Soon I was climbing, a fearsome spectacle of dirt, up the side of the knowe of the ‘scroggie thorns’. Suddenly, as I crawled, I was seized from behind in a grasp that threatened to dislocate my neck-bone, and a voice in my ear said, very low and deadly: ‘Yae word, ye crawlin’ blastie, an’ I’ll let the life oot o’ ye!’
Now this was not at all a useful observation. It was a perfect impossibility for me to utter a word had my life depended on it, for the thumbs which were choking me had been at the work before, and the pressure on my windpipe threatened to shut out the breath of life from me in a few moments. There were flashes of fire in my eyes, and stars that fell and burst; a sound as of a great spate of waters roared in my ears; then darkness.
To all intents and purposes I died then, for to lose consciousness by violence is to die. What more is there left to experience – in this life, at least?
WHEN I CAME to myself it was through the buzzing of a hundred million bees, each as large as my hand. It was a cold country I travelled through back to this earth, so cold that I wondered how such great bees came there and what flowers they were that they fed on, and who hived them, and what would happen if one of them stung me. Also many other things I saw which it would be tiresome to write down, even if there were a winter’s forenight to do it in. But after the bees there followed a thought of pie, and what a pity it was that I had not got that lass Maxwell’s pie eaten before I died. It was a good pie. It was warm, too, when she brought it, and I was so cold. Then at the last I wondered where I might be. I said to myself, ‘I know not where this place is, but it is not heaven, at any rate, so I must e’en content myself.’ Yet I remember I was not very much alarmed, nor yet very much disappointed. It was, in fact, as I had expected, or so like it that there was no need to make complaints. I had a comfortable sense of being somehow provided for.
When I came alive again there was a light on my face from somewhere, and somebody’s arm was round my head, and there was a stronger suggestion of pie in my mind than ever.
‘Is he come to?’ said someone in a man’s gruff voice, but yet softly.
‘No yet, faither. I think he’s comin’; but he’s gotten an unco chirt, puir laddie.’
‘It was a muckle bullock, May,’ said I, as hoarse as a crow, the words whistling in my throat like the night wind in the keyhole of the outer door. Being awake now I was aware how it was that my thoughts had run on pie, which, when you come to think of it, is a sufficiently curious thing to think upon when you are dead.
‘Aye, it was my faither,’ she said, quietly, and quite in earnest, transferring my head from her shoulder to some kind of pillow made of young bracken and a shawl – no kind of exchange at all, to my thinking. ‘He thocht ye war yin o’ the robbers.’
‘An’ weel it is for you, young Rathan, that my dochter kenned ye; for had ye been yin o’ that accursed crew o’ Yawkins’, ye wad hae suppit in hell the nicht,’ said the old man of Craigdarroch, solemnly and without heat, simply stating a fact which might be relied upon. I wondered to hear him, for though he had been a wild man most of his days, in his later years he had become a great professor and a regular attendant on the Cameronian meeting at the Nine Mile Bar.
There was a cut on Richard Maxwell’s forehead, done, as his daughter presently told me, with a seaman’s cutlass when he broke away from them. They had been awakened by the herd-boy crying that the outlaws were come down from the hills to drive the cattle. Maxwell wakened easily, being a light sleeper, and his daughter was soon beside him, and that in much better order of apparel, as my own observation told me, than might have been deemed possible in such hasty and sudden deray.
Her father cried to her to come and help him to carry away a chest of papers and valuables which the robbers were coming to search for in his house at Craigdarroch; for this Captain Yawkins had often threatened to do, swearing that he would harry Maxwell the Psalm-singer (for so they nominated him) with fire and sword, with the driving of cattle, and the hamstringing of horse. So ere the mounted smugglers arrived, May and her father got clear of the steading, and came out here to the moss-haggs where for the present they were safe. But it happened that her father, not content with what he had possession of, ran back that he might get his Bible. Then some of the outrunners of the robber band coming or he was aware, thrust in on him before he could win clear; but he broke through them, leaving one on his back at the steading gate, which is called the White Liggate; it is on the way to the watering-place where the plough-horses drink. And so he came hither with his coat most torn off his back, a great ragged cut on his brow, yet holding his Bible in one hand and a naked sword in the other.
This was the substance of what I learned lying there on the moor on May Maxwell’s shawl, while old Richard Maxwell in a low voice cursed the destroyers of his home and plenishing with great curses out of the Book of Psalms. It made me admire greatly to hear him so ready with his Bible words.
To us lying there in a little came Silver Sand and Quharrie, breathed and ‘peching’ with the race. Silver Sand looked a sharp reproach when I told him how it was that I came hither, out of the place and duty in which he left me; but he said no word, neither then, nor yet afterwards. May Maxwell and her father did not take his appearing as at all a strange thing; of which I now think the reason to be that all Silver Sand’s movements were so still and secret that no one would have been much astonished at any hour of the day or night had he appeared at their door or suddenly vanished from their sight. Yet to me he was always good and kind; and, indeed, so remains to this day – though now he is, as he says, so stricken in years that the tether-rope is round his foot, with rheumatism in the joints for clog and shackle to keep him nearer home, which means near the old house of Rathan.
‘We maun quit from here and that right speedy,’ said Silver Sand, ‘for they are firing the heather and bent, and it will run like February muirburn in this dry, easterly wind.’
‘What is it they want?’ said I to Silver Sand, for I could now sit up, and was feeling infinitely better. In truth it was more the surprise of it that hurt me than the old man’s thumbs, or even the cloots of that great rampaging stot which trampled me into the moss-hole when the drove went over me.
‘What is’t they want?’ said Silver Sand, testily. ‘The outlaws, what they can find – but Yawkins, he wants that bit kist’ (pointing to the brass-bound box on which old Craigdarroch was sitting), ‘an’ anither lad that I ken o’, he’s mair anxious to fa’ on wi’ the lass, I’m thinkin’.’
At this May Maxwell, kneeling by her father, seemed to draw nearer to me in the darkness; but whether it was from curiosity to hear, or only for company and the sense of safety, I could not at that time rightly understand.
The old man was keeping straight on, interposing prayers among his curses in a manner which, had the matter been a trifle less serious, might have produced laughter. But none of us had even a trifling sense of humour among us that night.
‘Curse them,’ he said, hissing his words, ‘curse them root and branch! But I maun try to be patient. It’s doubtless the Lord’s will that my seven braw sons should be awa’ at the Isle o’ Man when this comes upon me in my auld age. I maun e’en try to bear this. It’s after a’ the Lord’s will – but wait till they get hame, thae seven braw lads, an’ come to the blackened waa’s o’ Craigdarroch, and see the grey ash on the rick-bottoms that their ain hands laid, an’ a’ the bonny sheaves gane luntin’ up into the sky – there’ll be a vengeance that day so that they shall tell it to the babe yet unborn