nd on her left Garple chafing in its deep
forested gorges. Her eyes were quick and she noted with interest a
weasel creeping from a fern-clad cairn. A little way on she passed an
old ewe in difficulties and assisted it to rise. "But for me, my
wumman, ye'd hae been braxy ere nicht," she told it as it departed
bleating. Then she realized that she had come a certain distance.
"Losh, I maun be gettin' back or the hen will be spiled," she cried,
and was on the verge of turning.

But something caught her eye a hundred yards farther on the road. It
was something which moved with the wind like a wounded bird, fluttering
from the roadside to a puddle and then back to the rushes. She advanced
to it, missed it, and caught it.

It was an old dingy green felt hat, and she recognized it as Dickson's.

Mrs. Morran's brain, after a second of confusion, worked fast and
clearly. She examined the road and saw that a little way on the gravel
had been violently agitated. She detected several prints of hobnailed
boots. There were prints, too, on a patch of peat on the south side
behind a tall bank of sods. "That's where they were hidin'," she
concluded. Then she explored on the other side in a thicket of hazels
and wild raspberries, and presently her perseverance was rewarded. The
scrub was all crushed and pressed as if several persons had been
forcing a passage. In a hollow was a gleam of something white. She
moved towards it with a quaking heart, and was relieved to find that it
was only a new and expensive bicycle with the front wheel badly buckled.

Mrs. Morran delayed no longer. If she had walked well on her out
journey, she beat all records on the return. Sometimes she would run
till her breath failed; then she would slow down till anxiety once more
quickened her pace. To her joy, on the Dalquharter side of the Garple
bridge she observed the figure of a Die-Hard. Breathless, flushed,
with her bonnet awry and her umbrella held like a scimitar, she seized
on the boy.

"Awfu' doin's! They've grippit Maister McCunn up the Mains road just
afore the second milestone and forenent the auld bucht. I fund his
hat, and a bicycle's lyin' broken in the wud. Haste ye, man, and get
the rest and awa' and seek him. It'll be the tinklers frae the Dean.
I'd gang misel' but my legs are ower auld. Ah, laddie, dinna stop to
speir questions. They'll hae him murdered or awa' to sea. And maybe
the leddy was wi' him and they've got them