White Cockades: An Incident of the "Forty-Five"

All was dark as he turned toward the landing. —(p. 68.)
An Incident of the Forty-Five
BY EDWARD IRENÆUS STEVENSON AUTHOR OF THE GOLDEN MOON, ETC.
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1887
Copyright, 1887, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW'S PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, NEW YORK.
TO CLINTON BOWEN FISK, JR.
WHITE COCKADES AN INCIDENT OF THE FORTY-FIVE
Just as the brilliancy of a singularly clear July afternoon, in the year above named, was diminishing into that clear, white light which, in as high a Scotch latitude as Loch Arkaig, lasts long past actual sunset, Andrew Boyd, a Highland lad of sixteen, was putting the finishing strokes to the notch in the trunk of a good-sized oak he was felling. Its thick foliage waved rather mournfully, as if in expectancy of near doom, over the boy's head. That oak had engaged Andrew's attention pretty much all the afternoon. He was glad to be so well on toward his work's close.
Around the young wood-cutter soughed the dense forest. It clothed the mountain side, straight from the margin of the loch below. Andrew's blows rang quick and true against the trunk. His springy back, his well-developed legs and arms, came handsomely into play. On the moss lay his plaid and bonnet. The sweat dripped from his forehead, not much cooled by the breeze that tossed his yellow hair and the folds of his kilt.
Young Boyd did not cut down oak-trees for a livelihood, though he just now worked as if fortune had mapped a no less arduous career for him. He was the only son of a wealthy landholder of the vicinity, a man of English descent and English thrift. Andrew's grandfather came north into Scotland from Shrewsbury, in a sort of angry freak after a local quarrel. He bought and developed a valuable farm near Loch Arkaig, and then suddenly died upon it, leaving the newly acquired estate to Gilbert Boyd, the father of young Andrew. All of which had happened some forty years before this tale's beginning.