So Red Murdo, flown as he was with a lowly man's pride, which tends to an unbalancing, must launch upon an expedition of no common sort. It embellishes a ballad of which only two lines come to me as I write:
"There's four-and-twenty milk-white nowt, twal o' them kye
In the woods of Glen-Tanner, it's there that they lie."
Beyond what the lines tell of a bold piece of rieving and spulzy by Jock Farquharson's henchman, and done for him, I need not trouble to instruct you, because the event only leads into our chronicle as by a tributary wind. When there is a mystery, and you cannot fathom it by direct evidence, you are driven back on motives. They are, in fact, the nut and kernel of what lawyers call circumstantial evidence, a fitting together of suspicions which have made the coffin of many an honest Highland rebel.
I sought to keep my soldiers as unseen as a not over-great distance from Marget and her mother at the Dower House would permit. Naturally the Hanoverian uniform was a sore sight for their eyes, and even a personal grief, in that it recalled dear ones who had perished on the losing side. My desire to spare them was known to my men, who, in the same spirit, would often walk a mile round not to show themselves to the desolated inmates of the Dower House.
But it was essential, if anything unusual were to happen there, that we should know, since it was part of our charge to protect Marget and her mother from perils incidental to an unsettled country. Therefore, I had a private understanding with an old retainer of the family that he was to hasten to me, should protection at the Dower House ever be necessary.
This he was to do quietly, before giving any general alarm, as that might not prove necessary, and also because I remembered an old Highland wisdom, "Never cry fire, unless you want the heather to catch." Its bearing, as you will grasp is on strifes and feuds set alive, not on the actual burning of heather, which is done to let grass, for the sheep beasts, grow without being choked.
Well, on a night which I recall for its dense blackness, there came a tap, tap, tap, three of them, slowly and distinctly, at the small window of my room in the Castle. I knew by the method of the disturbance that it was not an accident, but I was on my feet and peering hard into the outer darkness before I realized that here was the prearranged signal of danger at the Dower House.
A hand moved close to the window, signalling me, and I motioned back, though, on either side, all this was divined, as divination takes place in the dark, rather than seen at all. I picked up my sword, which always stood in a certain corner of my room, pulled the door gently towards me and stepped softly out on to the grass, which grew close up to the Castle walls.
"Come ye, fast, Captain Gordon," quietly said a figure gliding beside me, and without another word we made for the Dower House. When I felt myself beyond ear-shot of the sentry, I asked:
"What's happened—what's wrong?"