“Strike a light, lassie. I’ve gotten haud o’ a spy here, an’ canna weel do’t mysel’.”
When a light was procured and held up, it revealed the pretty face of Jean Black, which underwent a wondrous change when she beheld the face of the prisoner.
“Uncle Andrew!” she exclaimed, “this is nae spy. He’s the man that cam’ to the help o’ Aggie an’ me against the dragoon.”
“Is that sae?” said Black, turning a look of surprise on his prisoner.
“It is true, indeed, that I had the good fortune to protect Jean and her friend from an insolent comrade,” answered Wallace; “and it is also true that that act has been partly the cause of my deserting to the hills, being starved for a day and a night, and taken prisoner now as a spy.”
“Sir,” said Andrew, hastily untying the kerchief that bound them together, “I humbly ask your pardon. Moreover, it’s my opeenion that if ye hadna been starvin’ ye wadna have been here ’e noo, for ye’re uncommon teuch. Rin, lassie, an’ fetch some breed an’ cheese. Whar’s Marion an’ Is’b’l?”
“They went out to seek for Peter,” said Jean, as she hastened to obey her uncle’s mandate.
At that moment a loud knocking was heard at the door, and the voice of Marion, one of the maid-servants, was heard outside. On the door being opened, she and her companion Isabel burst in with excited looks and the information, pantingly given, that the “sodgers were comin’.”
“Haud yer noise, lassie, an’ licht the fire—pit on the parritch pat. Come, Peter, let’s hear a’ aboot it.”
Ramblin’ Peter, who had been thus named because of his inveterate tendency to range over the neighbouring hills, was a quiet, undersized, said-to-be weak-minded boy of sixteen years, though he looked little more than fourteen. No excitement whatever ruffled his placid countenance as he gave his report—to the effect that a party of dragoons had been seen by him not half an hour before, searching evidently for his master’s cottage.