The McBrides Part 13

"They're in there like rabbits in a patch of corn in the harvest,"

cried one man.

"By G.o.d, if I could only get that Ronny McKinnon under my bonny blue hanger," said Gilchrist, the ganger that had the soft side for Mirren Stuart.

"One good prog wid pay for this night's daftness," growled his leader, and again came Gilchrist's voice--

"Was I tae ken McKinnon was ootside Finlay Stuart's and a dozen o' ye in the kitchen."

"Umph," sniffed Ronny, "it's the great company that gathers at Finlays," and indeed Mirren Stuart saved many's the house at that time, for the gangers and excis.e.m.e.n went after her sisters, while old Finlay smiled grimly, and Mirren got hold of the secrets.

"If a man runnin' like that Gilchrist can blurt oot the news and keep runnin', it's maistly truth, but if he stops and begins to walk, and twist his mouth before he speaks, he's makin' lies," said McKinnon, and turned himself in the water.

The searchers were beginning to tire of beating.

"Roast the devil oot." "Ay, gie McBride a taste o' the fire."

"I'm thanking G.o.d for a fool," said Dan, "if the whins will just burn, but whins are dour revengefu' bushes."

"Burn," says Ronny--"burn; they'll hiv a bleeze ye'll see for twenty miles--we're bate, Dan."

"Na, na," says Dan. "Wait you, yonder's a twinkle, anither. Man, they'll mak' a bonny lowe, and waste a heap of good keep."

Men were rushing hither and thither with flaming branches, and already, when the breeze freshened, you could hear the roar and crackle. The great lilac flames leapt ten feet in the air, and the night rained stars. The sparks fell above us like fire-flakes, and some came down and sizzled out in our pool.

When the flames were roaring like a hurricane, Dan spoke softly--

"We'll go now."

"Are ye daft?" said Ronny.

"Ye don't ken the effect o' a fire like that," said Dan. "A man must look at it, and see the lowes ploofin' into the sky, and the sparks fleein'. He canna help himsel'. The horses will be needing a lot o'

handling too, and the men on the low side'll just hiv tae run tae winward or lie in the burn, for the heat o' whuns is terrible. They'll a' face the flames waitin' till we run oot like bleezin' deevils, and they're sae sure that we will start every moment, they will not lift their eyes for fear they will be missing the sight o' us."

"We must just risk it," said I, "for I'm like to freeze here."

Dan put his head out of our hole and crawled out, and I followed, and Ronny last. We could feel the air warm, and the night was clear as day, and yet the searchers stood gazing at their fire as Dan had said.

We crawled flat like snakes, keeping among dark patches as much as we could, till we came to the turf d.y.k.e, and still our pursuers tended the fire. Slowly and softly we crossed into heather, and lay for a minute.

Then, looking down across the common, Dan threw back his head and laughed in his silent fashion.

"We're among our ain heather now, Hamish," says he. "In an hour we'll be among the peat hags. I've a mind tae whistle them up."

"I've lain long enough in the water, Dan," said I.

"Aweel," says he, "we'll just make McAllan's Locker for it; eh, Ronny?"

And again we started to run, zigzagging to the dark bits till we crossed the first rise, and we stood looking back. The whins were all ablaze and the trees in the belting standing out clear, and the little figures still running with the torches.

[1] Steep.

[2] Opening.

CHAPTER XII.

McALLAN'S LOCKER.

Over the first rise of the hills was a long dreary waste--treeless, awesome, desolate. Whiles, as we ran, a curlew would rise, and its long whirling cry rose in the night, filling the ears and leaving an emptiness afterwards in the silence, for things not canny to be filling. Once we startled a herd of red-deer feeding round the mossy lips of a frozen pool, and away they galloped. One lordly stag wheeled with antlers high, gazed at our flight, and vanished, leaving us in that dreadful stillness, and a cold eerie wind whined and sighed over us. We spoke little, having no breath to spare, for the ground was growing more steep and broken towards the second rise, up which we clambered, sliding and falling, grasping frozen heather till we reached the top. The hill was now a riddle of peat hags and binks, like a bee's skep, a place of treachery and slimy death, although the frost would have most of the sinking pools in its iron hand; but we never stopped the long stride that seemed so slow to me at first. Dan bent and twisted through the peat banks like a hound on the trail. Here was a place where folk had wrought, cutting their fuel for generations; and G.o.d knows what memories were lurking here from the old days, what ghosts of love and hatred, what spirits of tears and laughter. Would the race never end? My tongue, dry and swollen, stuck raspily against the roof of my mouth. Round my lips was a hot fire, for I had grasped a handful of snow and melted it in my mouth as I ran. We were past the peat hags, and the ground fell away under our feet; the heather got scantier and sprits more common, until we had descended, maybe, five hundred feet into a wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs. Here was the great grazing for young beasts in the summer, away here in the glen, but now only stillness and desolation. A wide burn rumbled and splashed on its gravelly banks in front of us, and we could hear the deep noise of a waterfall.

"Hold in to the fall," cried McKinnon, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e as a raven's.

"I ken this like the back o' my hand," said Dan, and led us, with never a break, to an easy crossing.

And now we took the greatest care of our going, for a great hill rose before us steep, as it seemed to me, as the wall of a house, and then all our care was made useless, for the snow began again.

Slowly, blindly we clambered and spelled up the hillside, now numb with cold, now fiery hot, Dan always in the lead, and me groaning at his hurdie.

"Keep a stout heart, Hamish; this is the last o't."

We were now, as it were, on a ladder on the hill face, for there were a succession of great holes like steps, on each of which three men could stand--the giant's steps, the old folks called them.

At the back of the step where we three lay was a grey rock, as though the earth had been worn away, leaving the rock partly bare. As we lay Dan struck it three times with a stone about the size of a putting-ball, and a great low baying sounded, and my blood ran cold, and then the grey rock moved inch by inch, and I heard a great rift of Gaelic, and Dan went crawling like a snake through the hole, and myself and McKinnon at his heels.

"Welcome, hearty welcome; whatever drives ye sae fast. Welcome to McAllan's Locker."

"It's latish for ceilidhing," said Dan. "I'm hoping me and my friends are not putting ye out in any ways, but just a shakedown o' breckans is all we're asking, and thankful for it."

"Better the bottom o' the locker than the end o' the cable. Sit ye doon and warm yourself."

I was sore done wi' the long running, and lay on the rook floor with my head on my arms, and I felt as a hound feels after a long chase, till the caveman answered Dan. At the first I thought his tongue had been malformed as he stood in the light, for a growling and grumbling came from his throat; and as he growled, from the darkness of the chamber a great brindled dog stalked to his side and stretched his fore-paws, opened a mouth like a red pit, and whined with outstretched curling tongue.

"He would tear down a stag, him," says Dan, nodding at the brute.

Again came the growling rumbling from the stranger.

"Hark tae him, Marr; hark tae him--a stag. Ho, ho, ho! He would tear a man's throat oot at his first leap," and man and dog rumbled and growled in devilish mirth. "Sing tae me, dog--sing," and the man threw his head up, and there came the long greeting howl of a dog baying the moon, and dog and man howled in unison, with swaying bodies and heads thrown upwards.

"G.o.d, but the open hill's a bonny place," said McKinnon, and a shiver went over him. In this terrible place we lay the night--a great gloomy forbidding place in the belly of the hill. Shiver on shiver went through me as I looked round me. The walls were rock, bare and dry, converging high up in the gloom; for there was just the peat fire and a cruisie alight. Once, as though disturbed in its sleep, I heard a rock-pigeon "rookatihoo coo-a" away above me in some cranny that must open on the hill face. The smoke curled up in a rude dry-stone chimney for about five or six feet against the rock, and the bulk of it still ascended in a column, although the chimney stopped, but a waving pall hung over the cave, swaying and undulating in long waves and streamers, and the air below was cool and fresh. There were great carvings on the walls--warriors and ships, galleys and horses a-rearing, and on a flat stone projecting from the chimney, and serving as the brace or mantelpiece, were models of ships made from the breast-bones of birds, some quite large and others very small, and needing an infinite deal of patience. There were rough stools and a table, all of which must have been made inside the cave, and, indeed, the bark was dry and brittle on the legs. Great bundles of heather, fashioned like narrow beds, lay along the wall in the firelight, and like a dark unwinking eye the light glimmered on a pool. There were square steps cut in the rock down to the pool, which was shaped like a horn spoon with the handle cut off short, and the water entering it from a crack in the rock, noiselessly as oil, trickled silently away in a little sloping gutter to the back of the cavern. Who first discovered the cavern I never knew, but by the fire lay, twisted and blackened, the hilt and half of a sword, and in a corner a black and rust-pitted breastplate. The back part of the cave narrowed, and through a pa.s.sage the Nameless Man pa.s.sed to bring us meat and drink. Have you walked on a bare moor road in the pit mirk wi' a drizzle of soft mist in a silence you could hear?

Have you felt the fear coming over you, like a cold hand on your heart, when ye knew that a thing gibbered and mouthed at your side? Well, the thought o' that man, the Nameless Man, brings fear to me in a lighted room.

For he was a dead white man, his hair, lank and white, hung round his shoulders, his beard was slimy and soft as a white hare's, face and hands cold, dead white, and his features were frozen.

No trace of any feeling showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good G.o.d's sunlight.

As we ate, Dan told him some of our story, and the Nameless Man sat, a handful of his beard in his hand, his elbow on the table, and his eyes growing and fading.

"I'm sair feart I left him deid," said Dan. "If they come for us, dog, when we're lying at the still and the good water turnin' to fine whisky--and the good nice water, trickling and dripping through the rocks for a hundred years--if they creep upon us, dog, what will we be doing, you and me, Marr? Ho--ho--ho! killing them, eh? Leaving their bones wi' the white bones away in there--the old, old bones," and dog and man made a howling of laughter. I knew then that this was the watcher of a smugglers' still; for let the gang o' Preventives do their worst, whisky would still be made in the hills.

It came to me then why the folk would be leaving peats for the wee folks, as they said, when they would be taking down the creels from the hills; for the Nameless Man threw more on the fire from some hidden store, likely nearer his worm, when we had finished eating. The great dog lay at the rock by which we entered, and I saw that the stone was swung on a balance; but if there was a way to open from the outside I never knew till long after. McKinnon and Dan lay talking, but I was silent for the most part, thinking of the sword and the armour, and of the people who fashioned the well, and wondering about the old, old bones away through the dark pa.s.sage into the heart of the hill. The far, far-away stories were in my mind of Finn and his warriors, of his great dogs and his queens. Did Ossian the bard tune his harp to great deeds, and to lovely women of the land of the Ever Young, in the cave of the past? Into my musings--for sleep had nearly come over me--broke the voice of the Nameless Man.