His small shrewd eyes travelling over the crowd settled for an instant upon Rob, and contracted suddenly as though he half recollected him, but was not sure. Then he was gone, and that was the last of the Fraser.
The scene sobered what little foolhardiness there was left in Rob. It made him walk less abroad. The arm of the law was long, but the arm of the Government was longer.
More than once he had a curious intuition on that afternoon that he was being followed. It might be only an accident, but he had run into two slouching frowsy rascals on two separate occasions, and each time they had stared very hard and looked back at him over their shoulders.
At last overcome by fear of capture he had taken to his heels and run up one close and down another, being quite unfamiliar with the City, but only anxious to shake off any shadowing. After he had doubled and dodged for a full half-hour he took cover upon an ancient stairway beside the White Horse Inn, and there he waited to see what would happen and whether there were really any upon his trail. It was about five minutes later that the noise of a man panting up the lane set him keeking down to see who came so hastily. To his dismay it was one of the loafers of the afternoon, and hard on his heels the other. They passed at a run and their footsteps died away.
Then speeding in the opposite direction Rob found a lodging in another inn, and slept far into the following day—the day on which he was to meet Muckle John and win to freedom at last. After all the turmoil and distress of the weeks following Culloden, it was a strange enough sensation to think of the great towns ahead in Holland or France, where there was no dire necessity to keep one eye over your shoulder and the other cocked upon the end of the street, and where a Jacobite was not considered food for the nearest gallows tree.
So thinking (and yet with misgiving for all that) Rob passed cannily out of Edinburgh and along the way to Leith, and again the dread fear that he was being followed took possession of him. The sun was falling when he saw the lonesome gibbet tree stuck up against the skyline. On it the body of some luckless creature was swinging in its chains—he could just catch the dreary creaking on the wind.
He looked backward for the twentieth time. But all the desolate landscape seemed empty of living soul or beast.
And yet he could have sworn that he had seen a head dodge behind the tussock of coarse rank grass just on the top of the mound. He was so sure of it he ran back, but when he reached it there was nothing. Then bending as a true hillsman reads the ground he saw the fresh mark of a boot in the wet sand.
There was danger lurking amongst the dunes, and still no sign of Muckle John.
Out on the Firth of Forth a ship was running up her canvas to the breeze, and it set him wondering in an idle fashion whether Muckle John might not be already aboard starting for France.