nd as water from the prow of a
wind-driven boat in a difficult sea-way.

Three or four times Louis tried to stop his companion, but Stair had a
spot in his mind where he could hold up the carriage. It was a sharp
angle of road, designed in days when levels and gradients were unthought
of, and still permitted to linger on to the danger of travellers' necks.
In fact the White Loch elbow remains to the moment of writing, in spite
of all modern improvements, a trap for the unwary, merely because a
laird's lodge-gate lies a few hundred feet to the north, and any new
road must cut a shaving off the entrance to his avenue.

But that night Stair made use of the gates manorial. Tying their ponies
to trees, they lifted the heavy gates off their hinges and "angled" them
skillfully across the road so as to form a barrier which must stop the
horses and carriage. Stair would have set up the barricade between the
double turn of the S-shaped curve, but Louis pointed out that if the
carriage went over the bridge, Patsy might very well be injured. So the
gates were ultimately placed where the horses would be halted while
ascending the long after slope with slackened pace.

Where Stair and Louis placed themselves, though some considerable way
from the burn which ran at the bottom of the defile, they were still in
a very pit of darkness. The leaves were dense overhead, and only the
white gates gleamed very faintly in the trough of gloom where ran the
eastern military road.

Louis lay under a tremulous rustle of leaves, for the wind was coming in
from the sea, and listened to the trill and chirrup of the burn which
carried off the overflow of the White Loch, as it muttered over its
sands or clattered across the loose round pebbles of its numerous
shallows.

The lads waited long and anxiously, not that they had any fear of having
missed their mark, for Stair had searched in vain in all the softest
spots for any trace of carriage wheels. They _must_ pass this way. They
could not go off the road, because there was no other. But, what would
have spoiled the matter more than a squadron of cavalry in attendance,
was the fact that if they delayed much longer, the carriage would reach
the Elbow of the White Water after daybreak.

From where they lay they could see the ragged fantastic line of the
hills to the east behind which the sun would rise. Stair watched these
anxiously. They had a clear hour before them, but unless the mist came
up ag