leave no time there for riding
hillward to rescue a rash adventure. We were beyond the pale, and must
face the consequences. That we all had known, and reckoned with, but we
had not counted that our risk would be shared by a woman. Ah I that
luckless ride of Elspeth's! But for that foolish whim she would be safe
now in the cool house at Middle Plantation, with a ship to take her to
safety if the worst befell. And now of all the King's subjects in that
hour we were the most ill-fated, islanded on a sand heap with the tide
of savage war hourly eating into our crazy shelter.

Before the daylight came, as I stood with my cheek to my musket, I had
come to a resolution. In a tangle of duties a man must seize the
solitary clear one, and there could be no doubt of what mine was, I
must try for the Tidewater, and I must try alone, Shalah had the best
chance to get through, but without Shalah the stockade was no sort of
refuge. Ringan was wiser and stronger than I, but I thought I had more
hill-craft, and, besides, the duty was mine, not his. Grey had no
knowledge of the wilds, and Donaldson and Bertrand could not handle the
news as it should be handled, in the unlikely event of their getting
through alive. No, there were no two ways of it. I must make the
effort, though in that leaden hour of weariness and cold it seemed as
if my death-knell were ringing.

Morn showed a grey world, strewn with the havoc of the storm. The
eagles were already busy among the dead horses, and our first job was
to bury the poor beasts. Just outside the stockade we dug as best we
could a shallow trench, while the muskets of the others kept watch over
us. There we laid also the body of the man I had shot in the night. He
was a young savage, naked to the waist, and curiously tattooed on the
forehead with the device of what seemed to be a rising or setting sun.
I observed that Shalah looked closely at this, and that his face wore
an unusual excitement. He said something in his own tongue, and, when
the trench was dug, laid the dead man in it so that his head pointed
westwards.

We wrought in a dogged silence, and Elspeth's cheery whistling was the
only sound in that sullen morning. It fairly broke my heart. She was
whistling the old tune of "Leezie Lindsay," a merry lilt with the hill
wind and the heather in it. The bravery of the poor child was the
hardest thing of all to bear when I knew that in a few hours' time the
end might come. The others were