ly steering a somewhat devious and uncertain course
homeward, when one of them tripped over a bulky object huddled on the
ground, and with an astonished curse fell heavily.

"What the de'il's that? Guide us, it's a man! Some puir body the waur o'
his drink, ah'm thinkin'. Haud up, maister! Losh! it's the cauptain," he
cried, as with the not very efficient aid of his friend he tried to
raise the prostrate man. But there was more than drink the matter here.

"There's bluid on him!" cried one who had been vainly essaying to clap a
battered hat on to the head of the form that lay unconscious in the mud.
A hard task it was presently, when his senses began to return, to get
the wounded sailor unsteadily on his legs; a harder to get him home. The
captain could give but a poor account of how he came to be lying there;
thickly and indistinctly he tried to explain that he had laid a course
for his own moorings, and had been keeping a bright look-out, when
suddenly he had been brought up all standing, and he thought he must
have run bows on into some other craft, for he remembered no more than
getting a crack over his figurehead. Morning was treading on the heels
of night before Hislop and Wallace had got the damaged man home and had
left him safely stowed in bed, and themselves were peacefully snoring,
unconscious of coming trouble.

A day or two passed quietly, and the damaged man already was little the
worse of his adventure. Then, however, the rumour quickly spread that
not only had the Captain been assaulted, but that he had been robbed.
Gossip flew from tongue to tongue, and folk began to look askance on
Wallace and Hislop, muttering that "they aye kenned what was to be the
outcome"; for who, thought they, but Wallace and Hislop could have been
the robbers? They had found him lying, the worse of liquor, having
damaged his head in falling, and they had robbed him, either then or
when they undressed him in his room, believing that he would have no
recollection of what money he had carried that night, nor, indeed, much
of the events of the entire evening. It was all quite plain, said those
amateur detectives. They wondered what the fiscal was thinking of that
he had not clapped the two in jail lang syne. So it fell out that,
almost before they realised their danger, the two men were at Jedburgh,
being tried on a capital charge.

The evidence brought against them was for the most part of no great
account, and the old sea capt