John Splendid Part 11

"We'll have to be moving before long," said Sir Donald, ruefully looking at them one day--so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingers round the dirk-hilts.

He had said the true word.

It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lift a hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in gra.s.s and bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyes were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry further.

For once John Splendid's cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way.

"I could have stabbed him where he stood," he said afterwards, "for I was in the shadow at his elbow;" but he forgot that the fire whose embers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite as well as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered only struck him when the man, after but one glance in, went bounding down the hill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.

It was "Bundle and Go" on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of the hill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in the direction of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fall upon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we came upon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in the heart of the forest of Creag Dubh,--or rather more on the upper edge of it,--their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of the mountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-trees lay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, with the wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charred arms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or about these once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them, had been spared by the robbers.

But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our way along the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sure to have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was bound to be round it.

It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and raw in the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves and moss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick nor ma.s.sive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, so that we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation.

We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our first check came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But there was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, plopping and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry--a laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder than a child's toy.

On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump of beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whin and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us, and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of Dunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which, with its moat and guns, and its secret underground pa.s.sage to the seash.o.r.e, was safe against surprises or attacks through all this disastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle was beyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered us wonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream of domestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.

"Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be," said John, digging herb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger, for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.

I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we must pa.s.s on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandary as ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald--good old soul!--he was now, as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendid helped him to.

We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the whole of us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by the spreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the _bruach_ we were invisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of our retreat and disclose the three of us.

The hours pa.s.sed, with us ensconced there--every hour the length of a day to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred, for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We had talked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of such unnatural discourse, and began to sleep in s.n.a.t.c.hes for sheer lack of anything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfall at least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to our hiding.

I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil, and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense, our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness that swelled the noises of nature round about us--the wind, the river, the distant call of the crows--to a most clamorous and appalling degree.

We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on the stunted gra.s.s above us, and so certain seemed discovery that we had our little black knives lying naked along our wrists.

The suspense parched me at the throat till I thought the rasping of my tongue on the roof of my palate seemed like the sc.r.a.ping of a heath-brush in a wooden churn. Unseen we were, we knew, but it was patent that the man above us would be round in front of us at any moment, and there we were to his plain eyesight! He was within three yards of a steel death, even had he been Fin MacCoul; but the bank he was standing on--or lying on, as we learned again--crumbled at the edge and threw him among us in a different fashion from that we had looked for.

My fingers were on his throat before I saw that we had for our visitor none other than young MacLachlan.

He had his _sgian dubh_ almost at my stomach before our mutual recognition saved the situation.

"You're a great stranger," said John Splendid, with a fine pretence at more coolness than he felt, "and yet I thought Cowal side would be more to your fancy than real Argile in this vexatious time."

"I wish to G.o.d I was on Cowal side now!" said the lad, ruefully. "At this minute I wouldn't give a finger-length of the Loch Eck road for the whole of this rich strath."

"I don't suppose you were forced over here," I commented.

"As well here in one way as another," he said "I suppose you are unaware that Montrose and MacDonald have overrun the whole country. They have sacked and burned the greater part of Cowal; they have gone down as far as Knapdale. I could have been in safety with my own people (and the bulk of your Inneraora people too) by going to Bute or Dunbarton, but I could hardly do that with my kinsfolk still hereabouts in difficulties."

"Where, where?" I cried; "and who do you mean?"

He coughed, in a sort of confusion, I could see, and said he spoke of the Provost and his family.

"But the Provost's gone, man!" said I, "and his family too."

"My cousin Betty is not gone among them," said he; "she's either in the castle yonder--and I hope to G.o.d she is--or a prisoner to the MacDonalds, or----"

"The Worst Curse on their tribe!" cried John Splendid, in a fervour.

Betty, it seemed, from a narrative that gave me a stound of anguish, had never managed to join her father in the boats going over to Cowal the day the MacDonalds attacked the town. Terror had seemingly sent her, carrying the child, away behind the town; for though her father and others had put ash.o.r.e again at the south bay, they could not see her, and she was still unfound when the triumph of the invader made flight needful again.

"Her father would have bided too," said MacLachlan, "but that he had reason to believe she found the safety of the castle. Lying off the quay when the light was on, some of the people in the other boats saw a woman with a burden run up the riverside to the back of the castle garden, and there was still time to get over the draw-brig then."

MacLachlan himself had come round by the head of the loch, and by going through the Barrabhreac wood and over the shoulder of Duntorval, had taken Inneraora on the rear flank. He had lived several days in a bothy above the Beannan on High Balantyre, and, like ourselves, depended on his foraging upon the night and the luck of the woods.

We lay among the whins and bramble undisturbed till the dusk came on.

The rain had stopped, a few stars sedately decked the sky. Bursts of laughing, the cries of comrades, bits of song, came on the air from the town where the Irish caroused. At last between us and Dun-chuach there seemed to be nothing to prevent us venturing on if the bridge was clear.

"If not," said Sir Donald, "here's a doomed old man, for I know no swimming."

"There's Edinburgh for you, and a gentleman's education!" said John Splendid, with a dry laugh; and he added, "But I daresay I could do the swimming for the both of us, Sir Donald I have carried my accoutrements dry over a German river ere now, and I think I could convey you safe over yon bit burn even if it were not so shallow above the bridge as I expect it is after these long frosts."

"I would sooner force the bridge if ten men held it," said MacLachlan.

"I have a Highland hatred of the running stream, and small notion to sleep a night in wet tartan."

John looked at the young fellow with a struggle for tolerance. "Well, well," he said; "we have all a touch of the fop in our youth."

"True enough, you're not so young as you were once," put in MacLachlan, with a sly laugh.

"I'm twenty at the heart," cried John,--"at the heart, man,--and do my looks make me more than twice that age? I can sing you, or run you, or dance you. What I thought was that at your age I was dandified too about my clothing. I'll give you the benefit of believing that it's not the small discomfort of a journey in wet tartan you vex yourself over.

Have we not--we old campaigners of Lumsden's--soaked our plaids in the running rivers of Low Germanie, and rolled them round us at night to make our hides the warmer, our sleep the snugger? Oh, the old days! Oh, the stout days! G.o.d's name, but I ken one man who wearies of these tame and comfortable times!"

"Whether or not," said Sir Donald, anxious to be on, "I wish the top of Dunchuach was under our brogues."

"_Allons, mes amis_, then," said John, and out we set.

Out we went, and we sped swiftly down to the bridge, feeling a sense of safety in the dark and the sound of the water that mourned in a hollow way under the wooden cabars. There was no sentinel, and we crossed dry and safely. On the other side, the fields, broken here and there by dry-stone d.y.k.es, a ditch or two, and one long thicket of shrubs, rose in a gentle ascent to the lime-kiln. We knew every foot of the way as 'twere in our own pockets, and had small difficulty in pushing on in the dark. The night, beyond the kiln and its foreign trees, was loud with the call of white-horned owls, sounding so human sometimes that it sent the heart vaulting and brought us to pause in a flurried cl.u.s.ter on the path that we followed closely as it twisted up the hill.

However, we were in luck's way for once. Never a creature challenged our progress until we landed at the north wall of the fort, and crouching in the rotten brake, cried, "Gate, oh!" to the occupants.

A stir got up within; a torch flared on the wall, and a voice asked our tartan and business.

"Is that you, Para Mor?" cried John Splendid. "It's a time for short ceremony. Here are three or four of your closest friends terribly keen to see the inside of a wall."

"Barbreck, is't?" cried Para Mor, holding the flambeau over his head that he might look down on us.

"Who's that with the red tartan?" he asked, speaking of MacLachlan, whose garments shone garish in the light beside our dull Campbell country war-cloth.

"Condemn your parley, Para Mor," cried Sir Donald; "it's young MacLachlan,--open your doors!"

And the gate in a little swung on its hinges to pa.s.s us in.