out the foot by old bushes of whin
and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us,
and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of
Dunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which,
with its moat and guns, and its secret underground passage to the
seashore, was safe against surprises or attacks through all this
disastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle was
beyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered us
wonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream of
domestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.

"Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be," said John, digging
herb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger,
for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.

I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we must
pass on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandary
as ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald--good old soul!--he was now,
as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendid
helped him to.

We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the whole
of us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by the
spreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the _bruach_ we were
invisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of our
retreat and disclose the three of us.

The hours passed, with us ensconced there--every hour the length of a
day to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred,
for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We had
talked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of such
unnatural discourse, and began to sleep in snatches for sheer lack of
anything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfall
at least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to our
hiding.

I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than
they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil,
and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense,
our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness
that swelled the noises of nature round about us--the wind, the river,
the distant call of the crows--to a most clamorous and appalling degree.

We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on the
stun