He uttered a thrill laugh, which rung round the vault, and for a moment rooted the poor sergeant to the bloody pavement; then the soldier, wild with terror, rushed into the light of day.
The story that a Scottish sergeant had seen the Devil in the mine occasioned great laughter in the camp, for no trace of his Satanic majesty—not even the print of a cloven hoof—could be found, when the 81st Regiment demolished the whole fabric next day, after dismantling the Vizie.
* * * *
After the capture of Morne Fortunée, a marked change came over the Captain Dhu. He was subject to fits of profound melancholy and abstraction, and to gusts of passion and fury, when he drank deep and became almost mad, exclaiming that he was tormented by fiends—that the atmosphere was full of flame—that hell was yawning under his feet, and so forth. His excesses soon impaired his health so severely, that he was sent home with invalids, on a year's leave of absence, with a constitution broken by war, wounds, and the wine-bottle; and with a temper soured and furious, none knew by what.
The transport Queen Charlotte, in which he sailed from St. Vincent, was wrecked in the Irish Channel; and of three hundred souls who were on board, the Captain Dhu—though but the ruins of what he had been in bodily strength—alone escaped, being cast ashore, lashed to a spar; and after many strange and perilous adventures among the Irish, who were then in arms against the government, in the winter of 1799, he found himself at home in his native place, the beautiful valley of the Spey: and now we have reached the last chapter in his mysterious history—an event which is still locally remembered by the Grants and others in Strathspey as the DARK DEED in the Forest of Gaich.
On the 11th of January, 1800, being the day preceding Yule, he summoned a party of gillies, and announced his intention of proceeding up the mountains to hunt the red deer in that place.
The Badenoch men looked at each other with perplexity and fear—as, from time immemorial, the Eve of Yule has been the epoch for all mischief, devilry, and witchcraft in the Highlands; and the scene of the proposed hunting was just the place that men might be supposed to avoid at such a time.
"To hunt on Yule Eve—and in the Forest of Gaich!"
Irresolute and unwilling alike to offend or obey, they gazed at each other in silence.
"Go not forth to hunt to-day," said old Hamish Grant, the sergeant, who, being discharged after long service, was an occasional visitor at the house of his old leader.