"Well, for your father's!" I said.

And at that she said nothing.

Then she told me that the young officer in command was a lad from one of
the good families of the North, and that he treated them civilly. But
that, having lost a prisoner on a former occasion, he might happen to
lose his life if he let slip so noble a taking; which made him careful
of his prisoners with a great carefulness. As well it might; for the
Privy Council was not to be trifled with in those days.

There were nine of the prisoners altogether, including the minister of a
Nithside conventicle that had been scattered that day. More I could not
get from her. For, one of the soldiers stirring without, she prayed me
so piteously to be gone, that I set off crawling down among the stones,
though I was eager to hear how they had been taken at Cove Macaterick.
But that I had to put off to another diet of hearing, as they say in the
kirk.

On the morrow we came upon the man that was of all men the best fitted
to give us aid in the matter of rescue. This was James Harkness of
Locharben, "James of the Long Gun," as he was called. He had been a
soldier, and was said to be the finest marksman in Scotland. Often had
the King's party tried to win him back again to the troop, but James
kept to the hills with his noted long gun ever at his back. For many
years he had as companion his brother Thomas, called "Tam o' the Lang
Hosen." But he had been killed in battle, so that often like a widowed
Jack heron, James Harkness stood at gaze on some hilltop, leaning on his
gun, and this was mostly his place at conventicles or meetings of the
Societies.

Being an old soldier, it fell to him now to choose the place of the
rescue and to command us in the manner of it. It was in the deep and
narrow defile of the Enterkin that he posted us--a most wild and
fearsome place, where the hills draw very close together. One of the
places is called Stey Gail, and is so high that the sheep grazing on it
are like flies but half way up, as my plain-spoken friend Mr. Daniel de
Foe well remarked when he passed that way. On the other side there rises
still higher, and almost as steep, the top of the Thirlstane Hill. There
is one place at which the water runs down the cleft of the hills, and
the place is perpendicular like a wall. It is so steep a place, as Mr.
Foe saw it, that if a sheep die it lies not still, but falls from slope
to slope, till it ends in the Enterkin Water.

The pat