"What's this?—Whare hae ye come fra? But I need na inquire."
"I have broken out of the tolbooth o' Irvine," said I, "and I am fleeing here with Mr Witherspoon."
"I, too," replied my brother, mournfully, "hae escaped from the hands of the persecutors."
We then entered into some conversation concerning what had happened to us respectively, from the fatal twenty-eighth of November, when our power and host were scattered on Rullion-green, wherein Mr Witherspoon, with me, rehearsed to him the accidents herein set forth, with the circumstantials of some things that befel the godly man after I left him with the corpse of the baby in his arms; but which being in some points less of an adventurous nature than had happened to myself, I shall be pardoned by the courteous reader for not enlarging upon it at greater length. I should, however, here note, that Mr Witherspoon was not so severely dealt with as I was; for though an outcast and a fugitive, yet he was not a prisoner; on the contrary, under the kindly cover of the Lady Auchterfardel, whose excellent and truly covenanted husband was a sore sufferer by the fines of the year 1662, he received great hospitality for the space of sixteen days, and was saved between two feather beds, on the top of which the laird's aged mother, a bed-rid woman, was laid, when some of Drummond's men searched the house on an information against him.
But disconsolatory as it was to hear of such treatment of a Gospel-minister, though lightened by the reflection of the saintly constancy that was yet to be found in the land, and among persons too of the Lady of Auchterfardel's degree, and severe as the trials were, both of body and mind, which I had myself undergone, yet were they all as nothing compared to the hardships of my brother, a man of a temperate sobriety of manner, bearing all changes with a serene countenance and a placable mind, while feeling them in the uttermost depths of his capacious affections.
"On the night of the battle," said he, "it would not be easy of me to tell which way I went, or what ensued, till I found myself with three destitute companions on the skirts of the town of Falkirk. By that time the morning was beginning to dawn, and we perceived not that we had approached so nigh unto any bigget land; as the day, however, broke, the steeple caught our eye, and we halted to consider what we ought to do. And as we were then standing in a field diffident to enter the town, a young woman came from a house that stands a little way off the road, close to Graham's dyke, driving a cow to grass with a long staff, which I the more remarked as such, because it was of the Indian cane, and virled with silver, and headed with ivory.
"'Sirs,' said Menie Adams, for that was the damsel's name, 'I see what ye are; but I'll no speir; howsever, be ruled by me, and gang na near the town of Falkirk this morning, for atwish the hours of dark and dawn there has been a congregationing o' horses and men, and other sediments o' war, that I hae a notion there's owre meikle o' the King's power in the place for any Covenanter to enter in, save under the peril o' penalties. But come wi' me, and I'll go back wi' you, and in our hay-loft you may scog yoursels till the gloaming.'
"Who could have thought," said my brother, "that in such discourse from a young woman, not passing four-and-twenty years of age, and of a pleasant aspect, any guilty stratagem of blood was hidden!"
He and his friends never questioned her truth, but went with her, and she conducted them to her father's house, and lodged them in the hay-loft.
It seems that Menie Adams was, however, at the time betrothed to the prelatic curate that had been laid upon the parish, and that, in consequence, aneath her courtesy, she had concealed a very treacherous and wicked intent. For no sooner had she got my brother and his three companions into the hay-loft, than she hies herself away to the town, and, in the hope of pleasing her prelatic lover, informs the captain of the troop there of the birds she had ensnared.