He sent for Mr. Honeyman, sheriff of the county, who dwelt between Kirkwall and the sea. After due deliberation, consultation and speculation, he issued his precepts to the constable and other peace officers, to call together the people “to assist in bringing those villains to justice.” Raised his posse, in plain Latin.
While these matters transpired at Kirkwall, other things significant for Gow were occurring on the Revenge, or, rather, off it, for the defection of Jemmy was followed by a veritable landslide; ten men, no less, seized the longboat and made off for the mainland, where they coasted along till they came to Leith, the port of Edinburgh. Their hard journey was rewarded by imprisonment in the Tolbooth at that place as suspected pirates. A well-founded suspicion, if there ever was one.
When John Gow took the next census of his crew only twenty-eight honest fellows answered “here.” Although it was obviously time to move on to uncropped pasturage, Gow first resolved to provision himself at the expense of the home folks by the violent means of robbing the wealthier residents alongshore. With that marked turn of his for a quaint joke, the first place that he selected for despoiling was that of our Mr. Honeyman, high sheriff.
Ten men in charge of the bo’sun were detached for this job, and, slinging upon their persons everything in the way of a weapon they could struggle along with, they started off in the early evening.
The high sheriff was flying about the country, compelling his posse, and it was Mrs. Honeyman, candle in hand, who answered the gently deceptive tapping on her front door. When she saw the bristling aggregation on the front steps, she thought for an instant that it was a party of neighbors stopping in on their way to a fancy-dress ball to show her their diverting make-up. Or she may have mistaken them for a part of her husband’s posse, and may have been about to assure them laughingly that they had made the funniest mistake in the world when one of the great beards cracked like a young earthquake and a gale-conquering noise boomed through the ancestral halls of the Honeymans.
“Excuse us, marm, yer leddyship, but we’re the pirates and we’ve come to rob the house. Gi’ us the stuff and there’ll be no trouble.”
Nine walking arsenals clanked into the house, while one remained on guard at the door. The good wife screamed and fled, but fled methodically to the place where the family treasure was secreted, and, throwing the money into an apron, she ran back and out past the sentinel. He supposed she was merely running for her life, and he did not blame her a bit, though that was as far as his interest went.
But upstairs she left her greatest valuable,—a lovely daughter, just blooming, as the romancers say, into beautiful womanhood. This young person’s sleep was interrupted by an inexplicable clamor below. She got out of bed, threw something about her and crept out on the stair landing. Unfamiliar voices surged up, together with a cracking and splintering that suggested an escaped menagerie. She inherited her mother’s presence of mind. Dashing into father’s bedroom, she grabbed the family papers, and with them in tight grasp, she leaped from her bedroom window, to speed ghostily into the dark.
The two female servants and Sandy, the groom, cowered in the kitchen. The marauders found them there; politely they bowed to the ladies, but demanded of Sandy whether he could play the bagpipes. Sandy admitted his skill on that instrument of torture. So they lugged him out by the ear and bade him pipe them down to their ship, while they followed behind with all the Honeyman plate and linen bundled up in bed sheets on their backs, and all the good Honeyman wine, accumulated through the thrifty years, kicking a jig out of their ruffianly heels.
Sandy’s wild night is doubtless still a story in Sandy’s generations.