They, the keepers, would take different roads, one to the western town, the other to the left, so as to intercept the kidnappers if they took either direction, while Fitzroy and the others would keep up the man-hunt in whichever way the dog chose to lead them.
Luck favoured them for once, for the brave Ralph, after trotting his masters along at the double, for three miles over a high rough heatherland brought them directly to the door of a shepherd’s cottage. A woman answered their loud knocking and they told the story.
“O, the villains, and it isn’t an hour since they left this place. O dear, and O dear, and I knew the weeping lassie who would neither touch bite nor sup wasn’t theirs. And it was the good mind to keep her I had. But I made her lie down in my room, and they, the scoundrels, lay before the fire, for two hours, and if my husband Donald, and his dog Curlin had been at home, sure they would have throttled the pair of them.”
“And which road did they take, my good woman?”
“Is it which road, sir? O, sure then, straight for the little clachan by the sea.”
Fitzroy slipped a silver coin into her hand, they swallowed a draught of milk each, and once more took the road.
* * * * *
The sun was in the west but still high over the blue Moray Firth, and the purple sierras of Ross and Sutherland, when the tired band paused for consultation on the cliff not more than half a mile from the seashore.
Gourmand, still holding the hound, who seemed anxious to tear on, looked round at his companions.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in his best stagey manner, “the curtain now rises on the last act of this beautiful drama ‘The Captive Princess; or the Giant, the Boy, and the Fairy Hound.’