re, that it had bound about the hair of Maisie Lennox. Though when
Wat asked of me (who, being a lover might have known better) how I knew
it for hers, I could not find words to tell him. But it is true that all
the same, know it I did.

So we followed down the trail, finding now a shred of cleading and again
the broken bits of a tobacco pipe such as soldiers use, small and black,
till in our search we had rounded the hill that looks into the valley of
the Cooran. Here at the crossing of the burn, where it was smallest, we
found Anton Lennox's broad blue bonnet.

It was enough. Soon we were scouring the hilltops as fast as our legs
could move under us. We travelled southward, keeping ever a keen watch,
and twice during the day we caught sight of troops of dragoons, moving
slowly over the heather and picking their way among the hags, quartering
the land for the sport of man-catching as they went. Once they raised,
as it had been a poor maukin, a young lad that ran from them. And we
could see the soldiers running their horses and firing off white pluffs
of powder. It was a long time ere the musket-cracks came to us, which
must have sounded so near and terrible to the poor fugitive. But they
hit him not, and for that time at least he wan off scot free. So
presently we saw them come back, jeered at by their comrades, like dogs
that have missed the quarry and slink home with their tails between
their legs.

But neither one of our poor captives was among them. So we held fast and
snell to the eastward, passing along the skirts of the Millyea, and
keeping to the heights above the track which runs from the Glenkens to
the Water of Cree. It was near to the infall of the road from Loch Dee
that we first gat sight of those we sought. It was not a large company
which had them in charge, and they marched not at all orderly. So that
we judged it to be either one of the Annandale levies of the Johnstone,
or Lag's Dumfries troop of renegades.

But as we came nearer, we marked quite clearly that they had two
prisoners, tall men, one with some white thing about his head, and in
the rear they had six or seven other men, mostly on foot. Coming nearer
we could also see a figure as of a young maid upon a horse. Then I knew
that the dear lass I had watched and warded so long, was surely at the
mercy of the rudest of the enemy.

We were thus scouring along the moor, keeping a wary eye upon the troop
and their poor prisoners, when Wat's fo