"Dear lad, this town is very bare of guineas and many of them are lighter than the law alloweth, but you shall have more as occasion offers.—Your friend, J. F."

I turned to the road again with a merrier heart than ever, for I thought, as Smite-and-spare-not would have thought before me, that the very handiwork of God Himself was here displayed, in that the seemingly most untoward events of our journey had been turned into means of strength and assurance. Had I, as I ought to have done, brought money of my own from the Hanyards, I should never have started highwayman, and so never have met Master Freake on Wes'on Bank.

Three miles or more we made in this manner, and I had heard nothing more alarming than the hoot of an owl from an ivy-crusted elm. Some distance back the road had climbed slightly for a space, then fallen into the level again, and now ran, open and unhedged, across the bleaky top of a barren upland. I chirruped to the sorrel and gave him another lick of sugar to comfort him. A moment later, I knew by the forward cock of his ears and the swift up-shake of his head that something was in the wind, and strained my own ears to listen, for there was nothing of note visible ahead or around.

From far ahead came the faint rattle of hoofs on the hard road. I pulled up, and, a moment later, Margaret and the Colonel stopped beside me.

"What is it?" asked the latter.

"Horse coming this way, sir," was my reply. The sounds were already plainer. For a full minute he listened carefully. "A good number of them, and making a smart pace," he said. "It can only be Kingston's advance guard falling back. Most likely the van of the Highlanders has beaten up their quarters. Once past them we shall be—Hello! Slids! What's that? Reinforcements! Egad. Oliver, we're between the hammer and the anvil."

He turned his head round sharply and so did Margaret and I. From behind us came again the unmistakable rattle of a body of horse. We were trapped completely.

"This is damned annoying," said the Colonel. He looked casually around, as indifferently as he would have looked round the guest-room of the "Rising Sun," and added, "Follow me, and ride as if the devil were at your tail."

He turned off into the bare, flat country, and we after him. How we rode! He was making for a little group of trees, some dozen wind-sown pines, stuck like a forlorn picket in enemy country a stone's-throw from the road. We got there in a bunch, for there was no time for Sultan's pace to count.

"Damn the moon!" he said, and dismounted. "But this is better than nothing. Take off Margaret's saddle, Oliver."

I got down, and assisted Margaret to dismount. She thanked me, briefly and smilingly, as unperturbed as the gaunt pine beneath which she stood.

The Colonel and I changed the saddles, and in a few seconds Margaret was on Sultan. I asked him in vain to take the sorrel and leave the mare to me, for she was getting restive, and the Colonel was not quite so able as I was with a strange horse. I insisted, however, in taking off my coat and wrapping it about the mare's head, and, being thus blanketed, she gave us no further trouble. By the Colonel's orders, Margaret, on Sultan, took her place between us, heading for the open country, while he and I turned to the road. The thin, straggling pine-branches cast but little shadow, and I knew it was next to impossible for us to pass unnoticed.

"Now, Madge," said the Colonel, "it's bound to come to a fight. As soon as the fun begins, off you go like the wind into this bog-hole in front of you, and in five minutes you'll be out of danger. Make a detour round to the road again, keep the moon behind your back, and push on to the nearest inn. Oliver and I will join you there, if so God wills. If we don't, you're on the Chester road. Have you your money still?"

"Yes, dad."

"You understand, Madge?"

"Quite clearly."

"Then kiss me, sweetheart."

She kissed him without a word, and turned to look goodbye to me. For a moment I went all aquiver with emotion. This wonderful new life of mine had at times to be lived in the outskirts and suburbs of death. Fortunately, a thought came into my head, and I tugged out the leathern bag and thrust it into her hand.

"Don't leave that under the bed," said I, and, being very bold, as one may be with death at one's door, I drew her gloved hand, with the bag in it, towards me, and kissed it. She said nothing to me, but the light in her eyes was like moonlight on the dancing surface of a mountain spring.

"Look to your pistols, Oliver," ordered the Colonel briefly and crisply. "See your tuck slips easy in the scabbard. Another minute will decide. You and I can easily give Madge all the start Sultan requires."

"Easily, sir," I answered stoutly.

"Good lad!" said the Colonel.

And Margaret, leaning across until her lips were near my cheek as I bent to see what she wanted, said, for the third time, "Well done, fisherman!" I laughed lightly and was glad, for was not this calm, brave, splendid woman thinking of how we two had met?

From the first cock of the sorrel's ears to this so characteristic remark of Margaret's could not have been five minutes, and now, although owing to the downward slope to our left I have mentioned, and its corresponding slope to the right, neither body was yet in sight, they were so nearly on us that differences between them became obvious. The southern troup was small, was not travelling beyond a smart trot, and was, so far as the men were concerned, absolutely quiet. The body from the north was large, was forcing a hot gallop, and much noise and shouting came from the troopers.

It was plain that we were in for it. The men from Newcastle were no doubt coming north as a reinforcement, but it was absurd to suppose that they had not been told of our doings and of our escape northwards. They had not overtaken us, and we must be on the road somewhere. The men from the north had not met us. Never since the world began had two and two been easier to put together. There was only one place for us to be in and this was it. A short parley, a glance our way, and an overwhelming force would dash at the picket of pines.

The bare road lay there in the moonlight, half a mile of it in clear view on either hand. The two bodies came in sight within a few seconds of each other, and the Colonel snapped his fingers and chuckled.

From the north a wild rush of spurring, flogging, shouting, cursing horsemen, about a hundred of them. No order, no discipline, no soldiership —nothing but mad haste and madder fear.

The mare began to plunge, and the Colonel, leaping off, nearly strangled her in the coat. The sorrel got uneasy but gave me no real trouble. Sultan took not the slightest notice of the din behind him, and leisurely cropped the tough bussocks of grass at his feet.

I looked to the road again. The southern body was small, not more than a score, compact, riding smartly but with military order and precision. The man at their head, the officer in command, no doubt, spurred on and began to shout at the oncoming northerners. He might as well have spoken fair words to an avalanche, and the men behind him began to waver and most of them pulled up. It was useless. The torrent swept into them and bore them backward, tumbling some of them over, men and horses together, but incorporating most of them in its own madness. In less than five minutes the last batch of dragooners had cursed and spurred themselves out of sight, and the bright moon shone down on a road once more bare and white save for a few scattered patches of black.

The Colonel uncovered the mare's head and nuzzled her. All he said was, but that very gleefully, "Geordie, my boy, I'll be routing you out of St. James's within the fortnight. I'll learn you to neglect the King of Sweden's Colonels! Damme, Oliver, it made me think of Pharaoh's kine—one lot eating the other up. Now, sweetheart my Madge, we'll have your pretty eyes a-bye-bye in no time."

"I never saw anything so funny in my life," said Margaret. "On with your coat, Oliver, before you take cold."

From all of which I learned to take, as they did, the fat with the lean in soldiering, and not to care a brass farthing which it was. Still, I was as yet so young at the game, that, though I was careful to swagger it out and say nothing, I did wonder why the body from the south was so small.

And I wonder as I write whether it was or was not the mistake of my life merely to wonder then.



CHAPTER XIV

"WAR HAS ITS RISKS"

I slept unsoundly and in snatches. Margaret was in the room beneath me, "dreaming in Italian," thought I, in unhappy imitation of her dainty gibe at her father. A problem was on my mind, and that was ever with me an enemy to sleep. I meant being the best of soldiers, and this that worried me was a military problem. To be short, I could not help asking myself, "Were the dragoons from the south intended as a reinforcement to the horse from the north?" And somehow I could not think they were. As the top-dog spirit in me put it: "It was like sending Jack to reinforce me. Quod est absurdum."

Time the Explainer permits me to be frank. There was this other side to my problem that I could not bring myself to be sure the Colonel's escape had come merely by happy chance. He was no party to contriving it, of that I never doubted, but it did look like a contrivance. We had been at the "Rising Sun" for six hours or more. Stone, the nearest head-quarters of Cumberland's forces, was only nine miles south of it, yet no attempt had been made to follow the fugitive. No, thought I again, that's wrong. Weir was sent on his track and actually found him. But this was as useless, so it seemed, as sending twenty dragoons, hundreds being available, to reinforce a thousand stout horse. There was no proportion between the ends proposed and the means adopted.

If the handful of dragoons were not a reinforcement, it was a pursuit of us, and this posed another problem. Why had the pursuit been allowed to flag all the afternoon and evening, to be taken up again far on in the night? What fresh fact, if any, had determined it? I could think of none, nor, on reflection, was one wanted, since both Master Freake and Jack had last night witnessed to the worn-out state of Brocton's horses. Consequently his dragoons would have been sent after the Colonel earlier had they been fit. Their coming, when fit, proved their anxiety to retake him. Therefore he was not allowed to escape, and the conclusion of my argument hit its major premise clean in the teeth.

"Oliver, my boy," said I to myself, "say a bit of Virgil and go to sleep. These matters are beyond you."

I picked on a passage and started mumbling it to myself. It was a lucky hit, for when I had in solemn whispers rolled off the great lines in the sixth Aeneid which foretell the work and glory of Rome, I thought of my Lord Ridgeley, thiever by cunning process of law of most of my ancient patrimony, and his blackguard son, my Lord Brocton, lustfully hunting the proud, gracious woman beneath, and I said grandiosely to myself, "Rome's destiny is thine too, Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards, and these betitled scullions are the proud ones you shall war down."

The notion was so soothing that I fell asleep again.

I have leaped over uninteresting but by no means unimportant events. We were staying the night at a wayside hostel, called the "Red Bull," situated at the point where a cross-road cut the main road. We were still in Staffordshire, a matter on which Margaret had laughingly placed the utmost importance, though an urchin, standing by the rude signpost, could have flung a pebble into Cheshire. Houseroom was of the narrowest, and I was tucked away in the attics, in a room I had to crawl about in two-double, walking upright being out of the question. It was the grown-up daughter's room, and she had been bundled out to make place for me, a fact I did not learn till it was beyond need of remedy. The lass had a good pleasant woman to mother, but her father, the host, was an ill-conditioned, surly runt, whose only good point was a still tongue.

Margaret was in the room below, and her father next to her along a narrow gangway. From my attic I got down to this gangway by means of a staircase hardly to be told from a ladder. The gangway, just past the Colonel's door, became a little landing whence three or four steps led down to a larger landing, from which one could mount up to the other and corresponding half of the house or descend to the entrance hall with which the various rooms of the ground floor connected.

I awoke again in a dim dull dawn. Tired of these bouts of wakefulness I got off the bed—for I was lying full-dressed even to my boots—and crept softly to the window. I would keep watch and ward for Margaret, as a true knight oweth to do. Then, if my obscure misgivings were unfounded, I should at any rate have done my duty.

There had been a slight fall of snow, enough to cover the ground and bring everything up into sharp relief. My window was a dormant-window, its sill being about four feet from the eaves. I flung it open, careful not to make a sound, pushed out head and shoulders, and took stock.

I dipped my fingers in the snow and found there was near an inch of it. The "Red Bull" stood back from the road, and on each side of the inn proper, outhouses and stables jutted out to the wayside. Drawn up under a hovel on the left was a huge wagon piled with sacks, probably of barley bound for Leek, a town renowned for its ale.

Without was silence and stillness, as of the grave, and it was nipping cold, but my mind was happily busy, having so many delicious moments to live over again. If by some unhappy chance I never saw her again and lived to be a hundred, I should never tire of my memories. She had as many facets as Mr. Pitt's diamond, as many tones as the great organ in Lichfield Cathedral. To know her had enriched my life and opened my mind. What Propertius had said of his Cynthia, I repeated to myself of my Margaret, Ingenium nobis ipsa puella est. 'My' Margaret! Well, it did her no harm for me to think it, and, after all, the sly, silly babblings of my under-self could be shouted down by the stern voice of common sense.

Here, under the stress of a new force, my thoughts flew off at a tangent, and I said to myself, "Bravo, Romeo! You shall find me a rare Juliet."

I had, indeed, much ado to keep from laughing aloud, as my situation was delicious, not to say delicate. For, on a sudden, noiselessly as the beat of a bat's wing, two feet of ladder had shot up above the eaves, and even now an ardent lover was hasting aloft, dreaming of lispings and kissings to come. I mustn't frighten him too soon or too much or he'd drop off, but as soon as he was fairly on the slope he should sip the sweetness of lips of steel. So I crept back, got a pistol, and stood to the left of the window.

I waited till his body darkened the room and then took a furtive look at him. It was no village lover climbing up at peep of dawn to greet his lass. It was one of Brocton's dragoons, one of the five who had been at the Hanyards.

In a twink I shot him. Without a word, he slithered down the tiles, leaving a mush of blood-red snow. His right leg slipped aslant between two rungs of the ladder, and his body, checked in its fall, swung round and dangled over the eaves.

In the room was a large oaken clothes chest. I dragged it to the light, tilted it on end, and jammed it into the gable of the window, which, luckily, it fitted completely, and so blocked any further attack from the roof. Snatching up my weapons, I tumbled down the ladder, only to hear the heavy tramping of feet upstairs. Standing by Margaret's door, I waited until the head and shoulders of the first man came in sight. He carried a lantern, and its yellow rays lit up for me the ugly face of the sergeant of dragoons. I fired my second pistol at him, crashing the lantern to pieces. Down he went, whether hit or not I did not know. In the darkness I heard the rush of a second man who came on so fearlessly and fast that he was far into the passage before I met him with a fierce thrust of my rapier. I thrilled with the zeal of old Smite-and-spare-not as, for the first time, I felt the point of my rapier in a man's body, and drove it home with a yell. Down he went too, with a gurgle of blood in his throat, and Margaret, coming out of her room, stumbled over his body as she raced after me along the passage.

The Colonel was at the stair-head before me, but there was, for the moment, no work for him. The enemy had tumbled noisily downstairs into the hall, and were collecting their scattered wits after their first rout. To my regret, the raucous cursings of the sergeant showed that he had not been killed and apparently not even hit.

"God damn ye!" he yelled. "Ten of you driven back like sheep by a raw youth. I'll settle with ye for it. Think I picked ye out of the stews and stink-holes of London to stand this? There isn't one of ye with the guts of a louse. I'll take the skin off the ribs of you for this, damn ye, and most of your pimp's flesh along with it!"

"What sort of guts was it brought yow tumblin' down so quick?" put in the surly voice of the landlord. "Yow cudna 'a come any faster if yer blasted yed 'ad been blown to bits instead of my lantern."

Some of the men laughed at this, whereon the sergeant blasphemed enough to make a devil from hell shiver. He cowed the dragoons, but the innkeeper only growled, "A three-bob lantern blown to bits! Fork out three bob!"

"I'll have him if I have to blow the house to bits!" vociferated the sergeant.

"Fork out three bob!" repeated the host.

Not a word had passed between us on the stair-head, and now, at the sound of preparations for a fresh assault, the Colonel took each of us by the arm and led us into his room.

"The stair-head cannot be held against fire from the opposite landing," he whispered.

When inside, he locked the door, and I helped him pile the bed on end behind it, heaping all the other furniture against the bed-frame to hold the mattress and bedding up against the door. Margaret, at a brief word of command, had meanwhile kept watch through the window.

"That's a fair defence," he said contentedly. "What are these devils?"

"Brocton's dragoons," said I. "I've settled two of them, one on the roof and one in the passage."

"Good lad! Ten of 'em would be long odds in the open; here we ought to have the laugh of them. Load your pistols! Damme, it's a bit chilly. Fortunately there's some warm work ahead."

He stamped up and down the room, swishing his arms round his body, and stopping every now and again to make some trifling change in our hurriedly contrived barricade. Margaret stood by quietly at the window, and when I had reloaded my pistols, I joined her there.

The ladder had been shifted and now lay along in the snow. There, too, lay the body of the dragoon I had shot, crumpled up in his death-agony. A brood of owls were clucking and cluttering about under the hovel, and there, too, leaning against the rear wheel of the wain, were a lumpish wagoner and our surly host. The one was stolidly smoking, the other was holding the battered lantern out at arm's length, and I could, as it were, see him growling to the lout at his side, "'Ew's to fork out for this'n?" A girl went towards them from the house, circling, with averted head, far round the dead dragoon, bearing them from the kitchen a smoking jug of ale.

"In England," said Margaret, "snow adds the charm of peace and purity to the countryside. There's never, I should think, enough of it to give the sense of utter desolation and deadness that it gives one in Russia."

"It's so uncertain with us," was my reply. "I've known a whole winter without a snowflake, and I've walked knee-deep in it in May."

The Colonel stopped his marching and swishing and came to the window.

"Don't bother, Madge," said he. "We'll pull through. Hallo, I didn't see yon wagon last night."

He took out his snuff-box and, hearing the noise of the enemy in the corridor, walked with it in his hand across to the door. He tapped his box with accustomed preciseness, but I, a step behind, having lingered for a last look into Margaret's eyes, heard him mutter, "Damn the wagon!"

"Ho, there within, in the King's name," shouted the sergeant.

"Ho, there without, in the devil's name," mimicked the Colonel.

"I want speech with Colonel Waynflete," shouted the sergeant.

"Then, seeing that Colonel Waynflete cannot at the moment give himself the pleasure of slitting your ruffian's throat, you may speak on," was the reply.

"You and your daughter may proceed on your way unharmed if you surrender. It's only Wheatman the farmer, now with you, that I want."

He could be heard all over the room to the last syllable, and Margaret quickly left her place at the window and came towards us, but the Colonel in a stern whisper ordered her back. "How dare you leave your post! Watch that wagon!" She crimsoned and returned.

"If Master Freake were here, Oliver, I think he would remark that there was no market for colonels to-day," said her father to me with a wry smile. He gave the lid of his snuff-box a final tap, opened it, and held it out to me. In the sense of the term known to fashionable London, he was not a good-looking man, but as he stood there, waiting gravely while I took my pinch, he had the irresistible charm of the highest manliness.

"Do you agree, Colonel?" bawled the sergeant.

"I do not," he shouted, and took his snuff with great relish.

"By God," and now the sergeant roared like a wounded bull, "I'll have you all in ten minutes." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Here, I say, you Wheatman, do you agree?"

"Certainly," said I, "I'll come at once." And I should have gone, there and then, but for the Colonel, who, as I laid a hand on the nearest piece of our barricade, promptly said, "I've only one way with deserters," and levelled a pistol at my head.

"For Margaret's sake, sir," I pleaded in low tones. "Let me go!" She had flown like a bird across to us, and so heard me.

"I had hoped you thought better of me, Master Wheatman," she said coldly, and went back to her watching.

The sergeant heard, or at least understood, what had been said in the room. We heard him say, "You know your job. Fifty guineas for Wheatman, dead or alive. Any man who touches the girl will be flogged bare to the bones." Then we heard him walk off along the corridor.

The dragoons without made no attempt on the door, and we joined Margaret at the window. Hardly had we got there when half a dozen dragoons dashed out of the porch and ran for the road. The Colonel flung the window open and emptied both his pistols at them, but they zigzagged like hares and the shots appeared to be thrown away. In the road they halted, formed a line in open order, and levelled their carbines at the window. All three of us moved aside, the Colonel tugging Margaret with him to the right while I hopped to the left.

"Take it easy, Oliver," he said very good-humouredly. "Until they think of the wagon we're safe enough on this side. These walls would almost stand up to a carronade."

With a clash the first bullet came through the window and knocked a huge splinter off a bedpost. There were six shots without, and six bullets spattered in a small area opposite.

"That's quite good shooting," said the Colonel. "Much better than I expected from such poor stuff."

I told him what Jack had said about the mixed quality of Brocton's dragoons. These good shots, I explained, were picked men off the Ridgeley estates, probably gamekeepers and bailiffs.

"Very like," he said. "They're used to shooting but not to fighting. Rabbits are more in their line."

There was no stir in the passage, and I wondered what the job was these men had in hand. The fusillade at the window was kept up unceasingly, generally in single shots, sometimes in twos and threes. The barricade took on a ragged appearance. I occupied my mind in thoughts of Margaret. She was in the corner, beyond her father.

The bullets had by now nearly cleared the window of glass, fragments of which covered the floor of the room. Through the cracking and spluttering we at last heard the noise of a wagon moving. The Colonel and I leaped up and peered round the edge of the window. It was being pulled by two horses, and was shifted till it was exactly opposite the window, and to my surprise some twelve feet distant. The sacks made a firm platform level with the window-sill. Flush with the window it would have made an admirable means of attack, but why the space between?

While the wagon was being put in position, there was a cessation of firing. We saw the six dragoons from the road climbing on to the wagon, while as many again joined them from the inn. The Colonel said, "Now's our chance!" and fired carefully. One man, who was poised on the rear wheel, fell into the road and hopped round to the back of the wagon holding his right foot in his hand; another, already mounted, sprawled full length on the sacks.

"That's the way," he said, with much satisfaction, and stepped aside to reload. "See if you can improve on it."

By this, under orders from the sergeant, two or three dragoons were creeping under the wagon to fire from behind the wheels. I dropped a man standing at the horses' heads and then, in the nick of time and on second thoughts, made sure of the mare and hit her in the neck. She squealed, kicked, and plunged, and the other horse sharing her fears, they began to drag the wagon off. The sergeant and two or three men leaped at them and managed to quiet them, and then took them out of the traces to save further trouble of the sort. The Colonel, meanwhile, having reloaded, brought down another dragoon with one shot, and ripped open a sack with another. It was barley.

For perhaps a minute the window had been as safe as her corner, and Margaret had been quietly watching the scene. Now, with seven or eight men lying on the top of the sacks, with a stout row of them piled in front as a bulwark, it was time for us to run to cover again. This time, of her own accord, she came my side, and nestled beyond me in the nook between the wall and my body.

The men in the passage still made no sign.

"Slids, Oliver," said the Colonel, "I can't see this ugly devil's game yet, but, whatever it is, you came near to spoiling it. Damme, it was a good idea to pepper the horse. Curse me! Where were my fifty years of soldiering that I couldn't think of it?"

"I suppose it comes from my being—"

The sweetest and whitest fingers in the world closed my mouth, and Margaret, thinking that I was on the verge of backsliding, whispered in my ear, "The readiest-witted gentleman in England."

I tingled with the joy of her touch, and turned to her so that I might go on into the coming fight with her last shade of emotion burnt into my memory. A stream of lead poured through the window, but the spluttering of bullets on the walls of the room had no more effect on me than the pattering of hailstones.

"May I finish my sentence, madam?"

"Not as you intended, sir."

"I can't go back on old Bloggs' teaching, madam."

She pouted and frowned, both at once, and the Colonel bawled through the noise of the fusillade, "Being what?"

"Fond of Virgil," roared I back again.

Margaret laughed. Could a nightingale laugh, it would laugh as Margaret laughed then.

Before the music of it died away the sergeant showed his hand, and death at its grizzliest grinned through the window. A great mass of damp, smouldering straw, lifted on pikels, was thrust into the window-frame, filling it completely, and thick wreaths of dense, foul smoke eddied into the room, while through the straw the rain of bullets poured on, smashing and splintering on walls and ceiling, door and barricade.

The Colonel slashed and poked at the straw with his rapier. Telling Margaret to crouch on the floor, I crawled on my belly and fetched the bed-staff, which stood in its accustomed corner of the chimney-piece. It made a much more serviceable tool for the job, and I flung it across to the Colonel, who seized it and worked it like a blackamoor till he was almost the colour of one, and had, to judge by his voice and demeanour, got almost beyond his German in his rage. Asking for Margaret's handkerchief, I tied it loosely round her mouth, my heart near to bursting as I looked into her calm and patient face. Then I lay down flat and wormed out into the room and, after a hard struggle, wrenched off one of the rods which carried the rings of the bed-curtains. I remember that, as I lay there, writhing and struggling, I counted the bullets, eleven of them, as they spattered about me. However, I got back to Margaret's side untouched, and poked and thrust and slashed to make a hole near her face between straw and window-frame.

Our efforts were practically useless. The straw was cunningly fed from below, and the pall of smoke was now so heavy and dense that the fringe of it was settling down on Margaret's tower of yellow hair, and as I watched the rate at which it was falling, I knew the end was coming. The Colonel had worked with the energy of despair to tear down the vile enemy that was killing us by inches, and now suddenly collapsed and fell like a log to the floor. Margaret would have crawled to him, but I kept her by main force against the wall while I wriggled out of my coat.

"We have one chance left, Margaret," said I. "Your father is only overcome by the smoke—see, there's no sign of a wound about him—and his fall is a godsend. Give me your other handkerchief and lie down flat, face to the floor and close to the window, and listen for my next instructions."

She did so without a word. I wrapped my coat loosely about her head, and before I could close it in the smoke cloud was settling down on her, even as she lay. I was nearly done for, but she was safe for a few minutes. Lying full length on the floor, under the window, I tied her handkerchief to the end of the curtain-rod, thrust it through the straw, and waved it about as vigorously as I could.

The sergeant's voice rang out. The firing ceased. The foul masses of straw were removed. Then the scoundrel came forward and leered up at me.

"Do your terms hold good?" I shouted.

"Yes," he said.

"Colonel Waynflete and his daughter will be left at liberty to go their way, if I surrender?"

"Yes," he said.

"Then in one minute I'll be with you," said I. Stepping inside the room, I first of all pulled the Colonel to the window, tore loose the clothes round his neck, and laid his head on the window-sill, in the good sweet air. Then crawling to Margaret, I unwrapped the jacket, and said briefly, "Force some of Kate's cordial down your father's throat. Goodbye!"

I returned to the window, clambered out, hung at arm's length, and dropped to the ground. Striding up to the sergeant, I said carelessly, "Your turn this time, sergeant. To-day to thee, to-morrow to me—it's neater in the Latin but you wouldn't understand it—and all Brocton's dragoons shan't save your ugly neck."

"Where the hell's your coat?" he demand fiercely.

A cool question, indeed, after trying to suffocate me, but it was never answered. The air was on a sudden filled with the weirdest row I had ever heard. It was as if all the ghosts in Hades had suddenly piped up at their shrillest and ghostliest. This was followed by a splutter of musketry, and this again by loud yells. Looking round I saw a swarm of strange figures sweep into the yard, half women as to their dress, for they wore little petticoats that barely reached their knees, but matchless fighting men as to their behaviour. On they came, with the pace of hounds, the courage of bucks, and the force of the tide.

It was the Highlanders.

The sergeant fled into and through the inn and, with the men from the corridor, got clean away. Not a man else escaped. Half the dragoons on the wagon were picked off like crows on a branch. The rest, and those in or about the yard, got their lives and nothing else barring their breeches, and that not for comeliness' sake but because they were useless. Every man jack of them, in less than five minutes, looked like a half-plucked cockerel, and their captors were wrangling like jackdaws about the plunder.

I glanced at the window. To my relief, the Colonel was already sitting up, pumping the sweet air into his befouled lungs, and Margaret smiled joyously and waved her hand to me. I was waving victoriously back to her when my attention was forcibly diverted by two Highlanders, who collared me, intent on reducing me to a state of nature plus my breeches. There was no time to explain, neither would they have understood my explanation. One of them, a son of Anak for height and bulk, already had his hands to my pockets. Him I hit, as hard-won experience had taught me, and he fell all of a heap. His fellow was struck with amazement at seeing such a great beef of a man put out of action so easily, and stood gaping over him for a while. Recovering himself, he snatched a long knife out of his sock and made for me murderously, but I had meantime fished out a guinea and now held it out to him. He took it with the eager curiosity of a child, looked at it wonderingly, made out what it was, and then ran leaping and frisking up and down the yard, holding it high over his head, and shouting, "Ta ginny, ta ginny, ta bonny, gowd ginny!"

I was saved further trouble by the approach of one of the officers, or, to speak with later knowledge, chiefs, of these wild warriors. He informed me in excellent English that he had heard the firing, seen my parleying at the window and my subsequent surrender, and desired to know the meaning of it all.

"The gentleman at the window," I explained, "is Colonel Waynflete, travelling to join Prince Charles. The lady is his daughter, and I am their servant, by name Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards. These King's men, belonging to my Lord Brocton's regiment of dragoons, attacked us; we refused to surrender, and the rascally sergeant in command smoked us out. I pray you, sir, to run the wagon up to the window that I may hand them down, since the door is heavily barricaded."

It was done immediately, and he and I ran up to the window together.

"You young dog," said the Colonel. "You surrendered after all."

"In strict accordance, sir, with military usage, I used my discretion as commander of the party."

"Slids!" His grey eyes had the old laugh lurking in them already. "Commander of the party?"

"There were only Mistress Margaret and I left," said I.

"And the peppermint cordial," put in Margaret.

So in sheer wantonness of joy we sought relief in bantering one another. Then I introduced the chieftain, who had stood there silent and graceful, a fine figure of a man, finely and naturally posed, and mutual compliments and thanks passed between us. Yet in that first minute, with Margaret and the Colonel perched on the sill, and the Highlander and I standing on the sacks of barley, I saw another thing happen, for the big things of life come into it with the swiftness of light and the inevitability of death. A chieftain proudly climbed the wagon; a bond-servant humbly handed Margaret down. As was fair and courteous, and suitable to my real position, I let him do it, and aided the Colonel, who was as yet somewhat shaky. After seeing him safe down, I rushed up again and recovered our weapons and my coat. Down once more, I was getting into my coat when Margaret, who was talking to the Highlander, looked at me and said quietly, "Pray, Master Wheatman, fetch me the domino from my room!"

She said it simply and mistress-like, and of course I shot off to do her bidding. I supposed, as I went, that it was the white snow all around that had brought out the blue in her eyes so vividly.

In the inn I found the host, the lantern still dangling from his finger, notwithstanding his greater woe, and his pleasant, placid wife weeping bitterly. Of the original twenty guineas of the Major's, I now had only four left, and these I thrust into her hand as I passed, and told her to be comforted.

From my shooting the dragoon on the roof to my running upstairs for the domino was in all not more than twenty minutes. I skipped over the man who had fallen to my maiden sword. He was lying between the door of the Colonel's room and that of Margaret's, and opposite one of the doors on the other side of the passage. Darting into Margaret's room, I recovered the domino.

I was only a moment, but in that moment some one opened the door in the passage against which the man lay and so brought him into the light, and I could not help taking a look at him.

My heart stopped with the horror of it; my whole being fell to pieces at the agony of it. I remember running from it as from the gates of hell. I remember reeling on the stairs. I remember a headlong fall. I remember no more.

It was Jack.



CHAPTER XV

IN THE MOORLANDS

I was in bed, there was no doubt about that, and a strange sort of bed too, for it moved lightly and deliciously through the keen, open air like the magic carpet of the Eastern tale. The bedposts at my feet were most curiously carved into life-like images of warriors, so life-like, indeed, that when the one on the right turned its shaggy head and spoke to the one on the left, I was not shocked and scarcely surprised. Bed it was, however, for mother's soft, smooth hand was on my cheek, and under the balm of its touch I went off to sleep again.

When my eyes opened again, the mists had cleared out of them and I was no longer in the land of shadows. The carven bedposts were Highlanders; the bed was a litter slung between four of them; the touch was hers. Somebody spoke, the Highlanders came to a halt, and Margaret bent over me. Her face was pale, grave, and anxious.

"Are you better, Oliver?" she whispered.

"As right as rain," I answered, pushing my new trouble behind me and speaking stoutly because of the whiteness of her face.

"Try to sleep again. You've had a bad fall, and there's an ugly cut in your skull."

"Indeed, I'll do no such thing," was my reply. "I don't want carrying like a great baby, and I do want my breakfast. I'm as empty as a drum."

"Can you stand?"

"Sure of it, and also hop, skip, jump, and, above all, eat and drink with any man alive. So, if you can make these men-women understand you, tell them I'm very grateful, but I've had enough."

The four tousled warriors were easily made to understand what I wanted, and, stout and strong as they were, welcomed the end of their labours with broad grins of satisfaction. They lowered me to the ground, and immediately Margaret's hands were outstretched to help me to my feet. But for the black death between us, it would have been new life indeed to see the colour and sunshine creeping back to her face, and to hear her whispered "Thank God!"

My head was bumming and throbbing, but nothing to speak of. The gash was behind and above my right ear, so I must have somersaulted down the stairs. Margaret, as I learned later, had bathed and bandaged the wound, and after my recovery of consciousness, it only gave me the happy trouble of persuading Margaret that it gave me no trouble.

I stamped and shook myself experimentally, took a few strides, and jumped once or twice, Margaret watching me as curiously and carefully as a hen watches her first chicken.

"Do mind, Oliver!" she said. "It bled horribly, and you'll start it again."

"I believe I needed a blood-letting," said I.

"Should you ever need another," she said crisply, "I hope you'll take it in the usual way. How did it happen?"

I had steeled myself for the inevitable question, and so answered ruefully, "I must have tripped over the domino."

"If it were not your mother's I would never wear it again," she said, plucking the skirt of it into her hand and shaking it as if it were a naughty child. "I thought you would never come round. For nearly an hour, I should think, you looked stone-dead. Then you just opened your eyes, but closed them before I dared speak, and lay so at least another hour. You have given me such a fright, sir, that, now you are up and about again, I'm beginning to feel I have a grievance against you."

"I'm sorry, madam," said I, very soberly.

"Now you're laughing at me, sir," was the brisk reply.

The word made me shiver. "Laughing"—over Jack's body! Margaret was in her stride back to her mistress-ship again yet her eye changed instantly with her mood when she saw me wince. Indeed, her mind flashed after my mind like a hawk after a pigeon, but I dodged the trouble by looking casually around to examine our whereabouts.

We were following a track down a dip in an open moorland. Across the shallow valley, and climbing the slope ahead of us, was another small body of Highlanders, whom I took to be our scouting party. The sun was a dim blob in the sky, and I saw from its position that our direction was easterly. A joyous hail from behind made me spin round, whereupon I saw the Colonel on Sultan and the young Chief on the sorrel turning the brow behind us. It took them a few minutes to trot down to us, and before they reached us four more wild warriors, our rear-guard apparently, came in view. One of them was my son of Anak, astride Margaret's mare, and so looking more gigantesque than ever.

"Good morning, commander!" was the Colonel's greeting. "Slids! But I'm glad to see you on your feet again. How's the head?"

"It still bumbles a bit," said I, "but, truth to tell, I'm thinking more of my breakfast than my head. I'm as empty as a drum."

"It's a guid prognostick to feel hungry after sic a crack o' the head," said the chieftain, smiling, and I thought with a twinge what a handsome, wholesome sight he made.

"I'm another drum," said the Colonel, "but deuce take me, Oliver, if I know how we're to be filled. Madge would have us start off with you at once, quite rightly too, and we'd neither bite nor sup before we took the road."

"And where were you taking me?" cried I.

"To the doctor's," explained the Colonel. "There's one in a village tucked away somewhere among these hills, and we've a lad on ahead to guide us. Colonel Ker, who commands the Highlanders who rescued us, gave us our friend here, Captain Maclachlan in the Prince's army, and a great chieftain among his own people"—here the chief and I bowed to one another —"and a dozen or so of his stout men as an escort. Two plaids were knitted into a litter, a log of a man named Wheatman was bundled into it, and off we started breakfastless, as I said before."

"I'm very grateful to you, Mistress Margaret," said I.

"Don't be silly!" she answered very sharply. "It is no praise to tell me I acted with common decency. And you weren't bundled in!"

"I was not praising you, madam," I retorted, quick as ever to return like for like. "I was thanking you, and I venture, with respect, to thank you again."

"Bother old Bloggs!" she said, suddenly all of a glow.

"Bloggs? Who's Bloggs?" asked the Colonel, plainly enjoying the fun.

"A rascally schoolmaster," she explained, "who flogged Oliver into a precision of speech which I find most trying. But I must not miscall the dear old man, for I stole his supper."

"I wish he'd flogged him into precision on a staircase," said the Colonel. "Damme, I am hungry."

"I'm thinking there'll be a dub of water in the bottom yonder," said the chieftain, "and Mistress Waynflete shall, if she will, take her first meal Highland fashion."

As I firmly declined to be carried another yard, the Highlanders unmade my litter and resumed their plaids. In the trough of the valley we found a streamlet of clear sweet water, and our repast consisted of a handful of oatmeal, of which every clansman carried a supply in a linen bag, stirred in a horn of water. It was not our Staffordshire notion of a breakfast, but it was better than nothing.

"Water-brose is a guid enough thing at a pinch," said Maclachlan to Margaret, "guid enough to take a big loon like yon Donald to London and back."

Donald, it appeared, liked an addition to it, notwithstanding his chief's praise of it, for he was taking a long pull from a leather bottle. This, he explained, was usquebaugh, "ta watter of life," and the spice of poetry in the description tempted the Colonel and me to try a dram. The Colonel probably had had worse drink in his time, but even he made no comment. I would almost as lief have had a blank charge fired into my mouth.

While we all took our brose, and Maclachlan squired Margaret, the Colonel told me how it had happened that the Highlanders chanced to come to our rescue in the very nick of time. My own trouble is to get my tale straight and simple, and I have no intention of making a hard task harder by trying to interweave with the threads of my own story a poor history of these important days. Mr. Volunteer Ray saw much more of these things than ever I did, and the curious reader may turn to his fat, little, brown volume for particulars. He was on the other side, and is too partial for a perfect historiographer, but the account of things is there, and reasonably well done too. But as what happened to Margaret, the Colonel, and me, happened because of the campaign of the rival armies, I must boil down what the Colonel told me if I am to make my tale clear. The Colonel, to his credit, as I think, was so enthusiastic over all matters military that he was rather long-winded in his account, and, in like fashion with our housewifely Kate, it behoves me, so to speak, to make a jar of jelly out of a pan of fruit, which is easier done with crab-apples than words.

According to the Colonel, one of the master maxims of the military art is, "Find out what the enemy thinks you are going to do, and then don't do it." My Lord George Murray, the Prince's chief adviser in military matters, had acted on this plan, and had given the go-by to the Duke of Cumberland in grand style. At Macclesfield, the traveller to London had choice of two high roads, one through Leek and Derby, and the other through Congleton and Stafford. Leaving the Prince at Macclesfield with the bulk of his men, Murray had pushed with a big force as far as Congleton on the Stafford road, and the news of his advance had made Cumberland withdraw all his northerly outposts to his head-quarters at Stone. It was the last body of horse, routed out of Congleton, which we had watched from the pines last night, racing in fear and disorder back to the main of their army. Before daybreak Murray had sent on a force of Highlanders under Colonel Ker towards Newcastle, to maintain the illusion that the Stafford road was the one the Prince would take, and the vanguard of this force, under Maclachlan, had saved us at the "Red Bull." Murray himself was marching from Congleton across country to Leek, while the Prince was marching thither also from Macclesfield. Murray would be there first, and did not mean to wait for the Prince, but to push on as far as possible towards Derby. We, too, were bound for Leek, where we should be safe at last, and the end of the Colonel's explanation came, not because he had said all he could have said, but because Donald was yelling to the clansmen in preparation for our retaking the road.

Maclachlan accepted with alacrity an offer I made to go ahead and join our advance. He ordered Donald to accompany me, giving as his reason: "For he kens the English fine when the spirit of understanding is on him, and ye'll easy get it on him by raxing him a crack in the wame, same as ye did back yonder at the yill-house."

The Highlander maintained the expression of a wooden doll throughout this explanation, but, as I leaped hard after him across the brook, I overtook a grin on his face that promised well for my future entertainment.

"She pe recovert," he said. "Tat was a foine shump."

Before I could reply Margaret was upon us.

"The mare is quite frisky. She thinks me a mere fardello after Donald. You're sure you're all right, Oliver?"

"So near right, madam, that I beg you not to worry about me further," said I.

"Worry about you or worry you?"

It hurt me to have her go so chilly all of a sudden, but I replied frankly, "Both. It does indeed worry me to have you breakfastless in these wilds through my doings."

"Yes," she said, smiling down on me, "I ken fine the distinction between water-brose and ham and eggs."

"We are still in Staffordshire," I said cheerily, "and I'll go ahead and see what I can do for you. Now, Donald, your best foot first!"

He and I started ahead again, leaving her waiting for the rest of the party, detained by some explanation on the Colonel's part of the military aspects of the lie of the land.

"There's a wheen foine leddies wi' ta Prince, Got bless him," said Donald, "but when yon carline gets amangst 'em she'll pe like a muircock amangst a thrang o' craws. She'll ding 'em a'."

I expected that Donald would cherish ill will to me for my blow, but in this I was wrong. So far from bearing me a grudge, he quite obviously liked me for it. He had a fist, or nief, as he called it, nearly as big as a leg of lamb, and almost the first thing he did when we were alone was to hold it out, huge, dirty, and hairy, and put it alongside mine. He scratched his rough head in his perplexity.

"At Gladsmuir," he said, "'er nainsell did take ten Southron loons wi' 'er own hant, wi' nobody to help 'er, an' now one callant had dinged 'er clean senseless wi' nothin' but a bairn's nief."

"It wasn't clean fighting, Donald," said I. "Nothing but a sort of trick. If you were to hit me fair and square I should snap in two like a carrot. Tell me how you captured the ten men!"

It was a longish story, at any rate as he told it, in quaint uncertain English, intermixed with spates of his own Gaelic as he got excited over the account of his prowess. One of them was an officer, and Donald finished up by ferreting out of his meal-bag a magnificent gold watch, lawful prize from his point of view, taken out of the officer's fob.

"Ta tam t'ing was alife when I raxed 'er out of 'is poke," he said, "but 'er went dead sune after. She can 'ave 'er for a shillin'."

He had no idea, nor could I make him understand, what it was and what purpose it served. When it had run down for want of winding, to his simple mind it had 'died.' He pushed it into my hand as indifferently as if it had been a turnip, and I promised to pay him at Leek, for my pockets were empty again and Margaret had the bag.

"'Er nainsell wad rather 'ave a new pair o' progues," said he. "And what for does anybody want a thing tat goes dead to tell ta time wi'? T'ere's ta sun and ta stars, tat never go dead."

As we walked rapidly we overtook our party soon after settling the matter of the watch. The plough-lad who had been pressed as guide told me we were near the road to Leek, and I let him return. We dropped down to a rough road running our way, and a mile or so along it the roofs of a village came in sight, and we halted till the main body came up.

"What is it, Oliver?" asked the Colonel.

"Breakfast, sir," said I.

We marched into the village in military array. At our head strode Donald, stout of heart and mighty of hand, with two pipers skirling away at his heels, and the clansmen stepping it out bravely two abreast behind them. Margaret came next, with me at her mare's head, and the Colonel and Maclachlan brought up the rear.

Our arrival created as much stir as an earthquake. The Highlanders, in twos and threes, swarmed into the houses and ordered their unwilling hosts to prepare them a meal. That it was war I was engaged in was, for the first time, brought clearly home to me when I saw a fearsome Highlander, with claymore, dirk, and loaded musket, posted at each end of the village. A touch of ordinary human nature was, however, added, when the children, fearless and happy in their ignorance, sidled up to the sentries and stared at them as eagerly as if they had been war-painted Indians in a travelling show.

At first, we, the gentry for short, intended to seek accommodation in the inn, poor and shabby though it looked, and Donald was ordered thither to give instructions. The Colonel and the chieftain rode along the village to observe how things were going, and this left Margaret and me together, and spectators of a delightful little passage. For as Donald approached the inn-door, the hostess, a sharp-nosed, vixenish woman, charged at him with a very dirty besom and routed him completely. Truth to tell, Donald, who had the sound, sweet nature of a child, had all the natural child's indifference to dirt, but even he, long-suffering in such matters as he was, had to stop to scrape the filth out of his eyes. This gave me the chance of making peace, and I went up and explained that we should pay for everything like ordinary travellers, good money for good fare.

"Oh aye!" she said.

"Jonnock!" said I.

"You're a Stafford chap," she asserted.

"I am," I agreed, "and I'll see you done well by."

That settled her, and Donald was settled too, for his immediate wants were satisfied by a large glass of brandy, and those more remote by a bucket of water and a towel.

"Gom!" said the virile little woman to me, "a wesh'll do him no harm. I've got the biggest gorby of a mon," she went on, "between Mow Cop and the Cocklow o' Leek. He's gone trapesing off, with our young Ted on his shoulders, to see yow chaps march into Leek. There's about a dozen on 'em gone, as brisk as if they were goin' to Stoke wakes. Fine fools they'll lukken when they comes whom to-nate."

As it happened, the "Dun Cow" was after all left to Donald and the pipers. When I rejoined Margaret, she said, "Pray help me down, Oliver, and we'll find the doctor, and have him dress your head. And, once out of Donald's sight, I'll have the laugh that's nearly killing me to keep under."

I helped her down, and said, "Never mind doctor! That fine old church yonder must be well worth looking into."

"You will mind, sir," she flashed. She beckoned to Donald to take charge of her mare, and then waylaid a passing girl, running from one sentry to the other, and got her to show us the doctor's.

So we started thither, and as we went she said, "Really, Oliver, you are inconsiderate at times."

"Nonsense," said I. "It's my head."

I was angry, not at her words, for I knew she did not mean them, but at my inability to see what the fascinating jade was driving at.

"Inconsiderate," she repeated firmly. "You'd be content to be introduced to the Prince with a great swathe of dirty, blood-stained linen round your head, regardless of how it reflected on me."

"Reflected on you?" I echoed blankly.

"Yes. We shouldn't match. I suppose dear old Bloggs was a bachelor?"

"He was," said I, resigning the contest in despair.

The doctor lived in a fair-sized stick-and-wattle house. He was a dapper little man, with a cleverish, weakling cast of face, and was all on the jump with the turn things had taken. He had just opened the door to us, and was eyeing us uncertainly, when the Colonel and the Chief, returning on foot from their inspection, having left their horses to be baited under the watchful eye of a Highlander, stopped beside us.

"Are you the doctor?" asked Margaret promptly, as if to forestall any backing out on my part. If I could have joyed at anything, I should have been overjoyed at her keenness in having me seen to.

"Yes," he said, but very softly.

"Then please attend to this gentleman's wound," she said.

"Is he a rebel?" he asked, so loudly that he might have been talking to some one across the street, and instinctively I turned round There, sure enough, was the parson, a pasty, pursy, mean-looking rogue, coming across to see what was doing.

"It's his head I want you to attend to," retorted Margaret, "not his politics."

"I doctor no rebels," said he, louder than ever.

"Man," intervened Maclachlan, taking a pistol from his belt, and emphasizing his words by gently tapping its barrel on the palm of his hand, "if in ten minutes yon head isn't doctored to pairfection, it's your own sel' will be beyond all the doctoring in England."

"It's against all law," said the doctor.

"I'm the law in this clachan to-day," said Maclachlan simply, still tapping away with his pistol. Hearing the parson behind, he turned round and added drily, "And the gospel." Hereupon the parson's face took on the appearance of ill-made, ill-risen dough, and he turned and slipped off with creeping, noiseless steps, like a cat.

"Come in," whispered the doctor.

"Ye're a man o' sense," said Maclachlan, and pushed his pistol back into his belt.

We all passed into the hall, and the doctor made the door carefully.

"That damned pudding-face is a Whig," said he, "and so, of course, he's a Justice. The Squire's a Whig, and he's a Justice. Here am I, well-reputed in the faculty, and my wife coming of the Parker Putwells, one of the rare old county stocks—none of your newfangled button-men and turnip-growers —and I'm no Justice, because I'm a Church-and-King man of the old school."

"They went out of fashion with flaxen bobs," said I.

"Come on, my tousled macaroni!" said he. "There's nothing the matter with the inside of your head at any rate, though the outside looks as if you'd been arguing with the parish bull."

"This is a verra fine house," said Maclachlan slowly and slily.

"A mere dog-kennel," said the doctor, "considering she's a Parker Putwell."

"And I'm thinking," said Maclachlan, very thoughtfully "that there'll be some guid victuals in the pantry and, mayhap, a gay wheen bottles of right liquor in the cellar."

"Oh aye!" said he, taken aback.

"Then I'm thinking we'll e'en have breakfast here and try their merits. And if it's a guid ane, I'll see you a Justice, whatever that may be, when the King enjoys his own again. A Maclachlan has spoken it."

The doctor went to an inner door and bawled, "Euphemia," and a discontented wisp of a woman answered his call.

"Madam and gentlemen, my wife, Mistress Snooks, born a Parker Putwell. Mistress Snooks, like me, will bow to your will with pleasure, nor will you mislike her table, I assure you. Now, my buck, let's see to this crack in your head."

He took me into his druggery, unwrapped the bandage, and examined my wound.

"So ho!" said he, "a right good sock on the head. How did it happen?"

I told him.

"It's lucky for you, my buck," he said, "that you've got a baby's flesh and a tup's skull, and some one had the sense to wash the cut clean as soon as it was done."

He set to work and made a good job of it, with a pledget of lint and strips of plaister, and meanwhile I speculated as to why, in all these bottles and jars and gallipots, neither nature nor art could contrive to store a drug magistral for the blow that had riven my heart asunder.

"That's better than two yards stripped off a wench's smock," he said at last. "And a damnably fine smock too, you lucky rascal."

He twittered a snatch of ribaldry that made my foot twitch in my boot. Behind his back, I pocketed the priceless relic, dank and red with my unworthy blood, and followed him back to the company.

We made a longish stay, and fared well at his table. The doctor was a good enough fellow in himself, but his wife, a salt, domineering woman, lived in the light of the Parker Putwells, and he, poor devil, in the shadow they cast. He was playing a double game too, for whenever the red-elbowed serving-wench came into the room, he roared his dissent from our lawlessness, and drank to the King with his glass over the water-bottle as soon as she went out. Once when she brought us a rare dish of calvered roach and, with wenchlike curiosity, lingered to pick up a crumb or two of gossip, we had a snap of comedy, for, in his play-acting, he would take none till Maclachlan, to keep up the farce, thrust a pistol at his head and forced him. Whereupon the maid, in plucky fashion, threw a cottage loaf at Maclachlan and took him fairly in the chest. The doctor, to his credit, rose to protect her, but she braved it out. She would, she averred, lend the thingamyjig a better petticoat than the one he'd got on. "If he mun wear 'em," she added, "he mought wear 'em long enough to be dacent." The doctor bustled her out at last, palpitating but triumphant.

Maclachlan had sprung up like a wild cat when the missile hit him. Luckily he was flustered by the bouncing of the loaf on the table and off again clean into Margaret's lap, or the ready trigger would surely have been drawn in earnest. Then Margaret promptly took the edge off his anger by saying with menacing sweetness, "I'm sorry the fun has gone further than was desirable, but I will not have the girl blamed for what was in her a brave deed, nor suffer any unpleasantness here on account of it. Pray be seated."

This ended the matter, and Maclachlan, with a wry smile, settled down again to his fish.

"It was a verra guid thing after a' said," he explained, "that it wasna my mouth, for it was an unco' ding. I'm half hungry yet, and, to be sure, breakfast and broillerie gang ill together."

It was well said, and Margaret rewarded him with a smile and engaged him in merry conversation. The Colonel, who had kept silent during the trouble, now plied the doctor with questions about the surrounding country.

"It's a poor biding-place for a Parker Putwell," he replied. "If there's a drearier or lonelier stretch in England than the moorlands of Leek, I would not care to see it. I go miles on end about it to visit my sick folk, and mostly in a day's riding I see nobody but a stray shepherd, a flash pedlar twanning his way across country with his gewgaws, and now and then a weaver scouring the outlying cottages for yarn."

When the meal was over Maclachlan insisted on paying for it, and bestowed a shilling on the loaf-thrower. In theory, I found, the clansmen paid for what they had, and Donald, being quartermaster to the party, was very busy discharging his obligations up and down the village. The only cause of dissatisfaction, but that not a slight one, was his Scots mode of reckoning, in which a pint was near on half a gallon, while his shilling was a beggarly penny. It always took a whirl of his dirk and a storm of Gaelic to convince a cottager of his accuracy, but he got through at last, and we reformed our order of march and started for Leek.

This time I took the sorrel and Maclachlan marched beside Margaret on her mare, for the Colonel wanted to give me an account, derived from the young Chief, of the Prince's marchings and victories. The Highlanders being astonishing foot-folk, and the Colonel being full of analogies and digressions, the tower of Leek church came in sight before we had got the Prince out of Edinburgh.

A halt was called to discuss what was to be done. The Colonel dismounted, and we followed his example. Margaret, I noticed, coloured slightly as Maclachlan lifted her down. She had been as cool and unfluttered as a marble image when she lay in my arms. Maclachlan was for marching on into the town, and the doubt on the Colonel's face rather nettled him.

"The considerable town of Manchester," he said, "was entered, and in part seized, by one Scots sergeant and his drummer. Of a certainty near a score of Maclachlans can intake yon little clachan."

"Of a certainty," retorted the Colonel, "Margaret and one of your pipers would be enough if we only had the townspeople to consider. There's no game much easier than walking into a lion's den when the lion isn't there, but it's pure foolishness to play the game till you're sure he's not at home."

"Lion! What's to do here wi' lions?" asked Maclachlan.

"As I'm only a volunteer," answered the Colonel, "and not yet a man of authority under the Prince's commission, which you are, I must ask your leave to explain that our getting into Leek is a military problem. I grant ye it's a little problem, since it wouldn't matter a pinch of snuff if we marched in and every one of us was promptly hanged in the market-place. But I undertook to make Oliver here a soldier, and, damme, what you want to do isn't soldiership, and he'll only learn soldiership by mastering the little problems first."

"Like sums at school," said I, whereat Margaret laughed aloud.

"Damme, you young rascal," stormed the Colonel, "if I'd got my commission in my pocket, I'd put you under arrest for impertinence."

"With great respect, sir," I answered, "I beg to say that I understand that, at a council of war, the youngest officer gives his opinion first."

"That's bowled you over, dad," said Margaret cheerfully.

"Damme, I'll bowl you off to Chester to-night," he retorted. "As sure as a gun's a gun, you'll ruin Oliver. Stop grinning like an ape, sir, at that jade's tricks, and listen to me."

"I'm thinking, sir," said Maclachlan, "that in my present responsible position I would greatly value your observations on the matter in hand."

This was a clever remark so far as the Colonel was concerned, for he would have talked to a viper about soldiering, but Maclachlan did not see, and I did, the delicate little mouth that Margaret made.

"My observations are simply these," said the Colonel: "We do not know where Murray is, we do not know where the Prince is, and we do not know where the Duke of Devonshire is. Any one of them may be in Leek."

"And who may be the Duke of Devonshire?" asked the chief. "I've never heard of him."

"One of Geordie's dandiprats, who has got together a big force of militia at Derby, and who, if he's any pluck, may have forestalled us all by marching to Leek."

"It's sair awkward," said Maclachlan, completely taken aback by the news.

"It is so," said the Colonel, "and seeing that Oliver knows the rules and procedures of courts martial, he shall deliver his judgment first."

"Sir," said I, bowing low, "I would, with respect, suggest...."

I got no further, for Donald, who was within a yard of my elbow, suddenly bounded into the air and let off a most astonishing yell. Then he ran up and down, like a foxhound after a lost scent, gabbling away in Gaelic. The clansmen put their hands to their ears, and their ears to the wind, listening intently, whereon Donald ceased his capering and chattering, and called out to us, "Ta pipes! Ta Prunce! Ta pipes! Ta Prunce!"

"Whist, ye auld fule," said the chief. "Ye're enough to deafen a clap of thunder."

"I'm telling it ye, ta pipes! ta Prunce!" he babbled, and then fell still, and we all listened.

The clansmen must have had ears like the bucks of their own mountains. I could hear nothing but the soft sough of the breeze as it swept o'er the rank grass of the moorlands, but they, Maclachlan as madly as any of them, yelled their slogan, and the pipers filled their bags and blew fit to burst. Like was calling to like across the wilds.

Margaret glowed with enthusiasm, and the Colonel's eyes sparkled as he handed me the box for the customary pinch—a courtesy, I found by later experience, he conferred on very few. Indeed, in my new trouble, the kindness and affection of the Colonel were becoming my best stand-by.

"The great game's afoot, Oliver," he said.

"And we'll play it to the end, sir."

"Good lad," said he.

"Donald, ye auld skaicher," said Maclachlan, "get your bairns agait. The Maclachlans are going to be last, where they should be first, at the intaking of a town, but the Prince, God bless him, will think me balm in Gilead when he sees the reinforcements I bring."

He was in high feather, and it interested me to watch in another the tonic effect of Margaret's presence. I took no advantage of my capacity as her body-servant, but leaped into my saddle and sat the sorrel like a wooden image as he dodged about to get her horsed again and ready for the road. He was, indeed, fit to serve a queen; the Highland fashion marvellously well set off the clean, strong lines of his body, and the single eagle's feather in his bonnet was the right sign to be waving over him. The top-dog spirit was fast oozing out of me, and I sat there sourly dusting the skirts of my poor country-tailor-made coat.

The men were lined up on the rough moorland track, Donald at their head, and the two pipers filling their bags and fingering their chanters behind him. Maclachlan took Margaret's rein and began to lead her mare up the slope of the path, but the Colonel called to him and diverted his attention, and she stopped beside me.

"Oliver," she said, "you must let me have your coat for half an hour when we are settled in the town, so that I can mend it. The holes in it make me shiver every time I see them."

"You are very kind, madam," said I, still dusting away, lest she should see how my hand trembled.

"Oliver!"

She forced me to look at her now, she spoke so peremptorily, and when the blue eyes met mine they were so clear and intent that I feared she might read my secret.

"Smile!"

Smile! I was to smile, was I? And when our Kate got the news at the Hanyards, the smile would die out of her eyes for ever, for Jack, dear, splendid Jack, was the weft that had been woven into the warp of her being.

"I do not smile to order, madam," said I.

She flicked the mare sharply and cantered up to the level, whither Maclachlan raced after her with the speed of a hound.



CHAPTER XVI

BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE

On our way into the town a thing happened which greatly shook me, being, as I was, nothing in the world but a small farmer who had never seen the wars. At a point where the rough road cut across a fold in the moorlands we saw, half a mile to our right, a herd of cattle being lashed and chivvied away to the remoter crannies among the hills by a throng of sweating hinds and fanners. Had it happened our way, thought I broodily, Joe and I would be there among the like, saving our own stock from the marauders. Donald looked at them longingly, but our haste brooked no delay, and besides, as he put it to me later, "It's a puir town, but, after a' said, better than a wheen lousy cattle, for I've come by a fine pair o' progues for a twa-three bawbees."

Leek was as full of Highlanders as a wasp-cake is of maggots, and still they were swarming in. Donald and the clansmen, indifferent to the crush and hubbub, clave a way for us to the market-place, where, on the Colonel's advice, they were dismissed to beat for billets. I then took charge and led my companions across to the "Angel," where the throng was so dense that they might have been giving the ale away.

To get the horses stabled and baited was easy enough, for few of the Highlanders rode south, although it was different going north again. Then, leading my companions into the yard, I pushed into the inn and, by good hap, lighted on the host, nearly out of his five wits with trying to understand one word of English in a score of Gaelic.

"Hello, surry!" said I.

"Gom!" said he, "Staffordsheer at last."

"I've heard a lot about Leek ale," said I. "Draw me a mug of it!"

He brought it in a trice, and his face beamed with honest pride as he said, holding it up between my eyes and the light, "What do you think o' that for colour and nap? Damn my bones! None of your London rot-gut, master, but honest Staffordsheer ale. Damme, you can fairly chew the malt in it."

"I'll bet you a guinea I've drunk better," said I, with the aleyard at my lips.

"I'd bet on my own ale," said he, "if the 'Angel' was full of devils let alone petticoats. An', as between friends, y'r 'onour, win or lose, dunna tell my missus you've 'ad better ale than ourn."

I drank off his ale and said judiciously, "No, I haven't. That's the best ale I've ever drunk," and handed him his guinea.

"This'n's a bit of fat along with the lean," said he, spinning the guinea up in the air, and, countrywise, spitting on it for luck. "Be there owt I can do for y'r, sir? A gentleman as knows good ale when he drinks it shudna be neglected for a lot of bare-legged savages that 'anna as much judgment in beer as a sow 'as in draff." He leaned towards me and added in a whisper, "I'm giving 'em bouse I wudna wesh my mare's fetlocks in, an' they're neckin' it as if it was my rale October."

"It was thundery in the summer," said I gravely, whereat he grinned intelligently.

"Y'r 'onour's up to snuff," said he. "Be there owt I can do for y'r, sir?"

"Fetch the missus," said I, "and we'll talk."

The hostess came. Her cheeks were brown as her own ale, and we talked, nineteen to the dozen, for at least ten minutes.

In the end I snapped up the best parlour overlooking the square for Margaret's use, and bedrooms for each of us, paying a substantial bargain-penny, for Mistress Waynflete had handed me back the bag of gold Master Freake had given me. It would be necessary, I found, to oust two or three bare-knees who had marked them for their own, but that could easily be done, if, as was unlikely to be the case, they were sober enough at night to crawl bedwards. These arrangements made, I pushed out and fetched in Margaret, who was very grateful for what I had done, and went off to her room, while we three men took our stand on the bricked causeway and watched the doings in the square.

We saw two or three battalions swing into the square from the Macclesfield road, and the Colonel scanned them keenly, and, as I thought, anxiously. Even to my untrained eye they were a mixed lot; the bulk of them, to be sure, were stout, active, well-armed fighting men, who marched in fair order, six or eight abreast; but there were numbers of oldish men and boys among them, and many were but indifferently armed.

"What do you number all told?" asked the Colonel.

Maclachlan answered in French. There was now no mistaking the gravity in the Colonel's face, and he took snuff so thoughtfully that, for the first time, he forgot me.

"Excuse me, my dear lad," said he, recovering himself and thrusting out the box towards me. "I hope there's a tobacco-man in the town who sells right Strasburg. I'm running out, and rappee and Brazil are mere rubbish to the cultivated palate." Then, looking around the square, he added cheerily, "Quite a show for the townsmen!"

Just in front of us, standing on the edge of the gutter, was a little, ancient, distinguished dame, who had been watching the scene with quick, avid eyes. She turned her fierce, scornful face up to the Colonel, and said, "Yes, sir! You are right. It's a show, just a show, for the townsmen. Yet I remember that, thirty years ago, the fathers of these spiritless curs were as eager for the cause as is the eagle for his quarry."

"So, madam," said the Colonel very gently.

"So, indeed," she returned. "But now, in their accursed grubbing for money, they have rooted up every finer instinct, and they think only of their tradings in silks with the Court ladies of London. Better a fine gown sold to godless Caroline than a stout blow struck for God-anointed James."

She was beyond doubt a lady of quality, but fallen on poverty and now, worst of all to her, on evil, faithless days. As she stopped, short of breath with her sharp speaking, for she was very ancient, a mean lout of a man edged himself up against her to get a better position for watching the arrival of another body of clansmen. In a fierce access of rage she struck him with the ebony stick on which she leaned and, almost hissing the words at him, said, "Back to your buttons and your tassels, Thomas Ashley, and get grace by thinking on your worthy father!"

The man sidled off, and she continued, addressing the Colonel, "In the fifteen his father was one of us, and suffered worthily."

"For what, madam?" I asked.

"For the cause," she replied.

"For what particular service to the cause, madam?" I persisted.

"He was zealous against the schismatics, sir," she said boldly.

"Madam," was my reply, "if the zeal of any one of us, townsman or clansman, takes the same form this day, I shall certainly wring his neck. We can fight for Charles without burning chapels."

"Smite-and-spare-not would subscribe to that doctrine," said Margaret, thrusting her way gently between the Colonel and me, and hooking a hand round an arm of each of us. Putting her lips to my ear, she whispered merrily, "Push of pike and the Word," and then looked so winningly at me that the black shadow lifted, and I smiled back at her.

And now the craning of necks at the angle where the great road curved into the square, betokened something out of the ordinary, which turned out to be the arrival of the Prince's life-guards. They were splendid, well-mounted fellows, clothed in blue, faced with red, and scarlet waistcoats heavy with gold. With them were the leading chiefs of the army, and I heard Maclachlan reeling off their names and qualities in the Colonel's ear. The guard, in number some sixscore, formed three sides of a square and sat their horses, while one of the leaders proclaimed James and took possession of the town.

The cheers of the clansmen died away, only to be renewed more loudly and proudly when another column swept into the square. Here, indeed, were men apt for war and the battle, six abreast and a hundred files deep, with a dozen pipers piping their mightiest, and a great standard flinging to the breeze its proud Tandem triumphans. At their head strode a tall young man, very comely and proper, with a frank, resolute, intelligent face. He was dressed in the Highland fashion, with a blue bonnet topped with a white rosette, a broad, blue ribbon over his right shoulder, and a star upon his breast. The thronging thousands of clansmen burst into thundering volleys of Gaelic yells, the waiting leaders bared their heads and bowed, and I knew it was the Prince.

After a short consultation with his intimate counsellors, Charles walked almost directly towards us, making, as it seemed, for the fine house that neighboured the "Angel."

Even the townsmen, as he approached, raised their hats and cheered a little, for he was on sight a man to be liked. When I hear sad tales of him now, I think of him as I saw him then, and as I knew him in those few stirring days when hope spurred him on, and the star of his destiny had not yet climbed to its zenith. I come of a stock that sets no value on princes, and I would not now lift a hand to snatch the Stuarts out of the grave they have dug for themselves, but it is due to him, and, above all, due to the chiefs and clansmen who followed and fought and died for him, to say that the Bonnie Charlie I knew was every inch of him a man and a prince to his finger-tips.

Maclachlan darted out and dropped on his knee before Charles, who, with kindly impatience, seized the shoulder-knot of his plaid, haled him to his feet, and plied him with a throng of questions. At some reply made by the young chief, Charles turned his eyes on us, and, easily picking out the Colonel, made for him with eager outstretched hands. For his part, the Colonel stepped clear of the crowd on the causeway and stood at the salute. He was, I thought, the most self-possessed person in the square, and, indeed, was taking a pinch of snuff as soon as the formality was over, while Margaret was red and white by turns, and I shook at the knees as if expecting the Prince, in the manner of old Bloggs, to call me out and thrash me soundly.

The joy of the Prince at being joined by Colonel Waynflete was overflowing.

"My Lord Murray has talked of you," I heard him say, "until I felt that you were the one man in England that mattered, and now here you are. I must tell Sheridan and all of them the good news."

He turned off and called to a group of men near him, and several of them came up and were made known to the Colonel. After more handshaking and chatting, the eager Prince caught the Colonel by the arm and was for dragging him off into the house destined for his lodging, but the Colonel in his turn resisted and led him towards Margaret.

"My daughter, sir," he said, briefly and proudly.

Off came the bonnet, and Charles bowed low and greeted her with very marked courtesy.

"Your prince, madam," he said, "but also your very humble servant. My Court is a small one, and you are as important and welcome an addition to it as is your distinguished father to my army. Swounds, Colonel," turning to him with a merry smile, "I shall put a flea in his lordship's ear when I see him at Derby. He never so much as mentioned your daughter. Man, one might as well talk of stars and forget Venus!"

"There is this excuse for him, sir," said the Colonel, very sedately, "that on the only occasion on which my Lord Murray saw her, which was at Turin in 1738, she was a whirlwind of arms and legs, long plaits and short petticoats."

"Whereas now she—but I will reserve my opinion for the shelter of a fan in a secluded corner at my next little Court." Then, very abruptly, fixing his eyes on me, all of a swither, with my milk-stained cap in my hand, "And whom have we here?"

Whereupon, strangely enough, forgetting all courtliness, Margaret, the Colonel, and Maclachlan fell over one another, so to speak, in telling the Prince who I was. For a few seconds there was a gabble of introductions, which made me feel hot and foolish.

"One at a time," laughed the Prince, "and, of course, Mistress Waynflete first."

"Your Royal Highness," said Margaret, "this is my splendid friend and gallant comrade, Oliver Wheatman."

"Enough, and more than enough, for a poor Prince Adventurer. Give me but the leavings of your friendship and comradeship, Master Wheatman, and I shall be beholden to you. And now, excuse us, madam, I have much to say to your father."

"Sir," said I, "I crave a little boon."

"You begin well," he said, and added, after a little laugh, "With all my heart."

"Here at hand," said I, "is an ancient lady who has faced this rough crowd and this bitter weather to see the Prince of her heart's desire. She is brave as a lion for you, but too modest to do more than stand and pray for you."

And then he did one of those princely things that made rough men willing to be cut down in swathes for him. He strode up to her and seized her trembling hands.

"Nay, kneel not, dear lady," he said, putting an arm around her to restrain her.

"God bless your Royal Highness, and give you victory," she said brokenly. "This is the hour I have prayed for daily these thirty years, and I thank God for giving us a Prince so worthy of an earthly throne. The Lord shall yet have mercy upon Jacob."

"I thank God," said Charles, "for giving me a friend like you."

His green plaid was looped up at his shoulder by a fine brooch, a cairngorm set in a silver rim. This he took off, and pinned it on the trembling woman's breast.