Patsy Part 35

Whether Eben McClure, ex-superintendent of recruitment and common informer, slept well or not during the first night of the investing of the Bothy of the Wild, is known only to himself. He at least pretended to pa.s.s an excellent night. The pretence was forced upon him by Stair Garland camping outside, his rifle ready to his hand, and the ceaseless patter of Whitefoot's alert sentry-go going round and round the hut.

By half-past five the day was beginning to come. Stair entered the Bothy, shook Eben by the shoulder and bade him prepare breakfast. Meals must now be taken as occasion served, and the whole business of their daily life would have to be reorganized. For they were now a city in a state of siege.

Eben knew too well the conditions of his life's tenure, to refuse to do anything Stair Garland bade him. He believed that while in the company of any of the band, he existed only by sufferance and had reason to be grateful for each hour of life vouchsafed to him.

So he made the porridge without demur, just as he had gone to bed fully dressed so as to be ready for any demand that the night might bring.

The meal being properly stirred, the porridge was poured into three wooden platters. Then Stair took a lump of fine Glenanmays salt b.u.t.ter from the firkin and dabbed it into the centre of each dish, the same amount for each. After which he went and knocked on the thin part.i.tion of Julian Wemyss's cubicle. Mr. Wemyss was already on foot, and had, in fact, almost finished the elaborate toilette which was habitual to him.

He saluted Stair and the spy with his usual calm civility, and with one glance at the stained, "up-all-night" look of Stair's dress, he gathered the truth. Stair Garland had been watching while he slept. He blushed a little at the thought, and resolved that for the future he would do his full share of night duty. Nay, even to-day he would see to it that Stair got his proper hours of repose. In the meantime, however, Stair's mind was full of quite another matter.

The loyalty of Eben McClure must be tested, and Stair was only waiting for the end of the meal in order to instruct the victim how he was to prove it. The door was open and Eben sat on the inner side of the table facing it. Between him and the light were Stair Garland and Stair Garland's gun. As usual Mr. Wemyss sat at the end of the table nearest to the fire.

"Eben," said Stair Garland, setting his elbows squarely on the table and leaning forward, "you are an intelligent man and you will understand that since the Bothy has been surrounded by an armed force and we may expect an a.s.sault any hour, your position has very much changed. We took you, to a very great extent, on your own statement. Now I do not think that you have sold us, or that you have brought these people down upon us. But we need to be sure. It will be obvious to you that if we are to depend on a third man in our midst, that third man must have all our confidence. Now, this is what I intend that you shall do. You and I shall follow the path as far as the big peat knoll. There we shall be in full view of the posts of the Preventive men. Having arrived there, you will appear to break from me after a struggle, and run as hard as you can towards the north in the direction of the excis.e.m.e.n. They will know you very well, having been your old cronies. You will have a white handkerchief in your hand which you will wave to them. If they take that signal to mean that you are escaping, we on our side will understand that you have been at your old tricks. If they fire--then you are cleared and can turn and come back to us. I will protect your retreat.

Now do you quite understand?"

Frequently in the exercise of his profession, Eben had need of indomitable courage, but now perhaps more than ever. Yet he was steadfast.

"I see no reason why you should trust me," he said. "I am willing to take the risk. When shall we start?"

"Now," said Stair, and in a minute more he was marching his man along the narrowing pathway between the dark pools of peat water. "There is only one thing I have to say. Do not pa.s.s the dwarf thorn-tree at the big elbow. If you run past that, I shall know you have it in your mind to desert, and it will be my duty to shoot. You know I do not miss."

It was a grey day with a gentle wind, the sky of a teased pearl woolliness with curious warm tints in it here and there. The face of the moorland was generally black, sometimes broken by borders of vivid green about the pools, and along the path edges by the little rosy rootlets of the plant called Venus's Flytrap.

They came to the outlying peat knoll, where an extra supply of fuel had been left under shelter during the previous autumn. Quite half of it still remained, and the "fause-hoose," or cavernous pit left from the digging out of the peats, afforded the best of cover. From it Stair would be able to follow the spy with his rifle all the way to the posts of the Preventive men which had been established on the rising ground above the edge of the Wild. A portable semaph.o.r.e stiffly flapped its arms as they looked, no doubt signalling their coming to other and more distant posts.

"There," said Stair, "they are all ready for you. Come outside and let us get our bit of a trial over. There is your handkerchief. As soon as you hear the bullets whistle, you can drop. Then turn about and crawl back to me."

"It does not seem to you somewhat cruel--this test?" said Eben McClure, looking wistfully at Stair. It was his only sign of weakness, and there are few who would have shown so little.

"No," said Stair, sternly, "when I think of those lads beaten insensible in the military prisons of your _depots_ or bleeding at the triangles--they gave Craig Easton a thousand lashes and he had had eight hundred of them before he died--I think I am letting you off easy. I ought to shoot you myself where you stand. And don't let me think too much about it or I may do it even yet. I am giving you your chance to be an honest man!"

They went together out into the open. Before them a little zigzag of pathway angled intricately among the sullen floods of the mora.s.s. The sky was pleasantly sh.e.l.l-tinted overhead. There was the way he must go.

Never had life appeared so sweet to the spy.

But he went through his part like a man in a dream. He struggled with Stair Garland, and though he did not hear himself he shouted fiercely as if for life. It was very real indeed. Then suddenly he broke loose and ran down the narrow towpath of dry land between the ink-black pools. He was still shouting. He had forgotten to wave the handkerchief. Then suddenly before him he saw the thorn at the angle of the big elbow.

He longed for the rattle of muskets--either from before or behind. It did not seem to matter much to him now which it was to be. He felt desperate and forlorn, hating everybody--Stair Garland most of all.

"_Hist--Skip! Crackle!_" came a volley from far away to the north, and Eben cast himself down behind a heather bush to draw breath. They had fired, and he was a proven man. He had faced death to certify his truth to the salt he was eating, and now nothing remained but to withdraw as carefully as might be. He crawled backward, now scuttling from one little rickle of peats left forlornly out on the moor to the next sodden whin bush, the p.r.i.c.kles of which yirked him as he threw himself down.

Stair kept his word, and from his peatstack delivered a lively fire upon the men in the shelters on the northern hillsides.

Eben was very white when he came back and dropped limp among the peat.

Stair said nothing, but for the first time he held out his hand. The spy had become a clean man again, and the same would be known from among all the folk from Nith Brig to the heuchs of the Back Sh.o.r.e of Leswalt. His kin would own him openly. Stonykirk parish was again free to him. Eben knew that he had not paid too dearly for his rehabilitation, for whatever the dangers he had faced or might be called upon to face, they were as nothing to the hate and opprobrium of the whole body of one's own people.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

PATSY RAISES THE COUNTRY

With three Galloway ponies and the contagion of her own enthusiasm Patsy undertook to arouse the country. She would save Stair and Julian by raising the siege of the Bothy on the Wild of Blairmore. She called upon her father at the gloomy house of Cairn Ferris and explained to him what she meant to do. She would not remain there in the meanwhile, but if he would lend her a pony or two, either from his stable or from among those running wild on the moors, she would not compromise him in any way.

"Whom, then, did she mean to compromise?" Her father put the question patiently.

Oh, Kennedy McClure was helping her, and Frank Airie, the Poor Scholar, and the Glenanmays lads--all the Stair Garland band, in fact. Yes, Miss Aline and the Austrian hunter were safe at Ladykirk. She could not have her mixed up in such a business, and Heinrich Wolf would look after her.

Adam Ferris listened and nodded his head.

"I am a barn-door fowl that has hatched out a sparrow-hawk," he said meekly. "Do not pyke your father's eyes out, chicken!"

And with this paternal benediction Patsy went forth on her errand.

Stair's Honeypot was at the door. Fergus Garland had brought him, offering at the same time to steal Derry Down from the Castle Raincy meadows. But this Patsy refused. She was not feeling particularly well affected towards Louis Raincy at that moment. Louis, as it were, had outlived his popularity.

Then began a great time. As flame after flame of lambent fire plays over the southern sky some eve of summer lightning, so Patsy came, and flashed, and pa.s.sed. Hearts waited expectant before her, grew angry and determined as they listened (not the young men only) to the tale of her wrongs, also of Stair Garland's courage and Julian Wemyss's duel. She pa.s.sed and left armed men with a definite rendezvous in her wake. Still keeping high up upon the pony tracks of the moors, she pa.s.sed eastwards to the Cree, crossed it, and with G.o.dfrey McCulloch to aid her, she carried the fiery cross along the sh.o.r.e-side of Solway to the great arch of the Needle's Eye, which is at Douglasha', in the parish of Colvend.

Here she turned, for she was frightened at what might be going on during her absence in the dim region of the flowes and flooded marshes called the Wild of Blairmore.

Behind her lads were marching. The countryside was moving. They had sworn to save Stair Garland and Julian Wemyss, and, if need be, they were ready to push the invaders of their Free Province into the sea.

Rebellion, not such a thing! Merely the affirmation of ancient privileges.

Even the Lord-Lieutenant and the old hereditary sheriffs at Lochnaw were displeased by any display of military force. They resented it, as the intervention of troops has always been resented in Galloway. What could the Government be thinking of? Why not let them settle matters in their own way? They were bound officially, of course, to give the business their countenance. Really, they liked it no better than did any member of Stair Garland's band. Earl Raincy, the Stairs of Castle Kennedy, the Monreith Maxwells, the Garthlands, and my Lord Garlies felt themselves perfectly well able to maintain order in their own lands. They could have removed Julian Wemyss to a quiet place over-seas, there to abide till the Wargrove affair had blown over. Who thought the worse of him for putting ten inches of steel through the pandar of a royal Duke, who had treated Adam Ferris's daughter as if she walked the pavement of Piccadilly or the Palais Royal? And as for Stair Garland--well, their lads would smuggle. They always had smuggled. But he was a good and a safe leader, who took his young men into no mischief and allowed no ribaldry or contempt for local authority. What more could be hoped for or expected, as long as young blood ran in young veins? And as to the little matter of the slugs in the royal haunches--well, the man was more frighted than hurt, and the twinges when the wind blew from the east would remind even a royal duke to leave their maids alone.

If belted earls and honourable baronets, the men of ancientest lineage, thought thus--consider what was the fierceness of public opinion among the farmers and their folk--the herds on the hills, the ploughmen and cattlemen, the crowds that gathered at kirk and market.

The provisions for the investing forces had actually to be brought from Ireland, for the country wives suddenly discovered that they had nothing to sell. Shops in town received known clients at the back door and served them behind closed shutters in the murky gleam of a halfpenny "dip." Had it not been for half-a-dozen sappers who had been busy with the new naval base on Loch Sw.i.l.l.y, his Majesty's forces would have been starved out of the country, and Galloway would have added one more to its long tale of the triumphs of pa.s.sive resistance.

But the six Loch Sw.i.l.l.y men had served in the Peninsula, and they were under a Chatham sergeant, who was a perfect Gallio, in that he cared nothing about all the things which were distracting the westernmost end of Galloway which gives on the Atlantic. He looked at the Wild of Blairmore from several sides. He swore that such a set of a.s.ses he had never seen, and then he settled himself, with his five soldiers and a couple of score of impressed men, to make a cutting through the sand-dunes on the seaward side. This ditch or drain, now smooth and greyish-green with bent and self-sown saplings, is still known as the Sapper's Cut.

On the morning of the second day after Sergeant Robinson had started his digging team, Stair looked out of the door of the Bothy and, instead of the black spread of water he had left there over-night, the Wild of Blairmore was dry. From the zigzag causeway on either side, stretched away an array of empty moss-hags still glistening with moisture. Only in the very deepest cuts a little water still lurked.

Stair Garland's lips tightened as he turned to the interior of the Bothy.

"It is all up, Mr. Julian," he said, "I am sorry I have led you into this--I knew the thing could be done, but they had been so long in thinking of it that I had come to believe they would never hit on it at all!"

"I am sorry, McClure!" he said to the spy, "you will have to give up the money and jewels, but that I always meant you to do in any case. For the rest--"

He paused a minute, not daring to trust himself to speak more words.

Then he continued--

"I have led you into all this. I thought there would have been a rescue-party long before now. There would have been if Patsy Ferris had been here. Now there is nothing for it but to give ourselves up. What is the use of making things worse by shooting two or three poor enlisted men who never did us any harm?"

And so it came to pa.s.s that Stair Garland and Eben the Spy were marched under strong escort to the gaol of Stranryan, while Julian Wemyss was shut up in his own house with a guard quartered on him. Thus had it been ordered from London, for there the Princess Elsa had been busy, and the local commanders knew that even when the Government is that of a Regent George, it cannot treat an ex-amba.s.sador like a common felon.

Stranryan is a largish town, historical and ancient, as its narrow and crooked streets sufficiently attest. At that period of the year it was exceedingly malodorous, and in the gutters tangle-headed children fished for spoil, or with noise and clangour dragged the damaged dead cat and the too-long-drowned puppy from the green ooze of one midden hole to another.