“Yes, sir, so I find; though there’s only a few, picked up in the last week. Them’s in the rooms below, the dungeons as we call ’em—all but a young man as has been kept by himself at the top of this very building; he’s been ill, I understand.”
Small doubt who that was. “You have seen this young man already, I suppose, sergeant,” asked Keith, making no attempt to begin his breakfast. “How did he seem? I am interested in him.”
“Indeed, sir! Well, he looks in but a poor way, and seems very melancholy like.”
“You do not know . . . you have not heard—anything particular about his previous treatment?” asked Keith, his heart suddenly beating hard. “You have not heard, for instance, that . . . that forcible measures have been used to wring certain information out of him?”
“Lord, no, sir! Have they so? Yes, ’tis true he looks as though something of the sort might have happened to him, but I put it down to his having been ill with his wound.”
Keith had turned away his face. “Do you mean,” he said after a moment, “that he is actually in this very corner of the fort?”
“Yes, sir; up a-top of you, as it were. ’Tis the least damaged portion, and even at that there’s some holes in it. You know them Highlanders used near twenty barrels of powder a-blowing of this place up.—Have you all you want, sir?”
“By the way,” said Keith, as his attendant was hobbling out, “do not tell the young man—Mr. Cameron of Ardroy—that I was asking about him.”
“No, sir, I won’t mention of it. Mr. Cameron, is that his name now? Why, ’twas a Dr. Cameron dressed my foot; a very kind gentleman he was, too.”
Keith’s breakfast was totally cold before he began it, and when the sergeant appeared again he opened his campaign at once. His guardian proved much less obdurate than he had feared. Obdurate indeed he was not; it was quite natural caution on his own behalf which withheld him from acceding sooner to Major Windham’s request to be taken up to see the rebel prisoner ‘up a-top of him’. It was fortunate for Keith’s case that Sergeant Mullins was unaware of the close connection between that prisoner and the English Major’s arrest; he believed the latter to be suffering merely for hot words to General Lord Loudoun, cause unknown. The fact of Keith’s being a fellow-countryman went for something, as did also the remembrance of the Highlanders’ good treatment of himself. Finally he yielded, on condition that he chose his own time for letting the sequestered officer out of his room, and that Major Windham gave him his word of honour not to take any steps to help the rebel to escape. Keith promised without difficulty that he would not even speak of such a thing; it was the past, and not the future, which was more likely to engage his tongue.