The whole of this silent and mysterious battalion passed in line of march up the glen, with the gleams of lightning flashing about them. One bolt more brilliant than the rest brought back the sudden flash of steel.
They had fixed bayonets, and shouldered arms!
And on, and on they marched, diminishing in the darkness and the distance, those ghastly Grenadiers, towards the flat bleak moor of Culloden, with the green lightning playing about them, and gleaming on the storm-swept waste.
The Wooden-leg—Ewen's unco' guest—disappeared with them, and was never heard of more in Strathnairn.
He had come with a tempest, and gone with one. Neither was any trace ever seen or heard of those strange and silent soldiers. No regiment had left Nairn that night, and no regiment reached Inverness in the morning; so unto this day the whole affair remains a mystery, and a subject for ridicule with some, although Ewen, whose story of the midnight march of a corps in time of war—caused his examination by the authorities in the Castle of Inverness—stuck manfully to his assertions, which were further corroborated by the evidence of his wife and children. He made a solemn affidavit of the circumstances I have related before the sheriff, whose court books will be found to confirm them in every particular; if not, it is the aforesaid sheriff's fault, and not mine.
There were not a few (but these were generally old Jacobite ladies of decayed Highland families, who form the gossiping tabbies and wall-flowers of the Northern Meeting) who asserted that in their young days they had heard of such a regiment marching by night, once a year to the field of Culloden; for it is currently believed by the most learned on such subjects in the vicinity of the "Clach na Cudden," that on the anniversary of the sorrowful battle, a certain place, which shall be nameless, opens, and that the restless souls of the murderers of the wounded clansmen march in military array to the green graves upon the purple heath, in yearly penance; and this story was thought to receive full corroboration by the apparition of a fat lubberly spectre with the nine of diamonds chained to his neck; as it was on that card—since named the Curse of Scotland—the Duke of Cumberland hastily pencilled the savage order to "show no quarter to the wounded, but to slaughter all."
Such was the story of our old Highland Quartermaster.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE LAST OF DON FABRIQUE.
A week or two after our return from Seville to Gibraltar, Jack Slingsby received a note from a Spanish officer, who commanded a detachment of the Grenadiers of Jaen, to the effect that the famous bandit Fabrique de Urquija had been taken, and was condemned to die by the spirited Alcalde of San Roque; that his execution was to take place on the day after to-morrow, and that if we wished to behold the mode of punishing such criminals in Spain, it would afford him much pleasure if we joined his party, which was ordered to assist in guarding the scaffold.