oth had gotten cleanly off, and that a soldier was invalided with a
sword-thrust through and through his shoulder, in which very clearly I
recognised Wat's handicraft.

CHAPTER LI.

THE SANDS OF WIGTOWN.

The morning of the eleventh of May came as calm and sweet as the night
had been, which had proved so disastrously clear for us. I slept little,
as men may guess, thinking on the poor lassies; and sometimes also on
the torture in the prison, and the death on the scaffold. For I knew
that though there might be delay, there could be no such thing as pardon
for one that had carried the standard at Sanquhar, charged the storming
fray of Ayrsmoss, and sole of all in Cameron's muster had gotten clear
away.

From early morning I could hear on the street the gathering of the folk
from the country-side far and near. And then the soldiers came
clattering by to their stations, laughing as they went like people going
to look upon a show.

"There are but two of them to be 'pitten doon,' after all," I heard one
of the soldiers say. "Gilbert Wilson has paid a hundred pound to get off
his bit lassie Agnes."

And that was the first intimation I had that only the elder woman,
Margaret Lauchlison, whom I had seen in the Thieves' Hole with her head
on her hands, and our own sweet Margaret were to be drowned within the
flood-mark of the Blednoch.

Black, black day! Would that I could blot it out of my memory. Yet that
men in after times may see what weak maids and ailing women bore with
constancy in the dark years, I set down that day's doings as I saw
them--but briefly, neither altering nor suppressing, because of this
matter I cannot bear to write at large. It was but half an hour before
the binding of the women that Lag sent for me--in order that I might see
the thing which was done, and, as he said, carry the word to Sandy and
the rest of the saints at Edinburgh.

And this, as I told him, with all constancy I should be very fond to do.

Now the Blednoch is a slow stream, which ordinarily flows in the deep
ditch of its channel, wimpling and twining through the sands of the bay
of Wigtown. The banks are but steep slopes of mud, on which if one slips
he goes to the bottom with a slide. Up this deep channel the sea comes
twice every day, damming back the sluggish stream and brimming the banks
at full tide. When Lag's men took me down to the water edge, I saw the
two women already tied to stakes set in the ooze of the Bled