Or . . . or . . . God of Heaven! The sand seemed to swim under Keith’s feet. It was not Charles Edward Stuart, it was Ewen Cameron who had walked into his trap, Ewen Cameron who had just limped down past him on the arm of one of the gillies . . . Ewen, his friend, whom he had thought safely hidden in Lochaber!
The bitter disappointment and the disastrous surprise of it overwhelmed Keith, and he stood there stupefied. Once more he had come on a fool’s errand—not the first since he had watched the coast. This was Edinburgh over again . . . but a much more sinister repetition of it. For the net which he had spread for the arch-rebel was not empty; it held a lesser but indubitable prize—a chieftain, Lochiel’s kinsman. With a wild sense of being in a net himself he realised the cogency of the arguments which he had used against Guthrie; if Ewen Cameron was too important to shoot out of hand, he was also too important to let go. . . . And he saw Ewen sent back to the scaffold after all, and by him: tied on a horse again, by his hands. . . . Or, since the boat was holed, and Ewen was lame, he would drown, perhaps, when it sank . . . the men were already pushing it nearer to the water. . . .
Stabbed to alarm by that thought he stepped almost unconsciously out of his sheltering hazel bush, and stood at the edge of the shadow with some vague notion of shouting to warn Ardroy. . . . No, what he had to do was to fire, and bring the patrol here quickly and arrest him. He was to stop all communication, to allow no one to leave . . . much less a chieftain and a kinsman of Lochiel’s. . . .
“God help me!” he said aloud, and put a hand over his eyes.
There was a sudden crackling of broken stems, a fierce exclamation behind him, something glittered out of the shadow, and Keith swung quickly round just as the man who had been tracking him for over a week sprang down upon him. And so he did not receive Lachlan MacMartin’s dirk between the shoulders, as Lachlan had intended, but in his breast.
Leaning on young Angus’s shoulder by the boat, Ewen watched the Morar fisherman hastily fitting in the spare plug which he had brought with him (because, as he had explained, the redcoats had played the trick of removing one from Ranald Mor’s boat the other night). The fates had indeed been kind—no patrol this evening—if they were quick they would get out of the bay without a single shot being fired at them.
The boat was being pushed down to the water when all at once the lad Angus gave a little cry, clutched at his master’s arm and pointed up the beach. Ewen, turning his head, saw two men locked together on the sandy slope, saw one drop and roll over, had a dim impression that he wore uniform, and a much clearer one of a wild figure running over the sand towards him with a naked dirk in his hand. Young Angus tried to throw himself in front of his chieftain, but the grip on his shoulder, suddenly tightening, stayed him. Moreover in another moment the spectre with the dirk was on his knees at Ewen’s feet, holding up the weapon, and, half sobbing with excitement, was pouring out a flood of words as hot as lava:
“Mac ’ic Ailein, I have kept my vow, I have avenged you—and saved you, too, though I knew not till the biodag was bare in my hand that it was you who had passed. The Englishman would have betrayed you a second time . . . but he lies there and will not rise again. Oh, make haste, make haste to embark, for there are redcoats at Morar!”
Despite his disfigured face, Ewen had recognised him at once, and the meaning of his words, for all their tumbling haste, was clearer still—horribly clear. Frozen, he tried to beat that meaning from him.