y that this realm is
guided. But if it please you to ken, I have been in all that has chanced
since Bothwell. I was at Enterkin the day we reft the prisoners from
you. I was in the ranks of the Seven Thousand when, at the Conventicle
at Shalloch-on-Minnoch, the hillmen made Clavers and Strachan draw off.
I was taken at the Tolbooth of Wigtown trying to deliver a prisoner,
whom ye had reprieved. And had there been anything else done, I should
have been in it."

The Council leaned back in their chairs almost to a man, and smilingly
looked at one another. The President spoke after a moment of silence.

"Ye are a brisk lad and ill to content, but your sheet is gallantly
filled. So that I think ye deserve heading instead of hanging, which is
certainly a great remission. I shall e'en take the liberty of shaking
hands with you and wishing you a speedy passage and a sharp axe.
Officer, the prisoner is in your care till his warrant comes from
London."

And to my astonishment Queensbury turned round and very ceremoniously
held out his hand to me, which I took through the bars.

"I shall never again deny that Gordon blood is very good blood," he
said.

Then they brought in Sandy, looming up like a tower between the warders.
He had a strange, dazed look about him, and his hair had grown till he
peered out of the hassock, like to an owl out of an ivy bush, as the
proverb says.

They asked a few questions of him, to which he gave but mumbled replies.
If he saw me he never showed it. But I knew him of old, and a sly tod
was Sandy.

Then Sir George Mackenzie rose, and turning to him, read the King's
mandate, which declared that, in spite of his underlying sentence of
death, he was to be tortured, to make him declare the truth in the
matter of Fergusson the plotter, and the treason anent the King's life.

Then, the black wrath of his long prisonment suddenly boiling over,
Sandy took hold on the great iron bar before him and bent his strength
to it--which, when he was roused, was like the strength of Samson. With
one rive he tore it from its fastenings, roaring all the while with that
terrible voice of his, which used to set the cattle wild with fear when
they heard it, and which even affrighted men grown and bearded. The two
men in masks sprang upon him, but he seized them one in each hand and
cuffed and buffeted them against the wall, till I thought he had
splattered their brains on the stones. Indeed, I looked to see. But
t