HIGH-HANDED LADY.

The storm died away in the night, and I awoke to a clear, rain-washed
world and the chill of an autumn morn. I was as stiff and sore as if I
had been whipped, my clothes were sodden and heavy, and not till I had
washed my face and hands in the burn and stretched my legs up the
hill-side did I feel restored to something of my ordinary briskness.

The encampment looked weird indeed as seen in the cruel light of day.
The women were cooking oatmeal on iron girdles, but the fire burned
smokily, and the cake I got was no better than dough. They were a
disjaskit lot, with tousled hair and pinched faces, in which shone
hungry eyes. Most were barefoot, and all but two--three were ancient
beldames who should have been at home in the chimney corner. I noticed
one decent-looking young woman, who had the air of a farm servant; and
two were well-fed country wives who had probably left a brood of
children to mourn them. The men were little better. One had the sallow
look of a weaver, another was a hind with a big, foolish face, and
there was a slip of a lad who might once have been a student of
divinity. But each had a daftness in the eye and something weak and
unwholesome in the visage, so that they were an offence to the fresh,
gusty moorland.

All but Muckle John himself. He came out of his tent and prayed till
the hill-sides echoed. It was a tangle of bedlamite ravings, with long
screeds from the Scriptures intermixed like currants in a bag-pudding.
But there was power in the creature, in the strange lift of his voice,
in his grim jowl, and in the fire of his sombre eyes. The others I
pitied, but him I hated and feared. On him and his kind were to be
blamed all the madness of the land, which had sent my father overseas
and desolated our dwelling. So long as crazy prophets preached
brimstone and fire, so long would rough-shod soldiers and cunning
lawyers profit by their folly; and often I prayed in those days that
the two evils might devour each other.

It was time that I was cutting loose from this ill-omened company and
continuing my road Edinburgh-wards. We were lying in a wide trough of
the Pentland Hills, which I well remembered. The folk of the plains
called it the Cauldstaneslap, and it made an easy path for sheep and
cattle between the Lothians and Tweeddale. The camp had been snugly
chosen, for, except by the gleam of a fire in the dark, it was
invisible from any distance. Muckle John was so filled