Robin caught up the sticks between his practised fingers, and in dumb show beat a spirited measure on the empty air. His red uniform, his cocked hat, showing his flaxen curls, his frank sun-burned face, and his laughing blue eyes, all combined to make up an appealing picture to the elder men, and despite a qualm of reluctance the trader could not refrain from saying, “Take a horn, callant, before you gae out in the air—you’ve a sair hoast now.”
With this reinforcement to his earlier potations,—still he was not what a Scotchman would call drunk,—Robin set out with swift strides in the black night, a drum-stick in either hand, in the direction of the fort. He might only know where it lay by a vague suffusion in a certain quarter of unappeasable bleak darkness—a sort of halo, as it were, the joint effect, he was aware, of the occasional opening of the guard-room door, the feeble glimmer of the lanterns hanging in the barrack galleries and outside the officers’ quarters, and the light that dully burned all night in the hospital, gleaming from the windows.
After a time a dim red spot toward the left showed him where lay the Indian camp. Now it became invisible as some undulation of the ground interposed, or some drift heavily submerged one of the myriad stumps of the cleared-away forest. Sometimes he ran into these in the blinding night, and once he stumbled, floundering so deep that he thought he had fallen into some pit sunk there in the days of the war to entrap an enemy—the remnants of an exploded mine, perhaps, or trous-de-loup. But he came upon hard ground with no mishap, save the loss of one of his drum-sticks, found after much groping. As he regained the perpendicular he noted that the red glow, indicating the Indian camp, seemed, now that he was nearer, but the light from embers. It was odd that their fires should die down. Ordinarily the flames were kept flaring high throughout the night, to scare away wolves and panthers. When this thought struck him he drew a long knife from his belt and passed his fingers gingerly along its keen edge, then thrust it anew into its sheath. But if the Indians were not there, whither had they vanished? The unfriendly, veiled night, with a suggestion as of an implacable enmity in its unresponsive silence, its bitter chill, its sinister, impenetrable obscurity, was appalling in the possibility that its vast invisibilities harbored these strange, savage beings, wandering, who knew where and with what ferocious intent. Robin Dorn suddenly began to run impetuously, stumbling where he could not heed, falling if he needs must, with his right arm advanced, as if the night were a palpable thing and he shouldered through obstacles in the obscurity. He met naught. He crossed the glacis, ran along the covered way, reached the brink of the counterscarp, and wavered at the little bridge above the ditch as the warder from the lookout tower challenged him with a stern—“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Robin Dorn. An’ I hinna the countersign. There’s a wheen Injuns flittering around yon. Let me come ben. What for have ye got the great yett steekit?”
“Come around to the little gate, Sawney!” said the sentinel below, after a word to his comrade aloft. “The sally-port is big enough for the likes of you.”
“I’m fair froze,” Robin whimpered, as the smaller postern at last opened to admit him. “Ohone! You’ve kep’ me jiggling an’ dauncing till my ears are fair frosted!”—he touched them smartly with his drum-sticks—“an’ me out on the business of the post! I did na think ye’d have served me sic a ill turn, Benjie! Steek the yett agin me!”
“Oh, stow your tongue!” retorted the sentinel. “I had nothing to do with closing the gate—the guard closed it. Get along with you.”
Robin shuffled along through the snow, bent half double and feeling pierced with the chill which he had sustained while waiting at the gate, over-heated as he was from running. He paused as he passed in front of the guard-house.
“What for did the guard steek the yett agin me?” he demanded of the sentinel on the step. “I’ll complain to the officer of the guard!”
“Go to bed, you zany!” returned the sentinel, “the officer of the guard is not here.”