He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat,
And flung him down upon the lead—
"Had there not been peace between our lands,
Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"'
In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap, sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border side.'
'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,
We bore him down the ladder lang;
At every stride Red Rowan made
I wot the Kinmont's airns played clang.
"O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie,
"I 've ridden a horse baith wild and wud;
But a rougher beast than Red Rowan
I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'
Then comes the wild rush for the Eden, where it flowed from bank to brim, with all Carlisle streaming behind in chase, and the bold plunge of the fugitives into the spate, leaving Lord Scroope staring after them, sore astonished, from the water's edge:
'"He 's either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mither a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie."'
History attests the main incidents and characters of Kinmont Willie as true to the facts; and tradition has broidered the story with incidents which the ballad itself does not record. The daughter of the smith, on the road between Longtown and Langholm, used to relate, half a century afterwards, how Buccleuch impatiently thrust his spear through the window to arouse her father and rid Armstrong's legs from their 'cumbrous spurs,' and remembered seeing the rough riders grouped in the outer darkness and streaming with wet. The rescue was one of the latest of the episodes of Border warfare before the Union of the Crowns; and Armstrong of Kinmont himself, besides being a typical specimen of his clan,
'Able men,
Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame,'
was one of the last of what we may describe as the legitimate line of Border freebooters, before the freebooter became merged in the vulgar thief, as explained quaintly and sympathetically in Scott of Satchells' rhyme:
'It 's most clear a freebooter doth live in hazard's train;
A freebooter 's a cavalier who ventures life for gain;
But since King James the Sixth to England went,
There has been no cause for grief;
And he that hath transgressed since then,
Is no cavalier, but a thief.'