No doubt the Black Colonel had got away very well, almost as if he had leapt through a lighted window, with a resounding crash of broken glass. Well, there would be the fragments to gather up, for the fragments have always to be remembered, or they may cause harm. Here I was a fragment, and I asked myself into what basket I was to be gathered, because, you should know, the hills give those of us who dwell among them a sense of fate—of the inevitable.
I was awakened from these thoughts by the entrance of my lieutenant, who said, "Still sighing that you were out of the chase after the Black Colonel?"
I answered vaguely, "A soldier who is a real soldier, which I may or may not be, is always sorry to miss an enterprise, whether it be duty or merely an adventure."
"Well," he remarked, "you had not been long gone when word came from Braemar Castle that the Black Colonel was to be in the Pass of Ballater about midnight, meeting some unknown person, and asking us to help capture him. We saw nothing of the other person, whether man or woman."
He looked slyly at me, and I remembered having said to him that I had had a tryst to keep among the hills. You must not, I think, mislead people by telling what is untrue, but you need not tell everything if it is going to make mischief. Mostly it is poor policy to try and ram the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, down a man's throat, because your version of it may not be his, and, anyhow, it makes dry eating.
My thoughts have a habit of wandering, of dreaming dreams, often when they should be otherwise occupied, and isn't there a bunch of manuscript verse somewhere in testimony of the same? Knowing this the lieutenant lighted and smoked a pipe of American tobacco, then a novelty and a luxury in the Scottish Highlands. With a wink of the eye he asked, "Who was she, captain? Wench or maid?" And he pronounced the words in different tones, as if I needed to be instructed about the difference he implied by them. A man says nothing to an arch-pleasantry like that, unless he be no man and only a babbler and boaster of his conquests. Then he has had none, and is a liar. No sort of fellow more fills men with contempt, and women, by their woman's instinct, pass him by, for any confidence whatever, in word or in deed.
"Don't let it be one of the Black Colonel's flames," said the lieutenant with a laugh, as he went out again, without the answer he had not expected, being himself a gentleman. "It needs a long spoon to sup with that dark devil at any time, but come between him and his rustic gallantries and you'll need a longer spoon than Corgarff Castle happens to possess."
The Black Colonel and I, as you will have gathered, were on different sides in politics, though we belonged to neighbouring clans which had many associations; he a Farquharson, I a Gordon. He was Jock Farquharson of Inverey, the last of his house, as I can say looking back on him, and doomed, so a woman of second-sight had declared, when he was born, to be the last; while I, Ian Gordon, was a cadet of the Balmoral Gordons, captain in his Majesty's Highland Foot, with no more to expect than what my commission brought me, and that was little enough.
He was a Jacobite, keeping that rebel flame alive in the Aberdeenshire Highlands, when, on the heels of the "Forty-Five," a red and woeful time, we were half-heartedly scotching it with garrisons in the Castles of Braemar and Corgarff. Yes, I wore the scarlet tunic of King George, thanks to family circumstances which had woven themselves before I was born, but the tartan lay under it, next my heart. We were rivals in war, thrown on different sides by the fates which gamble so strangely with mere men. Was there to be a still more vital rivalry? As has been hinted, I had more than rumours of the Black Colonel's strange powers among women. What if he had Marget Forbes in his dark eye?
Wherever the heart is concerned you have intuition, and that is why a woman has more of such super-sense, or rather, I would say, of wonderously delicate feeling, than a man. She needs it, being oftener heart-strung, because the wells of her heart are more emotional.