I CONSTRUCT A RAFT.
[_The Narrative is again from the MS. of Quintin MacClellan._]
It was growing dusk when Mary Gordon and I came to the edge of the lake.
Now, Loch Ken, though a narrow and winding piece of water, and more the
extension of the river than, as it were, a lake of set intent, has yet
many broad, still stretches and unexpected inlets, where it is a
paradise for children to play. And these I knew like the way to our well
at Ardarroch.
As Anna had foretold, we found upon the white sands neither the Lady of
Earlstoun, nor yet the boat in which Mary and she had come from the head
of the loch. We saw, however, the rut which the prow of the boat had
made in taking the pebbles, and the large stone to which it had been
fastened was there. The shingle also was displaced, and all about were
deeply marked footprints like those made by men who bear a heavy burden.
Then, when I had sat down on a boulder by the water’s edge, I drew the
little maid to my knee, and told her that I must take her home to find
her mother. And also that because the Earlstoun was a long way off, she
must let me carry her sometimes when she grew weary.
“Is that what Anna would wish?” she asked, for from the first she had
called my sister nothing else.
I told her that it was, and immediately she put her hand in mine, yet
not willingly nor yet trustingly as she had done to Anna, but rather
with an air of protest and like one who does an irksome but necessary
duty.
At the point of the loch at which we had arrived the trees crept down
the hillside quite to the edge of the water, so that for the first
quarter of a mile Mary Gordon and I proceeded northwards without ever
needing to show ourselves out in the open.
Then there comes the narrow pass between the steepest crags of the
Bennan and the water’s edge. We had been moving cautiously through the
trees, and were indeed just about to emerge from the brushwood, when a
rotten stick cracked beneath my foot. Instantly a soldier’s challenge
rang sharply out in front of us.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
Though little better than bairns Mary Gordon and I cowered with the
instinctive craft born of years of persecution and concealment. Again
the man cried, “Show yourselves there, or I fire!”
But as we lay still as death behind the tree he did not think it
necessary to enter the wood--where, indeed, for all he knew a score of
armed and desperate Whigs might have been in hiding.
Then we could hear his neighbours hail him from the next post and ask
what the matter was.
“I heard a noise in the wood,” he returned, gruffly enough.
“A wandering pig or a goat from the hill!” cried his comrade higher up,
cheerily. “There are many of them about.” But the man in front of us was
sullen and did not reply.
“Sulky dog!” cried the man who had spoken--as it were, in order to close
the conversation pleasantly.
The sound of his voice caused me to stop and reflect.
The hail of the second soldier had come distinctly from the rocks of the
Bennan, therefore their commander had established a cordon of sentries
in order to prevent the escape of some noted fugitive. What chance was
there for a couple of children to pass the guarded line? By myself I
might, indeed, have managed. I could well enough have rushed across the
line when the sentry was at the extreme point of his beat, and risked a
bullet as I plunged into the next belt of woodland; but, cumbered with
the care of a maiden of tender years, this was impossible.
The night had drawn down into a cool, pleasant darkness. Softly Mary
Gordon and I withdrew, taking care that no more rotten sticks should
snap beneath our feet. For I knew that in the present state of the
sentry’s temper we would certainly not escape so easily.
Presently, at the southern verge of the straggling copse of hazel, and
therefore close to the edge of the lake, we came upon a couple of
sheepfolds. One of these belonged to our own farm of Ardarroch, and the
other to our kindly neighbour, John Fullerton of the Bennan.
“I am tired--take me home. You promised to take me home!”
The little maid’s voice was full of pitifulness and tears as she found
herself going further and further from the house of Earlstoun.
“We cannot pass that way--the soldier men would shoot us,” I answered
her with truth.
“Then take me to my Auntie Jean,” she persisted, catching at my hand
pettishly, and then throwing it from her, “and my mother will come for
me in the morning.”
“But where does your Auntie Jean live?”
“How can I tell--it is such a long way?” she answered. “It is in a house
in the middle of a loch!”
Now this could only mean in the old tower of Lochinvar. But that was a
yet longer and more difficult road than to the Earlstoun, and the line
of sentries up the Bennan side barred our progress as completely as
ever.
Nevertheless there was something attractive in the little maid’s idea.
For that ancient strength, alone among all the neighbouring houses,
sheltered no band of troopers. Kenmure, Earlstoun, Gordonston, and even
our own little farm town of Ardarroch were all manned and watched, but
the half-ruinous block-house of Lochinvar set in the midst of its
moorland loch had been left untenanted. Its owner, Walter Gordon, the
famous swordsman, was in exile abroad, so they said, and the place, save
for a room or two, totally disrupted and broken down.
There was, therefore, no safer refuge for little Mary, if indeed her
aunt dwelt there and we could find our way. Suddenly, as we looked
about, an idea came to me, and, what is not so common, the means of
carrying it out.
The sheepfolds (or “buchts”) in which we were hiding were walled in with
rough stones from the hill, piled so as to form dry dykes, high and
strong, and the entrances were defended by heavy wooden gates swung upon
posts driven deep into the ground. The gates lifted away easily from
their hinges. Two or three of these would make a secure enough raft if I
could only fasten them together. And even as I set about to find ways
and means, I was conscious of a change. A strange elation took me at the
heart, and ran through my veins like unaccustomed wine.
I was no longer the careless herd laddie. I had entered life. I knew the
penalty of failure. The man in the brown coat lying prone on his face
up there above me on the crest of the Bennan quite clearly and
sufficiently pointed that moral.
So, with the little girl close behind me, I searched both sets of
“buchts” from end to end. I found three gates which could be easily
detached from their posts. These I dismounted one after another.
How, then, was I to get them to the water’s edge, for they were far too
heavy for my puny strength? I could only break a limb from a tree and
draw them down to the loch shore on that, even as I had often helped my
father to bring home his faggots of firewood from the hill upon a
_carr_, or trail-cart of brushwood.
So we set off for the wood to break our branch. It was not long before I
had one of beech lying upon the ground, with all its wealth of rustling
leaves upon it. But the snap I made in breaking it off from the tree
would certainly have betrayed us, had I not been cautious to keep a
sufficient breadth of wood between us and our surly sentry.
Trailing this behind us we came again to the “ewe-buchts.”
It was now no difficult job to transport the raft of gates down to the
water. I gave Mary Gordon a branch to tug at, which made her happier
than anything I had done since Anna committed her to my care, for she
pleased herself with thinking that she did the whole work.
I was almost on the point of using a hay-rope to bind them together as
the best I could do, when I remembered that in the corner of our own
“buchts” my father kept some well-tarred hempen cord, which I had seen
him place there only the day before he had been compelled to go into
hiding. If it chanced not to be removed, without doubt it would prove
the very thing.
I found it where he had laid it, in the little shelf-press rudely
constructed in the wall of four blocks of stone split into faces. There
was little enough of it when I rove it out, but I thought I could make
shift with it. It was, at any rate, far better than miles of hay-rope.
With this I tied the bars closely together by the corners and
cross-bars, and presently had built up a very commodious raft indeed,
though one more than a trifle heavy. It was some time before I hit upon
a plan of launching my top-heavy craft. With the loose “stob” of a
gatepost I managed to lever the crank construction to the edge of a
sloping bank down which she slid so quickly that I had to set my heels
into the grass and hold back with all my might.
But a moment after, without a splash more than a wild duck might make,
the raft floated high above the water. With the end of the rope in my
hand I climbed on board, but soon found that with my weight the top
“liggate” of my craft was within an inch of the water. Clearly, then, it
could not keep both of us dry.
But this troubled me little. I had not lived all my life on the shores
of a loch to be afraid of swimming behind a raft on a midsummer night.
For among other ploys Hob and I would often play at a sort of tilting or
tournament, sitting astride of logs and trying to knock each other off
into the water in the warm summer shallows.
So I placed the little girl upon the raft, cautioning her that as she
hoped to see her mother again, she must in no circumstances make the
least noise nor yet move from the centre of the raft where I had placed
her. Soon she had begun to take an interest in the adventure, and had
forgotten her weariness. She did not, however, again speak of her
mother, but said that she was ready to “go for a sail” with me if I was
quite sure that on the other side she should see her aunt. And this,
speaking somewhat hastily, I promised without condition.