Bog-Myrtle and Peat Part 39

"An' what brings the lang-leggit speldron howkin' an' scrauchlin' owre the Clints o' Drumore an' the Dungeon o' Buchan?" This was a question which none of Roy Campbell's audience felt able to answer. But each grasped his rusty Queen's-arm musket and bell-mouthed horse-pistol with a new determination. The stranger, whoever he might be, was manifestly unsafe. Roy Campbell had kept the intruder under observation for some time through the weather-beaten s.h.i.+p's prospect-gla.s.s which he had stayed c.u.mbrously on the edge of a rock. The man was poking about among rocks and _debris_ at the foot of one of the cliffs in which the granite hills break westward towards the Atlantic.

Roy Campbell, the watcher, was a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints--distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth. He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat. But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had taken daring as their stock-in-trade.

It was in the palmy days of the traffic with the Isle of Man, when that tight little island supplied the best French brandy for the drouthy lairds of half Scotland, also lace for the "keps" and stomachers of their dames, not to speak of the Sabbath silks of the farmer's goodwife, wherein she brawly showed that she had as proper a respect for herself in the house of G.o.d as my lady herself.

Solway sh.o.r.e was a lively place in those days, and it was worth something to be in the swim of the traffic; ay, or even to have a snug farmhouse, with perhaps a hidden cellar or two, on the main trade-routes to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Much of the stuff was run by the "Rerrick Nighthawks," gallant lads who looked upon the danger of the business as a token of high spirit, and considered that the revenue laws of the land were simply made to be broken--an opinion in which they were upheld generally by the people of the whole countryside, not excepting even those of the austere and Covenanting sort.

How Roy Campbell had found his way among the Westland Whigs is too long a story to be told--some little trouble connected with the days of the '45, he said. More likely something about a la.s.s. Suffice it that he had drawn himself into hold in a lonely squatter s.h.i.+eling deep among the fastnesses of the Clints o' Drumore. He had built the house with his own hands. It was commonly known to the few who ventured that way as "The Back o' Beyont." In the hills behind the hut, which itself lay high on the brae-face, were many caves, each with its wattling of woven wicker, over which the heather had been sodded, so that in summer and autumn it grew as vigorously as upon the solid hill-side. Here Roy Campbell, late of Glen Dochart, flourished exceedingly, in spite of all the Kennedys of the South.

So it was that from the Clints o' Drumore and from among the scattered boulder-shelters around it, Roy and his men had been watching this intrusive stranger. Suddenly Roy gave a cry, and the prospect-gla.s.s shook in his hand. A little after there came the far-away sound of a gun.

"Somebody has let a shot intil him," said Roy, dancing with excitement, "but it has no' been a verra good shot, for he's sittin' on a stane an'

rubbin' the croon o' his hat. Have I no telled you till I'm tired tellin' you, that there was no' be no shootin' till there was no fear o'

missin'? It is not good to have to shoot; but it iss a verra great deal waur to shoot an' miss. If that's Gavin Stevenson, the muckle nowt, I declare I'll brek his ramshackle blunderbuss owre his thick heid."

Taming for an instant his fury, the old man kept his eye on the distant point of interest, and the others fixed their eyes on him. Suddenly he leapt to his feet, uttering what, by the sound, were very strong words indeed, for they were in the Gaelic, a language in which it is good and mouth-filling to read the imprecatory psalms. When at last his feelings subsided to the point when his English returned to him, he said--

"May I, Roy Campbell, be boiled in my ain still-kettle, distilled through my ain worm, an' drucken by a set o' reckless loons, if that's no my ain Flora that's speakin' till the man himsel'!"

The old man himself seemed much calmed either by the outbreak or by the discovery he had made; but on several of the younger men among his followers the news seemed to have an opposite effect.

At the same moment, high on the hill-side above them, a young woman was talking to a young man. She had walked towards him holding a bell-mouthed musket in her hands. As she approached, the youth rose to his feet with a puzzled expression on his face. But there was no fear in it, only doubt and surprise, slowly fading into admiration. He put his forefinger and the one next it through the hole in his hat, and said calmly, since the young woman seemed to expect him to begin the conversation--

"Did you do this?"

"I took the gun from the man who did. The accident will not happen again!"

It seemed inadequate as an explanation, but there was something in the girl's manner of saying it which seemed to give the young man complete satisfaction. Then the speaker seated herself on a fragment of rock, and set her chin upon her hand. It was a round and rather prominent chin, and the young man, who stood abstractedly twirling his hat, making a pivot of the two fingers which protruded through the hole, thought that he had never seen a chin quite like it. Or perhaps, on second thoughts, was it that dimple at the side of the mouth, in which an arch mockery seemed to be lurking, which struck him more? He resolved to think this out. It seemed now more important than the little matter of the hole in the hat.

"You had better go away," said the young girl suddenly.

"And why?" asked the young man.

"Because my father does not like strangers!" she said.

Again the explanation appeared inadequate, but again the youth was satisfied, finding reason enough for the dislike, mayhap, either in the dimple on the prominent chin, or in the hole by which he twirled his hat.

"Do you come from England?" he asked, referring to her accent.

The girl rose from her seat as she answered--

"Oh, no, I come from the 'Back o' Beyont'! What is your name?"

"My name," said the young man stolidly, "is Hugh Kennedy; and I am coming soon to the 'Back o' Beyont,' father or no father!"

It was a dark night in August, brightening with the uncertain light of a waning moon, which had just risen. High up on a mountain-side a man was hastening along, running with all his might whenever he reached a dozen yards of fairly level ground, desperately clinging at other times with fingers and knees and feet to the niches in the bare slates which formed the slippery roofing of the mountain-side. As he paused for a long moment, the moon turned a scarred and weird face towards him, one-half of it apparently eaten away. Panting, he resumed his course, and the pebbles that he started rattled noisily down the mountain-side. But as he drew near the top of the ridge up which he had been climbing, he became more cautious. He raced no more wildly, and took care that he loosened no more boulders to go trundling and thundering down into the valley. Here he crawled carefully among the bare granite slabs which lay in hideous confusion--the weather-blanched bones of the mountain, each casting an ebony shadow on its neighbour. He looked over the ridge into the gulf through which the streams sped westward towards the Atlantic. A deep glen lay beneath him--over it on the other side a wilderness of rugged screes and sheer precipices. Opposite, to the east, rose the solemn array of the Range of Kells, deep indigo-blue under the gibbous moon. There were the ridges of towering Millfore, the shadowy form of Millyea, to the north, the mountain of the eagle, Ben Yelleray, with his sides gashed and scarred. But the young man's eyes instinctively sought the opener s.p.a.ce between the precipices, whence the face of the loch glimmered like steel on which one has breathed, in the scanty moonbeams.

Hugh Kennedy had come as he said to seek the Back o' Beyont, and, by his familiarity and readiness, he sought it not for the first time.

Surmounting the ridge, he wormed his way along the sky-line with caution, till, getting his back into a perpendicular cleft down the side of the mountain, he cautiously descended, making no halt until he paused in the shadow of the precipice at the foot of the perilous stairway. A plain surface of benty turf lay before him, bright in the moonlight, dangerous to cross, upon which a few sheep came and went. A little burn from the crevice of the rocks, through which he had descended, cut the green surface irregularly. Into this the daring searcher for hidden treasure descended, and p.r.o.ne on his face pushed his way along, hardly a pennon of heather or a spray of red sorrel swaying with his stealthy pa.s.sage.

At the end of the gra.s.sy level the little burn fell suddenly with a ringing sound into a basin of pure white granite--a drinking-cup with a yard-wide edge of daintiest silver sand. The young man made his way hastily across the water to a little bower beneath the western bank, overhung with birch and fern, half islanded by the swift rush of the mountain streamlet. Here a tiny circle of stones lay on the sand. Hugh Kennedy stooped to examine their position with the most scrupulous care.

Five black at intervals, and a white one to the north with a bit of ribbon under it.

"That means," he said, "that the whole crew are out, and they are expecting a cargo from the south. The white stone to the north and the bit ribbon--Flora is waiting, then, at the Seggy Goats."

He strained his eyes forward, but they could see nothing. Far away to the south he heard voices, and a gun cracked. "I'm well off the ridge,"

he muttered; "they could have marked me down like a foumart as I ran.

They'll be fetching a cargo up from the Brig o' Cree," he added, "and it'll be all Snug at the 'Back o' Beyont' before the morning." He listened again, and laughed low to himself, the pleased laugh a lover laughs when things are speeding well with him.

"Maybe," said he, "Roy Campbell may miss something from the 'Back o'

Beyont' the morrow's morn, that a score of casks of Isle of Man brandy will not make up for."

So saying, he took his way back through the low, overgrown cavity of the runnel. When he was midway he heard a step coming across the heath, brus.h.i.+ng through the "gall"[8] bushes, splas.h.i.+ng through the shallow pools. A foot heavily booted crashed through the half-concealed tunnel, not six inches from where the young man lay, a gun was discharged, evidently by the sudden jerk upon the earth, and the air was rent above him by a perfect tornado of vigorous Gaelic--a good language, as has been said, for preaching or swearing.

[Footnote 8: The bog-myrtle is locally called "gall" bushes. It is the most characteristic and delightful of Galloway scents.]

"That's Roy himsel'!" said the young man. "It's a strange chance when a Kennedy comes near to getting his brains knocked out on his own land by the heel of an outlaw Highlander."

Once on the hillside again, he kept an even way over the boulders and stones which c.u.mbered it, with less care than hitherto, as though to protest against the previous indignity of his position. But, Kennedy though he might be, it had been fitter if he had remembered that he was on the No Man's Land of the Dungeon of Buchan, for here, about this time, was a perfect Adullam cave of all the broken and outlaw men south of the Highland border. A challenge came from the hill-side--"Wha's there?" Kennedy dropped like a stone, and a shot rang out, followed immediately by the "scat" of a bullet against the rock behind which he lay concealed.

A tramp of heavy Galloway brogans was heard, and a half-hearted kicking about among the heather bushes, and at last a voice saying discontentedly--

"Gin Roy disna keep Kennedy's lift.i.t beasts in the hollow whaur they should be, he needna blame me gin some o' them gets a shot intil their hurdies."

"My beasts!" said Kennedy to himself, silently chuckling, "mine for a groat!" He was in a mood to find things amusing. So, having won clear of the keen-eyed watcher, the young man made the best of his way with more caution to that northern gateway he had called the Seggy Goats.

There he turned to the right up a little burnside which led into a lirk in the hill, such as would on the border have been called a "hope." As he came well within the dusky-walled basin of the hill-side, some one tall and white glided out to meet him; but at this moment the moon discreetly withdrew herself behind a cloud, mindful, it may be, of her own youth and of Endymion's greeting on the Latmian steep. So the chronicler, willing though he be, is yet unable to say how these two met. He only knows that when the pale light flooded back upon the hillside and cast its reflection into the dim depths of the hope, they were evidently well agreed. "It is true what I told you," he is saying to her, "that my name is Hugh Kennedy, but I did not tell you that I am Kennedy of Bargany, and yours till death!"

"Then," said the girl, "it is fitter that I should return to the 'Back of Beyont' till such time as you and your men come back to burn the thatch about our ears."

The young man smiled and said--"No, Flora, you and I have another road to travel this night. Over there by the halse o' the pa.s.s, there stand tethered two good horses that will take us before the morning to the Manse of Balmaclellan, where my cousin, the minister, is waiting, and his mother is expecting you. Come with me, and you shall be Lady of Bargany before morning." He stooped again to take her hand.

"My certes, but ye made braw and sure of me with your horses," she said.

"I have a great mind not to stir a foot."

But the young man laughed, being still well pleased, and giving no heed to her protestations.

So there was a wedding in the early morning at the Manse of the Kells, and a young bride was brought home to Bargany. As for old Roy Campbell, he was made the deputy-keeper of the Forest of Buchan, which was an old Ca.s.silis distinction--and a post that exactly suited his Highland blood.

Time and again, however, had his son to intercede with him not to be too severe with those smugglers and gangrel bodies who had come to look upon the fastnesses of the Forest as their own.

"Have ye no fellow-feeling, Roy, for old sake's sake?" Kennedy would ask.

"Feeling? havers!" growled Roy impolitely, for Roy was spoiled. "I'm a chief's man noo, and I'll harbour nae gangrel loons on the lands o'