“It’ll do my head no harm,” said Neal. “You know well enough, Peg, that there never was much the matter with it.”
They shouldered their loads again, walked up the street, and then, quickening their pace, tramped along the Shore Road for about three miles.
“Now,” said Hope, “turn to the left up that loaning, and we’ll strike for the hill.”
They crossed the fields round the homesteads which lay between the hill and the road, reached uncultivated and stony ground, and then commenced their climb. Neal was strong, active, and accustomed to fatigue, but he began to feel the weight of his sack of cartridge cases before he had climbed five hundred feet. When Hope bade him halt he was glad enough to lie panting on the springy heather.
“We’re safe now,” said Hope, “but we’ve got further to go before night. We must make the place I named so that the men will be able to find me and the cartridges to-morrow morn.”
Neal, ashamed of his weariness, bade Hope lead on.
“I might have trysted with them for Mac Art’s Fort,” said Hope. “It was there that Neilson and Tone and M’Cracken swore the oath. That would have been a brave romantic spot for you and me to spend the night. We might have thought of great things there with the stars over us and nothing else between us and God’s heaven. But it’s a draughty place, lad.” The laughter came into his eyes as he spoke. “A draughty place and a stony, like Luz, where Jacob lay, and maybe the angels wouldn’t come near the likes of us. The place I have in my mind is warmer.”
They reached it at last—a little heathery hollow, lying under the shelter of great rocks.
“You might sleep in a worse place, Neal. It was here that Wolfe Tone and the men I told you of dined three years ago—and a merry day they had of it. I could wish we had a few of the scraps they left. It’s cold work sleeping in the open on an empty stomach, but we must just cheer each other with Tone’s byword—
“‘’Tis but in vain
For soldiers to complain.’”