In the chimney-stack, just as Muckle John had said, there was a place very cunningly hollowed so as to be invisible from below, where a man looking upward saw only a square patch of sky and the broken masonry that fringed the top.
Crouching doubled up with his head upon his knees, he listened for a word from Muckle John. But none came. All he heard was a curious shuffling and a noise like the shutting of a door.
Suddenly, it seemed about a mile distant, a bugle sounded, and very faintly there drifted to him the echo of a shout.
Through the empty place below he heard the wind crying, and the singing of it in the long grass, but of Muckle John not a word.
Out on the moor he could hear the stream drumming cheerily over the stones. It was a bright spring morning full of the singing of birds, very difficult to associate with sudden death and a quick burying under the heather. Those who had met the English on their jaunts into the hills had small reason to hope for mercy and none for the dignity of a trial. It was better to leave home by the back door and dodge the bullets. In those far-off days an English soldier at fifty yards was comparatively harmless.
Rob craned his ears for any sound of their advance. But there was not the smallest hint of impending danger. For all he knew they might be scouring the country-side Loch Ness way. They might by this time be a couple of miles away. Already he was becoming exceedingly stiff. He struggled with a growing temptation to move one leg just an inch. Very cautiously he did so. He succeeded in making a noise—not a loud noise, indeed, but in that hollow place quite loud enough to make him turn cold with fear. But nothing happened, there was no whisper of spying red-coats creeping stealthily amongst the ruins, listening for all he could tell within three feet of his hiding-place.
Suddenly he heard a rustle in the grass below him, and a creak like the noise of a boot. He was instantly transfixed with terror. It is well enough to meet death in the open, though by no means a pleasant business there, but to sit cooped up in a chimney unable to see what is happening above or below is more than human nerves can tolerate. He had a tantalizing desire to peep over the edge, to catch one heartening glimpse of the green grass below, to assure himself that a red-faced English soldier was not peering up or fixing his bayonet to poke it about inside.
But he knew in his heart that did he look down he would most surely see what he most dreaded, and so he lay still with every bone in his body aching and one leg tingling with numbness as though a score of needles were pricking it from every side.
And still nothing happened, and there was only the crying of wind about the crumbling walls, and the ceaseless drumming of stream water on the moor.
He fell into a kind of doze at last when the blood seemed to stop circulating in his body, and once he knocked his head most painfully against the sharp edges of the crevice, having nodded with fatigue. His eyes would not stay open, and a terrible struggle against sleep began. He had already suffered a rude awakening by the soldiery outside Captain Campbell's tent, and he was not desirous of undergoing another. He began to hear noises that he knew in his heart did not exist, or if they did were caused by the creatures of the wild or birds settling for a moment up above his head. He took to staring at the opposite of the chimney where very dimly he could see the pebbles stuck in the mortaring and the rude chipped stones. These he counted for a time in order to rid his mind of the bayonet. But always he saw its gleaming steel-cold point just before his face. He could see it now. Surely it was a bayonet? Rob shut his eyes very tightly, then opened them again. It was still there. More than that it moved—it scraped against the stone just an inch from his foot. He saw a small piece chipped neatly off. He actually heard it rattle down upon the empty floor below.