en the meal was over, I bethought me that I should make an excuse, and
steal away over to the side of the Meaull, to see what it might be that
was stirring on that lonely brae-face. For save the scraggy scrunts of
the rowan trees and birks that surround the cave, there was not a tree
within sight, till the woods at the upper end of Loch Doon began to take
the sun.

I carefully charged my pistols and told Anton how I proposed to go out
to shoot mountain hares or other victual that I could see.

He did not say a word to bid me stay, but only advised me to keep very
close to the cave. Because, once off the bosky face of the cliff, there
was no saying what hidden eyes might spy me out. For Lag, he said, was
certainly lying in hold at Garryhorn at that time, and Claverhouse
himself was on the borders of the country. Concerning this last I knew
better than he, and was much desirous that we could get Anton well
enough to move further out of the reach of his formidable foes.

I started just when the heated haze of the afternoon was clearing with
the first early-falling chill of even. The hills were casting shadows
upon each other towards the Dungeon and Loch Enoch, where, in the
wildest and most rugged country, some of the folk of the wilderness were
in hiding.

As I went I heard the grey crow croak and the muckle corbie cry "Glonk,"
somewhere over by the Slock of the Hooden. They had got a lamb to
themselves or a dead sheep belike. But to me it sounded like the
gloating of the dragoons over some captured company of the poor
wandering Presbyters. It seemed a strange thing for me, when I came to
think of it, that I, the son of the Laird of Earlstoun, my mother, that
had long time been the lady thereof, and my brother Sandy, that was now
Earlstoun himself, should all be skipping and hiding like thieves, with
the dragoons at our tail. Now this thought came not often to us, who
were born during the low estate of the Scottish kirk. But when it did
come, the thought was even more bitter to us, because we had no
sustaining memories of her former high estate, nor remembered what God's
kirk had been in Scotland from the year 1638 down to the weary coming of
Charles Stuart and the down-sitting of the Drunken Parliament in the
Black Year of Sixty.

But for all that I thought on these things as I went. Right carefully I
kept the cover of every heather bush, peat hag, muckle grey granite
stone, and waving clump of bracken. So that in n