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THE HUNTED OUTLAW
OR
DONALD MORRISON, THE CANADIAN ROB ROY
By Anonymous
_"Truth is stranger than Fiction."_
PROLOGUE.
Psychology strips the soul and, having laid it bare, confidently
classifies every phase of its mentality. It has the spring of every
emotion carefully pigeon-holed; it puts a mental finger upon every
passion; it maps out the soul into tabulated territories of feeling; and
probes to the earliest stirrings of motive.
A crime startles the community. The perpetrator is educated, wise,
enjoys the respect of his fellows. His position is high: his home is
happy: he has no enemies.
Psychology is stunned. The deed is incredible. Of all men, this was the
last who could be suspected of mental aberration. The mental diagnosis
decreed him healthy. He was a man to grace society, do credit to
religion, and leave a fair and honored name behind him.
The tabulation is at fault.
The soul has its conventional pose when the eyes of the street are upon
it. Psychology's plummet is too short to reach those depths where motive
has its sudden and startling birth.
Life begins with the fairest promise, and ends in darkness.
It is the unexpected that stuns us.
Heredity, environment and temperament lead us into easy calculations
of assured repose and strength, and permanency of mental and moral
equilibrium.
The act of a moment makes sardonic mockery of all our predictions.
The whole mentality is not computable.
Look searchingly at happiness, and note with sadness that a tear stains
her cheek.
A dark, sinister thread runs through the web of life.
CHAPTER I.
"Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure,
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor." _Gray_.
The Counties of Compton and Beauce, in the Province of Quebec, were
first opened up to settlement about fifty years ago. To this spot a
small colony of Highlanders from the Skye and Lewis Islands gravitated.
They brought with them the Gaelic language, a simple but austere
religion, habits of frugality and method, and aggressive health. That
generation is gone, or almost gone, but the essential characteristics of
the race have been preserved in their children. The latter are generous
and hospitable, to a fault. Within a few miles of the American frontier,
the forces of modern life have not reached them. Shut in by immense
stretches of the dark and gloomy "forest primeval," they live drowsily
in a little world where passions are lethargic, innocence open-eyed, and
vice almost unknown. Science has not upset their belief in Jehovah. God
is real, and somewhat stern, and the minister is his servant, to be
heard with respect, despite the appalling length of his sermons.
Sincerely pious, the people mix their religion with a little whiskey,
and the blend appears to give satisfaction. The farmers gather at the
village inn in the evening, and over a "drap o' Scotch" discuss the
past. As the stimulant works, generous sentiments are awakened in the
breast; and the melting songs of Robbie Burns--roughly rendered, it may
be--make the eye glisten. This is conviviality; but it has no relation
to drunkenness. Every household has its family altar; and every night,
before retiring to rest, the family circle gather round the father or
the husband, who devoutly commends them to the keeping of God.
The common school is a log hut, built by the wayside, and the
"schoolmarm" is not a pretentious person. But, what the school cannot
supply, a long line of intelligent, independent ancestors have supplied,
robust, common sense and sagacity.
Something of the gloom and sternness of the forest, something of the
sadness which is a conscious presence, is in their faces. Their humor
has a certain savor of grimness. For the rest, it may be said that they
are poor, and that they make little effort to be anything else. They do
a little farming and a little lumbering. They get food and clothing,
they are attached to their homesteads, and the world with all its
tempting possibilities passes them by. The young people seek the States,
but even they return, and end their days in the old home. They marry,
and get farms, and life moves with even step, the alternating seasons,
with their possibilities, probably forming their deepest absorptions. It
remains only to be said that, passionately attached to the customs, the
habits of thought of their forefathers, the Highlanders of the Lake
Megantic region are intensely clannish. Splendidly generous, they would
suffer death rather than betray the man who had eaten of their salt.
Eminently law-abiding, they would not stretch out a hand to deprive of
freedom one who had thrown himself upon their mercy.