it was not
quite so brutal, it would seem, as the King.
"Put them in the Greyfriars Churchyard," was the order--and to that
celebrated spot they were marched.
Seated at her back window in Candlemaker Row, Mrs. Black observed, with
some surprise and curiosity, the sad procession wending its way among
the tombs and round the church. The news of the fight at Bothwell
Bridge had only just reached the city, and she knew nothing of the
details. Mrs. Wallace and Jean Black were seated beside her knitting.
"Wha'll they be, noo?" soliloquised Mrs. Black.
"Maybe prisoners taken at Bothwell Brig," suggested Mrs. Wallace.
Jean started, dropped her knitting, and said in a low, anxious voice, as
she gazed earnestly at the procession, "If--if it's them, uncle Andrew
an'--an'--the others may be amang them!"
The procession was not more than a hundred yards distant--near enough
for sharp, loving eyes to distinguish friends.
"I see them!" cried Jean eagerly.
Next moment she had leaped over the window, which was not much over six
feet from the ground. She doubled round a tombstone, and, running
towards the prisoners, got near enough to see the head of the procession
pass through a large iron gate at the south-west corner of the
churchyard, and to see clearly that her uncle and Quentin Dick were
there--tied together. Here a soldier stopped her. As she turned to
entreat permission to pass on she encountered the anxious gaze of Will
Wallace as he passed. There was time for the glance of recognition,
that was all. A few minutes more and the long procession had passed
into what afterwards proved to be one of the most terrible prisons of
which we have any record in history.
Jean Black was thrust out of the churchyard along with a crowd of others
who had entered by the front gate. Filled with dismay and anxious
forebodings, she returned to her temporary home in the Row.
CHAPTER NINE.
AMONG THE TOMBS.
The enclosure at the south-western corner of Greyfriars Churchyard,
which had been chosen as the prison of the men who were spared after the
battle of Bothwell Bridge, was a small narrow space enclosed by very
high walls, and guarded by a strong iron gate--the same gate, probably,
which still hangs there at the present day.
There, among the tombs, without any covering to shelter them from the
wind and rain, without bedding or sufficient food, with the dank grass
for their couches and graves for pillows, did most o
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