enough in the country as it was. He could not afford to be "ill seen" at headquarters as well.

Patsy found herself left alone in the bothy. But she knew that the two men who had not spoken would certainly leave some hidden spy to watch whether the young men returned, or if she attempted to communicate with them.

Therefore she did not hasten. Jean would arrive before long with the garments in which she had left home, and which she had shed, as it were providentially, to be able to run the better across the sands of Killantringan and the heathery fastnesses of the Wild of Blairmore.

Hardly had Patsy gotten the bothy to her liking—or something like it—when Jean arrived, full of wonder and joy. She carried a parcel under her arm, done up carefully in her neckerchief.

"It is a pity to change," she said, "you will never look so pretty again!"

And she detailed with the admiration of generous youth the beauty of the black locks, waved tightly about the small head, the pale blue linen gown girt with the sash of scarlet silk, and the cross-gartered sandals, showing Patsy's brown skin and pretty ankles half-way to the knee.

"It is a great shame," she repeated, "that you can't go about like that all the time."

"I shall think it over," said Patsy; "but if I went to the kirk on Sabbath dressed as you would have me, I believe Mr. MacCanny would have me turned out."

"Yes," said the loyal Jean, "because nobody would be able to attend to his sermon for looking at you!"

"But what are the lads going to do?"

"Oh," said Jean, "they have two or three places handy for lying up in. They are snug by this time. At least Fergus and Agnew are. Stair I met on my way here. He was lurking in a moss-hag with his gun ready for the first red-coat or blue-jacket who should lift a hand to you."

"Send him off to join the rest," said Patsy more seriously. "I never was in the least danger, and there is no doubt but that the man McClure has left some of his rascals to watch the bothy."

"Then High Heaven help them if they come across Stair and his blunderbuss. He will bring them down like so many partridges. Not even father can manage Stair. He will take orders from no one, except in matters of the farm. He is a good boy, and has great influence among the young fellows, for he will stick at nothing. But he is easily angered, proud, and often both reckless and desperate. You may be sure that he will not leave you till he sees you safe in your own valley and among your own people."

Patsy heard this with outward impatience, but, like every girl, with something also of inward pride. She smiled at what Louis Raincy would have to say to this constant watchfulness, and how she herself would like it when next Louis and she climbed up to their "Nest" for one of their long talks. Would Louis be in danger from the bullets of the arrogant Stair?

She wondered if what Uncle Julian said could indeed be true—that though the men's secret of the heather ale had been lost, the women of the Picts would keep theirs and whistle men to heel, as sheep-dogs follow their masters. Uncle Julian said that she had in her the blood of Boadicca, who once on a day was a queen of the Picts far to the south.

But, after all, Uncle Julian jested so often, even when he appeared most serious, that you could not tell whether he meant it or no.

It would be nice if it were true, thought Patsy, but, after all, just because Uncle Julian said so did not make it true.

"Your daughter, sir," said Lieutenant Everard, half an hour later, "has aided the escape of three young men, all deeply implicated in breaking the laws of the land."

It was in the ancient hall of Cairn Ferris that Adam, tall, black and solemn, was receiving unexpected visitors. The hall, oak-beamed and still lighted mainly by tall, narrow windows, originally slotted for arrow and blunderbuss, was discouraging for men in search of the support of a modern justice of the peace.

The chief of a clan, some of whose members had been cattle-lifting, might have received them so.

"What men? What laws?" demanded Adam Ferris.

"The young men Garland, sons of one of your tenants," said the officer; "and as for the laws, they are those of His Majesty's excise."

"Ah," said Adam, dryly, "pardon me. Your uniform misled me. From your dress I took you for a naval officer."

"And so I am," cried Lieutenant Everard indignantly; "of His Majesty's ship Britomart, presently cruising in these waters."

Adam Ferris bowed gravely, as one who receives valuable information.

"I congratulate you," he said. "As for the young men, Fergus, Stair and Agnew Garland, they are fine lads and a credit to the neighbourhood. I cannot imagine that they have anything more to do with the traffic of which you speak than I myself. But if they have been reported to you as guilty, I am prepared to take cognizance of the evidence. I presume you did not come here without a warrant."

"We need no warrant," said the Lieutenant. "I am in command of His Majesty's press."

The expression of Adam Ferris's face changed suddenly.

"My tenants and my tenants' sons are not subject to the press-gang. There are no sailors among them—no, nor yet any fishermen."

"Captain Laurence of the dragoons is with us, sir," interpolated Eben McClure; "he has a right to beat up for recruits for the land forces."

"Ah," said Adam, "at fairs and markets, with fife and drum—yes! But not all over my estate, nor yet to meddle with my tenantry."

"He has particular permission from Earl Raincy," said the spy.

"I am not Earl Raincy, nor are my lands his," quoth Adam Ferris; "but, by the way, where is this Captain Laurence of whom you speak?"

The question seemed to embarrass the two men. "He was with us," said the Lieutenant at last, "but having discovered some fancied kinship with your brother's family, he separated himself from us and went (as I believe) to his house of Abbey Burnfoot!"

"Then I hope he does not press Julian for the cavalry. His cousin, the Secretary, might have something to say to that!"

Altogether there was small change to be got out of Adam Ferris, and as they gathered their men and, marched them off, they fell foul one of the other, the officer with his exercised sea-tongue having much the better of the word-strife. But presently they were friends again, both cursing Captain Laurence of the dragoons for deserting them in their time of need.

"I believe," said Lieutenant Everard, "that Laurence simply turned in his tracks and went back to that bothy to carry more water for the black-headed girl!"

This, however, was of little moment to the Superintendent of Enlistments, who had a bounty upon every pressed man safe drafted to headquarters or delivered on board ship.

"At any rate," he said, "we have lost our men, and we are little likely to see them again!"

The Lieutenant turned angrily upon him.

"You are thinking of your dirty dollars," he said bitterly. "It is for the sake of such as you that His Majesty's officers must be treated like huckstering excisemen by every dirty Scot who owns as much ground as a cow can turn round in! 'My estate!' 'My tenantry'—paugh, and the back of his hand to you because you are no better than an Englishman!"

"The Ferrises are an ill folk to come across!" insinuated the Superintendent of Enlistments.

Everard turned hotly upon his companion.

"And who brought us here to rub noses against rough stones climbing your accursed dykes, only to be insulted by country bumpkins and outwitted by half-clad minxes? You are a spy, and no fit company for gentlemen. I tell you so much to your face. But when you are in your own country and doing your foul business, you might at least have your information correct before calling out the forces of His Majesty."

And ten minutes later the boat of the Britomart was being rowed fast in the direction of that ship, because the men knew well that their officer was in no mood to be trifled with.

CHAPTER IV

BY FORCE OF ARMS

The press-gang and its ugly work, Castle Raincy and its feudal associations, stern Cairn Ferris, the Abbey Burn and the bright new house of Julian Wemyss—Patsy going from one to the other, and the patriarchal simplicity of the farm of Glenanmays, with its girls and boys, its cave-riddled shore and its interests in the Free Traffic—these are what the district of the Back Shore meant in later Napoleonic times.

Most of this was on the surface, to be seen of all men, but the traffic and the "press" are only spoken of in whispers. As to them it is dangerous to appear too knowing.

Even great people were mysteriously tongue-tied. Silence was particularly golden in these days, and in the stillness of the night the little click of a sheep's trotters descending a mountain pathway was often mistaken for the clank of a scabbard point, or the clink of a gun-butt striking a loose stone.

Girls in moorland farms lay awake, half-fearing, half-hoping to hear the saddle-chains of the laden horses, each led by a lover or a brother.

King George might (and did) multiply officials and send what could be spared in the way of landing parties to support the executive, but the claims on the ministry were too many. They could only say, "Wait for a time of peace and then we will regulate the matter of the Solway free trade once for all."

But the most ignorant lad on the shore of Galloway from Loch Ryan to Annan Waterfoot knew that so long as the government waged war against Napoleon and America, it had no time to attend to them. The press-gang was all they had to avoid, and for that they trusted to their clear eyes and nimble feet.

They were also well informed. So soon as a patrol cleared the Irishman's Port in Stranryan, or a boat's crew was seen making for the beach of any of the Back Shore coves, messengers, ragged and brown, sped inland to warn the farms and villages engaged in the business, or even those merely acting as recipients and depots. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, all men under forty-five disappeared from the fields. The teams found their own way homewards or stood still till they were loosed by girls hurrying out from the steadings.

"Patriotism," said Stair Garland, bitterly, "that is a fine word. But the fine patriots tie the lads they catch to rings in the wall of the Stranryan gaol. They lash them till the blood runs just to learn them not to complain. Don't tell me about glory. There was Rob Blair, who came back from Spain after his brother Maxwell had been flogged to death. He shot a general near Corunna—him they make a fuss about—he and half a dozen of his mates, and he told me the reason that Allingham keeps so far ahead of his own soldiers is that they are better shots than the French, who do not fire at him nearly so often."

True or not, this was the Galloway idea of soldiering during the later Napoleonic wars, and it was only after a bout of drunkenness at some fair that recruits could be looked for. Suicide was not uncommon after a few weeks of discipline, and many were drowned from the transport ships which took them to Vigo or the Tagus mouth.

Galloway has always been cut off from the rest of Scotland. In spite of the invasion of its fertile valleys by Ayrshire dairy farmers it has remained the old Free Province, a little anti-Scottish, a good deal anti-Irish, excessively anti-English, self-centred, self-satisfied, quarrel-some and frondeur, yet in the main politically conservative.

In 1811 the Ayrshire invasion had not yet begun, and there was nothing to mitigate the determination of the people not to send a single man to fight in a war about which they cared nothing. No regiment in the service bore its name. It was looked upon as the haunt of an evil breed who would smuggle and fight, but against, and not among, the soldiers of the King.

A landing party had been attacked and cut up on the Corse of Slakes. Soldiers had to take and hold the old camp of the Levellers in the Duchrae wood, near the Black Water. Bitter hatred prevailed between the Lord Lieutenant's party, formed to aid the government in obtaining recruits, and the commonalty, which was equally determined that no one of theirs should be carried off to endure the shame of the cat-o'-nine-tails.

Earl Raincy made a tour of his estates, and the farmers promised wonderful things, but carefully and immediately sent their lads to the heather and the hill-caves for change of air. The girls took to the plough and threshed the grain on the beaten earth of the barn floor—emerging tired, but bright-eyed and happy. This, at least, they could do to keep Alec or John from the dread triangle and the lacerating whip. The Frenchman's bullet they were willing to risk, but not these. Galloway furnished its full tale of officers to both services, but as a recruiting-ground, even in milder times, it has given poor results.

In 1812 there was a good deal of writing about patriotism in struggling local journals. The big farmers were often loud-voiced, and the publicans hung out colours when the recruiting-officers made temporary headquarters of their houses, but the mass of the people stood silent, sullen and determined. They would not be taken, and if any were seized they would put up such a fight that the "press" would pay three or four lives for one. The chiefs would stay their hand, they argued, if they had to pay the price of three or four formed and disciplined men for a single unwilling recruit who would certainly desert at the first opportunity.

In the old outlaws' cave on Isle Ryan, towards the Mull out beyond Orraland, thirty or forty young men were gathered. They were not afraid of any attack by land or water. The stony bulk of the isle did not even fear cannon, and the passage, open only at low water, was exceedingly easily defended. Provisions they had in plenty, and for more they had only to cross to the mainland, where every farmer would willingly supply them.

Lads from all Galloway were there, shock-headed Vikings, with far-looking blue eyes, from Kirkmaiden to Leswalt, black, hook-nosed Blairs and McCallums from Garlieston sat beside Rerrick and Colvend men with deep-set eyes, the fine flower of the Free Trade, men whose forefathers had run cargoes for a hundred and thirty years into the same ports, and refused King's service for many thousand, though perfectly obedient to their own lords and war committees. There were always a plenty of fighting men along Solway shore, as the published rolls of 1638 attest.[1] Willing were they to fight, only they would fight when and against whom they chose, under such and such officers, appointed by themselves, and under no others. Kings, whether Highland Stuarts or German Guelphs, they would not obey—no, not though military parties made examples of them at every dyke back. The iron of the Killing Time was branded deep into the folk of Galloway. They would not go soldiering, and they would smuggle. In the last resort, if matters got too hot, the young men would silently betake themselves to Canada, where they rose to be factors and chief traders under the Hudson Bay Company, or, like Paul Jones, took service under another flag, and fought with the lust of battle ever in their heart, against all that was English or smelt of the service of King George.

"Are we to stay here for ever?" demanded Stair Garland, lying on the sand of the upper cavern and looking out at the blue curtain of sky, which was all he could see. Outside was a kind of balcony on which they stretched their legs at night, but, as there were preventive officers on the cliffs with telescopes under their arms, it was forbidden to go out there in daylight.

"We must stay here till the ships of war have gone out of the channel. You can see the top-sails of the Britomart at this moment, hanging about the Mull, and a sloop-of-war lies off Logan House, waiting for Captain Laurence's orders."

It was a Stewartry man who spoke, keen of eye and crisply black-haired, his voice soft and easy, not hectoring and overbearing like that of most of his fellows—his name, Godfrey McCulloch, the younger son of a younger son, but of the best and oldest blood in Scotland, which is to say of the Ardwalls.

Godfrey and Stair were in a manner rivals for leadership. The Stewartry man was the elder by many years, and among his own enjoyed an unrivalled reputation, but three-fourths of the Isle Ryan refugees were Wigtonshire men and faithful to Stair Garland.

But Stair Garland was often reckless and headstrong, so brave himself that he hardly thought of danger to those whom he led. Godfrey McCulloch, on the other hand, was cautious and long-sighted. He argued out every possibility, and arranged what was to be done if things fell out so and so. Sometimes he even hesitated too long, balancing between two wise courses, while Stair, leading his men with a rush, would thresh his way through to victory. On the whole, Godfrey was the safer, Stair far the more popular leader.

"We cannot lie up in this hole much longer," said Stair, digging his heels into the sand.

"I do not see that you do much lying up," retorted Godfrey McCulloch, his eyes dark and beady in the semi-dark; "you are off ashore more than half the time—"

"After that little slip of a Ferris girl, Patsy," said an Irishman from Antrim. "I saw the pair of you go down the glen together, and may I never see Cushendal more if you had not your arm about her waist behind the dyke—"

Stair's clenched fist shut in the remainder of the sentence. The Rathlain man choked as he swallowed a couple of teeth, and felt his raw lip acrid upon the gap.

"Tell them you lie—tell them before you spit—or I will send the rest of your teeth after those two!"

The man gasped out that "Sure it was only a joke—"

"A joke, was it?" said Stair fiercely; "then I hope you will consider the teeth you have swallowed as the cream of it!"

The men were silent—not from fear at all, but because any two of them had a right to settle such differences in their own way.

"Will the Irishman not sell us because of Stair Garland's fist closing his mouth so awkward like?" inquired a second Rerrick man, lying at the shoulder of Godfrey McCulloch.

"Not by a great deal," said Godfrey, "perhaps he will kill Stair if he can, though Stair is more likely to kill him. But he will not lay information as to the lads of the Free Trade. He will remember what happened to Luke Finney and James Tynan when they thought to lift the hundred pound reward out for Captain Maxwell of the Scaur."

"What was that?" said the youth at his elbow.

"Have you not heard? It is a Colvend story, too," said McCulloch. "We took them out into mid-channel and tied each man to an old anchor with his fifty pounds in jingling gold about his neck. For which cause Luke Finney and James Tynan, two rusty anchors and a hundred guineas of unrusted gold lie in the gut of the North Channel to this day."

"Is the water deep?" the young man asked.

"Deeper than any diver will reach till the judgment day," quoth Godfrey. "This Rathlin man will think twice before he plays Judas to the lads of the Trade."

"It must have been worst when they were over the side before the anchors went plunk!" The young fellow shuddered. A clean death in a fair fight he did not mind more than another, but dangling there tied to an anchor—"Ugh!" said the lad.

That night a cargo was to be run into the Abbey Burnfoot Bay, close by the house of Julian Wemyss. The King's ships had settled themselves, one in Belfast Lough, and the sloop-of-war well round the point into Loch Ryan. The Good Intent might therefore discharge her cargo in peace, and the boats were ready on the beach of the Water Cave to put the Inch Ryan refugees in charge of the pack horses which were to carry the stuff inland, distributing as they went.

The lads were riotous to be off, and Stair had to exercise his authority, backed by Godfrey McCulloch's experience and influence over the eastern men, to keep them quiet in the cove till the time should come for the Good Intent to cast anchor in the bay.

The chastisement of the Rathlin man had cowed the wildest spirits, and, still more than the fear of Stair, the acquiescence of the company in the justice of the punishment. Nevertheless, those in the cave were restless and uneasy, setting their heads out to sniff the salt of the sea beneath, and craning their necks through the spy-hole to watch the sand-pipers wheeling as if dancing new-fangled waltzes, or probing the sands after little shellfish and sea worms, never getting in each other's way, but each working quietly along, like a minister in his own parish.

Stair Garland was lost in admiration of the glory of the sea and sand at sunset. The crying of the island curlews coming down each in long plane flight eased his mind. Willy-wha—willy-wha! they called in long diminuendo, before they settled.

Presently the mist began to rise out of the hollows and hung out over the sea from Inch Ryan to the mainland crags like the stretched awning of a tent. Stair gave the lads leave to go on the balcony while he himself started on a tour of inspection. He would have liked to take Godfrey McCulloch with him. But he knew that his own following would be jealous and resent his passing them over, so he contented himself with saying, "Attend to what Godfrey says, boys. He has seen more than all of us put together. Fergus" (this to his elder brother), "knock the heads of any men who make a noise. No one shall come with us to-night who does not obey now!"

Stair went out by the little passage, spoken of in other chronicles, which opened into the inner towers of the ancient castle of the Herons. He found himself among rugged, heathy ground, the hollow palm of the island, now suffused with milky opalescence, for the sun was setting. Hardly could Stair see from one tuft to another, but out of the tinted mist swooped first two and then three birds like angels appearing out of a white heaven. Magnified by the mist Stair hardly recognized the green and black summer uniform of the golden plover, but he heard their softly wistful cries everywhere.

And as the mist shifted and flowed everywhere more and more were revealed, doing sentry duty each on his tussock of bent-grass, while behind his mate effaced herself upon her four eggs or led her little flock into the deepest of the growing heather and among the white meadows of cotton-grass which blew about them, more downy than even the youngest nestling.

Stair made his way to the most easterly point of the isle—that nearest to the Burnfoot Bay. Already the fog was bunching and billowing uneasily. He noted that it was losing its steady, even pour over the island. "It will lift," he muttered.

And from far away there came the sound of a schooner's mainsail being brought down as her head came to the wind, the plunge of an anchor, and then, through a gap in the gloom, the tall, bare mast of a ship in the direction of the new house of Abbey Burnfoot.

"The Good Intent!" he muttered. "She must be very sure of herself to come to anchor like that. Still that is Captain Penman's business. If he can discharge his cargo, I can put it out of harm's way. We shall have two hundred lads on the beach by midnight, and whatever force they may bring against us, we can go through them with the strong hand!"

CHAPTER V

PATSY'S CONFESSIONS

Patsy had said nothing at home about her race over the moors to save the Glenanmays lads from the press-gang, and when her Uncle Julian, having talked to Captain Laurence, approached her on the subject, my lady replied that she was at the Bothy of Blairmore to help her friend Jean Garland.

"And where was Jean when the 'press' found you there alone?" said Julian Wemyss, smiling.

"She was outside, keeping watch for her brothers," said Patsy, looking at him with bright, clear eyes that could not be other than truthful.

But Uncle Julian had had much experience, and he only smiled more knowingly than ever.

"And the famous costume which so witched the men of war?" he asked.

"Oh, that," said Patsy, "I had to run, and you can't run fast in a frieze coat with many capes!"

"No." Uncle Julian nodded his head; "sandals cross-gartered, a bathing dress and a sash! I would that I had been one of His Majesty's officers to see you."

"I shall dress up for you some time," affirmed Patsy soothingly, "if you will give me the yellow sandals for my very own."

"Ah," said Uncle Julian, "of that I am not sure. They recall something which makes them precious to me."

The girl clasped her hands delightedly.

"Oh, a story at last," she cried, nestling against him. "I shall not tell a soul. You shall see how I can keep a secret."

"But I shall see still better if I do not tell it you!"

"Oh, how abominable of you, Uncle Julian! And I thought you loved me."

"The yellow sandals remind me of a time when I was young—young as you, and a great deal more foolish!"

"But they are a girl's sandals, Uncle Julian—you said so yourself when you lent them to me."

"Indeed, both of them would hardly cover a man's foot!"

"Who was she? Oh, where did you meet her? Did you love her very much?"

"I met her on a little coasting boat belonging to her father, on which I had taken passage from Chios to Smyrna. She knew no English. I knew only one sentence of modern Greek, and I was not sure of the meaning even of that. So I had to be careful. I had it from a poem which was making a noise at the time."

"Oh, I know," cried Patsy, "Louis is always saying it over to me: Zoë mou, sas agapo! What does it mean?"

"That I did not know at the time, but I know what I meant the words to mean."

"Was she very lovely?"

"Very," said Uncle Julian. "I see you want a description, but I can only indicate. She had great dark eyes into which every sort of languid delight seemed to have been melted and concentrated, and eyelashes like the fringed awnings of a tent. When she lowered them they swept the ground, and when she lifted them it was slowly, as if their very weight fought against her will!"

"Oh-o-o-h!" said Patsy, feeling with her fingers, "I have regular scrubs. You won't ever love me when you think of her, Uncle Julian."

"I might," he answered, "if you had only the yellow sandals—"

"No, no, tell me about her! What did you say to her?"

"I said 'Zoë mou' half a dozen times, sitting closer to her every time. I spoke lower and lower, till the last 'Zoë mou' was whispered into her ear.

"Then I risked the other part, 'sas agapo'—and expected a box on the ear, or perhaps an appeal to her father, but instead she turned and kissed me!"

"Hurrah, Uncle Julian, I'm sure so should I—if any one had the sense to talk to me like that, low and in my ear (that tickles anyway) and in an unknown tongue."

"But you see the point was that the tongue was not unknown to her. She was a Greek girl and—"

"But what, after all, did it mean? She told you afterwards, of course."

"Well," said Uncle Julian, meditating, "not exactly. I found out. I had said, 'Zoë mine, I love you!"

"But what does 'Zoë' mean?"

"My life!"

"Life of mine, I love you!" Patsy repeated, trying various tones. "Uncle Julian, you must have made love like an archangel. Without knowing it, you had said about all that there was to say, and changing your voice like that—oh, I do wish I had been that girl. I don't wonder you don't want to give me the yellow sandals. I should not even have lent them for five minutes. You must not. I shall bring them back to you. It would be a sacrilege!"

"No," said Uncle Julian, "you are the brightest thing in my world, the likest the Greek girl and all the young things I once loved. It is your turn now, you small, black-headed Pictish woman!"

"I am not 'small.' I am taller than you, Uncle Julian!"

"I daresay, but you are slim as a willow branch. I could take you up between my finger and thumb."

"If you could catch me, Uncle Julian; but, see—you could not!"

With a swift spring she threw herself out of the low French window and stood on the lawn, ready poised for flight.

A brightness came into her uncle's eyes.

"I have known many and learned much," he thought, "but I have missed the best."

"Come, Uncle," she said, tapping the grass with her shoe, "I can't run as well as in kilt and sandals, or like the girl who played ball on the sands, but I can beat you—yes, I could run in circles about you!"

"I know, I know, you swallow!" proclaimed an admiring uncle. "But the day is past when I ran after agreeable young women. Generally they have to pocket their pride and come to see me—you do every day, you know!"

"Yes," said Patsy, "but do not think it is to see you, even if you are my mother's brother—"

"Half-brother—"

"My mother's brother, I say," persisted Patsy. "It is because you teach me to speak French and to read Latin books, and the mathematic (though that I love not so well), and also chiefly because you lend me many books to read up in dull old Cairn Ferris."

"Do not blaspheme the habitation of your fathers," said Julian Wemyss. "Here is a house all ready for you when you marry. If it were not for the table of affinities in the beginning of the Bible, and if I were twenty years younger, I should ask you myself!"

"Oh," said Patsy, "that would be splendid. You are far the nicest man and the most interesting I ever talked to. Don't ask me, for I should say 'yes' in a minute."

Usually Patsy Ferris and her father had not much to say to one another.

"Good morning, daughter!" quoth Adam, coming in from his early inspection; "whither away with such skip-jack grace, habited in yellow and black like a wasp?"

"I have done my work, father," Patsy would answer. "I promised to go help Jean at Glenanmays. The lads are all in the heather and the maids have to do the heavy work of the field."

"But not you—I cannot have you handling the hoe and rake like a field worker!"

"No, no, father; Jean is always indoors or at the dairy."

Adam Ferris looked thoughtful and his dark brows drew together. He detested the press-gang and all it meant to the young men of the parish.

"I could send over a man or two, but my grieve or I myself would require to accompany them for protection against seizure."

"No need," said his daughter, hastily. "Diarmid would not wish to draw you into his sons' quarrels and, I think, Stair's band ran a big cargo last night from the Burnfoot Bay. There were twenty preventive men there, they say. Yet they stood aside and let the pack horses go by like men in a dream!"

Adam grew a little paler. He did not like this open defiance of the forces of law and order.

"How was that?" he demanded, "where was the military?"

"There were two hundred lads, all masked and all armed, a hundred pack horses and another hundred to ride upon. What could twenty customs men do with the like of these? Stair Garland left enough good lads to herd them close under the cliff till the Good Intent had her anchor up and the caravan was out of all reach of danger."

This was by far the most serious news Adam Ferris had received for a long time, but there was worse still to come.

"Uncle Julian says I ought to tell you, father," Patsy began with quite unusual gravity, "that when the press-gang went to the Bothy of Blairmore to take the lads of Glenanmays, they found me. I could run much faster than Jean, so I got there first."

Her father grew grey under the olive of his skin. "The men were not insolent?" he asked, for he knew the manners and customs of his Majesty's press in lonely shielings.

"I only saw the officers—Captain Laurence and a naval lieutenant—besides that smooth rascal McClure from Stonykirk!"

Even then Patsy hardly dared tell her father how unconventionally she had been clad, but she plucked up heart and went through with it.

"I ran from the Maidens' Cove at the foot of the Mays glen along the sands, and through the heather. I had Uncle Julian's yellow sandals on my feet and I got there in time for the lads to scatter, though I had started after the boat had passed out of sight round the Black Point."

"They knew who you were?" her father asked.

"Certainly, I told them," said Patsy, eagerly. "I said also that they had no right on my father's land. We had no sailors or fisher folk on Cairn Ferris."

"Right enough," said her father, "but I hope you were not hasty with the men. Laurence is an honest enough fellow, doing an unpleasant duty, and the others—well, they are apt to find ways of revenging themselves."

"Oh," said Patsy, suddenly radiant, poising her small black head, "I think they rather liked talking to me. I had Jean's dress kilted below the knee. It was blue, and went well with the yellow cross leathers of the sandals. I had a broad sash about my waist, too."

"What difference did that make?" her father asked.

"Oh, none to you, father," Patsy answered saucily, "but to them it seemed to make quite a lot of difference."

Adam Ferris shook his head in reproof.

"You grow reckless, Patsy," he said, "either I must send you away where you will have ladies of your own position to look after you, or we must marry you out of hand and let your husband be responsible for you!"

"If you want me to run away, dad, just keep on talking to me like that. I won't have any old 'camel' women to rule over me. I am not going to leave home, but when I want to get married I shall make my own arrangements and then—tell you afterwards."

"Surely you will ask my permission?"

"The same sort of permission you asked when you ran away with my mother from the door of the Edinburgh Assembly rooms!"

Adam Ferris smiled grimly.

"What is allowable for a man does not always become a woman," he said.

"But what holds for one Ferris becomes another," his daughter retorted.

"Jeddart justice," said her father, still smiling; "then you will marry first, and ask permission afterwards."

"Exactly," said Patsy, cheerfully. "I knew I could make you understand."

CHAPTER VI

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

In spite of her black, close-clustering hair Patsy had the dark blue eyes of her Uncle Julian. Young men and older ones also (who ought to have known better) were in the habit of calling them violet when they walked with Patsy in the twilight, when many unforeseen things happen.

Then Patsy knew exactly what to think. For her Uncle Julian had told her that when a man is in love, he becomes colour blind. When asked how he knew, Julian said that once on a time he had friends who used to confide their love affairs to him. But he smiled as he said it—the believe-as-much-of-that-as-you-like smile which was Patsy's own, and was her heritage from a less grave race than the Ferrises of Cairn Ferris.

Julian had the same smile when he condemned the Free Trade as an interference with the financial policy of King George, and at the same time drew a jug from a jar of "special" Hollands, or from such an anker of cognac as could not be found elsewhere in Scotland. He had found both, as it were dropped from heaven, in a corner of his stable, but Tam Eident, whom he had carefully catechized, knew nothing about the matter. He had, he averred, been asleep at the time in his bed in the stable-loft.

Doubtless the Free Traders thought they were paying for some complaisance on the part of the master of Abbey Burnfoot. But his light burned steadily up in his study window. He had never looked down on the flitting torches, the turmoil of the loading, the black figures crossing and recrossing the glimmering strips of sand, the clinking of shod feet on the banks of pebble, the jingling of the chains of the pack saddles. He had been wisely deaf and had carried his lamp upstairs to the little turret chamber, where he chose to sleep on wild nights, that he might the better hear the wind swirl about him, the wind thresh and the sea roar and churn on the beaches and snore in the spouting-crags of the Burnfoot.

So on nights when strange noises came from without, and the wild birds keckled with a sound that might be mistaken for the neighing of horses, Julian Wemyss betook himself to his strong tower, and, locking the door at the top of the stone staircase, went peacefully to sleep, till the morrow showed up wide wet sands, whipped by the wind, many tracks of horses among the dunes, and, dipping far down the channel towards St. Bees, the top-sails of a schooner, which might be the much-sought-for Good Intent, or, again, might not.

Julian Wemyss was not so old as you might expect from a man so learned and so apart from the world. Various reasons had been given for his retirement to this lonely spot when, during the truce, an appointment as ambassador extraordinary to Paris was within his grasp. He had acquitted himself highly on several "missions" already, and there was no doubt that Vienna was only a step to a permanency in Paris, so soon as the war should cease. But suddenly Julian Wemyss resigned all his appointments into the King's hands, and it was whispered that he had done so on account of a lady so highly placed that even to name her was something like high treason. This was already years ago and even the memory of it had grown dim.

Now, Julian Wemyss might be somewhere near fifty years of age, but did not look a day more than forty, and with certain lights on his face and that kindly smile of his, wise and tolerant, he looked younger still.

He was erect and slender, not very tall beside Adam, his brother-in-law, but moving with a light, easy carriage something between that of an athlete and a favourite of drawing-rooms.

He had the noticeable dark blue eyes that twinkled merrily, yet with something gloomy in their darkness, as of hyacinths in a woodland glade, drifting and smoky, like the kind of smoke that comes from weed-burning or a peat-fire lit on a still day.

His niece, who had heard from Jean Garland some of the talk of the country, for long dared not ask her uncle point-blank if it were true about the princess, but she showed such continual curiosity about his love affairs, that he would keep her waiting while he made an entry in his diary, or other book of written notes, and then declare solemnly that the only girl he had ever loved was named Patsy, and was a thankless brat, unworthy of the care and affection of the best of uncles.

"Nonsense," his niece would cry, happy, however, all the same to have him say so.

"A girl named Patsy," he would continue, "who was put into my arms an hour old to take what care I could of, her father being ill-suited for the task! I am the only relative she has on her mother's side, and Adam Ferris is equally solitary on the other. So we must take good care of the minx, Adam and I. She is all we have, little as she deserves that we should waste a thought on her—though she threatens to run away with the first gipsy that comes to the yett, as did the Countess of Cassillis in the ballad."

"My father has been telling tales—oh, shame of him!" cried Patsy, reddening. "I said that I would run away with you, if you were not my uncle, but then I did not know about—"

She stopped suddenly. Her tongue had betrayed her.

"About what? Out with it," said Julian.

"About the princess!" Patsy answered, her eyes in his.

"Who has been listening to gossip now?" said Julian Wemyss.

"I—I," cried Patsy, "and I would give all I have to know what is true and what is clatter of the country."

"There is little to hide," said Julian quietly, looking past his niece out of the windows giving on the sea; "but that little is not my own to tell. If some day I am at liberty to speak, I promise that little Patsy Ferris shall be the first to hear."

Then he patted her head reproachfully. "Little Curiosity," he said with tenderness, "it is not good for girls to be told everything. Old fellows like me ought to know, so as to keep their wards out of mischief. The world is a strange and dangerous place, full of traps and quicksands, and for this reason see that you always come to me with your troubles. Do not bother Adam Ferris with them. He has never ventured beyond the Plainstones of Dumfries on a cattle-fair day. Besides many women have told me their sorrows."

"Yes," promised Patsy. "I don't know about princesses, but I do know that many girls must have loved you, Uncle Julian, for that is the reason you are so sweet to me now!"

Julian's chief ally in the county was Miss Aline Minto of Balmacminto, who lived at Ladykirk. She was wealthy, but had been so shy of men that she had escaped numberless wooers, sorely enamoured of the Balmacminto estates, and now at the age of forty-five showed the prettiest fringes of white curls in the world, a complexion of seventeen, and something so trustful and rare in the way of brown eyes that Raeburn, at the height of his fame, had painted her for the mere love of winsomeness in growing old.

She knew Julian's reputation and at first had kept out of his way. But when once she met him, the two had become comrades on the spot. Miss Aline saw that this man had no designs either upon her or upon the estates. A kindly aloofness from all such mean projects, an ease and grace that spoke of worlds quite unrealized by Miss Aline, somehow urged her to confide in him. In a month he had become indispensable. Miss Aline asked his advice and called upon Julian Wemyss for aid in all circumstances.

He found her a new factor, carrying on the duties till the new young man (from his own solicitor's office) was installed. He waited with Miss Aline the portentous visit of Sir Bunny Bunny, Bart., of Crawhall. He came to demand the honour of her hand for his clodhopping son, George Bunny Bunny, who hitherto had only distinguished himself by shooting a keeper in the leg, by frightening village children gathering violets and daisies, and by going to the wars with a troop of horse raised in the neighbourhood, only to be sent back again for incompetence. He had, since then, been the chief support of the press-gang in the neighbourhood, and, if he had not been so much despised, might have been hated. But he had enough sense to restrain from active interference with the Free Traders, for, owing to a personal dislike for violence in any form which might endanger his skin, he kept clear of press-gang scrimmages, confining himself to assisting Superintendent McClure with such information as the Easterhall coast-line afforded.

The baronet himself was a keen-eyed, long-nosed old gentleman, with many times the spirit of his son. He had been accustomed all his life to getting his own way, except with his wife. Even at Castle Raincy he had known how to cow the gentle mother of Louis Raincy, though something dangerous in the boy's eye had led him to let Louis alone.

"The spark of mad Raincy blood is in the whelp," he confided to his friends; "the same his grandfather has. They can look positively murderous sometimes."

Sir Bunny was taken aback to find Julian waiting for him in Miss Aline's white and gold drawing-room at Ladykirk.

"Am I, then, to congratulate you?" he said to Julian Wemyss, with false good nature.

"You are," said Julian calmly, "upon the friendship and trust of the best woman in the world. Anything else I should consider impertinence and know how to resent as such!"

"I desire to see Miss Aline," said Sir Bunny, to cut short a conversation which might easily become unpleasant.

"Certainly," said Julian carelessly, as if he were saying the lightest of nothings; "but I think you will find that I could have answered you quite as well."

"How so?" said the baronet, glowering at him, his fingers twitching to take this courtly, easy-spoken man by the throat.

"Because you come to propose your son, Mr. George, for the honour of the hand of Miss Aline Minto. Miss Aline can say 'No' for herself. But I think you had better not trouble her and content yourself with the indication I give you."

"And what is that?"

"That Miss Aline prefers to remain as she is!"

The baronet, however, insisted on a personal answer. Miss Aline came in and stood shyly while Sir Bunny pointed out the advantages of his proposal—the estates joined, the parish under control, and the family name changed by poll deed to Minto-Bunny-Bunny.

"I am obliged for your thinking of me," said Miss Aline sweetly, "but for the present I have no intention of marrying."

"I warn you," said Sir Bunny Bunny, "that by continuing to act as you are doing, you are exposing yourself to misconstruction—"

Julian Wemyss, who had been looking out of the window, turned suddenly and caught his eye.

Old Sir Bunny was no coward, but he shrank from the look of Julian Wemyss as if it had been a knife at his breast.

"I mean," he said, "that Miss Aline, gracious and youthful as she is, ought to remember that youth does not last for ever!"

He thought he had turned the matter off rather neatly, and was surprised when Julian merely shrugged his shoulders and turned again to the window. Presently Sir Bunny Bunny made his bow and departed, cursing the interference of Julian Wemyss in what had long been the desire of his heart, the union of the Bunny Bunny properties with those of Balmacminto. He had thought about it so long that it had become to his mind an accomplished fact. Indeed, he had only been waiting for his loutish son George to finish his wild-oat sowing before communicating the news of her good fortune to Miss Aline.

He was still more astonished on the way home from Ladykirk. An officer, riding, checked at his approach, and, with a sketched salute, reined his steed long enough to ask, "Do you know where Mr. Julian Wemyss is to be found? He is to go home immediately. His Royal Highness the Duke is at Abbey Burnfoot!"

"What duke?" the baronet fairly gasped.

"The Duke of Lyonesse, of course, on his way from Ireland," said the officer, "he was junior attaché to Mr. Wemyss at Vienna!"

"Good God!" said the baronet, "I wonder if Wemyss will bring him to Bunny House."

And he offered to ride with the officer to where Julian might be found. The adjutant took one look at the plethoric proportions of the baronet's mount, and answered that he was in a hurry. A simple indication would be enough for him. Whereupon, with some reluctance, Sir Bunny pointed to the chimneys of Ladykirk quietly reeking through the trees, and with a hasty lift of his reins the officer rode on, leaving the baronet staring after him, wondering whether he ought to tell his wife, or if he should leave her to find out for herself.

His brain wheeled. For Julian Wemyss, whom none of them, except Miss Aline, had chosen to know, was receiving at his house, hitherto the eyesore and scandal of the neighbourhood, a Prince of the blood Royal. After all, there must have been something in that talk of great ladies heartbroken because of this Julian Wemyss, in whom the county saw nothing, and in whose ambassadorship they had refused to believe, even though his resignation of it so unexpectedly had been commented upon in the Edinburgh Magazine, which was taken in by Sir Bunny and passed round afterwards from house to house.

What could so great a man find to do there? In a distant and disdainful fashion Sir Bunny knew Abbey Burnfoot. It was not even a mansion—merely a new-fangled sort of cottage at the best—built in Italian fashion, they said, but after all, only two score yards of garden, with a narrow rim of links overgrown with sea pink and ground holly. It was stuck ridiculously in between the white sands and the pour of the Abbey Burn—no drives or pleasances, no cropped hedges and trim parterres—nothing, in short, which Royalty had a right to expect when visiting a real gentleman's country seat, such as he flattered himself could be found at Bunny House in the shire of Wigton.

It did not occur to Sir Bunny Bunny, with his poor little squireen's point of view, that His Royal Highness might possibly come to see, not long avenues and close cropped hedges, but his old kind chief of Constantinople and Vienna.

So he was forced to content himself with many shakings of his head, and muttering that the country was going to the dogs when princes consorted with beggars or little better, as he rode off home to Bunny House in desperate fear of what his wife Lady Bunny would say when he got there.

CHAPTER VII

THE LADS IN THE HEATHER

Patsy came into her uncle Julian's drawing-room in her most tempestuous manner. She had been for a gallop along the sands on Stair Garland's pony and had beaten Louis de Raincy's Honeypot by a length. She was in high feather, and as she tramped along the cool parqueted hall she kept calling out, "Uncle Ju—where are you, Uncle Ju?"

When she opened the door and dashed in she disturbed the conference of three men by the window, one of whom was in uniform, and the other two dressed in the latest fashion, of which Patsy had as yet only seen prints at the end of her uncle's Town and Country Magazine—a review which, curiously enough, always lacked some of its pages by the time Patsy was allowed to see it.

"Oh," said Patsy, no ways abashed, "you have come to see my uncle—will you be seated?"

Patsy noticed that the tallest of the young men made a slight sign to his companions, and that they sat down as if in answer to that signal instead of accepting her invitation at once.

"We have indeed come a long distance in order to call on Mr. Julian Wemyss," said the young man of the signal. "I knew him at Vienna, and as I was passing through from Ireland, I took this opportunity of paying my respects to him. But it is better still to find such a charming young lady installed in his house to do the honours!"

"Oh," said Patsy, "I do not live here, but with my father at the other end of the glen. I only come every day to cheer him up—Uncle Ju is so apt to get the 'pokes'!"

"The 'pokes'—what are they?" exclaimed the tall and ruddy young man, who continued to stare at her in a manner which would have discountenanced any other than Patsy.

"The 'pokes' are what you get if you are left too long alone with all these shelves, especially if you stop indoors to read them. Then I come and take Uncle Julian out, and he feels better before I have gone a mile with him!"

"So you are a remedy for the 'pokes,'" said the young man, drawing his chair nearer to that of Patsy, as if to show his interest. "I often have the disease, though with me it does not come from reading too many books. But I should gladly take the malady that I might taste of the antidote!"

And Patsy felt her face flush with the intensity of his regard. She cast down her eyes, and the young man took advantage of the fact to signal slightly to his friends. One after the other they rose and, with an excuse, left the room.

The tall young man came gradually closer to Patsy till she started to her feet, merely to break the nervous tension. An instinctive repulsion sent her to the window, and, then, though he followed her, she somehow felt safe. There were the familiar sands, and in a moment she could be outside where none could touch her. After all, she thought, as she looked at the white line of the breakers and heard the familiar clatter of the servants in the kitchen below, she was a fool to be so idiotically nervous, like a fine smelling-salts lady. What could happen to her? What if she did not like this very forward young man? He was a guest of her Uncle Julian's—he might even be his friend. Very likely he meant no harm, and she would treat him just like anybody else. Yes, that would be best.

"Ah," said the young man, leaning over her as she stood looking out, "if only I had been at that cottage on the hills with the officers the other day! I would have given a thousand guineas for their luck. But now that I am fortunate enough to have you to myself for a moment, let me say how much I admire you, Miss Patsy—that is your name, I think?"

Patsy did not answer. She had one hand on the sill and was wondering if the young man were mad or only drunk—also how long it would take for her to be safe among the heather.

"You are far too fine and beautiful," he continued, "too bewitching and original to remain here. You must come to London and take your place among our reigning beauties. Ah, if only you would trust to one who adores you, one who would do anything in the world for you—"

"If you mean yourself, will you help me to wind wool?" said Patsy. "I have a pair of heather-mixture stockings to make for uncle. I promised to make them for him last Christmas and I only began them yesterday."

"Certainly," said the young man, visibly discountenanced, "but can your uncle not wait a little longer? I wish to talk to you. It was solely for that purpose I came here, believe me. I had heard of you from Captain Laurence, and young Everard, one of the officers of the Britomart, in which I came from Ireland. I was over there governing the island for my father!"

"Ah, were you?" said Patsy, "well, here is the wool. Can you wind it? No! Then you had better hold it. That, at least, you can do.—Well, there you are, remember I shall find you out if you are boasting."

"But I have got much to say to you!" the young man objected.

"I can listen better on my feet. I must be doing something. There—sit down on that three-legged 'creepie,' and, whatever you do, do not tangle the wool."

Patsy was resolved that, whatever she might do in the future, she would now take the matter lightly, and not insult her uncle's guest in the drawing-room of Abbey Burnfoot.

When Julian Wemyss returned in haste from Miss Aline's, he found no less a person than H.R.H. the Duke of Lyonesse seated on a stool holding wool for Patsy, who wound a ball with rapid, nimble fingers while she scolded a delighted Great Personage for his mismanagement. Two gentlemen, of whom one was Captain Laurence, stood outside and waited gravely, as indeed became them. But the Duke of Lyonesse was in the highest spirits and really gave himself to his task, knitting his brows and striving to follow Patsy's instructions to the letter.

"It is a long time since I heard so much truth about myself," said the Duke. "I own I am both stupid and awkward, but then, by gad, I am willing to learn!"

"People who are stupid and awkward ought not to offer," said Patsy. "I am sure that Captain Laurence, whom you sent away, could do it a great deal better."

"I can't give up the honour even to my friend Laurence," said the Prince. "In for a penny, in for a pound. I must conquer this art or be for ever disgraced in this lady's eyes, and, therefore, in my own!"

"You should practise before boasting of what you can do," said Patsy. "Make Captain Laurence wind for you an hour each morning, and in a little while you will be able to knit your own stockings."

"By gad," said his Highness, "that is a good idea. Will you teach me? Often when I was at Constantinople and also at sea I wished I had something to help the time to pass besides stupid books!"

He glanced about him at the crowded shelves. "Though I know your uncle does not think them stupid," he added, with some sense of an apology due; "but then we cannot all be so clever as he!"

"I should think not, indeed," said Patsy sharply, "nor half so handsome!"

The two gentlemen at the door glanced at one another, but the Duke of Lyonesse did not wince. He went on carefully slanting his hands time about to let the wool slip round, bending his thumbs to act as a drag and obeying his task-mistress to the best of his ability.

"That has always been the opinion of your sex all the world over," he said gravely, "if Julian Wemyss entered for a race, what was left for the others but the Consolation Stakes? But you, at least, are a stake for which he cannot enter!"

A quick, light footstep passed through the hall and the door opened.

"Ah, Wemyss," cried the Duke, "don't interrupt, like a good fellow. I am on my promotion. Your niece has been dressing me down. I hope to do better after a while. Besides, we have just been saying how perfectly irresistible you are, and how the ladies love you. You ought to be grateful for that at any rate."

The last threads ran swiftly over the opened fingers, and Patsy deftly slid the end into the ball, said "Thank you," and, with a curtsey, went out by the way of the French window leading to the garden, leaving the men to themselves.

"Jove," said the Duke, looking after her through the window, "where and how did you find such a treasure? No wonder you gave up Paris for this. Like Henry of Navarre, I should give up both Paris and France for such a mass—a real exile's consolation, good faith. Wemyss, you used to make me read about Ovid starving for years in the Danube swamps, but this would be consolation for an exile if he had to roof in the pole to make himself a house."

"I am sorry," said Julian, somewhat formally, "that I was not in time to introduce you to my only sister's only daughter, my niece and heiress, Miss Patricia Wemyss Ferris of Cairn Ferris."

"I beg your pardon," said his Highness. "Captain Laurence made us laugh so much at a tale he was telling, that I fear the introductions were a little slipshod. I shall make my apologies to the young lady when I have the opportunity of bettering the acquaintance."

Julian Wemyss knew very well what was the story which Laurence had been retailing—that of the disappointed man-hunters at the bothy in the Wild of Blairmore. But he said nothing, and proceeded to make his young friend at home in his house of Abbey Burnfoot. He made no apologies. There was need of none. At Varna and in the little towns along the Illyrian coast his pupil and he had often had to share far humbler accommodation.

For though Julian Wemyss lived apart from the world, he kept a small yacht to keep him in comfortable touch with the outside markets. The passage to Glasgow was an easy one. Dumfries and the Cumberland ports were open to him, and so, with the foreign articles which were found in his outer cellars after a trip of the Good Intent (master and owner, Captain Penman), no house in the county could produce at short notice so excellent and various a bill of fare.

A place had been set at dinner for Patsy, but it remained empty. Patsy had simply disappeared. No one had seen her about the shore, nor had she been met with along the dusky alders and dimpling birches of the path by the burnside. Neither had it pleased her to reappear at Cairn Ferris, whither Julian had been careful to send an inquiry.

Such conduct, however, did not seriously disquiet anybody, for Patsy's ways were too erratic and the country too safe (so long, at least, as she kept to the Ferris properties) for any one to harbour serious fears about her.

And, indeed, there was no cause. Patsy had no idea of going off her father's lands. She had simply taken a scamper over the Rig of Blairmore, keeping to the deeper cover of the hollows till she came to the nook that sheltered the bothy. Here she glanced within, but all was empty, swept and garnished. There was no sign about the place of any recent occupation.

All was trim and well-kept as she had left it—dust being unknown on the Wild of Blairmore. But in the little hiding-place which ordinarily held the key, a small rock-cupboard beneath a couple of great boulders, fallen thwart-wise across one another like drunken men embracing, she found a strip of twisted paper. Patsy thought that it contained a message from Jean, but in a moment she recognized the aggressive penmanship of Stair Garland.

"If you want me, stand five minutes on Peden's Stone!"

That was all, but Patsy knew that Stair had all the time been watching over her in some wild, sudden-swooping, peregrine falcon-fashion of his own. He had left the warning if she should happen to visit the Bothy while it was being watched for the return of the young men whom the "press" had missed on the day of Patsy's wild race in the yellow sandals.

Now, save that it might pleasure the boy, Patsy had no special reason for wishing to see Stair Garland. But it would certainly be well for her to talk with his sister Jean. She wished to do this without going to the farm itself. Her absence from her uncle would soon be noticed, and as she had not appeared at her father's house of Cairn Ferris, it was to Glenanmays that any searchers would go first. She was therefore wishful to speak to Jean and ask her opinion of the visitors who had taken possession of her uncle's house at the Burnfoot.

So with circumspection she crossed the pebbly bed of the Mays Water and climbed up into a crater-like amphitheatre from the edge of which a flat block of stone jutted out. It was told in the "persecuting" lore of the parish that the great "Peden the Prophet" had often used it as a pulpit, his congregation being seated round the semi-circle and the Mays Water birling and singing handily below in case of children to be baptized.

Patsy stood on the stone, all trodden smooth by the restless feet of the hill lambs which in spring came from the most distant parts of the moor to gambol there. She could look both up and down the water, but for a while she saw nothing of Stair.

But the five minutes were not up, when, from a thick tuft of broom, she heard the call of the whin-chat, like a tiny hammer ringing on hard stone. The sound came from up the water and Patsy moved towards it, stepping deftly from stone to stone in the bed of the stream.

"Stair," she said softly, "where are you, Stair?" A full swathe of broom moved itself aside, and she could see Stair Garland lying in a rocky niche which he had prepared long before, in case of such a very probable emergency as the officers of the excise coming after him.

The barrel of his long gun looked over his shoulder.

"Go on, Patsy," he said, "walk on up the burn as if you had seen nothing and I shall be with you in a moment."

She had reached a little knoll, crowned with alder bushes, when she found him entering from the opposite side. Sitting down, she told him of the Duke's coming to Abbey Burnfoot, and of the two gentlemen who were with him, Captain Laurence and Lord Wargrove.

"Ah," said Stair, "so it is for that we have a full squadron of dragoons camped in our barns at Glenanmays, the stable emptied of our own horses to make room for those of the dragoons, and the whole house turned upside down. I thought it was too big a force to be sent after the three of us."

"Fergus and Agnew are still away, then?" queried Patsy, sure that they were.

Stair grinned.

"They are in the heather, like myself," he chuckled, "but neither of them has such a choice of hidie-holes as I have. I can hide better and lie closer, besides keeping a watch on the farm and on you, Miss Patsy, with the soldiers all about within the shot of a gun."

"Can you bring Jean to me, Stair?" said Patsy, "it will be hard, I know, with all those men on the watch at Glenanmays."

Stair flushed a little with the joy of a difficult commission. He whistled shrilly three times, and then sat quite still listening. Then he whistled thrice more and the echoes had hardly died away before the wise, towsy head of a rough collie with the big, brown eyes of the genuine Galloway sheep-dog peered out of the bracken and long grass of the burnside. He came silently and expectantly to his master, as if he enjoyed the game as much as any one.

"Here, Whitefoot," said Stair, and the dog came obediently to his side. He wore on his neck a plain leather collar, which his master undid. In one place the inside leather was doubled but held tight when worn by Whitefoot, owing to the roughness of the dog's mane of hair. Stair pushed back the understrap, and taking a piece of paper from his waistcoat wrote upon it the figure "2" very large and clear. Then he shook a forefinger before Whitefoot's moist nose, and said with emphasis the single word "Jean."

The dog lifted his forepaws a little clear of the ground, and, as it were, barked without noise, making an eager, half-strangled noise in his throat to show he understood.

"Jean!" Stair repeated.

"A-owch!" whispered the dog, his tail wagging violently and his eyes fairly blazing.

"Go!" said Stair, and the next moment the tall bracken had closed on Whitefoot. Not the tremor of a leaf, not the swaying of a rag-weed told Patsy which way he had gone. In these days the very dogs had been trained to run invisibly and to bark under their breaths. The Traffic and the "press," but especially the latter, had silenced much of the immemorial mirth of the farm-towns. The shadow of the war cloud rested on the ancient Free Province. The lads might 'list, but they would not be "pressed." "A lad gaen to the wars" or "a lassie fa'en wrang" were the utmost shame that could fall upon any Galloway household, and of the two the lassie was more readily forgiven than the lad with the colours.

"I shall wait till Jean comes," said Stair, a little shame-facedly, because he understood that the girls would naturally wish to talk of their own affairs. "I must see how the spurred gentry are behaving themselves up at the farm."

But to assure Patsy of his complete disinterestedness, he went to the edge of alder-clump and stood there leaning on his gun. He watched keenly the twisting links of the Mays Water, a silver chain flung carelessly in the sun, cut with gun-metal coloured patches where it sulked a while in shadowy pools. Whitefoot would do his duty. Of that there was no doubt whatever. He would find Jean. He would attract her attention. Jean would go out to the dairy, whither Whitefoot would follow. There the collar would be opened, the paper taken out, and she would soon be on her way for that one of Stair's trysting-places which bore the number "2" on the list he had given her.

Presently out of the tall grass of the lower meadow the head and shoulders of Jean Garland appeared. He could see her wading breast-deep along the rag-weed and the meadow-sweet. The faint wind-furrow which preceded her showed where Whitefoot, still invisible, guided the girl to the exact clump of undergrowth where Patsy and Stair were waiting.

After a little they could see, emerging likewise, the cocked ears, the shaggy head and eager brown eyes of Whitefoot as he turned at every other yard to make sure that Jean was following, and appreciating all his cleverness. At the edge of the clump of dull green alders he drew back to let her pass, as much as to say, "There now—you can do the rest—go on and see for yourself if I have not guided you aright."

Jean came upon her brother first. He was still leaning with one hand on his gun and the opposite elbow crooked about the hole of a tree.

"All right up there?" he demanded in a low tone, indicating the farm with a jerk of his head.

Jean nodded without speaking. She was sure it was not merely to ask this that he had sent Whitefoot to bring her to him.

"No insolence?"

"No," said Jean, "they are all as little troublesome as they can help. There is some general or great person over at the Abbey Burn House—"

"A Royal Prince," said Stair bitterly, "go on, Jean. I think it is about him that Patsy wishes to speak to you! Keep Whitefoot by you, and if you want me he will know where to find me."

Jean disappeared, and in another moment had found her friend. In the snuggest nook of the shelter afforded by the alder undergrowth the two sat down.

Then Patsy revealed to Jean her invincible fear and dislike of the royal visitor whom she had seen at her uncle's. She had seen something glitter for a moment in his eyes which had frightened her, and though she had played her part out to the end, she had fled the moment after to consult with Jean, a wise maid for her years and the only soul in the world fully in Patsy's confidence.

"Uncle Julian cannot help me this time," she said, "he is the man's friend. He would believe no ill of him. And, indeed, I have nothing really to put before him. Men want evidence, not impressions. If I were to say to my Uncle Julian that I was afraid of the man's eyes, he would only call me a little fool and tell me to look the other way!"

Patsy found Jean exceedingly comforting. Jean understood without having to have things explained, without asking questions. She shelved the doubt as to whether Patsy was under a misapprehension. Patsy was afraid. Patsy had seen, therefore, the thing was so. That is the reason why girls reveal themselves one to the other and why their friendships are often durable. They may quarrel like two little spitfires, and mostly do, but—they respect each other's intuitions.

So that as soon as Jean was in possession of Patsy's fear of an unknown hovering danger, she called out to Stair, "Don't go far away—we may need you!"

To understand Patsy's feeling it must be remembered that she had been accustomed from her earliest infancy to hear of the wild deeds of the King's sons—how this one had carried off an actress, another made prize of a young lady of fashion—the Regent, the Dukes of York and Cumberland had set the fashion. The younger princes had out-princed their elders, and there was not a gossip in the countryside but could retail their latest enormities with loud outcries of horror, yet with an undercurrent of the curious popular feeling that, after all, it rather became young princes so to misconduct themselves.

If the Duke of Lyonesse had been less talked about than his brothers, it was only because his long residence abroad had blunted the edge of calumny. For in his case the women were French or Austrians, and it seemed quite natural that such things should befall "foreigners."

All this made a background to Patsy's fear of the Prince, but there remained something else as well. Patsy had never been afraid before—and she was not quite sure whether she liked it or not.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BLACK PEARL OF CAIRN FERRIS

"Never was such a pearl—a black pearl—yes, but worth a thousand of your drowsy blondes. I am damnably obliged to that recruiting fellow—what is his wretched Scotch name—oh, McClure—for signalling such a treasure to a man who can appreciate her. You, Laurence, would have been long enough without opening your mouth. You had, I dare say, some idea of paying court in that quarter on your own account. Well, I am your superior officer and you must stand aside. But if you back me up now, I swear that you shall be gazetted Colonel in a month."

It was thus that the Duke of Lyonesse, in the guest-chamber which Julian Wemyss had prepared for him, announced his intentions as to the niece of his host and sometime chief. The young men of the blood royal in those days considered such things as marks of honour paid by them, and, indeed, the old Arabella Churchill tradition was still so fresh, that they had some excuse for so thinking.

It was, indeed, to see the marvel of the Bothy of Blairmore that the Prince had come so far out of his road. He was on his way back from Ireland where, as usual, he had been sent, somewhat optimistically, to solve the Irish question. As the Prince who could easily most be spared, he had been ordered to show himself in the regions which had been convulsed by the rising of '98. He had escaped without hurt and was now on his way Londonwards. So he could afford to halt a while to behold a wonder of grace and beauty. The dangers of his Irish campaign deserved at least some recompense.

Besides Everard of the Britomart had talked at some length to him. The girl of the yellow sandals whom the "press" had found in the Bothy of Blairmore, was still the talk of the officers' mess when that ship had been sent to Belfast Lough to ferry successful Royalty over to a more peaceful country.

Captain Laurence felt at least something of shame at the position in which he found himself, but in the presence of the Duke and his evil counsellor, Lord Wargrove, he was compelled to be silent. He could not even send a message to the girl's father, for the Prince's suite and the senior officers of his regiment were the guests of Adam Ferris at Cairn Ferris.

"Your Highness will remember," he ventured to suggest, "that these Galloway squires are apt to carry the vendetta rather far. They are not so easily bought off with a title as others farther south."

"Nonsense," said the Duke, "if the girl's father does not see reason—why, Julian Wemyss at least knows what is good for his niece. She had better be a peeress in her own right and married with the left hand to my father's son, than stay here to spend her life with the first clodhopper who will make her his housekeeper, instead of, what she was born to be, the toast of London society."

"You are sure about the title," queried my Lord Wargrove cynically, "or are you only going to promise like the rest of them?"

"Oh," said the Duke, "I am sure George owes me more than that. I am the only one of our family who has never pestered him. Besides, I have got him out of one or two difficult ditches in his life, and he will give me the title right enough if I get the girl."

"There will be some difficulty," said my Lord, thoughtfully rubbing his chin with his forefinger; "we shall have to depend on our own devices. The only great land-owner about here is old De Raincy up at the castle yonder. He hates the Ferrises like poison, but I do not see myself going up there and asking for the loan of his best horses in order to carry off his enemy's daughter! A nice clean murder he might not object to as a fitting finish to the Ferris line, but not what your Royal Highness proposes to himself."

The Duke waved his hand carelessly.

"All that is for you to arrange—what else are you for? You are my Master of the Horse, and as I have none at present, it is your business to provide some for me! Now good-night to you—I must see that girl again to-morrow. Gad, when I once get her safe to Lyonesse House, she shall wear the cross-gartered sandals, the blue skirt with the red sash, and if London does not bow down and worship, I am no true son of my father."

But the next day Patsy was still absent, greatly to the annoyance of the Duke. He had counted on a difficult but not unwilling captive. He judged from her easy familiarity in the matter of the wool-winding that he would have little difficulty in persuading her to make a dash for the liberty which would also be glory.

But all the morning the Duke waited in vain, and the strange thing about it was that neither at Abbey Burnfoot nor at Cairn Ferris did any one appear to be concerning themselves about daughter, niece or heiress.

The Duke and his party did not know that as Adam Ferris was making his evening round of the sheep on the hill, a plaided shepherd leaped a drystone dyke ten yards in front of him, and was followed by a shaggy, brown-eyed dog. The men exchanged a few words and then each went his own way. Adam Ferris was reassured as to his daughter, and as for Uncle Julian, busy with his guests, he understood that Patsy was safe with the Garlands at Glenanmays.

But instead Stair had convoyed her, with the utmost pains of wood and heather craft, to Ladykirk, where she had been received by Miss Aline with such quiet rejoicings as the staid little gentlewoman permitted herself.

Having housed his charge, Stair set himself to establish a guard about the old house. His two brothers and half a dozen other members of the band were easy to put hands upon when wanted, but Stair needed some one above suspicion, who could come and go freely. He remembered, with a grimace, that the matter would certainly interest Louis Raincy, and accordingly he posted to Raincy Castle to find him, as soon as he had got Agnew and Fergus into position.

Louis Raincy needed no spur. In order to help he was willing to break all rules and dare all angers. He did not even pause to ask himself why Stair Garland was taking so deep a concern in the matter. Patsy was his Patsy, and he flattered himself that the young man from Glenanmays was only recognizing his rights by coming to ask for his assistance.

Louis Raincy was Galloway bred. He knew the farmers' sons of the whole district. He had always met them, played with them, and, on fit occasion, fought with them as equals. Only he did not trouble his grandfather with the closeness of his acquaintance with his neighbours. The old gentleman would neither have understood nor approved. He himself had always stood aloof, and he desired no better than that his heir should follow in his feudal footsteps.

More than this, Louis had made a trip or two with Stair Garland's Free Traders—of course, in the strictest privacy and in a disguise which was immediately penetrated by the whole convoy, though they pretended to accept Stair's statement that the young fellow with the false beard was an Isle of Man shipper who had come to see how his goods were disposed of.

The band thought no worse of Stair for trying to throw dust in their eyes, but an Isle of Man shipper in possession of two spirited Castle Raincy horses was too much for them. They laughed as they rode and wondered how the heir of Raincy would explain matters to the Earl if the business culminated in a tussle.

But Louis had come out all safe, and though he openly flouted the Free Trade with the young men of his own rank, there was no part of his past, except only his talks with Patsy in the hollow of the old beech bole, which returned to him with such a flavour of fresh, glad youth as the "run" in which he had taken part.

So now that he was again to do something which would lead him out on the hills of heather in the misty shining of the moon or under the plush-spangled glitter of the midnight stars, he went off in high spirits to take his groom into his confidence and have the horses ready.

Obscurely, however, he felt that he was about to take part in a struggle for Patsy. It was to be a fight, not so much against danger from unscrupulous dandies like the Duke of Lyonesse and his acolyte, my Lord of Wargrove, as between Stair and himself. Louis de Raincy himself was "of as good blood as the King, only not so rich," as say the Spaniards. But this restless, stern-visaged Stair Garland, with his curious Viking fixity of gaze, what was his position towards Patsy? Was it all only friendship for the confidante of his sister? Louis Raincy's own hopes and purposes were of the vaguest. He did not even know whether he himself loved Patsy, but he was quite clear on the chapter of nobody else having her if he could help it.

CHAPTER IX

HIS LIFE IN HIS HAND

Louis Raincy rode right up to the door of Ladykirk and asked to see Miss Aline, with whom he had always been a great favourite. As a boy he had loved to play about her shrubberies. He remembered still the quaint smell of the damp pine-needles on the ground, the bitterness of laurel leaves which he broke across the centre and nibbled at, and above all, the long pleasant days of Miss Aline's jam-making, when he skirmished in and out and all about the kitchen and pantry, getting in everybody's way. Why, his very breath smelled sweet to himself after he had cleaned out brass pan after brass pan, with that worn spoon of horn warranted not to scratch, kept and supplied by Miss Aline for the purpose.

Now he was grown up. School and college had passed him by, and much to his own astonishment had left him in many ways as much a boy as ever. He had not been allowed to enter either of the fighting services, so he took what of adventure the country afforded—the rustic merry-making of the "Kirn" in the days of harvest home, the coastwise adventure of ships, and the midnight raid of the Free Traders with their clanking keg-irons and long defiles of pack horses crowning the fells and bending away towards the North star and safety.

Now Miss Aline greeted him cheerfully as he came in through the great doors of the courtyard which had been shut that morning for the first time since her father's funeral.

"Ah, Louis," she cried at sight of him, "it is easy to guess what brings you to my door so early in the morning. It is long since the days of the brass preserving-pan. Laddie, I'm feared that 'tis quite another berrying of sweets which brings you so fast and so far!"

"Miss Aline," said the lad, with a frankness which made the good chatelaine like him the better, "I rode over to see Patsy Ferris. I must hear what all this is about the Duke of Lyonesse."

"Nothing, so far as I can hear, Louis," said Miss Aline; "but our maid is afraid, and her father's house and her uncle's are both as full of soldiers and ribaldry as ever in the times of the Covenant. So where should she come if not to me? It was more wisely done than I could have expected from that 'fechtin' fule' of a Stair Garland."

Louis Raincy saw Patsy. She was sitting in Miss Aline's own room among the simple daintiness of many white linen "spreads" with raised broidery, the work of Miss Aline's own hands. Here she told him her determination to keep out of the way till the Prince and his train had left the country. The reasons for her instinctive dislike of her uncle's guest were not clear to any except herself, but on these Louis did not insist. It was enough that Patsy was so minded. In any case he wished her to know that he would follow the movements of the enemy with care, and warn her of their intentions. Captain Laurence, especially, was a free talker, and might let slip useful information. He, Louis, would ride over to headquarters that very afternoon, and, if Laurence was still absent, he would get an orderly to find him.

Thus was Patsy equipped with two cavaliers of courage and address, one of whom had his entries everywhere, while the other possessed the supreme skill of sea, shore, morass, hill, and heather, which comes only after generations of practice. But against them they had a man infinitely subtle and wholly without scruple. Eben McClure was of that breed of Galloway Scot, which, having been kicked and humiliated in youth for lack of strength and courage, pays back his own people by treachery with interest thereto.

The like of Eben McClure had tracked with Lag when he made his tours among his neighbours, with confiscation and fine for a main object, and the murder of this or that man of prayer, covenant-keeper or Bible-carrier, as only a wayside accident. Now Galloway is half Celtic, and the other half, at least till the Ayrshire invasion, was mostly Norse. So McClure was hated with all the Celtic vehemence which does not stop short of blood. He was the salaried betrayer of his own, and in time, unless he could make enough money and remove himself to some far hiding-place, would assuredly die the death which such men die.

Of this, of course, he was perfectly aware, and had arranged his life accordingly.

In the meantime he watched and pondered. He disguised himself and made night journeys that he might learn what would suit his purpose. He could be in turn an Irish drover, a Loch Fyne fisherman, a moor shepherd, a flourishing burgess of Lanark or Ruglen, even an enterprising spirit dealer from Edinburgh or Dundee, with facilities for storage of casks when the Solway undutied cargoes should reach these cities.

And the marvel was that in none of his personations had he yet been caught. In proof of which he was still alive, but McClure confessed to himself that it was only a matter of time. He must make a grand stroke for fortune—quick fortune, and then bolt for it. For his heart was sick with thinking on the gunshot from behind the hedge or the knife between his shoulders. He never now went to his own parish of Stonykirk where his father had been a well-doing packman—which is to say, a travelling merchant of silks and laces. McClure knew that he was in danger anywhere west of the Cree, but the danger increased as he went westwards, and in his own parish of Stonykirk there were at least a score of young blades who would have taken his life with as little thought as they would have blooded a pig—aye, and had sworn so to do, handfasted upon it, kissing alternately Bible and cold steel.

It was no difficult matter for McClure to possess himself of the unavowed reason of my Lord Wargrove's ardent search for a carriage and horses. Clearly it was for a secret purpose—one that could not be declared. Because in any other case Lord Wargrove had only to take the pair which belonged to his host, or more easily still, Adam Ferris's in the north end of the Glen. If these were not regal enough, Earl Raincy had in his stables the finest horses in the county, and would certainly, though of old Jacobite stock, not refuse them to the King's son, albeit only a Guelph. Then there was old Sir Bunny Bunny. His wife would gladly have harnessed the horses herself and put her husband on the box, if only she had suspected a desire which she could have treated as a royal command.

As for the purpose, Eben McClure was in no greater difficulty. What but a pretty woman to run away with, did any of the king's sons care for? There was but one such girl in the countryside. She had made the Duke hold wool for her—many hanks, it was said in the regiment—and he had fallen in love with her on the spot.

But that girl, whether taking alarm or to increase her value, had gone into hiding, and apparently no one knew where. It was certain that her kin at one time or another had dipped their fingers pretty deeply in the traffic. There were caves and hiding-places, which it would be death to search except with a company of sappers. And more than that, he would have to stay behind alone and face the back-stroke. He could not always ride out with the helmets of the dragoons making a hedge about him.

Now McClure was a clever man, and he had been with the soldiers that day when Whitefoot, questing for Jean, had entered the kitchen of the farm of Glenanmays. He had wondered at the persistency with which the dog had followed the girl. At first he had waited to see her give him something to eat from the debris of the meal which was being prepared for the soldiers.

But after Whitefoot had twice sniffed at the alms tossed him without touching the gift, still continuing to follow Jean, now tugging at her apron-string and now licking her hand, McClure, a man of the country, began to suspect that the dog was a messenger from one of the lost Garland boys whom they had missed so narrowly the other day in the heather of the Wild of Blairmore.

So upon Jean's departure he stepped quietly to the door and noted that she took the way down the valley towards the shore. He had not thought much about it at the time, for at the moment all chasings of smugglers and expeditions in aid of the manning of the fleet were absolutely at a standstill. The Duke's arrival on the Britomart by way of Stranryan had mobilized all the forces of order, as escorts of safety or guards of honour. So there would be no more raids till His Royal Highness was safe across the Water of Nith.

There remained to McClure the alternative of following Jean on his own responsibility, but the Stonykirker had far too great a respect for his skin to search a valley bristling like a thousand hedgehogs with all manner of thorn and gorse bushes, waved over with broom and darkened with undergrowth, any single clump of which might conceal half-a-dozen rifles, each with the eye of a sharpshooter behind it—a mere spark in the sheltering dusk, but quite enough to frighten most men in his position.

So, though strongly suspected, Jean sped on her way unopposed. McClure put the incident away in the pigeon-holes of his memory. It might be useful some day. He thought deeply upon the affair which now delayed Royalty and, incidentally, was stopping his business. If he could put the son of the King under a great obligation—he might at one stroke make his fortune and save his life. He had had enough of Galloway, and a permanent change of air was what he longed for—to a far land, under other skies, and among a people of a strange tongue, who had never heard of press-gangs and Solway smugglers.

CHAPTER X

THE WICKED LAYETH A SNARE

In the enforced leisure provided for him by the stoppage of compulsory recruitments, Eben McClure added to his knowledge. He left the men and women in the drama which was unrolling itself about Glenanmays to take care of themselves. He might not have had any the least interest in them. He gave his whole thought to Whitefoot, Stair's lean, shaggy collie.

By observation he obtained a good working knowledge of the whereabouts of Whitefoot's master—not sufficient, certainly, to act upon if it had been a case of capture. But all the same, near enough to enable him to keep well out of Stair Garland's way, which at the moment was what he most desired.

He rather despised the heather-craft of the other brothers, Fergus and Agnew Garland, and he gave never a thought to Godfrey McCulloch or the Free Trade band, which, he knew, was busy running in small cargoes as quickly as possible during the blessed time of relief from military and naval supervision.

But Stair Garland was another matter. Instinctively the spy knew his danger. This was not a man to hesitate about pulling a trigger, and his life, in the hollow of Stair Garland's hand, would weigh no heavier than a puff of dandelion smoke which a gust of wind carries along with it. So from his first acquaintance with him the spy had given Stair a wide berth.

As the result of many observations and much reflection, McClure decided that the lurking-place of this dangerous second son of the house of Glenanmays was on the hill called Knock Minto, a rocky, irregular mass, shaped like the knuckles of a clenched fist.

The summit overlooked the wide Bay of Luce, and the spy had remarked thin columns of smoke rising up into the twilight, and lights which glittered a moment and then were shut off in the short, pearl-grey nights of later June, when the heavens are filled with quite useless stars, and the darkness never altogether falls upon the earth.

Cargoes were being run on the east side—of that he was assured. But after all that was no business of his. Eben found it more in his way to watch Whitefoot. He had attempted, in the farm kitchen of Glenanmays, to make friends with the collie, but a swift upward curl of the lip and baring of the teeth, accompanied by a deep, snorting growl, warned him that Whitefoot would have none of him.

Nevertheless, the dog went and came freely, and as the spy made no further advances, Whitefoot soon ceased to regard him at all. And ever more curiously Eben McClure kept his eyes on the outgoings and incomings of Whitefoot.

And so it was that one still afternoon he found himself hidden under the dense greenish-black umbrella of a yew tree, lying prone on the ivied wall of the orchard of Ladykirk and listening to the talk of Patsy and Miss Aline, who were sitting beneath in a creeper-covered "tonelle," work-baskets by their sides, and as peaceful as if Ladykirk had been Eden on the eve of the coming of the serpent.

"Well," said Miss Aline, a little pleasantly tremulous with a sense of living among wild adventure, "have you had any news to-day? I saw your four-footed friend waiting for you at the corner of the shrubbery!"

"My Lord Wargrove has been to call upon Earl Raincy at the Castle," said Patsy with unusual demureness. "Louis could not tell what he wanted, but at any rate Earl Raincy promptly sent him and his insolence to—a place you have heard of in church. He said it so loud and plain that the whole house heard him, and he added remarks about royal dukes which would have brought him to the scaffold along with his grandfather, if only he had lived a century earlier."

"Perhaps the man only wanted to find out if you were there. Well, now—" Miss Aline pondered, "the thing is not so foolish as it looks. For little Lady Raincy, Louis's mother, might have secreted you somewhere and never told the earl. The Castle is big enough, I'm sure. But, my dear, you are better here. I am glad that you gave me the preference."

At this moment there was a stir up at the house of Ladykirk, whereupon the spy modestly retired. He did not mind listening to the talk of women, spread-eagled on the wall and hidden by the yew shade, but then, again, he might chance upon men who were looking for him and find himself very suddenly with a gunshot through him, or packed along with the cockroaches in the grimy hold of the Good Intent. Captain Penman was a singularly unsociable shipmate at the best of times for a man of Eben's profession, and might even go the length of throwing him overboard some dark night, merely, as it were, in order to lighten ship.

So the spy betook himself to a little fir-wood which commanded the entrance of Ladykirk, the avenue, the flowery borders of the parterres, the laurel copses, and the clumps of rhododendron through which the white statues peered.

McClure was not long in finding out that Whitefoot had one favourite mode of entering Ladykirk policies, a way contrived by himself. At the corner of the vegetable garden the wall ran to the edge of a ha-ha and there stopped short. A beech hedge met the masonry at right angles, and just at the point of juncture the hedge thinned off a little. Whitefoot had observed this, and was in the habit of racing like an arrow towards it, and taking a leap across the ha-ha. Then, with his nose close to the ground, he passed through the hole in the beech-hedge with undiminished speed, skirted a flourishing rhubarb plantation, and so emerged into the shaded path which led directly to the back door of the house.

As Eben McClure lay and watched, a plan flashed into his mind. By it he saw that he would put the son of the King, and with him my Lord of Wargrove, under everlasting obligations—such obligations as could not be denied or escaped. Scottish law did not treat the abduction of heiresses against their will in a gentle spirit, and before the northern courts the son of the King would be in no better case than the sons of Rob Roy, with whose exploits in this direction a taste for the reading of chap-books had made him familiar.

McClure had not the least doubt that, against his own judgment, Lord Wargrove had been compelled to call at Castle Raincy to ask for the loan of a carriage and horses, only to receive a rebuff from the haughty old Jacobite who held rule there.

Clearly, then, the princely party at Abbey Burnfoot must want assistance very badly, and would be willing to pay very highly for it. He, Eben McClure, was the man who would supply all that was necessary. He felt already that modest pride which comes to an intelligent, fore-thoughted man among a people of no initiative. He would take the whole matter into his own care. Single-handed he would carry it through, but at a price, a price to be arranged beforehand.

Now Eben McClure of Stonykirk, though held a traitor by the countryside, came of no mean parentage. The McClures are a strong clan, and the running of many cargoes has made them well-to-do. The day of their desperate deeds is over. They prefer the cattle-market and the tussle of wit with wit, matching knowledge with cunning in the arena of the "private bargain."

All these and an infinity of other characteristics were united in the burly person of Kennedy McClure of Supsorrow. A man of sixty, stout and hardy, he still added field to field. He laid out every shilling of his money wisely. He spent little, gave less, and swallowed up every neighbouring piece of property which came into the market. If a man were in difficulties, Kennedy McClure waited for the time when he would be ready to accept an offer for such and such a meadow or stretch of corn-land which he had long coveted. He would not cheat. He would pay the proper price in ringing guineas, but he must have the first chance. And then, overjoyed by the mere sight of the added acres, he would pace the newly acquired territory with a step to which a full figure lent importance, a certain pride of bearing which went well with the length of his purse, and the authority which could be felt in his least word.

Kennedy kept up a certain parade of humility, but his looks and walk belied him. A Royal Commission once approached him with a summons to give evidence as to a plague of voles which was desolating the fertile fields of the south-west, and his opinion was valuable because he had recently acquired by purchase the great, barren hill called Ben Marrick.

"What is your business?" said the chairman, a profound English agriculturist, with as profound an ignorance of the fine shades of Galloway speech.

"I work on the land," said Kennedy McClure with smileless deference.

"What, a farm labourer?" said the great man; "this is first-hand evidence indeed. Well, I suppose that you have studied the devastation caused by these animals on the—the—what is the name—ah, yes, Ben Marrick?"

"My lord," said the many-acred "farm labourer," "there is never a vole on the Ben o' Marrick. The vole is far ower good a judge of land to waste his time on the Marrick."

It needed the intervention of the local clerk of the commission to convince the chairman that he was talking to a man far richer than himself, besides being experienced and sage to the confines of rural wisdom.

It was to this kinsman that Eben McClure was thinking of making an appeal. He knew that along with the property, Kennedy had taken over the carriage and capitally matched horses of the late laird of Glen Marrick. Perhaps he would lend them to a kinsman in order to oblige a Royal Duke. He need not be too precise as to what the Royal Duke wanted them for if the pay were good and sure.

Accordingly Eben the Spy went to Supsorrow with an unquiet heart. He was not at all assured how he would be received. He guessed, however, that a promise made to the laird his cousin, that his herds and workmen, his plough-hands and cattlemen, should be respected by the superintendent of the "press," might do much to calm the first indignation which his proposal would infallibly arouse.

Then Kennedy of Supsorrow hated the Free Traders, because they drew away young men from his service and gave them false notions as to the amount of yearly wage with which they ought to be content.

When a man can make as much by a couple of successful "runs" as by a year's hard work at Supsorrow, he naturally began to reflect. And when the Laird approached him to know if he were "staying on" as term-time approached, the bargain became more difficult to strike. In many cases it was finally understood between contracting parties that the wages should continue the same, but that the occasional absence of a pair of horses from the stables was a matter to which the master should shut his eyes so long as he was satisfied in other ways.

Now Laird Supsorrow did not like this, but was compelled to like it or leave it. He had so added to his fields, multiplied his acres, extended the territories on which fed his flocks and herds, that service he must have, and that of the best. He must be able to trust his men—for, though he rode from dawn to dark, he could not overlook a tenth of his belongings.

Still, though compelled to submit, Kennedy McClure bore a secret grudge to the Traffic, all the more bitter that he did not venture to show it in any way.

Eben found him getting ready to ride forth to look at a new farm for the purchase of which he was negotiating.

The spy, in spite of his recent assumption of military port, made but a poor figure beside his wealthy kinsman. The Laird wore his light blue riding-coat with silver buttons, his long-flapped waistcoat, from which at every other minute he took the gold snuff-box that was his pride, white knee breeches, and rig-and-fur stockings of a tender grey-blue, finished by stout black shoes with silver buckles of the solidest. He clung to his old weather-beaten cocked hat, which, in the course of argument, he would often take from his head and tap upon the palm of his hand to emphasize his points.

"Kinsman," said Eben McClure, bowing humbly, without venturing to shake hands, "I have need of a word with you. I shall not in any way detain you, but it is a matter of His Majesty's Service, which I judge it will be for your good to know."

The Laird of Supsorrow regarded his cousin with no very friendly eye, and, pulling his gold snuff-box from his pocket, began to tap it in an irritated, impatient manner.

"Ye are not thinking of coming here to borrow money as ye did the time before?" he growled, "for if so, I tell you plainly that there is not the half of a copper doit for you here. Besides, I hear that you are doing very comfortably in the King's service, making yourself rich as well as universally beloved, and a credit to your name!"

Eben McClure took the flout as he would have taken a kick from that honoured double-soled shoe.

"Cousin Kennedy," he said, "I have no purpose but to do you service. As you are good enough to remark, I have nothing to complain of in the service of His Majesty, and it shall be my first duty and pleasure to repay to you the little advance you were good enough to make me—with interest."

Kennedy McClure looked his visitor over coolly.

"You have been robbing the stage?" he demanded.

The spy laughed, but it was a laugh from the teeth out-wards. As the French say, he laughed "yellow." Nevertheless, he drew a pocket-book from his breast, and suggested that if his kind cousin could spare the time, perhaps it would be as well for them to speak together in a more retired place.

"Come ben," said the Laird of Supsorrow, "there is no close time for the receiving of siller."

They passed through a vast kitchen where everything was in the pink of order. The tables were ranged in the middle. An array of pots brooded over the fire, so close that they jostled each other. To the right the eyes of the spy fell with respect upon the great oaken chair of the master. For in this also the Laird had kept up the patriarchal style. He still willingly, and with a certain gusto, took his seat in his own kitchen, where he smoked and talked at ease with the men and maids as they came or went. A little cupboard with a double door was fixed above the chair within reach of his hand. It contained his pipes and his library—a Bible, the poems of Burns, Boston's Fourfold State, The Cloud of Witnesses, a Grey's Tables, a book on mensuration, Fowler's Horse Doctor, and many almanacs tied in packets.

The master of all these strode through the kitchen, opened a door, passed down a long passage, and ushered his relative into a room full of stacked papers, driving whips, favourite bits and bridles. The grate was still full of burned papers. A tall five-branched silver candlestick stood in the middle of the table, and along the wall were ranged a few chairs of the rudest fashioning, but all polished with use.

He motioned to Eben of Stonykirk to take a seat in one of these and proceed with what he had to say.

"I can only give you a quarter of an hour," said the Laird. "I have an appointment with that wee wastrel of a man-of-law, McKinstrie, down at the Foulds. He is coming express-like from Cairnryan to meet me—and it's me that will have to pay for his time!"

Whereupon the spy opened out his case and the great man of horses and beeves listened intently. The Duke of Lyonesse wanted a carriage to drive into England, where his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, had an estate. The neighbouring great lords were all Jacobites at heart. Yes, even the Earl Raincy had point-blank refused his carriage—a service such as any gentleman might render to another, whatever might be his political opinions.

"And so you come to me to hire," said Kennedy, scornfully. "I do not keep post-chaises, man."

"No, cousin, no," said the spy earnestly, "your name need not appear at all. Only leave the door of your stable unlocked, or at least so barred that we can easily get through without doing damage, and we will answer for the rest. And I will pay you fifty pounds down on the spot."

"That is not anything near the value of the horses," said Laird Supsorrow, keeping his eyes fixed upon his cousin so that he might divine where the trap lay.

"No," said Eben, "it is not. But if one of your men rides after—that is, a few hours in the rear, the horses and carriage will be delivered to him at the boundary of the kingdom of Scotland just at the farther side of the Gretna bridge—"

"H-m-m," said Kennedy McClure, "if you deposit the money here, and obtain a written security from his Highness to indemnify me for any damage to the horses or vehicle, you are at liberty to do as you like with Ben Marrick's equipage. On my side I shall arrange with Saunders Grieve, my yardsman, that you shall not be disquieted in taking them."

"Would not a word from my Lord Wargrove suit you?"

"No," thundered the Laird, "let me have his Highness's fist and seal or I shall not let a hoof leave the yard! What is Lord Wargrove to me?"

"Very well, then, cousin. I will send you the document by a sure hand, and I leave the fifty pounds in your hands now, merely taking your receipt for the Duke's satisfaction."

The Spy well knew that there was not the least possibility of getting his Royal Highness to sign such a document, but as he himself was leaving the country for good at any rate, he did not mind adding a little forgery to his other necessary arrangements. Paper and seal were easily accessible in the parlour, where the Duke often kept Eben waiting for hours. He was an expert in other people's penmanship, and the princely scrawl would not present the least difficulty to him. Still, in case of accident, it would be as well to keep back the document till the last possible moment. For his cousin was not a man to be easily hoodwinked, and he might take it into his head to ride over, document in hand, to require the prince acknowledge his own signature.

As he rode away the spy said to himself, "Yes, forgery it is, of course. But sometimes it is worth while tossing a penny to see which it shall be—fortune, or the hangman's rope."

CHAPTER XI

THE TRAMPLING OF HORSE IN THE NIGHT

Whitefoot the brown-eyed, intent on his business, was taking his usual route to Ladykirk. It was a dark night, but he could see more and farther than any man. He knew that Patsy would be waiting for him in the kitchen of Miss Aline's house, that she would have something extremely toothsome for him to eat while she was preparing the collar which in a few minutes would be slipped about his neck. Then he would be free to return to his master in the secret den which he had chosen to sleep in that night.

Whitefoot moved like a lank and ghostly wolf through the tall grass and crops, skirting the barer places and keeping close in to the dusky verges of the hedges. All went well with him till he took the ha-ha ditch at his usual racing pace, and was instantly wrapped up by a net into a kicking ball exactly like a rabbit at the mouth of a hole. A bag was somehow slipped over his head, and inside it he could neither bite nor bark. His nose was tightly held and his collar removed.

It seemed ages to Whitefoot before he found himself free again. Then he wasted no time, but made one bolt for the kitchen door of Ladykirk. It was open, and he entered all dazed and shaking. He had felt the hands of men about him, yet they had done him no harm. He shook himself joint by joint to make sure. All was right. Perhaps they were only out hunting and he had deranged them. Whitefoot knew quite well what it was to chase rabbits and hares into just such nets. At any rate he could not explain, but took the piece of beef which Patsy had waiting for him with satisfaction.

On his return Whitefoot tried the garden-hedge farther down, but here again he found himself in a bag. Evidently they were netting the whole of the garden. He lay still, certain now that they meant him no harm, and, indeed, in a far shorter time than before he was loose and scouring away into the shadows of the woods. This time the man into whose nets he had blundered, merely stood behind a tree, and at sight of his shadowy figure Whitefoot got himself out of the neighbourhood. Men with nets, guns that went off with a bang, and dead things that kicked and bled were connected in Whitefoot's mind with such night expeditions. So no wonder he betook himself away as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible.

But the message that Patsy received was this:

"Important see you to-morrow night, smaller avenue gate, ten o'clock.

"Jean."

To this Patsy had replied, moistening the stub of her "killevine" in her mouth as she had been wont to do at school:

"Dear Jean,—of course I shall be there!"

Never fell gloaming so slowly for Spy Eben of Stonykirk as that of Friday the 26th of June. The red in the west mounted ever higher, revealing and painting infinitely the remote strata of cloud-flecks which thinned out into the azure. At half-past nine it seemed that ten o'clock would find the old military road upon which debouched the little avenue of Ladykirk, still as bright as upon a mellow afternoon.

But arriving suddenly and surpassing all his hopes, a wind from the sea began to blow, bringing up the outside fog from the ocean. First it came in puffs and slow dragging wreaths, but afterwards with the march of steady army corps which sponged out the house, the trees and the road.

By ten all was slaty grey dusk, into which a man could stretch his hand well out of his own sight. The heart of the Spy exulted. It was a thing so unexpected, and (for he remembered his upbringing) so providential, that he almost returned thanks, as after an unexpected meal.

He did so quite when a little after the hour rapid feet pattered down the lesser avenue, a hand was thrust from a shawl, and Patsy's voice called "Jean—where are you, Jean?"

In an instant the girl was swept from her feet, enveloped in a great travelling coat, and carried to a carriage that was in waiting close against the hedge under the black shadow of the beech leaves. Patsy had no time to cry out. She was too astonished. Besides, the large hand of Eben the Spy was pressed against her mouth. She felt herself thrust without ceremony into a carriage on the front seat of which sat two men, dark shadows seen for a moment as the door opened, against the pour of the sea-mist past the windows.

"I think," said a voice, "you had better let me manage her—for the present, that is. She has just bitten me. Ah—quick with that Indian shawl. Thank you, my Lord. We must keep her from crying out. Now, my pretty, there you are with your ankles tied and your hands kept from mischief, so we shall soon reconcile ourselves!"

Patsy strove vehemently, but the arm about her was strong. Her feet and hands were fastened with soft swathes of silk, while about her mouth and chin the Indian shawl proved an efficient gag.

She could hear the clatter of the horses' feet, and was conscious of the rapid movement of the carriage. Once or twice the man on the front seat leaned over and spoke soothingly to her, or so at least it seemed. But he appeared to be sorely at a loss for words.

"You will be glad of all this to-morrow," she recognized the thick voice of the man whom she had made hold her wool; "you shall be my little black pearl!"

"Better let her come round of herself, your Highness," said the man who held her. "They take it a bit hard at first, but after the anger and the tears, then it will be time to argue with her."

The man addressed as "your Highness" dropped back into his seat, and for a long time nothing was heard but the changeful clatter of the shod feet of horses. Patsy sat muffled and helpless, conscious that she had been trapped, but determined that since somebody had dared, somebody also should die before a hand was laid upon her. She felt strangely at home. Her Pictish blood spoke—perhaps still older bloods, too, within her. It was somehow perfectly natural that a man should try to carry her off. She was obscurely but surely aware that men of her race had done things like that. But then, also, they did them at their peril. And Patsy the Pict felt herself strong enough for these things. It was the age of Miss Jane Austen's dainty heroines. Miss Fanny Burney was still at court, writing in her Diary that the King was very happy and innocent, imagining himself each day in intimate converse with the angels.

But Patsy had no idea of fainting. Tears were far indeed from her eyes. She was only calling herself a fool, and wishing that she had thought to bring her little dagger with her—the double-edged one that Julian Wemyss had given her on his return from the Canary Islands, black leather sheath scrolled in gold to be worn in the stocking. Still since she had not that, why, she would take the first weapon that came to her hand. And whenever they ran dear of the fog, which happened at the top of every considerable hill, her little white teeth gleamed in the darkness with something like anticipation.

"Up, Louis, out with you—they are away! The Prince has carried off Patsy. Here is your pony. Get in the saddle. I must manage without!"

Unceremoniously Stair Garland awaked Louis from his drowse in the cave's mouth. He had ridden down from Castle Raincy to see if he could help. The moment had come and Stair had not disappointed him.

"They are already on the road—in a carriage—Kennedy McClure's, I think," said Stair; "stand still there, Derry Down, or by the Holy—!" And he leaped into his saddle which was no more than the corn-sack doubled and fastened close with broad bands of tape, used to go under the heavy pack saddles when a run was forward.

"Where have they gone? Are they far ahead of us?" questioned Louis.

"They are on the military road—in a carriage and pair, going west. They cannot get off it. But if you can trust your pony, we can cut corners and ride as we like."

"Of course," said Louis; "show me the way—you know it better than I!"

So, each on his deft, sure-footed Galloway pony, like their ancestors of the English forays of which Froissart tells, the two lads plunged into the night.

They sped along the barren side of the Moors, taking any path or none, whisking through the tall broom and leaping the whins. The ponies took naturally to the sport. Sometimes the going was heavier, but not for so little did the animals slacken. They were to the manner born, and minded no more the deep black ruts of the peat, which in the more easterly country are called "hags," than the open military road along which the carriage was bowling.

The heather was mostly short and easy—"bull's fell" heather as it was named. Tall cotton grass flaunted up suddenly through the slaty haze of the night of pursuit. The plant called "Honesty" with its flat, white seed vessels, gaunt and startling, swished past them, the dry pods crackling among their horses' legs.

Mostly they rode easily, swaying to the movements of their beasts, letting the little horses do the work as the Lord of the moors gave them wisdom to do—using no whip or spur—these were not needed—and very little guidance of rein. The little Galloways, Louis's black "Honeypot" and Stair's "Derry Down," picked their way swiftly and cleanly. They might have been steering by the stars. But it was only their instinct sense of smell which told them when they were approaching a bog too soft to be negotiated. Then they would turn their faces to the hill, questing for the good odour of the "gall" or bog-myrtle, which is the characteristic smell of good going in the Galloway wilderness. Stretches of that delightful plant surround all bogs, morasses and other dangerously wet spots, but the little beasts knew that so far as they were concerned they were safe where the gall bushes grew. And, indeed, it was well to keep wide. On the moorland face the silver flowes glittered unwholesomely, deadly as quicksands in the Bay of Luce. It was marvellous to see how gingerly the little beasts footed it in such places. Never did they let a foot sink to the fetlock. With a quick flinging swerve, they cast themselves to the side of safety and the foot would come loose with the "cloop" of an opening bottle.

Sometimes the sand was firm, and then they would scour fearlessly along it with many tossings of their heads and playful attempts at biting one another. But so soon as they came upon the green froth of the "quaking bogs" or the snake-bell shine of the shivering sands, it was each for himself again—or rather for himself and herself, for Stair's mount was a small barren mare, which in such things is even better than a horse, better and more cunning, besides being more companionable for her journey-mate.

They rode through banks of midges so huge that they almost reached the dignity of mosquitoes. For where in the world except on the lonely road past Clatteringshaws and the Loch of the Lilies, can you meet with midges which for number and ferocity can compare with those of the Moors of Wigtonshire? Sometimes the two lads, riding easy, would come to water. This was a negotiation which was better left to Honeypot and Derry Down. If the water was black and peaty with a heavy smell of rotting vegetation, the ponies knew it, but if they scented the fresh rush of a hill burn, or the soft coolness of an arm of sandy-bottomed loch, then Louis and Stair would suddenly feel the cool sluicing of water about their legs, causing them to turn their pistol belts over their shoulders, where Stair already carried his long-barrelled gun with the stock upwards.

"We shall close upon them at the White Loch," said Stair, during one of these pauses. "They have a long detour to make. I would rather have waited till they had got to the crossing of the Tarf, but that is too far for our beasts on these short nights of June."

(He meant the Wigtonshire Tarf, which comes from far Laggangairn and the Bloody Moss, not the shorter, fiercer tributary of the Dee.)

"The White Loch be it," said Louis, for indeed it was all the same to him. He was out to fight for Patsy, and fight he would. He did not care what his grandfather might say, nor what penalties he might incur. What Stair Garland was ready to do for Patsy, surely he had the better right to be a partner in.

They drove through a herd of kyloes recently sent down from Highland hills to try their luck on Galloway heather. The horns clicked sharply together. There was a whisking scamper of hoofs as the beasts fled every way, only to bunch anew a little farther out of the path of these wild riders.

Now Stair and Louis found themselves on a kind of track, narrow and stony underfoot. The blackfaced sheep of the hills had made it so, with their little pattering trotters which dug out a stone at every step. Above was a waste of boulder, grey teeth grinning through the black heather. They began to see more clearly, for they were now far above the mist, into which they would not again need to descend till they should reach the White Loch and cut down to head off their prey, comfortably rolling Gretnawards—a duke royal, a peer of the realm, and a spy with a promise of fortune in his breastpocket, all looking after Patsy Ferris, the daughter of the Picts, and drawn by Kennedy McClure's excellent pair of horses along the best road in all the south country.

Sometimes a wilder track led Stair and Louis unbreathed across an open moor, the path being too narrow to ride abreast, when it was the mare's privilege to lead. She snuffed the air, and even while keeping to her pace, would reach forward her neck to smell the better. Derry Down knew that she was on one of the old "drove roads" by which horses had been driven to the eastern fairs and trysts for hundreds of years, before ever Lord Hillsborough came into the land, or the pick of a governmental sapper had been set in the heather.

Generally the pursuers kept wide of all human habitation. They could see the stars now, and so in a manner choose their direction. The details they left to the horses, and especially to Stair's wise "Derry Down." But the scent of a single "keeping" peat in a herd's house would send them all up the hill again. It had been carefully bent over the red ashes to hold them alight till the morrow, for the goodwife's greater ease on rising, and also because it was the immemorial custom of all Moor folk from Killantringan even to the Moss of Cree.

A fly-by-night bumblebee, honey-drunk, followed the cavalcade blunderingly a little way, perhaps in the hope that they who seemed to know their way so well, might lead him safely home, ring the door-bell for him, and tumble him into the lobby of his home under the bent tussock where he fain would be. Nevermore would he stay out so late again. So much he would gladly promise the reproachful wife who had sat up for his coming.

But the ponies drew away, and there was nothing for him but to snuggle down with a buzz and a grumble among the wet bluebells and wait for daybreak, for sobriety and with it a new sense of direction.

Occasionally Stair urged his mare forward, though only by a closer clip of the knees. She was a willing beast, and responded gallantly. It was easy going now, and the night was speeding quickly. Presently they would need to go down the side of the fell, and skirt the White Water to their ambush place at the head of the Loch. Of this last, Stair thought exclusively. But with more of the mystery of an older race about him, Louis Raincy listened to the firs whispering confidences overhead as they sped downhill. Then came the birches' clean rustle—for the burn they were following led them among copses where the legs of the horses risped with a pleasant sound through the lash of leaves.

The ponies were going easily now, their masters being sure that they were far in advance of their time. They had cut the circle cleanly, and those they were pursuing would have to make nearly three times the distance they had traversed.

Besides, Patsy's captors did not know they were being pursued. Never once did the "clash of the spurs" warn them that Care and his horsemen rode behind.

As the two came down from the high moors, tracking cautiously through the woods and stray belts of culture which hung about the thatched steadings and shy, deep-hidden farm-towns, a wildness awoke in Stair Garland. The little mare, Derry Down, responded to his mood. She held her head high, and capered like an unbitted yearling fresh off the first spring pastures.

Louis rode more quietly and also more steadily, and especially so when at last they got down to a made road in the valley of the White Water. Here Louis had several times to urge his companion to save the beasts a little, for if they rescued Patsy, they would need to bring her home on one or the other of them.

"We have to settle our accounts first," said Stair, "then we will think about taking her back to those who knew so ill how to protect her!"

He was silent a moment and then added as if in pity for Louis's ignorance, "See here, man, this is all my country. Think you there is a farm where I could not leave the ponies and get the loan of other? We are on the main caravan trail of the Free Traffickers, and there are few hereabouts who would venture to refuse Stair Garland."

Perhaps there was some boyish pride in this, but Louis had been long enough within the sound of the jingling anker chains and the creaking pack saddles to know that Stair spoke well within the truth. He felt with a sudden pang that in this rescue of Patsy he was playing a very secondary part. But the true nobility of soul shown by Stair Garland was not at the time revealed to him. He did not understand the reason why Stair had brought him at all. It was because he disdained to take an advantage. He would not magnify himself in Patsy's eyes while Louis, unwarned, slept in his bed at Castle Raincy.

Whatever the odds against him, Stair would give his adversary the floor, and at the end of the day accept the umpire's judgment as to which was the better man.

CHAPTER XII

PATSY'S RESCUE

Like a greyhound coursing sped the little mare. After Derry Down stretched the more sturdily built Honeypot. He made no flourishes with head or tail but simply laid well into his work, going so fast that his rider Louis Raincy seemed to be bending to meet a strong wind. The hedges and tree clumps poured behind as water from the prow of a wind-driven boat in a difficult sea-way.

Three or four times Louis tried to stop his companion, but Stair had a spot in his mind where he could hold up the carriage. It was a sharp angle of road, designed in days when levels and gradients were unthought of, and still permitted to linger on to the danger of travellers' necks. In fact the White Loch elbow remains to the moment of writing, in spite of all modern improvements, a trap for the unwary, merely because a laird's lodge-gate lies a few hundred feet to the north, and any new road must cut a shaving off the entrance to his avenue.

But that night Stair made use of the gates manorial. Tying their ponies to trees, they lifted the heavy gates off their hinges and "angled" them skillfully across the road so as to form a barrier which must stop the horses and carriage. Stair would have set up the barricade between the double turn of the S-shaped curve, but Louis pointed out that if the carriage went over the bridge, Patsy might very well be injured. So the gates were ultimately placed where the horses would be halted while ascending the long after slope with slackened pace.

Where Stair and Louis placed themselves, though some considerable way from the burn which ran at the bottom of the defile, they were still in a very pit of darkness. The leaves were dense overhead, and only the white gates gleamed very faintly in the trough of gloom where ran the eastern military road.

Louis lay under a tremulous rustle of leaves, for the wind was coming in from the sea, and listened to the trill and chirrup of the burn which carried off the overflow of the White Loch, as it muttered over its sands or clattered across the loose round pebbles of its numerous shallows.

The lads waited long and anxiously, not that they had any fear of having missed their mark, for Stair had searched in vain in all the softest spots for any trace of carriage wheels. They must pass this way. They could not go off the road, because there was no other. But, what would have spoiled the matter more than a squadron of cavalry in attendance, was the fact that if they delayed much longer, the carriage would reach the Elbow of the White Water after daybreak.

From where they lay they could see the ragged fantastic line of the hills to the east behind which the sun would rise. Stair watched these anxiously. They had a clear hour before them, but unless the mist came up again with the tide, they could count on no more time.

Already out on the face of the moorland the curlews were crying tentatively one to the other. Louis would gladly have talked, but Stair sat grave and silent. At last, visibly unquiet, he betook himself up through the wood to the edge of an old turf-built fold where in summer the cows were wont to be milked. Here he occupied himself with the priming of his gun and looked to his pistols. An undefined glimmer from the sky and the absence of trees on the heathery slopes enabled him to dispense with other light.

In ten minutes he was back again by the side of Louis Raincy.

"They are coming," he whispered, "up yonder I heard the rumble of the carriage. Listen—we shall catch it in a minute."

Louis listened intently and at last could make out, from very far to the west, the rhythmic and yet changeful beating of the feet of horses. But it was not till the carriage had actually climbed to the summit and was rumbling down the slope that Stair Garland moved.

"I am going to meet them there at the gates," he said, "be you ready with the horses. There is a part of this business in which there is no need of your being mixed up, only see that Honeypot and Derry Down are ready for Patsy. If for any reason I cannot get away with you, take the upper side of the White Loch till you strike the old track by which we came, then give the little mare her head and she will carry you safe."

"But why will you not be with us? We can ride time about."

"There are certain risks," said Stair,—"I do not know what will come out of all this. But at any rate your business is to get Patsy home to her father's and then carry the word to my sister Jean that the house is to be strongly guarded. She will understand."

The carriage was very close now. They could hear the labouring of the horses, the wheezing of straining harness. Then the pole of the carriage became entangled with Stair's carefully angled lodge-gates. The coach stopped. The driver sprang from his seat and ran to keep his horses from plunging over into the ravine. An angry voice from the inside called out to know what was the matter.

A pistol shot rang out. Then several answered, followed by the roar of a fully charged gun, a turmoil of voices, the stamping of horses, and a voice that cried: "They have killed the Prince! The Duke is shot!"

The next moment through the green velvety dark Louis heard footsteps approaching. Stair, his gun flung over his shoulder, had Patsy with him.

"Quick, up with you! There!"

He placed her on Derry Down.

"Now, Louis—off with you, and remember what I said. Keep the upper side of the valley, and if in difficulty let the little mare lead. I shall follow, as soon as I can get a horse to ride. One of our lads lives not far from here!"

"You have not killed him?" said Louis, anxiously.

"I do not know. I certainly let the marauding Turks have the benefit of a few slugs," said Stair with carelessness. "If his princeship is a little worse splintered than the others, why, so much the better. But they will all have a souvenir to carry away. Now, ride, and never mind me!"

In ten minutes Louis and Patsy were fairly safe from pursuit—at least from any immediate pursuit. They followed the line of the White Loch—the shore sand gleaming like silver beneath them making the task a simple one. Then by easier gradients than the path by which they had so precipitately descended, Louis struck diagonally for the old drove road. As they mounted higher they became aware that the day was breaking behind the distant Minnegaff ridges—the hills of the great names, Bennanbrack, Benyellaray, Craignairny, The Spear of the Merrick, and the Dungeon of Buchan, coming up one by one in delicate aërial perspective.

In half an hour Louis Raincy could see Patsy's face suffused with eager joy, freedom and the red in the east together making it flush like a dusky peach.

"Oh, I am so glad," she broke out when at last they could ride together over a little stretch of bent, "I had not even my Canary Island knife, or anything, but somehow I thought that you or Stair would follow me."

"It was all Stair's doing," said Louis; "he called me, and gave me the chance to help him when he could quite as well have taken one of his brothers, Fergus or Agnew."

"Why did he stay behind just now?" Patsy asked. "If they capture him they will kill him."

"I think there is no great fear of that, for the present, at least," said Louis Raincy, loyally. "Stair Garland has many hiding-places. I don't believe any one can catch him in his own land. He is off to find a moor-pony and will ride after us as soon as it is safe. If not, he will come home on foot, lying up in the daytime. He knows every farm and cothouse and is welcome at all. Sea-cave and moss-hag, wood-shelter and whin-bush, he knows every hidie-hole for forty mile."

Louis and Patsy kept so far to the north among the flowes of the moors that they never once came in sight of the road, along which all that day frenzied messengers tore east and west with tidings that the King's son had been murdered near the White Loch, by a gang of ruffians who had laid a trap and overturned his carriage.

So the two young people travelled in a great loneliness of plovers and curlews and peewits, all singing and calling and whistling their hardest. They saw the glimmer of a herd's house or two, faint whitewashed dots on the brown, surface of the moor. But of living souls they met not one.

Nor had they seen anything of Stair when, at dusk, they breasted the last bosky eyebrow of Raincy territory which overhung the rich Ferris valleys, and saw beneath them, as it had been deserted, the House of Cairn Ferris. Windows had been knocked out. Household gear lay scattered in the yard and even littered the avenue. A great blackened oblong showed the position of a burned hay-mow.

Louis halted a moment, in doubt what he should do, and then seeing that there was no safety in such a place for Patsy, he turned the tired horses about and rode straight for the great towers of Castle Raincy which frowned above them out of the purple gloom of the woods.

"Grandfather," said Louis, still holding Patsy by the hand as he penetrated unannounced into the Earl's study, "this is Miss Patricia Ferris. The Duke of Lyonesse laid a trap for her. He carried her off, bound and gagged, in Kennedy McClure's carriage, but Stair Garland and I rescued her. There was a fight and I believe the Duke is hurt, but it served him right. I took her home, but the house has been sacked. So I brought her to you!"

The old man, who had nightly cursed the Ferrises, root and branch, all his life, rose to his full height, for a moment irresolute. Then he bowed, and took Patsy's hand in his.

"You are welcome," he said, "I am—hem—satisfied that my boy had the pluck to put a bullet into the Hanoverian swine. He came and asked for my carriage, curse his impudence—my carriage and horses to play his Guelphish pranks on honest men's daughters. Royal prince or no royal prince, I will stand by you, hang me if I don't! And when it comes to the House of Lords, I shall have a few truths to tell the whole royal gang which will make their ears tingle from the Regent himself to poor Silly Billy."

In the meanwhile no news of Stair. He had, as it seemed, been entirely blotted out. Had he fallen into the hands of the cavalry which after a fruitless search had sacked Cairn Ferris at their pleasure upon the first news of the killing of the king's son? They had departed to scour the easterly roads and had been seen no more in the valleys or on the heights of Raincy.

There was no news except that Kennedy McClure had been seen galloping eastward in frantic search of his carriage and horses. The former had been reported blown to flinders, and his two carefully matched horses killed by the bandits. So he was now riding in his shirt-sleeves, the cowrie shells at his watch fob clanging against the little bundle of keys he wore there. In his mind he was doing sums of which the main issues were, "What is the difference between the fifty pounds I have in hand and the value of the carriage and horses, and will my loss give me a claim on the royal family and the Government?" Kennedy McClure saw before him endless Court of Session pleas, with expenses mounting steadily up, and the verdict given in his favour upon appeal to the House of Lords.

The Laird of Supsorrow, who loved a good-going plea, felt vaguely consoled, but he spurred his beast all the same to find out what he had to go upon. That the whole countryside spoke of the young prince as dead was nothing to him. His horses and the precious chariot with the yellow wheels, the pale blue body and linings, were more to him than the whole royal house. There were a plenty of princes—and no great gain to the country either by all accounts! But he, Kennedy of Supsorrow, had only one chariot and one well-matched pair of carriage horses, for which he had paid out good golden guineas.

As he rode he heard the sound of horses galloping behind him. They turned out to be a patrol of dragoons from Cairnryan headed by Captain Laurence. That officer was in great fear for his commission, being in military command of the district; and though he had received the Prince's own orders to confine himself to his barracks that the ways might be clear, he could not hide from himself that if anything happened to the King's favourite son, he might as well send in his papers.

So whenever he crossed a coast-guardsman, or even the most ignorant and harmless farm-lad, he shouted to him, "The Duke—the Duke! What of the Duke? Have they killed the Duke?"

To which Kennedy McClure of Supsorrow responded like an echo, "The horses—the horses? What have they done to the horses? Have they killed my horses?"

CHAPTER XIII

PLOTS AND PRINCES

But the Duke of Lyonesse was not dead. He lay at the King's Arms in the town of Newton Douglas, well peppered with slugs, and swearing most royally. Lord Wargrove was alone in attendance upon him. One might well pity him, for his job was no pleasant one.

Eben the Spy had disappeared, and with him every stiver of the Prince's money, which had been kept in a leathern dispatch case carefully stowed beneath the seat of the carriage. His wallet of jewels, too, had vanished, so that the poor Duke had never a spare snuff-box or a change of rings.

More wonderful still was the official declaration made and sworn to before the Fiscal and Sheriff. The attack had been made entirely for the purpose of robbery, by Ebenezer McClure and a band of malefactors, collected by him for the purpose. In proof of which it was shown that the said Eben McClure had driven the carriage into a trap, previously laid with care in the dangerous defile of the White Water near where it enters into the loch of that name, that he had removed the Duke's treasure during the fight, and so escaped, mounted upon one of the horses which he had borrowed of his kinsman Kennedy of Supsorrow. The name of Patsy Ferris did not appear.

This explains why on arriving at Newton Douglas in search of his steeds, Kennedy McClure found himself pulled down from his horse, treated with much official roughness, and finally lodged in the townhouse awaiting his removal to the gaol of Wigton. He began to think that the fifty pounds which had been paid down by Eben of Stonykirk constituted but a feeble consolation for losses such as his. The Duke could not see him. My Lord of Wargrove would not, and Captain Laurence, to whom in desperation he made his plea, consigned him with extreme conciseness of speech to the deepest and hottest pit of Eblis.

All these things made no considerable stir in the little village of Newton Douglas, which was beginning to extend itself under the heights of Penninghame. The borough was proud of its guest, but what the Duke and his hench-man desired most of all was to be safely across Cree Bridge and to place a county or two between them and the wrath of Adam Ferris and his brother-in-law Julian Wemyss, whom they held to be answerable for the attack at the White Loch. So as soon as the wounded man could be moved, the best horses to be had in Minnigaff drew the coach gingerly across the bridge and out of immediate danger of pursuit.

The Duke thought it safest to make as little of the occurrence as possible. He had many debts, and the present loss of his treasures seemed a good chance to get the Government to pay off his creditors. He had, he was willing to swear, been bringing over from Ireland the moneys with which to conclude the arrangement. And now he had lost not only the treasure but his jewels as well, in the discharge of his duty to the King and the Houses of Parliament. What more fitting, therefore, than that the loss should be made good to him, together with some compensation for the wounds he had sustained in the defence of his creditors' property?

During the rest at Carlisle it was agreed that Lord Wargrove, in consultation with Mr. Robert Adam, the Duke's legal adviser and boon companion, should draw up a schedule of his losses—such as might be expected to pass the House of Commons without any of the unpleasant rakings up of the past which usually distinguished these periodical cleanings of the slate.

Only a couple of years had elapsed since the Commons had been engaged for weeks in the examination of the Duke of York's affair with Mrs. Clarke, and the Duke of Lyonesse felt that he must not allow his application to be handicapped by the account of an attempt at abduction, such as that of which the daughter of Adam Ferris had been the object.

It became highly necessary, therefore, that the mouths of the girl's relatives should be closed, and it seemed to the Prince and his advisers that the delicate negotiations could better be conducted through Julian Wemyss, who at least could not fail to know the character of his former attaché.

"Besides, I know something about him," said the Duke, "which will make him think twice before denouncing me."

Lord Wargrove put an eager question. He would have rejoiced to be able to repeat in society the tale of some disgraceful and unpublished scandal attached to the name of the ex-ambassador.

"No, no," said the Duke, promptly, "nothing of that sort. There is nothing against him personally. But he will hold his peace for the sake of a certain great lady. Oh, Wemyss is a man. He quitted his post at Vienna rather than bring a lady's name into a quarrel, in course of which he was challenged. Now ambassadors do not fight duels, so he resigned and killed his man. I was there at the time."

"Ah," said my Lord Wargrove, thoughtfully, "so he is a wine of that vintage, is he? Then we shall probably hear more of the little adventure which went to smash when that old thief's horses blundered into those white gates."

"You do not suppose," cried the Prince, startled into raising himself incautiously on his elbow so that he grimaced with pain, "that it was Wemyss who pursued us?"

"Certainly not," said Wargrove. "If he is the man you describe, he would never have fired a blunderbuss into a dark carriage. He would have stopped the horses and shot us one after the other at twenty paces like a gentleman."

"What, without seconds! That would have been murder!" exclaimed the Duke of Lyonesse, who liked well enough running away with pretty maids, but much deprecated the interference of inconvenient relatives afterwards. As, for that matter, did most of the royal princes of that time.

Who did their ill by stealth,
But blushed to find it fame.

"A man who can resign an ambassadorship to pink his man is never in want of a second, specially in his own country. He would have fought us—be sure of that—and so far as I am concerned, the pleasure is only postponed. As for you, your Highness had better get to Windsor or Carlton House, as soon as may be."

"I cannot go to Carlton House," the Duke answered sadly, "though I dare say George would be glad enough to see me. We always had a great deal in common, but all that is of no use. The Fitz does not like me and she is ruling the roost there again."

"Well," said Wargrove, quaintly, "I shall be jotting down the provisions of my last will and testament as we are jogging along southward."

"I wonder," said his Royal Highness, pensively, "what has become of the little baggage. She would have been entrancing if we only could have got her safely trapped."

"Well," said my Lord, "you would not listen before, but I tell you now that if you had trapped her, as you say, you would certainly have died in bed with a dagger in your throat. That was what she meant by 'Oh, if I only had it!' You heard her say that. I remember my cousin Southwald getting hold of an Italian girl—a little minx from Apulia, fine as silk but dusky as a Brazil nut. She fought wild and bitter like a trapped wild cat. It was at Lecce in Murat's time, but Southwald was conceited that he could gentle her. He did not care for what he called the 'full-uddered kine.' He liked them parched and lithe with eyes like smouldering fires—"

"Ah, like Patsy!" said the Duke, not yet cured of his love-sickness.

"Exactly," countered my Lord, "like Miss Patsy to a hair. Well, when we went into his tent the next morning—Murat had excused him service—he—well, he was not pretty to see. To begin with, his throat was cut and the girl nowhere to be seen. Yet I could be sworn I tied her wrists tightly enough. One look at Southwald spoilt more breakfasts than mine that day, and Murat himself, who did not stick at trifles, brought all his available officers, a whole camp of them, and made poor Southwald the text for a little discourse. No, Murat did not say anything, he only pointed, but my cousin made a better homily and application than parson ever preached."

"And pray what were either of you doing in Apulia with the brother-in-law of Buonaparte?" cried the Duke, who compounded for the sin of private cowardice by excessive public patriotism.

"You were at Vienna at the time, and ought to remember," said my Lord, quite calmly. "Murat was keen to emancipate himself from the yoke of the Emperor, and was playing for his own hand. Southwald and I had been sent informally from Malta to Naples to discover what lengths he was prepared to go."

"Nonsense, Wargrove, I know better," the Duke exclaimed. "That was not your real reason."

"It was that which was marked on our passports and safe-conducts. But" (here he yawned courteously behind his hand) "perhaps your Highness has remarked that though the Buonapartes are doubtless all great rascals, their female kind have a habit of being deucedly pretty and liberal-minded women!"

"But why then did your cousin mix himself up with little blackamoors?"

"Chacun à son gout!" said Wargrove, lightly. "I always knew that my taste in women was better than Southies. So he got what I tell you, and I"—(he fingered at a ribbon), "I got the Order of the Golden Fleece—Murat's own, which he had brought from Madrid after the Dos de Mayo. Murat was pleased with me. I read the burial service over Southwald out of a prayer-book his mother had written his name in, with Murat and his Frenchmen standing round with bared heads like gentlemen, though they could never have seen a priest before in a Guards' uniform."

"And the girl?" demanded the Duke. "Of course she was sought for and punished?"

Wargrove sighed long and then paused to give his words wing. "Not at all," he said. "I think the general feeling was that Southwald was a fool and deserved what he got. I know that was my own impression!"

"Jove!" cried the Duke, suddenly wroth, "I shall not suffer this, Wargrove. You mean me!"

"That," said Wargrove, with a face like a statue hewn in granite, "is precisely as your Highness pleases."

CHAPTER XIV

THE END OF AN OLD FEUD

Since the looting of his house by Laurence's dragoons, Adam Ferris had lived mostly at Abbey Burnfoot, the property of his brother-in-law Julian Wemyss. Julian was not there. He had gone to London upon unknown business. At least if Adam Ferris knew of his kinsman's mission, he would have been the very last man to speak of it.

Nor indeed, did any try to wind the secret out of him. Adam had always been a silent man, distantly smiling and peaceable, but even then there was something about the man which caused his neighbours to be careful how they meddled with him.

But now he brooded darkly, wandering much on the moor and along the shore. Only the old Earl dared to front him, and as there had been enmity between the houses for four hundred years, the first meeting was not without some piquancy.

It happened the first morning after Louis had taken Patsy to Castle Raincy. The old gentleman stood upon the point of etiquette, and though he was stiff with rheumatism, he drilled his shoulders and strode down the glen, crossing by the stile from which he had so often cursed the lands of Cairn Ferris and every soul who dwelt therein. But now that he had called up his men and shut the gates of Castle Raincy upon the heiress of his enemy's house, he passed into Ferris territory as if he carried the white banner of envoy extraordinary.

There was something fresh and almost childish in the delight with which he noted every twist and turn of the long Glen burn, the trouts whisking in the brown pools or floating with their noses just showing under the shade of rugged willow roots which wind and water had undercut. He had observed these things all his life—from above, but his feet had never been set upon Ferris ground. His eyes had never looked (as it were) upon Zion, and now the goodly things were goodlier, the bunches of Eshcol grapes heavier and more purple, the pine trees nobler and higher, the peeps of corn-land more enthralling to the spirit, than ever they had appeared seen from above as if marked on a chart.

Presently he came in sight of the house of Cairn Ferris with its doors and windows wrecked and broken, at the mending of which the joiners of the estate and others from Stranryan were at that moment busy. He passed a heap of broken furniture still huddled together and smoking in a corner, at which he stood still and cursed as he if had been Adam Ferris himself.

He did not love the man nor his family. But Ferris was a gentleman and a neighbour. Only let him get to London. He would make the ears of these Hanover rats lie back when he told them an honest man's opinion of them on some day of great debate. Oh, it was not the first time he had spoken. Hear him they must and hear him they should.

Earl Raincy reached the new house of Abbey Burnfoot in safety. As he came out of the birches of the glen among which the path played hide and seek, he saw the climbing roses and red tropeolum mounting almost to the roof, the full dusky green of the hops twining to the chimney tops and setting a-swing questing tendrils from every balcony. The old man had never before seen such a building, but in an illustrated book of travels he had come across something like it. So his heart expanded when he thought of his own austere baronial keep and the crow-stepped bluestone gables of his ancestors' many additions. The newest of those was four hundred years old, and was only beginning to lose its look of having been finished yesterday.

He shrugged his shoulders at Julian's foreign-appearing palace of pleasure.

"Very well, I dare say," he muttered; "but what will it be after a few hundred winters?"

He did not pause to think what in such circumstances he would be himself. Raincy ground would still uphold Castle Raincy. Raincys would still dwell there, but this little dainty playhouse on the sands of the Abbey Burn would long ago have been swept away by centuries of Solway storms. The thought re-established him in his own esteem, and even the Ferris rule of the coveted Twin Valleys seemed evanescent and fleeting as a cloud on a mountain side beside the invincible eternity of the Raincy dominion.

He knocked at the door and waited. The man who came was Julian's Austrian valet Joseph, courteous, grave, and exquisitely "styled," as was fitting for the house of an ex-ambassador.

"Would his excellency enter? Joseph regretted much that the Earl should not find Mr. Julian. But he had been summoned to London. Yes, certainly, Mr. Adam was somewhere on the beach. He had gone out after breakfast and was still absent. If my Lord would wait, Mr. Adam should be at once informed."

But my Lord greatly preferred to see Mr. Ferris at once, and would walk along the sands till he met with him.

"As his Excellency wills," said Joseph, bowing low, and Earl Raincy went his way, tall, whitehaired and slender, to meet Patsy's father. Within tide-mark they met, at the exact point where the Raincy properties join the valley possessions of the Ferrises. Therefore in the most fitting spot—a true no-man's land, in that the foreshore was the property of the Government, though on the "heuchs" above the butt of the separating march dyke, built with masonry and bound and spiked with iron, testified that the Jews of the hills had no dealings with the Samaritans of the valleys. The lesson, seen close at hand, was a little marred by the fact that Louis and Stair with the assistance of a forehammer had converted certain of the spikes into a very practicable ladder which either of them, when pressed for time, could take at racing pace.

But from the beach below the barrier seemed of the last truculence and efficacy.

The old Earl took off his three-cornered hat with the gold button on a white rosette at the side. Adam did the same with his more modern broad-brimmed, low-crowned white beaver.

"I have the honour to announce to you," said Earl Raincy, bowing formally, "that your daughter is at my house under the care of my daughter-in-law. My grandson Louis, with, I believe, the help of several of your tenants, conveyed her safely back, and I congratulate myself that Louis had the good sense to bring her to Castle Raincy. You will pardon him, I feel sure. He went first to your house of Cairn Ferris, but finding it dismantled, he made up his mind that she could not safely return to Miss Aline's at Ladykirk. So I came off to see you at once, and to say to you how highly I feel myself honoured that one of your name should sojourn under my roof. Time is a great healer, and by gad, sir, if you will permit me to say so, I shall stand by you in this affair, and between us we shall crack the rascals' skulls!"

He held out his hand, which Adam, who had listened sympathetically to the old man's speech, instantly took. Then after one solid grip, they dropped each other's palms with a slight feeling of awkwardness.

"I thank you, my Lord," said Adam Ferris, "I appreciate your coming to me. I knew some time ago by a messenger from Stair Garland that my daughter was safe. I was starting to run down the villains, but my brother-in-law begged that he might be allowed to settle the family quarrel. He was anxious that nothing should appear about my daughter which might hurt her future. Here, of course, in our own country, the poorest and most ignorant would not make any mistake in judgment. But Julian said it would certainly be otherwise in London, especially with those who know the doings of our Royal Dukes. He begged that in the first instance I should leave the affair to him and if he did not settle matters to my satisfaction, I could then take what action I chose. So, because he knew more of these courtly circles than I shall ever know or desire to know, I bade him go."

"Put that way," said my Lord, "you were quite right. The man was, I understand, a guest in the house of Mr. Wemyss. He sent from there to borrow my horses, damn his impudence. He shall answer to me for that some day. Oh, I forgot—yes, your daughter. But I have been in London and at Court. I have been honoured by the King's commands, but I can only say that this new age—these young men—are rotten to the core. Therefore I agree that for Miss Ferris's sake, the less said the better. When, think you, will your brother be back? I should wish to pay my respects to him as soon as might be!"

"That," said Adam, "I cannot say. I wait any summons from London, but as yet I have heard nothing from Mr. Wemyss."

The earl was silent a while, now tapping imaginary dust from his breeches and again patting his flowered waistcoat to settle the long flaps in their places. He looked away across the shore, pale amber and white at the sandy edge and deep blue beyond. Then frowning with the effort, he spoke.

"Sir," he said, "our young people are wiser than we. My boy brought your girl to Castle Raincy as to a city of refuge, and why should not you and I, sir, copy them? Will you do me the honour to walk to Castle Raincy with me and take dinner? 'Zounds, sir, we ought to have thought of this long before. They put us to shame, these helter-skelter youngsters of ours."

"I accept your invitation, my Lord," said Adam gravely.

"Come now, Ferris," cried the Earl, with characteristic impulsiveness, "we are neighbours and gentlemen—I pray you let there be no 'Lordships' between us. Call me 'Raincy,' and be done with it!"

"I fear," said Adam, smiling, "that with the best will in the world it would be difficult for me to get my stubborn Galloway tongue round the word. But I am glad to hear you call me by my name, though I fear me, my Lord, that you must e'en let a thrawn Scots hermit gang his ain gait. If I were to call you 'Raincy' I should feel like a boy who threw a stone at election time. Why, sir, my father would rise from his grave and floor me with the lid of his coffin!"

"By gad, sir," said the Earl, "I believe you are right. That comes of English public schools and all the rest of it. Add to which that small daughter of yours is a witch and will make a man say anything—even a man of my age. But since we are both Galloway men, we may surely call each other by the names of our holdings. If you are 'Cairn Ferris' to everybody—well, I am 'Castle Raincy.'"

"To that I see no objection," said Adam, smiling, "though you wear your rue with a difference!"

"Eh, what's that?" cried the Earl, who did not read Shakespeare—"oh, something out of a book—I thought such things were your brother-in-law's perquisite. But I understand—you mean the handle to my name. That is very well for outside use, but never mind handles to-day. Let us be young again to-day. Come and see Patsy!"

"Patsy!" that young person's father muttered to himself, "so it has come to Patsy! Evidently she does not take after me. I have no doubt that the vixen will be calling him 'Raincy' by the week's end."

CHAPTER XV

THE FECHTIN' FOOL

These were hard days for Stair Garland. He alone had planned and carried out the deliverance of Patsy. He had dared the spilling of the blood royal, yet he had given all the profit of it over into the hands of another. And now Louis Raincy had Patsy safe within the walls of his grandfather's castle, and all that remained for Stair was liberty to keep watch and ward outside.

I do not imagine that Louis cared much about the matter. Why should he? He had other things to think about—bright, young, heart-stirring things that danced and glistened, flitting up before him just as a sudden wind-gust may for a moment turn a petal-strewn garden path all rosy.

But, to make up for such ingrate forgetfulness, Patsy thought a good deal. She knew—no woman could have helped knowing—the fact of Stair's devotion. But then she had always accepted it as quite natural, which it was. Also as calling for no particular notice, except, as it were, for a certain graceful obliviousness on her part, modified by a possessive glance or two from her fearless black eyes—glances for which Stair watched more alertly than he had ever gazed into the night for the signal flashes from the Good Intent.

But now he, Stair the doer, was without while Patsy was within with Louis the dreamer. At this time Stair had more liberty to come and go. He could now spend some of his days at Glenanmays helping his brothers and sisters in any emergency. The attack upon the Duke of Lyonesse had been hushed up—so far, that is, as any official inquiry was concerned. The matter was not even referred to in Parliament.

It had been announced that the Prince had been hurt somewhat seriously in a carriage accident, frequent in travelling through such wild lands as Ireland and the south of Scotland. People averred that he would find himself safer on the Mall or climbing the slopes of Primrose Hill.

And meanwhile McCarthy, the Irish doctor who attended him, said nothing about the gunshot wound in the thigh which caused the Duke to walk with a slight limp ever after.

Stair, of course, knew nothing of this in detail. But he was keenly alive to the results. With the disappearance of McClure the Spy the press-gang work was suspended for a time, and, though a party of light horse lay in Captain Laurence's old quarters at Stranryan, they confined their trips to sending recruiting parties in an above-board way to the fairs and market towns.

At the end of harvest they would doubtless make a good haul among the foolish young men who had been at the southern reaping. These, having spent their cash in Carlisle or Dumfries, would be afraid to face their people at home, and might be expected to take his Majesty's shilling with alacrity.

Without the support of the military, led by so experienced a man as Eben McClure, with local knowledge and connections, the Preventive men displayed no initiative, and seldom ventured far from their barracks on the cliff. They might surround an alehouse in a village with all the pomp and circumstance which shows zeal and is put down to the Supervisor's credit as an efficient officer. But word was always sent before, so that everything dutiable might be removed in the night.

So fearless did the Free Traders become that not a week passed without a successful run at the Waterfoot or in the Mays Bay, and such vessels as the Star of Hope from the Texel and the William Groot (everywhere known as the "Billy Goat") of Flessingue, thought it worth their while to come to the coast of Wigton with full cargoes of tea, Hollands, brandy, lace, and tobacco.

All this stir in his own business did Stair a great deal of good. It kept him from grieving about Patsy. Besides, the constant adventure of the night and the lying up in the Cave of Slains during the day, enabled him to sleep off his weariness and kept him away from the neighbourhood of Castle Raincy.

Sometimes, however, he used to lie out with Whitefoot, hidden deep among the bog-myrtle and small silvery willows. On these occasions he would talk to his dog with such earnestness that Whitefoot used to shake all over with sympathy, whining softly as he laid his shaggy muzzle on his master's knee as if in agony because he was unable to speak.

"Those were better days than this, Whitefoot," said Stair, "when she stood on the bookboard of Peden's Pulpit and we watched her through the broom, before you took the road to fetch sister Jean."

At the words Whitefoot leaped up delightedly and gave his short silent bark. He thought he was to be trusted with another message.

"No, Whitefoot, no," said his master, and the dog's waving tail dropped suddenly. "I know you would go to Jean or even find Patsy through the gates of Castle Raincy, but it would do no good. I am not of her world. I am only the 'fechtin' fool.' Not that I am complaining, Whitefoot—that is what you and I are for, Whitefoot. We have fought before and may again. But she is not for us, lad—a laird's daughter—what could we do with the like of her if we had her?—A captain of smugglers and his dog, Whitefoot! That's what we are. Nothing better!"

"Rouch," said Whitefoot, his brown eyes flashing and his ears cocked. He kept up a little alternate dancing motion on his fore paws, raising his body from the ground without ever ceasing to hold his master's eyes for a moment. "Oh, I know you love me, Whitefoot, but that does not help much just for the minute, lad. We are at the ban of the law, and the coastguards would hang you as gladly as they would gaol me if they could catch either of us. Only just at present we have the whip hand of them. They have a shrewd suspicion that the hand which filled a Royal Duke with slugs would not be backward in serving them the same. And, particularly to an exciseman, a whole skin is a whole skin."

Whitefoot growled at the word "exciseman," showing a set of firm white teeth under a black bristly lip turned up wickedly at the corners.

"But this will not always last, lad," Stair Garland went on, "the wars will blow over and they will have men and troops to stop all this open cargo-running. Then they will never beat us altogether, and for years and years they will have the upper hand in their turn. What will come of you and me then, Whitefoot? We shall have to foot it, far afield, lad. Fergus will have the farm when my father has done with it. Agnew takes to books and will get learning. But the 'fechtin' fool' must still be the fechtin' fool. And there is no outgate for him except what he can make with his two hands.

"What has he to do with falling in love, Whitefoot?—Answer me that, silly dog, instead of lickin' and slaverin' all over my hand! Can he marry? No. Would he take any woman into this life of straits and hidings and ambushes? No! And yet what a fool he is because Patsy (oh, Whitefoot, our little Patsy!) being a laird's only daughter, goes for a while with her own kind as she must at the last. What a fool you have for a master, Whitefoot! Tell him so!"

"Ow-oww-ouch!" The dog's answer came in a kind of furious shout that was at once a defiance of fate, of the dread Power which deprived masters of their heart's desire and dogs of speech, shutting them both in within the narrow bounds of a hard necessity.

Stair soothed the dog with one hand, for he could hear his heart thump in short laboured leaps as if after a long pursuit of a dog-fox on the hillside.

"It is all no use, Whitefoot," he went on, more gently, "but after all you are a friend, and it does me good to talk to you. You are always on my side, and I do believe that you understand better than any one else. But now the moon is up we must be going down to the Cave of Slains, or perhaps the Calaman. Stand up, Whitefoot, and say good-night to Patsy before she goes to bed."

Stair rose bareheaded on his rock and looked towards the head of the long bare glen, above which he could see the grey towers of Castle Raincy touched to silver by the moonlight. Some windows were still illuminated on the ground-floor, but higher up only one held a light.

Stair waved his hand towards it.

"Come on now," he said encouragingly to Whitefoot. "Speak—give it tongue! Say good-night to Patsy. She will never know."

And along with his master's shout there went out towards that single light high on the side of the castle wall, the dog's cry to which Stair had trained him for night signalling. And it came to the ears of Patsy as she leaned from her high window, long and lonely and bleak as the howl of a wolf, outcasted from the pack.

Patsy shuddered and shut down the window.

CHAPTER XVI

A RIDER COMES TO CASTLE RAINCY

One night the two gentlemen sat over their wine in the dining-room at Castle Raincy, the Earl and Adam Ferris of Cairn Ferris, who had now fallen into the habit of coming every day to the Castle either for dinner or supper—dinner being, according to the fashion of the time, at two and supper at eight. Generally Adam came to supper. In this case he saw more of his daughter, and the old Lord found him right good company, thoughtful and well-informed. Besides, what was best of all, Adam was an excellent listener.

So, sitting toying with the stem of a wine glass, he heard for the twentieth time the tale of the Earl's early adventure with Gentleman Cornwallis—how they had vied with each other over neckcloths and fair ladies, how they had fought for three hours, as the Earl said "sticking each other here and there" without any great damage, neither able to get home, and finally how they had their wounds dressed by the same doctor before sitting down to ombre, each man with his bowl of gruel at his elbow, how they bet who should drink both bickers, and how it stood on one throw of the dice—how Cornwallis won, and he, Earl Raincy, duly performed his obligation.

Then came how they ordered in a second supply and played who should swallow that. The Gentleman won again, and he, Raincy, was so full of gruel that he had to have four strong footmen to carry him home!

"By gad, sir, so I was—drunk as an owl on gruel, damned slimy apothecaries' gruel. But I was the better of it, sir, and got well in a week, while Cornwallis had rash and erysipelas and all manner of trouble, because he did not do as his doctor told him! Served him right, say I!"

And at this point, without any announcement, Julian Wemyss suddenly stood before them. He was travel-stained and hollow of cheek. He had manifestly ridden far and hard.

"I beg your pardon, Earl Raincy," he said, bowing courteously, "for thus forcing my way into your presence. But it was necessary that I should at once speak to my brother-in-law, Mr. Adam Ferris. They told me he was here, so I came on."

The Earl welcomed him after saying that he had intended to call upon him at the Abbey Burnfoot as soon as he knew that he was home, he added, "You will find the wine good, Mr. Wemyss. I will now leave you to yourselves. By the way, can I send up anything from the kitchen?—A hungry man, you know, can do no business with a man well dined, as I warrant you Cairn Ferris has!"

But Julian Wemyss begged Lord Raincy to stay. What he had to say concerned him also, or at least his grandson, and all who were interested in Miss Patricia Ferris. As to supper, he had already had something at his own house, where his servant had been instructed to be ready for him.

But he took a glass of wine, and, after draining it, he said, speaking quietly and leaning a little towards the two gentlemen, "I have had the misfortune to kill my Lord Wargrove in a duel on Calais sands."

"Gad," said the Earl, "if it had only been his master! But so far, so good!"

"Why did you come back here?" put in Adam. "Why did you come back from France?"

"Because in France my work was only half done," Julian spoke gravely. "There was some one in London whom it was my duty to consult. Whatever happened it was necessary to risk a conference with ... that person. My Lord (here he turned abruptly upon Earl Raincy), Adam there is wholly incapable of bringing up Patsy as she ought. She runs the country—with the adventurous lads who play at smuggling. She comes and goes at her will and not a soul is disquieted about her."

The faint flicker of a smile passed over the cheek of the old Earl.

"Well, Mr. Wemyss," he said, "you have known more women than ever I spoke to—for all my frosty poll—and can you say on your conscience that there was ever a one of them more charming, sweeter, or more ladylike than your niece Miss Patricia?"

"That, my Lord, is not the question," said Julian, smiling also and shaking his head. "Patsy is all you say and more. But if she had been better trained and somewhat more under control, she would never have run like a hare to the Wild of Blairmore, the Duke of Lyonesse would have been spared the charge of buckshot in his haunch, and I should not have had the death of Lord Wargrove on my hands."

"Pooh," said the old Earl, "that is what every man runs the risk of. 'Tis not the first time you have held a foil. Who were your seconds?"

"Mine? Oh, Erskine and the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. I was not particularly keen about Erskine, but he has his relations with the court party and would report that all was done in loyalty on both sides. The other seconds? Why, Watford and Queensberry."

"You certainly gave him every chance," said the Earl, leaning back and considering Julian Wemyss, "they are all of his own kidney except the Prince—and him I do not know."

"Oh, the finest blade in Europe," cried Julian, more enthusiastically than he had yet spoken, "and ... a Prince of the Empire."

"I see," said Earl Raincy, "between the two of you, you could have accounted for an army of Duke's favourites!"

"Perhaps," said Julian Wemyss, "but to get back to what we were saying, the question is what are we to do with Patsy? I do not mean to spend my whole life in exile, and though we simply could not let Wargrove pass, we cannot go on fighting duels for the sake of this young woman. Besides, it is bad for Patsy."

"What do you propose, Julian?" said Adam. "I see you have come with a plan all ready made up your sleeve. Out with it, man!"

"Well, I have. There is a great lady in London who wishes to take Patsy and treat her as her own daughter—yes, a lady of the court, but not of the Regency court—the Princess Elsa-Frederica of Saxe-Brunswick—"

The Earl's eyes dropped suddenly upon the decanter. He put out his hand, and poured himself a glass. The name was that of one of the King's near relatives, married to the aged reigning prince of Saxe-Brunswick for reasons of State, but now returned to her family and living at Hanover Lodge close to Kew.

The two men at the table instantly found themselves on the verge of matters as it were within the veil. They looked uncomfortable, almost unhappy, as men do on these occasions. Only Julian Wemyss went on with his usual serenity.

"My friend offered to take the responsibility of Patsy off our hands. She is a wise woman and a good woman. There lives no man who dares say different—"

At this point both Adam Ferris and the Earl thought of the man in Vienna who had once dared, and whom the gentle-mannered duellist before them had sent quickly to his own place, with no more time given than to retract his words and receive holy absolution. For in the Austria of that time two gentlemen took a priest as well as a doctor with them to the field of honour. Then Adam Ferris remembered his lonely house below the dark green pines and demanded with a sudden darkening of humour, "And how long is this going to last?"

It was on the tip of Julian's tongue to answer, "Till Patsy is married." For indeed that had been his real thought. But he only said, "For a year or two, brother—it is better so—she runs the hills like a wild thing. Why, officers of his Majesty have boasted of having met and talked to her dressed only in yellow sandals and a blue bathing dress!"

"And, pray, whose fault was that?" her father demanded.

"Not mine," said Julian calmly, "she ran to save the Glenanmays lads from the press-gang; and if the sandals were mine, she ran better with them than without."

"So have I heard all that," said my Lord. "But if only she were a daughter of mine, I should not send her to London to be made as commonplace and artificial as everything else about the Hanoverian court."

"That, my Lord," said Julian, "is the opinion of a partial grandfather. Pardon me for my freedom, but if that boy Louis had been your son, you would have packed him off to dree his weird in the army. And yet he is a wise enough lad, and has come to no great harm—nay, I know him to be both brave and chivalrous—"

"He is a De Raincy," said his grandfather, rather haughtily.

"And as such should have a career," Julian continued without heeding the expression on my Lord's face.

"I have heard of a man who had the highest prize of the most distinguished of careers right in his grasp, yet one fine day dropped everything to go out in an unstarched linen shirt with another man at six o'clock in the morning!"

"When Louis de Raincy has my reasons for doing the like," said Julian, looking directly at the Earl, "you can welcome him home and let him watch the trees grow in the park. He will have given his proofs and learned the meaning of life."

"I beg your pardon!" said Lord Raincy, "I recognize that what you say is true. I am not sure, however, whether I can afford to let Louis go. But perhaps you came back from France to suggest as much to me."

Julian Wemyss laughed for the first time, a clear light-running laugh very pleasant to hear.

"I own I had it in my mind," he said, "all this night-hawking and saving of entrapped damsels is apt to make a boy romantic. Well, no harm for a while, I say. But if you follow my thought and excuse it—'tis not enough to set up house upon. I have no doubt that your grandson thinks himself over head and ears in love with my niece. What Patsy thinks I do not know—probably that young men were created for that purpose and that one is very like another."

"At his age I should certainly have been most deucedly in love with the lady," said the Earl.

"Just so," quoth Julian. "Now I do not know what plans you have for the future of the lad. I do not know Adam's mind. But even if your ideas happened to agree, which is unlikely—it would be a thousand times better for the young people to see something of life first. Let them have three years apart, meeting other people, getting little electric shocks which will surprise them amazingly, and then if you and Adam agree and the young people continue of a stable mind—why, there will be so much the less danger of their House of Life coming about their ears afterwards!"

The morning after the three Wise Men had sat in council together in the castle dining-room, Patsy Ferris and Louis Raincy climbed over opposite high walls and dropped almost simultaneously, and as naturally as ripe fruit falls, into the old orchard of Raincy. In the midst of the walled enclosure stood the marble mausoleum of the family, a heavily domed structure, drowned among high trees, through the narrow windows of which tombs and statues could be seen, and more than one De Raincy in his chain mail with his head on a marble pillow, his hands with the finger-tips joined, and a favourite dog at his feet.

The keys of the enclosure were in the Earl's own coffer, and the trees being too old for valuable fruit, the gardeners never went there, except once a year after the falling of the leaves, "to tidy up a bit, because one never knows what may happen," as old Steven the head gardener said. Even then the Earl came, and, sitting on a chair, surveyed their labours jealously, before locking up after them and going in to put away the key in its place for another year.

Patsy and Louis did not greet each other, though they had not met that morning. In the house one said, "Good morning," "I hope you passed a good night," and silly things like that, but not in the green shade of the old orchard. A weeping willow had been turned over in some winter gale many years ago, but had nevertheless managed to go on growing in its new position. It lay like a feathery plume along the side of the Raincy mausoleum. It was not the first time that Louis and Patsy had utilized it as a convenient seat.

The red squirrel who lived in one of the high pines dropped the husks of the larch tassels on which he was fond of browsing, upon their heads. But he did not chatter at them any more. He recognized a not remote kinship with people who had sense enough to come here to be out of the way, and he said as much to his own mate who was lying lazily curled in a big nest high up the bole of the pine which overtopped the white marble roof of the little chapel and looked clear away to sea and back to the towers of Castle Raincy.

"Patsy," said Louis, "they are going to separate us—I am sure of it. That was why your Uncle Julian came all the way from London."

"Well, let them," said Patsy, swinging her feet and poking at the grass with a branch she had stripped of willow leaves; "I suppose that even if you are at the castle and I at Cairn Ferris we can always come here or meet at the alder grove—why, there are a thousand places."

"Ah, but," said Louis, "I am to go into the army—and you are to go to London, to be taken care of by some great lady whom your Uncle knows!"

Patsy clapped her hands with sudden pleasure.

"Oh, that must be the Princess—Uncle Ju's princess—then I shall know her. It will be such fun!"

"No doubt—for you," said Louis, bitterly, "but since you are so glad to be away from me and with other people, you will the more easily forget all about me."

"Nonsense," said Patsy, "our people won't lock us in dungeons and feed us on bread and water. They don't do it now-a-days. And so will you like to go soldiering. Why, haven't you been moaning to me every day for years because your grandfather would not let you go to be an officer and see the world and fight? You owned that it was fun stopping the carriage and getting me out and riding home—"

"Oh, yes," said Louis, "I do not deny it a bit. I own I said so, but even there it was Stair Garland who had most to do with the real business."

"Well, you must own that he played the game pretty straight."

"Umph," growled Louis, "of course. So would any one!"

"Now, Louis," said Patsy, "don't be a hog. You know you have often said that Stair Garland was as good a gentleman as anybody. Of course, he is fond of me—"

"Has he told you?" cried Louis, starting up and glowering with clenched fists.

"What is that to you, sir?" Patsy retorted, biting her upper lip, while her black eyes shrank to glittering dots under the long lashes through which she considered the speaker. "Attend to your own business, Louis Raincy. It is no business of yours what Stair Garland has said to me, or what he may say!"

"But it is—it is!" cried Louis, shamelessly, stamping his foot.

Patsy swept her skirts aside and motioned with her hand.

"Sit down, little boy!" she said, "you are not built to sing on that key. I can. Your grandfather could, or Uncle Julian—"

"He has killed a man in a duel—another man, I mean—I heard them telling about it to-day in the stables...."

Patsy grew pale.

"Not the Prince!... He will be outlawed. Perhaps they will send him to prison or cut off his head."

"No, no," Louis broke in; "not the Prince, though that is a pity too. I should liked have a whack at him—"

"Well, never mind—Stair Garland had one, and they say that he will hardly ever walk straight again. But whom has Uncle Ju killed? I knew if he heard of it he would kill somebody. He did once before."

"Lord Wargrove. They fought on the beach at Calais. He came straight over to London to arrange about your going to his Princess, whoever she may be, and he arrived here at the castle while your father and my grandfather were sitting together after dinner spinning stories. He was for your going to London directly. He spoke to grandfather about me, too. Mother says he is a bloodthirsty wretch and no right Christian. But grandfather must have thought a lot of him or he would never have listened to a word about my going for a soldier. Now he has written to the Duke to get me a company, and there will be a lot of money to pay, also, which grandad won't like. I am to go to the dépôt immediately to learn the drill and so on. It is a blessing I can ride."

"I don't believe you will be sent to the war at all," said Patsy, "at least not for a while. So don't get cock-a-hoop. You will have a lot to learn, and you can persuade your grandfather, if you really want to see me, to open up his house in London, and then you can come and see me as often as you like."

"What, with a glorified Princess looking after you? I do not see myself, somehow!"

"Oh, you will learn," Patsy retorted carelessly. "Of course we have all got to do that. I don't want very much to leave all this. How should I? It is my country and my life, but I suppose they know best, and at any rate if they keep me too long, I can always run away. You could not do that, of course, when you are a soldier, for that would be desertion, and they would shoot you as they did Admiral Byng."

The bad business of their exodus from the Glens began to wear a brighter aspect for Louis Raincy. London with Patsy partook of the unknown and certainly adventurous. Every young fellow of spirit longs for money in his pocket to see the world, and at the worst Patsy would be well away from the neighbourhood of Stair Garland.

Then the next moment Louis was ashamed of his thought and strove to make amends.

"I wonder what will become of Stair if you go," he said. "I am afraid he will go the pace wilder than ever, and as like as not get into bad trouble."

"Before I go I shall speak to Stair myself," said Patsy with great determination. "He shot a prince of the blood for my sake; perhaps I can make him keep the peace for the same reason. At least for a while."

At this Louis sulked a little, so little indeed that no one but Patsy could have noticed. But she was down upon him like a hawk on a field mouse.

"See here," said Patsy, "this is no stock-in-trade to start out on. You sulk at the first mention of a man's name. I shall see hundreds in London. You will see as many women. I am only a little country girl staying with a great Princess, while you will be the heir to an earldom, besides having all the prestige of the uniform. Oh, I shall like that part of it myself, I don't deny. But I am not going to have you sulking because I speak to this man or dance with that man, or even tell you that I like one man better than another."

She paused, but Louis did not speak. So Patsy, after a long look at him, continued. "I don't know yet whether I love you as you mean, Louis Raincy—or whether I shall ever love any man. Certainly I am not going to cry about you or about anybody. I like you—yes—I like you better than any one I know except Uncle Julian, but not a bit like the lovers in books. So I suppose I am not in love. I would not have you climbing balconies or singing ditties in boats for half this country. I should want to be in bed and asleep. Some day, maybe, I shall love a man, and then I shall love him for take and have and keep. But it has just got to happen, Louis—and if it comes for somebody else, why, I rather think it will be so much the better for you. Come now, it is time to go home. Shake hands, and be friends—no, sir, nothing else. Wait a good quarter of an hour after I am gone. We don't know what is before either of us, but if you are going to whimper about what we can't help—I am not!"

She jumped on the first branches of the larch, still holding Louis's hand. As she let go she took a handful of his clustering curls and gave a cheerful tug to his head that brought the tears sharply to his eyes.

"Go off and try to fall in love with a dozen of the prettiest girls you can find in London, and if you don't succeed in three years, come back here and we will talk the matter all over again from the beginning."

She was now on the top of the wall. She turned her legs over deftly to the other side with a swirl of her skirts.

"Good-bye, Louis!" she said, waving a brown hand at him as she slid off into the wood. "Some day you will be more of a man than I, and then you will not let a girl put you down."

"Do you know what I think?" cried the boy, exasperated. "I think that you are a hard-hearted little wretch!"

But only the sound of Patsy's laughter rippled up mockingly from far down the glade.

CHAPTER XVII

PATSY HELD IN HONOUR

Patsy set out for London with some pomp and circumstance. Quite unwittingly she had made herself a kind of idol in the countryside. The tale had been told of how she had run to warn the Bothy of Blairmore, how she had faced the press-gang that the Glenanmays lads might have time to escape. She had been carried off and rescued. Men had been shot and died for her sake. Louis had taken her to Castle Raincy for safety, and now, girt with a formidable escort, she was setting out to visit London, where it was reported that she should see the King and be the guest of royalty itself.

The old Earl had offered his coach for the journey, and early one September morning he brought Patsy out on his arm, and threw in after her his own driving-coat, made after the fashion of the Four-in-Hand Club—the very "Johnny Onslow" model, with fifteen capes, silk-lined and finished,—lest she should take cold on the way.

"My dear," he said, "fain would I have made you a present of another sort, but your uncle tells me that you are amply supplied with pocket-money, and so you take with you an old man's good will, and would have his blessing, too, if only he thought that of any value!"

Patsy had said good-bye the night before to her Uncle Julian, and had received from him a netted purse which was even then weighing down her pretty beaded reticule. Patsy had not thought that there could be so much money in the world, and she had cried out, "Oh Uncle Ju, is all this really for me? What in the world shall I ever do with it?"

"You will spend it, my dear," he said smilingly, "that and far more. London is a great place for running away with money! There are so many pretty things to buy."

"Can't I give some of it to Stair Garland and his sister Jean?"

"I have no doubt that you would like to," said her uncle. "Was there ever a Wemyss yet who could be trusted not to throw away money? But it seems as if your Master Stair and I would be a good deal together in the future, and you may safely leave that part of it to me. Stair and Jean shall not lack."

"Uncle Ju," cried Patsy, almost dancing, "are you going to smuggle? What fun!"

"As you say, what fun! Well, there is some smuggling to be done, but I am the contraband goods this time, and I must trust your friend Stair to help me over the sea. He and I are marked down, and we shall both have to run and hide so long as we stay in this country. Even such paladins as he and I cannot go righting the wrongs of distressed maidens without a certain danger, when the ogres and giants are royal Princes and their favourites."

Thus, on the morning of the twenty-fourth of September, just one hundred years ago, Patsy was handed into the coach by Earl Raincy, who stood back with bared head to see her ride out of the courtyard of the Castle. Her father was on one side, mounted on his big black horse, and Louis Raincy guarded the left flank on "Honeypot." He was to convoy the party as far as Carlisle and then return.

But at the gate of Ladykirk stood a dainty old lady, equipped for journey. Miss Aline was going to London. She was quite shaking with the excitement, and pulled at her openwork mitts with smiling expectancy.

"My dear," she said, "I am coming with you. I think it is more proper. I shall set you down at the house where you propose to stay, and I have taken a room at Ibbetson's Hotel, which is a well-known house, at very reasonable charges, much frequented by the clergy."

"Oh, Miss Aline," cried Patsy, "I am sure you are giving yourself a great deal of trouble. You would be much better at Ladykirk."

"'Deed then no," said Miss Aline, dropping into the vacant place beside Patsy. "'Tis the only chance I shall ever have to see London before I die, and I have given Tibbie, the cook, all instructions about the plums and the heather honey. The jam has been a great fret to me this year, and I deserve a bit jaunt. So I will e'en ride in this braw carriage all the road to London, and Eelen Young, the lass that does for me, will bring on my kists by the coach. She is a clever wench, and very likely will be at Ibbetson's before me. At any rate I have nothing with me but this bandbox with a night-rail and a change of apparel, such as is suitable for posting-inns. You have, I see, plenty of men-folk to escort you, and, as I jalouse, more to follow—but what you need is a well-born gentlewoman of comfortable means for a duenna! Oh, ye will try to come round me with your 'Miss Aline's,' and your coaxing. But as long as ye are under my care, off to bed ye shall march at a reasonable hour. Then I shall lock the door on ye and keep the key under my pillow. I lost ye once out of Ladykirk when ye slippit out at the back door. But this time ye shall have a better gaoler. Hear ye that, Mistress Patsy?"

There was nothing to be said, and, indeed, it was a great sacrifice which Miss Aline was making in the upturning of all her cherished habits, and the abandoning of her dear Ladykirk in the season of all others which she preferred—the time, as she expressed it, "of the ingathering of the fruits of the earth."

The "more to follow," by which Miss Aline had intimated an addition to Patsy's escort, was in waiting a little farther on at the head of the Long Wood. Stair Garland and twenty-five of his best horsed and most gallant lads stood waiting to fall in behind the carriage. As Patsy came near she put her head out at the window and cried, "Oh, Stair, is it safe?"

But Stair only smiled, and took his broad blue bonnet off with a sweep which caused the eagle's plume in it to touch the dust. The twenty-five behind him uncovered also. They made a gallant show, every man with his carbine slung over his shoulder by the broad bandolier strap which crossed his chest, his cloak and provender rolled on the pommel of his saddle, and his bridle and spurs jingling as the ponies fidgeted restlessly in the narrow space.

Then Stair commanded, "File out there," as the carriage rumbled into the shades of the wood and took the direction of the White Loch, and Patsy remembered that other journey and the dreadful uncertainty of it. She shut her eyes and recalled it till she shuddered so that Miss Aline asked if she were cold. She had never lost faith in her friends even then, and now Louis was riding close to the left window of the carriage, and Stair Garland, with his horsemen, guarding her, sending her forth out of her own country as hardly a Princess had ever left Galloway.

They sent the Earl's team back from Dumfries. Stair Garland and his company rode with them over the wild marshes of Solway moss to the Bridge of Gretna, where they formed into two lines, and between them Patsy passed into England. Patsy looked out and kissed her hand to them. They were all sitting still on their wiry little beasts except Stair, who had dismounted, and stood uncovered till the carriage, with its two flanking riders, had passed into the distance. Stair got blown a kiss all to himself, but if he saw it he took no notice, and so was left standing pensive and motionless by the end of Gretna Bridge, the last thing that Patsy could see on Scottish ground, except the top of Criffel wreathed in thin pearly mist of the evening.

Louis, save for the glory of keeping on a little farther than Stair Garland, might very profitably have gone back with the troop of twenty-five. Few would observe too closely the road chosen by such a cavalcade. Supervisors drew back into convenient shelters. Outposts on craggy summits, after one long look, shut up the reglementary brass three-draw spy-glass and sat down with their backs to the road to smoke a pipe. But Louis Raincy was to stay a night at Corby Castle before turning his face homeward again towards his mother and grandfather.

When the time came to part Patsy held out her hand frankly to Louis.

"Thank you for coming so far," she said, "I shall not say good-bye, for we shall soon be meeting in London, and you will be ever so grand in your new uniform. The ladies will dote upon you. I shall tell them all you are coming."

"Patsy," said poor Louis, "you are very cruel to me. You know I shall only care for you in all the world."

"Fudge!" said Patsy irreverently, "you will like every single one of the pretty girls—the really pretty girls, I mean—who admire you, and if you don't know I shall tell you what to say to them."

"Patsy—!"

"Yes, I know, so you think now, but wait till you have had two or three months of being an officer of dragoons and the heir to an earldom—I wager that no Waters of Lethe would make you forget your old comrade Patsy Ferris so completely!"

"Oh, Patsy," groaned Louis, "do not laugh!—You did not use to talk like that in our nest under the big beech. Do not break my heart!"

"Strange to think," mused Patsy, "that it will not even affect his appetite. Louis Raincy, cock your beaver on the side of your head. Cry, 'I don't care a button for you, Patsy Ferris' and ride away without once looking behind, and if you could do that—I verily believe I should run after you. But let me tell you, sir, whimpering never won a woman—at least not one like me!"

She turned and entered the carriage, which started at once on its pleasant journey through the Westmoreland dales towards the south.

Miss Aline was sitting with her handkerchief to her eyes when Patsy sat down beside her.

"Why, what in the world is the matter, dear Miss Aline?" cried Patsy.

"I do think you might have been kinder to him," said the old lady. "I could not bear you to send him away like that."

"All for his good," said Patsy easily. "He has been too long mollied over by his mother, besides getting all his own way from his grandfather. But ... before I finish I shall make a man of Master Louis!"

"And Stair Garland?" ventured Miss Aline, taking one swift glance sidelong at Patsy's dark, decided face.

"Oh, Stair Garland," said Patsy with emphasis, "he is a man already. As old Dupont, my French governess, used to say, Stair Garland was born with the 'panache.'"

"And what does that mean?"

"Why, that he was born with his hat-plume in the wind and his hand on a sword-hilt. But I am not sure that he has not been born a century or so too late. What a soldier of fortune he would make, what a cavalry leader, what an adventurer—what a lover!"

"But, my dear," said Miss Aline, speaking very softly, "what a very dangerous man to think of marrying!"

Patsy slid her hand under the silken half-mitt of fine lace and stroked the little dry, trembling hand which nestled into hers.

"Little angel, I am not thinking of marrying Stair Garland," she laughed; "rest easy in that dear peaceful soul of yours."

"I am so glad," said Miss Aline, furtively dabbing at her eyes. "Louis, there, is like a boy of my own, and he has always been good and brave. One feels so safe with him—"

"Oh, please don't turn me against the poor lad!" cried Patsy, stuffing her fingers into her ears that she might hear no more of Louis Raincy's praises.

"And the other—that Stair Garland?" Miss Aline continued, with a certain unusual sharpness, "he is so wild. He rides at the head of gangs of smugglers and defies everybody, even the minister and my Lord Raincy. I am sure that he would be very insusceptible to proper domestic influences. I doubt if even you could tame him."

"I doubt if I should want him tamed!" said Patsy, with the same dark gleam in her eye with which her uncle had gone out upon Calais sands to kill my Lord Wargrove.

And at this gentle Miss Aline sighed. She did not always understand Patsy.

CHAPTER XVIII

UNCLE JULIAN'S PRINCESS

A blue-eyed, placid woman, with abundant fair hair of the sort which hardly ever turns grey, came forward to receive Patsy. The drawing-room of Hanover Lodge was long, and the windows looked on the river. Patsy flitted forward with her usual lightness. She was not in the least intimidated, but only regarded with immense interest the woman who had loved her Uncle Julian and was still his faithful friend.

Patsy had had it in her mind to kiss the hand of the Princess, but she, divining her intention, caught the girl in her arms and pressed her close, kissing her on the cheek and forehead after some foreign fashion.

"You have come from Julian," she murmured, "you are very like him—the daughter of his only sister. I shall love you well!"

"And this is my father!" said Patsy, who as usual took command of the situation, as soon as there was a man anywhere about to be told what to do. "Come forward, father!"

But though the laird of Cairn Ferris was only a country gentleman who had seldom left the bounds even of his parish, he was come of good blood and had been well brought up. He kneeled on one knee to kiss her hand, perhaps not with the courtly grace of the ex-ambassador, his brother-in-law, but still with a dignity which was altogether manly.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Ferris of Cairn Ferris," said the Princess Elsa. "I have never seen your beautiful land, but the best and wisest men I have known have belonged to your nation—the courtliest and truest gentlemen, both with sword and tongue."

She was silent a moment, and both Patsy Ferris and her father understood that she was thinking of Julian Wemyss. Then she added very thoughtfully, "I have spent a great part of my life among men who do not speak the truth to women, and would think themselves shamed if they did. Therefore I have learned how to cherish men of their word, and these I have found among men of your nation."

"I fear me, your Highness," said Adam, smiling darkly, "that I could not give my countrymen so wholesale a certificate for truth-speaking; but I can also promise you that our Patsy will not lower your opinion of her nation in that respect. Rather she speaks before she thinks, this maid, and so gets herself and other people into much trouble."

Adam remained at Hanover Lodge for lunch, a meal which his hostess called breakfast, and which was served in the continental fashion, every dish separate. The well-styled domestics, in their black liveries on which the device of the galloping horse stood out on each side of the collar, moved noiselessly about, seeming to fade away and leave the room empty when there was no need for their presence, and yet to be behind everybody's chair at the right moment. He bethought him of his own honest James and William who often had scarcely time to discard the gardening clogs or lay down the wood-splitting axe in order to pull on their livery coats, and so began to understand that there were degrees of perfection in servitude.

Certainly Patsy would learn many things here, but would she ever come back to be just his own wild, frank, helter-skelter maid? He doubted it. And it was no comfort to him to reflect that it was for that very purpose he was letting her go, that she might be under the care of this great lady. Well, his brother-in-law must know what was best, certainly, and the Princess—Julian's Princess—appeared to take very well to Patsy. But oh, Cairn Ferris and the Abbey Burnfoot would be lonely places without her. And the lads who had escorted her like a queen! Clearly it was better that she should not run altogether wild, being what she was and the favour of men so easy to be won. But—it was hard, also, for he was a lonely man. And it was with a very heavy heart that Adam Ferris took leave of his daughter.

No, he would not stay. He was responsible for Patsy's share in the general quiet of the country. In her absence he knew very well that the temptation to break out would be almost too great for Stair Garland and his friends. He would have more influence with them than any one else. Therefore he would betake himself back to Galloway straightway.

To the Princess, who demanded a reason for this haste, he answered, "Madam, I must go back and keep my country quiet. We are, you know, somewhat turbulent in the North."

"You do well," she said gravely, speaking as one accustomed to government. "I hear that there is much lawlessness in your lands, and for that reason I am glad to be able to shelter your daughter. It is very well for men to wield the sword and hold the scales of justice, but a young maid will be safer in Hanover Lodge."

"All the same I am losing one of my best lieutenants—indeed the best," said Patsy's father.

And with that he kissed her and was gone. Patsy watched him as he walked down the avenue towards the river, where he would find a waterman to carry him to town. Adam Ferris had a stoop in his shoulders she never remembered to have noticed before. For the first time it struck her that her father was growing old.

Something caught her in the throat, something dry and hard that swelled but would not break. She could have run after him and told him that she would not stay without him. But the Princess, who had been watching keenly, took her by the hand and, whispering that she had something to say to her, drew her into a little boudoir looking out on a garden, all shaven lawns, artificial ponds, in which stately swans moved slowly up and down with a barge-like gallant manner as though they were accustomed to take part in royal processions.

"And now," said the Princess Elsa, drawing Patsy down on a sofa by the window, "let me look at you that I may see what it is that sets all the men agate to be carrying you off, and fighting duels about you. I suppose a woman cannot always tell, just because she is a woman. But I can see that you are vivid with life. You shine like a black pearl—"

Patsy drew in her breath sharply at the word.

"That was what he called me," she said nervously, looking about the room as if she expected her sometime captor to appear.

"He? Who? That wretch of a Lyonesse? Do not trouble your pretty head. He will not come near Hanover Lodge—neither he nor any of his brothers, except perhaps poor Billy."

The Princess did not further embarrass Patsy by prolonging her inspection. She began to talk of Galloway and of the people whom Patsy knew. Nothing loath was Patsy to pour out her soul on such a subject. This was Uncle Julian's Princess, and though she seemed older than she had anticipated—fairy princesses should at least always remain slim—she had all the gracefully placid beauty and the exquisite manners she had looked forward to.

Patsy told of Louis Raincy and his grandfather—of Castle Raincy and the four hundred-year-old feud between the Raincys and the Ferrises. She told the story of her rescue, and how Stair had shot the Duke, while Louis kept the horses to be ready for the return.

"And what is this Stair Garland?" the Princess asked. "The son of a yeoman, and not the eldest son. Ah, I understand—the cadet, the adventurous one. We have some such in our armies, and many more in the Austrian service. Perhaps we will send your Stair to wear the white uniform. It would become him rarely. And which of the two do you like the best?"

The last question was unexpected, but it was not a habit of Patsy's to be embarrassed—at least, not for long.

"Oh," she said crisply, "these are only two—there are others, and so far I have felt no desire to make any choice. I foresee that if the malady takes me, I am more likely to run away with the man than he with me. Uncle Ju says that is the way with our family. I am really more like my mother's people than the Ferrises—so at least every one says."

"Did not your father run away with an earl's daughter from the door of some ball-room?" the Princess asked.

"It was the Edinburgh Assembly rooms, but Uncle Ju says that it was my mother who ran away with him!"

"That," said the Princess, in a low tone, "I can very well believe. So you have yet to fall in love! Well, my advice to you is, do not put it off too long, young lady. And when once you have made up your mind, stick to your man though he were a baker's apprentice!"

"You talk just like Uncle Ju, Princess," said Patsy, smiling, "only that he wants me to see as much of the world as I can before—taking your advice."

"What does your Uncle say?" the Princess Elsa asked gently, not looking at the girl but beyond her out into the hazily bright garden.

"Well, if you know him, you will remember that it is difficult to separate what he really means from what he only says, because he means to tease. But at any rate he warns me not to run off with the first tight-girthed youth with a curly head who tells me he loves me. As if I were likely to! Why, I can hardly remember the time when somebody was not making love to me, and I do not see that it has made very much difference."

"No," mused the Princess, a smile of quiet amusement in her blue eyes, "but you are not at the world's end yet, and now we must go to town and get something wherewithal to fit you out."

"Uncle Ju has given me such a lot of money, Princess," said Patsy, jumping up, "shall I go and bring it? There is enough to pay for ever so many dresses. If I were to live to be a thousand I don't think I could spend all that!"

"Your Uncle Julian is a wonderful man," said the Princess Elsa, "he has a purse as long and as ready as his sword. And what he gave you was no more than a little pin-money, just to keep in your pocket, so that you would not need to be coming all the time to me for everything that you might want. But he has put a great sum in the bank for me to use for you, and so you need have no care as to your ball and court dresses and all your fineries—except the worry of having them fitted, which I find a very great one indeed."

Then the Princess broke out in a new place.

"And did Julian send you all the way to London without a maid? Surely such a man knew better than that. I shall scold him when I see him, but I suppose it will be a long time before he dare come to London."

"He said that he would first need to make his peace with the Prince Regent, and I don't believe he will do anything in the matter himself."

"Well, he has friends, and we can afford to let the killing of such a man as Lord Wargrove in a loyal duel stand to his credit a little while longer. Yet perhaps we may see him sooner than we expect. Your uncle, child, is at once the most reliable and the most unexpected of men!"

Patsy let this drop. It was clearly a reflection of the Princess upon which she was not required to comment. So she went back to the question of travelling without a maid.

"It is true," she said, "that I had no maid—these are rather scarce in Galloway. I only know of Lady Raincy (Louis's mother, that is) who has one, and she is always changing. But the dearest lady in the world came with me—you would love her—Miss Aline Minto of Balmacminto. One day I shall bring her to see you!"

"What is the reason she did not come with you here?" said the Princess.

"Dear lady," said Patsy (the minx had learned her modes of address from her uncle), "she is too shy. No, she is not at all the type of old maid—she is not an old maid at all. She has a good estate, and I know that Uncle Ju has to go to Ladykirk often to keep at bay suitors for the estate and for Miss Aline's hand."

"Ah, has he, indeed?" said the Princess, at once showing interest; "then I must make haste to see this Miss Aline of Ladykirk—what a pretty name and style. I don't believe I could get my tongue round the title of her estate. And so Julian acts as her protecting angel—"

"Oh," said Patsy calmly, "there is no love-making in it, you understand—they are both too old, of course. But Julian is the handsomest and richest bachelor in our parts, and Miss Aline—well, she is Miss Aline and owner of the Balmacminto estates. So I think she and uncle make—what is it called?—a kind of defensive and offensive alliance. I know Uncle Ju had nearly to fight old Sir Bunny Bunny the other day. He interviewed the old fellow. He had come to propose his son, who is such a donkey that the very village urchins bray after him and pretend to munch thistles!"

"Let us go and see Miss Aline!" said the Princess, and rang the bell. "Where did you say she was living—at a hotel—why did she not go to friends? It is so much more convenable for a lady travelling alone!"

"Well," said Patsy, "I think her aunt the countess is away, and I am not sure whether she would wish to put herself under an obligation. Then Lord Raincy is coming to town next week or so to place his grandson in the dragoons, but his house is not opened up yet. Of course, Miss Aline would have gone there. My father wanted to take her back to Ladykirk—it is so safe and peaceful. No soldiers or press-gangs or smugglers ever go there, for Miss Aline is like something sacred—so unable to take care of herself that everybody must look after her!"

"And particularly Julian?" observed the Princess, with a spark in the blue eyes.

"As you say, dear lady," retorted Patsy maliciously, "especially Uncle Julian!"

"Order the carriage!" said the Princess.