Thus far the quarto pages. Their author—Mr Boswell or some other—no doubt intended to explain how he received the further papers, and to cast them into some publishable form. Neither task was performed. The rest of the manuscript, as I have said, was orderly enough, but no editorial care had been given it. I have discovered nothing further about Alastair Maclean save what the narrative records, and my research among the archives of Oxfordshire families has not enabled me to add much to the history of the other figures. But I have put such materials as I had into the form of a tale, which seems of sufficient interest to present to the world. I could wish that Mr Boswell had lived to perform the task, for I am confident that he would have made a better job of it.
Contents
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | [IN WHICH A HIGHLAND GENTLEMAN MISSES HIS WAY] | 17 |
| II. | [IN WHICH A NOBLEMAN IS PERPLEXED] | 36 |
| III. | [IN WHICH PRIVATE MATTERS CUT ACROSS AFFAIRS OF STATE] | 60 |
| IV. | [MR KYD OF GREYHOUSES] | 71 |
| V. | [CHANCE-MEDLEY] | 84 |
| VI. | [INTRODUCES THE RUNAWAY LADY] | 102 |
| VII. | [HOW A MAN MAY HUNT WITH THE HOUNDS AND YET RUN WITH THE HARE] | 114 |
| VIII. | [BROOM AT THE CROSS-ROADS] | 129 |
| IX. | [OLD ENGLAND] | 142 |
| X. | [SNOWBOUND AT THE SLEEPING DEER] | 157 |
| XI. | [NIGHT AT THE SAME: TWO VISITORS] | 178 |
| XII. | [THE HUT IN THE OAK SHAW] | 189 |
| XIII. | [JOURNEYMAN JOHN] | 203 |
| XIV. | [DUCHESS KITTY ON THE ROAD] | 216 |
| XV. | [BIDS FAREWELL TO A SCOTS LAIRD] | 229 |
| XVI. | [BIDS FAREWELL TO AN ENGLISH LADY] | 250 |
| XVII. | [ORDEAL OF HONOUR] | 261 |
| XVIII. | [IN WHICH THREE GENTLEMEN CONFESS THEIR NAKEDNESS] | 279 |
| XIX. | [RAMOTH-GILEAD] | 294 |
I In which a Highland Gentleman Misses his Way
The road which had begun as a rutted cart-track sank presently to a grassy footpath among scrub oaks, and as the boughs whipped his face the young man cried out impatiently and pulled up his horse to consider. He was on a journey where secrecy was not less vital than speed, and he was finding the two incompatible. That morning he had avoided Banbury and the high road which followed the crown of Cotswold to the young streams of Thames, for that way lay Beaufort's country, and at such a time there would be jealous tongues to question passengers. For the same reason he had left the main Oxford road on his right, since the channel between Oxford and the North might well be troublesome, even for a respectable traveller who called himself Mr Andrew Watson, and was ready with a legend of a sea-coal business in Newcastle. But his circumspection seemed to have taken him too far on an easterly course into a land of tangled forests. He pulled out his chart of the journey and studied it with puzzled eyes. My Lord Cornbury's house could not be twenty miles distant, but what if the twenty miles were pathless? An October gale was tossing the boughs and whirling the dead bracken, and a cold rain was beginning. Ill weather was nothing to one nourished among Hebridean north-westers, but he cursed a land in which there were no landmarks. A hill-top, a glimpse of sea or loch, even a stone on a ridge, were things a man could steer by, but what was he to do in this unfeatured woodland? These soft south-country folk stuck to their roads, and the roads were forbidden him.
A little further and the track died away in a thicket of hazels. He drove his horse through the scrub and came out on a glade, where the ground sloped steeply to a jungle of willows, beyond which he had a glimpse through the drizzle of a grey-green fen. Clearly that was not his direction, and he turned sharply to the right along the edge of the declivity. Once more he was in the covert, and his ill-temper grew with every briar that whipped his face. Suddenly he halted, for he heard the sound of speech.
It came from just in front of him—a voice speaking loud and angry, and now and then a squeal like a scared animal's. An affair between some forester and a poaching hind, he concluded, and would fain have turned aside. But the thicket on each hand was impenetrable, and, moreover, he earnestly desired advice about the road. He was hesitating in his mind, when the cries broke out again, so sharp with pain that instinctively he pushed forward. The undergrowth blocked his horse, so he dismounted and, with a hand fending his eyes, made a halter of the bridle and dragged the animal after him. He came out into a little dell down which a path ran, and confronted two human beings.
They did not see him, being intent on their own business. One was a burly fellow in a bottle-green coat, a red waistcoat and corduroy small clothes, from whose gap-toothed mouth issued volleys of abuse. In his clutches was a slim boy in his early teens, a dark sallow slip of a lad, clad in nothing but a shirt and short leather breeches. The man had laid his gun on the ground, and had his knee in the small of the child's back, while he was viciously twisting one arm so that his victim cried like a rabbit in the grip of a weasel. The barbarity of it undid the traveller's discretion.
"Hold there," he cried, and took a pace forward.
The man turned his face, saw a figure which he recognised as a gentleman, and took his knee from the boy's back, though he still kept a clutch on his arm.